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Featured Video: Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

Posted on by by Posted in Creative Thinking, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

In this RSA animation, Steven Johnson talks about his research into what kinds of situations and environments are most conducive to great ideas and creativity:

It turns out that good ideas take a lot of time. There’s not usually an “Eureka” moment, but a slow development, often requiring exchange of ideas, creative conversation, and collaboration.

That’s why coffee shops are so important! :)

But also, the increase in connectivity that came along with new technologies can be seen as a major engine of creativity and innovation.

 


Ahoona! A New Online Decision Support Tool (Review)

Posted on by by Posted in Career Development, Creative Thinking, Health Decisions, Relationship Decisions, Uncategorized

There’s a new decision support tool out, developed by Ali Abbas at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by an NSF award:

https://www.ahoona.com

It’s a very rich tool, so check it out for yourself! This review is only based on a test run I did on parts of it.

When first looking at it, and reading the NSF report, where Ali describes the application as a “‘Facebook for Decision-Making”, I thought that it was just an aggregation (however sophisticated) of our friends’ or stranger’s opinions, which I would not find too exciting.

However, I did a test run with a random decision, and found that the program can be used quite independently of the social network aspects. It does actually walk you through a process of thinking your decision through (listing alternatives, goals, pros and cons, uncertainties, even asking some bigger picture questions and offering me additional information based on my keywords). It also gives you feedback on how to think deeper at each of those steps. I imagine that this part alone could already be quite useful in a difficult decision situation, by helping people think their concerns through systematically.

If you keep going, the program will then offer you several forms of analysis, such as decision trees and “weight and rate”. Those are rather sophisticated forms of analysis, and I was impressed by how the program was relatively easy to use despite the depth of the process. Some aspects might be hard to understand, especially in the decision tree analysis, and the possibilities of just playing around with it and figuring it out are somewhat limited, because you can’t always go back easily, without restarting the whole analysis. But overall this is one of best online decision tools I have seen.

I would love to hear your experiences if you’re trying it!


Procrastination and Self-Compassion

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

It’s not surprising that procrastination can lead to considerable stress, exacerbated by feelings of guilt and failure. A recent study found that procrastinators were indeed less self-compassionate than others, and that those who showed least self-compassion experienced the most stress as a result of procrastination.
The author, Dr. Fuschia Sirois, suggests that this lack of self-compassion might not just be a consequence of procrastinating, but that it might set the stage for procrastination to become more chronic in nature. Namely, the self-blame could lead people to over-identify with procrastinating and to ruminate about the unattained goal, rather than to focus on a new goal.

Or, in other words, being more self-compassionate after we fail may help us get over it more quickly, move on, get a fresh start and get new things done.

Happy New Day!

Sirois, F. M. (2013). Procrastination and Stress: Exploring the Role of Self-compassion. Self and Identity, 12, doi:10.1080/15298868.2013.763404.


Decision Support Tools – Workshop for Coaches/Counselors

Posted on by by Posted in Career Development, Health Decisions, Uncategorized
This is a special opportunity for coaches, counselors, mental health professionals, and other people who want to learn how to guide people through major life decisions. If that’s not you, maybe you know some that you could share this with… Please do!

If you are a coach or counselor, you are routinely helping people through very difficult decisions. However, most coaching, counseling or therapy approaches don’t offer any explicit training on formal decision support tools.

This is why I’m offering an intensive small-group workshop where you can learn some hands-on tools that were developed to improve and support decision making. The techniques have been shown to help us think more systematically and at the same time more creatively than usual.


This is the Take-Home Toolkit that you’ll get from this workshop:

  • Practical tools to clarify goals and values, such as the construction of a value tree.
  • Creativity techniques that allow a focused search for new winner alternatives, based on a set of specific goals and values.
  • A reusable flexible template of a decision matrix to evaluate options and to test the robustness of a decision in the face of uncertainty.
  • A method of combining decision trees and tables for problems that in involve major risks and uncertainties.

 

Location:
Yeon Building, Conference Room 7th Floor
522 SW 5th Ave
Portland, OR 97204

Time and date:
The workshop will take place in two sessions of 2.5h each. Please indicate your availability for the first session below. We will determine a date for the second session that works for everybody in the group.

Cost:
$125 for 5 hours.

Sign up:
Register below to reserve your spot. The group size is limited to six participants to allow for a very interactive process.


Book Recommendation of the Month: Rational Decision Making

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Career Development, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development

Eisenfuehr, Weber & Langer. Rational Decision Making.

This month’s pick is a classic textbook, presenting theory as well as practical methods on how to improve decision making. It is admittedly not the easiest read, but those who are truly interested in the formal methods of how to approach difficult decisions will find this book very rich and thorough.


Seth Godin: Do You Ship?

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Creative Thinking, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

Seth Godin makes the case that having great ideas is not difficult. “Shipping” them – actually getting them done and out – is the hard part, and the important part.

