Creative Thinking Archives - Decision Coaching – Ursina Teuscher, PhD

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Attention Span & Productivity – Book Recommendation

My main take-aways from Gloria Mark’s book: “Attention Span”
A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity

In her book “Attention Span“, Gloria Mark explores the impacts of today’s fast-paced technology on our attention spans, productivity, and happiness. She presents a lot of research done both by her own and other teams. Based on that, she offers advice, not only on how to gain more control over our attention, but also on finding balance between productivity and happiness.

Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity by Gloria Mark (2023). [1]

Here are just a few of the findings and insights I found helpful.

Fun facts about attention and productivity
Have our attention spans really decreased?

Maybe you are feeling it yourself? Or maybe you’ve heard humans’

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A Creative Conversation

I recently met for coffee with my friend and colleague Leo MacLeod, who is a leadership and communication coach. Among the many topics we talked about, one conversational thread led to an unexpected result – a guest blog post by him.

Finding Meaning in Solving Problems
Guest Blog Post by Leo MacLeod

I recently turned sixty-five and, for the first time in a long time, found myself without a plan for my future. I’ve always been a person who has done well with setting goals and following a schedule to accomplish them. But as I looked at retirement, I found myself staring into an abyss of having a lot of time without knowing how to fill it. I lacked purpose.

How do I decide what’s important to me, and how do I take the steps toward a meaningful future?

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Summer Reading List 2021: Five Books that Changed my Mind

This past year gave me a fair amount of time to read and listen to audiobooks. Here are five books I found truly impactful, in that they managed to change some of my fundamental previous assumptions and opinions.

Steven Pinker (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Steven Pinker presents a passionate and persuasive defense of reason, science and progress. He shows with an abundance of data how a commitment to humanitarian values has kept winning – in the long run – dramatically and consistently over the destruction and chaos that would be the easier and more natural course. It is an uplifting as well as urgent perspective that challenges lazy dogmas from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

To get a first impression and hear his own voice,

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Should You Become an Intrapreneur?

Could you make your job better by becoming an intrapreneur? Intrapreneurship means to think and work like entrepreneur, even though you are still a part of a large organization.

For example, you might have an idea of how to improve a product, and suggest those changes to your boss. Or, you might look for ways to make a specific service more profitable for your company. Maybe you discover a new opportunity to market a product or a service. You might find ways to communicate better within your team, and with that, speed up the workflow. Or you might go the extra mile to increase customer satisfaction. In other words: whatever your role within the organization, you actively drive innovation and keep looking for opportunities to improve your company.

Good employers realize how valuable intrapreneurs are to their organization, and a lot of research is being done in the attempt to understand how different leadership styles and company cultures can encourage intrapreneurship among employees.

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Self-Assessment: How Awe-Struck are You?

In a earlier post, I wrote about how feelings of awe can affect our decision making. Here you can take a quick self-assessment as to how often you experience awe in your own life.

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Inspired: How Awe Affects Our Decisions

Feelings of awe and wonder make us feel smaller, but richer in time. This affects our decisions in several interesting ways.

Awe is a powerful emotion that we feel when we encounter something so strikingly vast (grand, beautiful, or powerful) that it overwhelms our mental capacity. Some researchers describe such vastness as “provoking a need to update one’s mental schemas”, while the rest of us might more succinctly call it mind-blowing. These feelings can be induced experimentally, for example by having research participants stand in a grove of towering trees or looking at stunning images of the sky, space or landscapes.

It turns out feelings of awe have interesting effects on decision making.

For one, feelings of awe can lead to more ethical decisions,

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Are You Scared of Your Next Decision?

Scared of Your Next Decision?

Edvard Munch (1893): The Scream. Oil, tempera & pastel on cardboard. [Image rights in the public domain.]

Tonight will be a scary night for the bravest of us, with countless children roaming the streets, high on sugar, threatening to knock on our very doors.

However, even today, our most crippling fears probably come from within. Are you scared of your next decision? Afraid of making the wrong choice? Funnily enough, while dogs and – some say – children can smell our fear; on our own we’re not always very good at recognizing when and why we’re scared.

Here’s how you can recognize whether your decision scares you:

You avoid making the decision altogether, for example by procrastinating or by shifting the responsibility to others.
You get overly emotional about your decision.

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Summer Reading List 2016

Some book recommendations on decision making, innovation and productivity:

Kayt Sukel (2016) The Art of Risk: The New Science of Courage, Caution, and Chance
A very readable overview of current research on the neuroscience of risk, illustrated with personal stories and some inspiring interviews with risk takers and scientists.

Charles Duhigg (2016). Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business.
Important insights into how organizations can foster better productivity and innovation. For my taste, the book relied very heavily on anecdotes though, to the extent that I found it difficult to identify key takeaways.

Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner (2015). Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.
A convincing case that – while even experts usually make poor predictions about the future – forecasting is a skill that can be improved.

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Why is it such hard work to find your own niche?

Because until you fill it, it’s just a gap.

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

Find your own niche

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Featured Video: Raise Your Children As Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurial skills are not a part of traditional education, even though they are important if we want to empower more people to make an independent living in a world where not everyone can find a good job.

In this TED talk, Cameron Herald argues that we should encourage and foster those skills in children. He makes a case that entrepreneurial traits occur quite naturally in children and can be encouraged and reinforced in playful ways. He gives many practical suggestions how parents can help their children develop those skills. For example, rather than giving children allowances and thereby getting them used to expecting a regular paycheck, children could be paid for specific projects.

Many important traits could be developed in that way, including such big ones as creativity, social skills, a proactive attitude towards working, and an understanding of what it means to create value for others.

