Psychology
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Uncertainty, Argh!
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2 min read
I just heard a talk at Lean Startup Machine NYC by Jonathan Fields, author of the book Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance. It was only about 20 minutes but had maybe the highest useful content density of any talk I’ve ever heard. Here’s a few notes: A startup at the beginning…
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User Experience Areas Explained
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1 min read
Can these disciplines be explained in two sentences? Click for a larger version…
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How Recruiting iPhone Designers is Like Raising Kids
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2 min read
When two of the really amazing thinkers I admire — Ken Bain and Jeanne Liedtka — both say they admire Carol Dweck, I figure it’s time to figure out who Dweck is. Her latest book, Mindset, provides some fascinating psychological support for the power of play and prototyping, as she says… People who believe in…
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Pundits and the Need for Certainty
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2 min read
The world is getting to be a whole lot more complex, and we seem to be reacting with increasing punditry, from cable news hosts to conference speakers (there are currently 14810 slideshows on Slideshare explaining the future of something or other). And of course I’m guilty of this as the next guy, so I thinking…
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Is Play Important?
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2 min read
Business design people talk a lot about the importance of play at work, the sort of improvisation that — because it is both fun and challenging — encourages us to persist at an activity by generating new ideas. Robin Marantz Henig’s recent essay in the New York Times, Taking Play Seriously, focuses on the scientific…
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I was very frustrated at work yesterday thinking through a key business issue with a lot of variables in play, and the emotion was clouding my ability to think about the problem. Approaching the problem creatively was even harder, even though I was aware of this obstacle at the time. And of course this is…
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Does Strategic Thinking Reduce Stress?
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1 min read
If you’re a designer, you can become very stressed over a small product detail, something so small most customers may not notice. If you’re a product manager, you may attend to the product details without stressing over them because you see the bigger picture of how the product competes in the market and what the…
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Want to Be An Expert? Practice for Ten Years
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1 min read
In Daniel Coyle’s article on Russian tennis players we receive another interesting tidbit from the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. We already knew about the need for feedback, but this is the first I’ve heard of the Ten-Year Rule: “an intriguing finding dating to 1899, which shows that even the most talented individual…
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Emotional Intelligence and Job Titles
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0 min read
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Engage: Resources on Designing for Emotion
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1 min read
Trevor van Gorp just pointed me to the Engage site which — once you’ve completed the free registration — has a wealth of resources for doing research and design with emotions in mind (which, given we’re emotional creatures, should be pretty much always). Trevor, incidentally, just finished an impressive master’s thesis at the University of…
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The Neuroscience of Leadership
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1 min read
I agree with Ed when he says of The Neuroscience of Leadership “it’s an outstanding piece of work, well worth your time” but that the authors’ critique of humanism is both lame and unnecessary.
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Female masters of innovation
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1 min read
Last year I went back to Jeanne Lietdke’s Strategy as Design article for a second, close reading. One thought I came away with was, “It’s not too surprising this has come from a woman. The creative embrace of conflict, the willingness to stay in the problem space, the lack of need to control a situation…
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Malcolm Gladwell’s Troublemakers extends his Blink thinking to how we generalize. The takeaway is “It doesn’t work to generalize about a relationship between a category and a trait when that relationship isn’t stable — or when the act of generalizing may itself change the basis of the generalization.” In the article he asks whether pit…
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Call an expert or toss a coin?
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3 min read
Louis Menand reviewed Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?†which summarizes a twenty year study of people who make prediction their business. In short, their predictions are “worse than dart-throwing monkeys.” This is good news for strategists using future planning tools like scenario planning: they don’t…
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Don’t Think of an Elephant!
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6 min read
I finally got a around to reading Don’t Think of an Elephant! in which George Lakoff applies his linguistic and cognitive ideas on framing to American progressive politics. It’s a compelling, important book, and the theory can be used anywhere, particularly the hierarchy of vision -> values -> principles -> policies -> ten-word philosophy. It’s…