Shipping is not just hard because it takes a lot of work, but also because it’s scary. It’s our shipped stuff that will be judged, and – as opposed to our brilliant ideas – the finished product will never be perfect.

I can relate to that very well, because almost everything that I ever accomplished in my life required me to get out of my comfort zone – not only the big projects, but even the daily little shippings, like sending emails, or posting stuff to this very blog.

So how can we do it?

  1. Commit to delivering on time. For bigger projects, set your own deadlines earlier than the date you really want to be finished, and set deadlines for steps along the way.
  2. Get into a routine. Protect regular time in your schedule to work on the important stuff. I find early mornings best for not getting interrupted or distracted.
  3. Once the shipping date gets closer: embrace the fear. Being aware that shipping is scary is the first step in overcoming our excuses. Also, notice that fear and excitement can feel very similar to our bodies. Oftentimes, when we experience fear, we would have just as much reason for excitement. (“I have this opportunity to give a talk in front of 200 people! How exciting!!” “I’m ready to ship now! Wohooo!!”)

What do you want to ship? When is your deadline, and what will be your best scheduling routine? And what’s your fear, and your excitement?

 


How to Increase Innovation in Organizations

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Creative Thinking, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development

Innovation and creative thinking in organizations is not only difficult to achieve, but also potentially risky, time consuming, and expensive. Is it worth the effort? Several studies suggest that indeed, higher organizational innovation affects overall performance quite strongly and is worth pursuing.

How, then, can innovation and creative thinking be increased in an organization? One important factor seems to be a strong learning orientation within the company.

Learning orientation (as defined in this body of research) consists of the following four components:

  1. commitment to learning,
  2. shared vision,
  3. open-mindedness, and 
  4. intra-organizational knowledge sharing.

Studies have shown that learning orientation not only influences firm innovativeness directly, but that it also moderates the impacts of risk-taking, creativity, competitor benchmarking orientation, and environmental opportunities on innovativeness.

There is also a direct positive relationship between learning orientation and firm performance (as measured with market share, new product success, and overall performance).

To sum it all up, learning orientation seems to be critical for innovation and performance.

For leaders who want to foster that kind of learning culture, the four components above offer a good starting point. For example, as a “commitment to learning”, managers could encourage employees to use company time to pursue knowledge that may lie outside the immediate scope of their work.

There are many other possibilities of how each of those aspects of learning orientation could be implemented and assessed. In general, a company might want to treat “learning orientation” just like they would treat any other core strategic goal.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

Pesämaa, Ossi, Aviv Shoham, Joakim Wincent, and Ayalla A. Ruvio. “How a Learning Orientation Affects Drivers of Innovativeness and Performance in Service Delivery.” Journal of Engineering and Technology Management 30, no. 2 (April 2013): 169–187. doi:10.1016/j.jengtecman.2013.01.004.

Calantone, Roger J, S.Tamer Cavusgil, and Yushan Zhao. “Learning Orientation, Firm Innovation Capability, and Firm Performance.” Industrial Marketing Management 31, no. 6 (September 2002): 515–524. doi:10.1016/S0019-8501(01)00203-6.

 


Book Recommendation for February

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations

Luke Rhinehart. The Dice Man.

Time for another fiction recommendation: the 70’s cult classic “The Dice Man” by Luke Rhinehart tells the story of a psychiatrist who begins making decisions based on the casting of dice, and develops a radical new approach to psychiatry with his “dice therapy”.

Warning: this book was banned in several countries due to the way it deals with controversial topics.


A Freakonomics Experiment: Let a Coin Decide Your Real Decisions!

Posted on by by Posted in Uncategorized

Do you ever feel like leaving a particularly tough decision up to a coin-toss? Here you can do cointossprecisely that and make a contribution to science: www.freakonomicsexperiments.com.

Of course this is not at all in line with my own approach to tackling difficult decisions! BUT… I am a sucker for cool experiments, and this one strikes me a quite brilliant. You tell the researchers what your decision is (narrowed down to two options), they flip a virtual coin for you, you do what the coin tells you to do, and the researchers and follow up later to find out how that worked out for you.

I looks like a lot of people have already participated in the coin flip. I imagine the main problem will be that many participants will not follow through with the option that the coin chose for them, or won’t respond to the follow-up questions, and whether they do or not will not be independent of what the coin chose for them. But no experiment is flawless, especially not one that tackles such real-life questions outside the lab.

Here’s some more info.
 


The Dark Sides of Positive Thinking

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Career Development

Illustrated by an artist in this RSA animation, Barbara Ehrenreich explores the problems of positive thinking:

Positive thinking, to the extent that it is delusional (and it often is), is not as harmless as it sounds. It can keep us in a powerless or complacent state, rather than forcing us to acknowledge the unpleasant reality and take action.


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