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Do Reading and Writing Make you More Creative?

A study by Amber Y. Wang gives us reason to think so: students who spent more time reading and writing performed better on creativity tests.

The study only investigated the correlations however, so it can’t tell us what’s cause and what’s effect. Reading and writing might indeed lead to more creativity, but it’s also possible that creative people naturally feel more drawn to reading and writing, or that other factors influence all of it together: reading, writing and creativity.

What we can say in any case is that both reading and writing are related to creativity.

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling, LLC

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Book Recommendation: How To Write A Lot

Paul J. Silvia (2007). How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing.

Paul Silvia makes a strong case for scheduling in his book “How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing“.
It has been one of the most influential books for my own writing practice, and I often find myself mentioning gems of practical wisdom from this book in my own workshops and coaching sessions.

The book focuses on academic writing, but a lot of its advice applies to anybody who has a hard time working towards goals that are important in the long run, but not urgent on any particular day. Writing is just a really good example of such a goal.

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling,

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Featured Video: Low-Cost Creative Problem-Solving

If you want to see what innovation can look like on a very tight budget, watch this TED talk by Navi Radjou:

Navi Radjou borrows the Hindi word “jugaad” to talk about frugal innovation: that is, creative problem-solving with extremely limited resources.

Importantly, the idea is not just to “make do” with what you have, but to do more and better with less. The talk covers many examples of how people got spectacular value from limited resources.

He suggests three principles to get to frugal innovation into your own organization:

Keep it simple – don’t try to impress
Build on existing and widely available resources
Think and act horizontally

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

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tDCS: Brain-Zapping for Creativity and Focus

Fun Stuff Brought To Us By Mad Scientists

A recent study found that participants were performing better than usual in a creative task when they received electric stimulation of the brain.
The method is called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and this particular treatment was set up to increase activity in the right hemisphere, while diminishing activity
in a part of the left hemisphere involved with sensory input, memory, and language.

If you’re intrigued – or alarmed – by the idea of sending electric current through your brain, I recommend this Radiolab episode:

It does a great job explaining how tDCS works, including interviews with participants, researchers, and other neuroscientists who might have a more skeptical view of this method.

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

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Featured Video: Does Brainstorming Work?

In this very short (2:21) animated video, Jonah Lehrer makes a case that criticism is an important driver of creativity:

If we want to come up with new and better ideas, we need to interrupt our most comfortable and efficient (but lazy) way of thinking. So, in order to be innovative, we should actively seek out disagreement and criticism by others.

I would add to this: if we manage to adapt this attitude genuinely, and if we keep practicing it, I believe that we can become masters not only in creative thinking, but in social gracefulness and in building respectful, enriching and diverse relationships.

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling, LLC

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Summer Reading Recommendation: Children’s Fantasy for Grownups

Michael Ende. The Neverending Story.

Many of my German-speaking friends will have read this one, and would quite likely list it as one of their favorite childhood books. In the English speaking world, the book seems to be less well-known. Some people I asked seemed to have a vague idea of “wasn’t there a movie in the 80’s? With a white dragon…? Yes?” No! I’m NOT recommending the movie (among others, the author himself hated it quite fiercely).

The book, however, is one of the most beautiful fantasy novels I’ve come across, starting with the print itself: the hardcover edition is printed entirely in colored ink, purple and green, for the different story threads.

Without giving away too much of the plot: a shy and bookish boy, Bastian, needs to find his journey through a fantastic world and back into his own by following the (too?) simple instructions: “

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Featured Video: Can You Make Yourself Smarter?

This RSA talk by Dan Hurly is a bit slow (I recommend listening to it while doing something else, rather than watching), but I found the content excellent, well-researched and important.

(The actual talk starts at 1:30 and ends at 27min, the rest is Q&A.)

Here’s why I believe it’s so important:

1. Smartness matters.
Intelligence is often underrated as a geeky and nerdy quality, irrelevant for practical purposes, or even worse, as being a hindrance for emotional and intuitive skills. That’s very wrong: general intelligence is highly related to emotional and social skills, and even to health and longevity.

2. Yes, we can become smarter.
Therefore I think we should make that effort – not just for ourselves, but for the coming generation. Let’s remember that the children who are now in school are the ones that will make decisions for us when we’re old.

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Creativity Tip – How to Make Other People Think for You

We’ve all experienced it: we’re talking to somebody, and suddenly they are trying to solve our problems for us or give us unasked advice. Our first impulse? Shutting them down. Saying, “yes, but …”, and making clear that their idea is neither new nor helpful. But here’s the thing: if we do that, we’re missing out on some great creative potential.

If you want to get into the habit of thinking more creatively, here’s a tip.

Whenever you feel like saying “yes, but…”

for example:

“yes, but I don’t have enough money for that”, or
“yes, but that will take too much time”,

instead say “Oh, yes!”, and then something to make your friends think even harder for you (since they seem to love doing that).

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Book Recommendation: “Decisive” by Chip and Dan Heath (2013)

Chip and Dan Heath (2013). Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. New York: Crown Business.

I was impressed with this new book by the Heath brothers, a very helpful guide to decision making. It does not offer any formal tools to evaluate options, but a process with powerful ideas that are easy to apply to any personal or business decision.

They call their approach the WRAP process, an acronym standing for (1) Widen your options, (2) Reality test your assumptions, (3) Attain some distance, and (4) Prepare to be wrong.

Here’s a sample of some ideas that I’m finding very effective with clients as well as for my own decisions:

For widening your options,

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Featured Video: Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

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.

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