Get More Mileage from your Thinking Time
Jean Moroney, President of Thinking Directions, teaches
managers and other professionals how to use targeted thinking to solve
problems faster, make better decisions, and get projects finished.
She started her career as an engineer, graduating from MIT with Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1985 & 1986. She quickly found her strength in working as a systems engineer and program manager. By the time she was 25, she was leading a $1.5 million dollar program, which provided the wavefront sensor for the first successful field experiment in laser guidestar adaptive optics at the Starfire Optical Range (1988-1989).
To her surprise, she became more interested in the thinking processes she was using than the problems she was solving. She took time off from work to earn a Masters Degree in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University (1994) and to complete a graduate training program in philosophy focusing on the theory of knowledge and logical analysis at the Objectivist Graduate Center of the Ayn Rand Institute (1996).
She left engineering for good in 1998 in order start a business coaching individuals in analytical thinking skills, including concretization, differentiation, essentialization, and identifying fundamentals.
Applying what she had learned as a project manager, she helped her clients fix the biggest problem first. Over time she realized that the main challenge most people face in analytical thinking is difficulty in dealing with routine mental obstacles, such as distractions, overload, conflict, and blankness. So she turned her attention to developing tactics to address these issues directly.
In 2000, she started giving classes and seminars on thinking skills. Since then, thousands of people have benefited from her methods, including people from a wide range of professions: engineers, small business owners, artists, writers, lawyers, and managers. She has given workshops across North America, in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Denver, Toronto, Washington DC, and San Francisco.
She started offering seminars to corporations in 2003. Her work with corporate audiences led to the development of her signature 1-day workshop, Thinking Tactics, which presents the core set of tools that enable a thinker to deal quickly with mental obstacles, so they can stay focused on the most important task at hand. Attendees of Thinking Tactics have reported savings in money, time, and frustration—as they use the tactics to unleash their own creativity to tackle business and personal challenges.
Her biggest corporate clients include BB&T, Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Canadian Bank Note Company, each of whom has brought her back to teach Thinking Tactics to 100-plus professionals at the company.
She now offers a range of coaching, consulting, training, and speaking services to individuals and corporations. Her main topics include:
Ms. Moroney continues to think of herself as an engineer, engineering the thinking process. She lives in New York City with her husband, Harry Binswanger.
A 6 1/2 hour course, taught in seminar and individual formats (2004-present). The objective of the course is to teach methods for monitoring one's cognitive progress and strategies for re-directing one's thought when something blocks that progress. It includes tactics for sustaining thinking despite four common problems: blankness, vagueness, overload, and floundering.
A 45-90 minute workshop, introducing one basic skill from "Tackling Hard Thinking."
A 6-unit course with homework, given by teleconference, 1998-2004. A condensation is a list of the main points and the theme of an article. Condensing helps one understand and retain the material and provides practice in formulating thoughts precisely.
An 8-unit course with homework given by teleconference, 1998-2004. A definition identifies the units of a concept by naming what is essential. Defining terms helps one master many basic thinking skills: concretizing, differentiating, identifying fundamentals, and condensing the essential into a succinct statement.
A 4-unit workshop given at the Second Renaissance Conferences, 2000. An example is a concrete, specific instance of an abstraction. Examples are crucial for eliminating vagueness. The method of concretizing helps one learn to use creative, compelling examples in explanations.
An individually-designed tutorial program given by telephone, 2001-2003, for anyone who was dissatisfied with some aspect of his thinking.
A 2-day seminar for executives, 2003. The goal of the seminar was to present the fundamental facts and methods of cognition, and show how to apply them to business thinking. Dr. Binswanger presented the theory. Ms. Moroney conducted workshops on specific skills, including concretizing, naming fundamentals, thinking on paper, and analyzing emotions.