Psychology
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Refresher on critical thinking
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1 min read
Stever Robbins pens a critical thinking refresher in the new HBS Working Knowledge… Make sure you understand the logic behind your decision. Identify your assumptions and double-check them. Collect the data that will support or disprove your assumptions. Deliberately consider the situation from multiple frames. Remember the people! Think short and long term.
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Stephen Johnson & flow
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1 min read
Stephen Johnson @ TED Salon Stephen Johnson’s new book, Everything Bad is Good for You is getting warm reviews, particularly from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. Listening to him tonight, I particularly liked his comparison of video game levels to the concept of flow (though he didn’t use that term). Games progressively get harder,…
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Strengthen your right brain
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2 min read
In the April issue of Scientific American Mind, Ulrich Kraft’s Unleashing Creativity ($*) investigates the physical and behavioral evidence for our creativity, still of course a mostly mysterious thing. One fascinating finding is how the left brain’s convergent thinking can inhibit the right brain’s divergent thinking. The neurologist Bruce Miller studied patients with dementia that…
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Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind”
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2 min read
Recently I was emailing with Andrew about Daniel Pink’s new book “A Whole New Mind”. Andrew caught Dan’s great talk at SXSW and was reading his book, one chapter of which is devoted to design. There’s a review at the CEO Read site. “His key thesis is that the future no longer belongs to analytical…
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Empathy and the design of JetBlue
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1 min read
David Batstone recaps a conversation with David Neeleman, the CEO and founder of JetBlue in the March 2005 Harvard Business Review and shows perfectly how the empathy of great design thinking improves both human experience and the bottom line simultaneously: For starters, Neeleman was troubled by the vast inequities of privilege and poverty he saw…
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The Wisdom of Crowds: cognition problems
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2 min read
More notes from James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds… As an example of solving cognition problems, he discusses decision markets like The Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), which has generally outperformed election polls. Over time, they are also less volatile than polls, changing less dramatically to new information. The IEM is not big or diverse, involving…
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The Wisdom of Crowds: Intro
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2 min read
James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds is the best book I’ve read in a while. In it he forwards a compelling thesis: If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest that group’s decision will, over time, be intellectually superior…
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The Paradox of Choice
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3 min read
I meant to make a note of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice a while ago, and was reminded of it as it’s now in paperback. The New Yorker review is, as usual, the best introduction to the topic. Excerpts: As Herbert Simon, the 1978 Nobel laureate in economics, observed, any firm that tried to…
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Malcolm Gladwell blinks
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1 min read
Malcolm Gladwell I just saw Malcolm Gladwell do a book tour talk. With “The Tipping Point” and now “Blink” it’s clear he’s a student of change. In his new book he looks at the ability of the adaptive unconscious to make good decisions because it’s been trained through experience. The implications for practice and iteration…
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Where creative thinking meets critical thinking
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2 min read
In all the bruhaha on business innovation and creative thinking, the focus is often on new ideas, and by extension how different the ideas are. I very rarely see an important dichotomy represented, that of developing ideas that work both inside and outside the organization. In companies, this translates into making money while also serving…
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From anger springs innovation, sometimes
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2 min read
Tom Peters in Re-Imagine! For me business is personal, not an abstraction… I’m writing another book because I’m pissed off… I happen to believe that innovation comes not from market research or carefully crafted focus groups but from pissed off people…. Many people I’ve met who strive to be designers and innovators are driven by…
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Entitlement bargaining
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1 min read
James Surowiecki, explaining why it’s so difficult for legacy airlines to change, relays what social scientists Simon Gächter and Arno Riedl call entitlement bargaining… …for people in a negotiation, ideas of fairness are determined by what happened in the past. Once someone earns a particular cut, all the participants, on both sides of the bargaining…
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Cost and Style
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2 min read
My post on eBay-as-Flea Market received a bit of attention, including — judging by the referers — some folks from eBay. Later discussions with Tanya and Owen refined these ideas a bit, namely: I was a bit sloppy in my use of the word design. eBay’s design works, though the style of the site —…
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Theory: EBay as Flea Market
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2 min read
Let’s assume EBay looks the way it does (not great) because not a lot of attention was paid to the design. Now let’s say they had contracted the design to a professional services firm that practices user-centered design. What would the result look like? Most likely something pretty slick. Conventional wisdom – at least with…
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Mental Model vs. Innovation
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1 min read
So I bought an iPod used from a friend. Never has a device been so fulfilling and so annoying at the same time. I love the integration with the $.99-a-tune music store, but: the front panel is too sensitive, there’s no on/off switch, there’s no volume control (without attaching the additional wired remote do-dad), the…