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.
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Decision Coaching – Ursina Teuscher, PhD
Helping you make big decisions and achieve goals
Ahoona! A New Online Decision Support Tool (Review)
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:
It’s a very rich tool,
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Procrastination and Self-Compassion
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.
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Decision Support Tools – Workshop for Coaches/Counselors
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.
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Book Recommendation of the Month: Rational Decision Making
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,
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Seth Godin: Do You Ship?
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,
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How to Increase Innovation in Organizations
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.
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Book Recommendation for February
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,
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A Freakonomics Experiment: Let a Coin Decide Your Real Decisions!
Do you ever feel like leaving a particularly tough decision up to a coin-toss? Here you can do 
precisely 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!
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The Dark Sides of Positive Thinking
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.
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Shortcut to Conflict Resolution With Game Theory
“Fair Outcomes”, an online system, offers an ingenious alternative to conflict resolution, based on the principles of game theory. The ABA journal has just published an article about it.
In contrast to litigation, arbitration,
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Book Recommendation for the New Year
Charles Duhigg. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.
This book offers a very well-researched but easy to understand explanation of how we form and maintain habits.
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Are we better at deciding for others than deciding for ourselves?
It seems that if we are making choices for others, we are often doing a better job than if we are deciding for ourselves. This seems to be the case for quite different aspects of decision-making. For example, previous studies had already shown that people are looking for more information if they’re deciding for others than if they’re deciding for themselves.
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Book Recommendation on Consumer Decisions: “Spent”
I guess I could call this a “seasonal pick”, as Amazon keeps counting down the days to Black Friday:
Geoffrey Miller (2009). Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
Geoffrey Miller presents an evolutionary psychology perspective on consumer decisions: why do we buy so much,
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Thinking in a foreign language makes decisions more rational
An interesting study that came out this year suggests that when people think in another than their native language, they are judging risks more rationally:
With several experiments,
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Which types of decisions do we regret most?
In this TED talk, Kathryn Schulz makes the rather unusual
claim that regret is not always a bad thing:
It is a worthwhile talk for many reasons. One thing I found
particularly remarkable was a study she cites,
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Book Recommendation for October
Jon Krakauer: Into Thin Air
This is Jon Krakauer’s bone-chilling eye-witness report of the disastrous 1996 Mount Everest climb that killed eight people. I’m not going to discuss why this book is about decision making and goal achievement (well –
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Choose both
A friend just sent me this wonderful poem by Robert Crawford. Couldn’t be more perfect for here:
When you are faced with two alternatives
Choose both. And should they put you to the test,
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Relationship decisions – deciding matters…
Here is a very interesting new take on an older debate: why is living together before marriage, particularly before engagement, associated with higher risks for divorce?
http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2012/9/11/twos-company-but-is-it-necessarily-bad-company.html
It is an uncomfortable finding for us secular liberal folks….
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Book Recommendation for September
Morgan D. Jones. The Thinker’s Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving:
Nice collection of simple strategies that help thinking and problem-solving; from problem structuring to hypothesis testing,
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