Idea Champions
Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 9:28AM Ciaran Foley Came across an interesting company (whose products I haven't evaluated yet) that is tackling the challenge of innovation with their own metholodies and approaches.
According to their site:
Idea Champions is a consulting and training company specializing in creativity, innovation, team building, leadership and out of the box products. Since 1986, we've been helping forward thinking organizations unleash their collective brilliance and achieve extraordinary results. Our work, however, goes well beyond getting people out of the box. Beyond brainstorming. Beyond ideas. Beyond the fuzzy front end of the corporate innovation process. What we do, ultimately, is help our clients establish humane, inclusive, sustainable cultures of innovation - the kinds of environments that become fertile ground for the natural expression of creativity, collaboration, commitment and uncommon success.
http://www.ideachampions.com/index.shtml
idea, innovation, methodology, technique Permalink Inattentional Blindness
Saturday, January 2, 2010 at 4:30PM Ciaran Foley Inattentional blindness is a term used in reference to psychological studies that reveal subjects to be completely unaware of very obvious details in scenes that they view. One such study is the Gorilla in the Basketball Game - wherein an outside observer is asked to count the number of times that a basketball is passed between players on a court. At a point during the exchange, an individual donning a gorilla suit conspicuously walks amongst the players, waves at the camera and leaves. A large percentage of the audience watching the video (without forewarning) will completely miss the presence of the gorilla. Such a phenomenon is called inattentional blindness and refers to our brain's inability to truly "multitask." As attention is being paid to a particular task, the brain, in a quest (seemingly) for efficiency, effectively blinds us to external stimulus--thus, inattentional blindness. This study brought to mind the usefulness of a tool to aid in conceptualization and thinking tasks...
Idioms - Adaptability in Language
Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 2:23PM J.H. Everett www.hyperthinking.org - No matter how carefully and correctly words are chosen, idiomatic expressions and the like may forever present a difficulty in communicating ideas due to their naturally evasive quality. However, idioms might also offer important insights into the understanding of how words commingled with time can be used as an element in aiding human beings with their constant struggle to move themselves away from the contemptible. Examining the lineage of the idiom to pull the wool over one's eyes illustrates a fascinating connection: a culture's obsession with the words it chooses to convey its thoughts and its simultaneous need to remove itself from the unpleasant.
The Benefits of Slow Thinking in Hyperthinking
Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 3:42PM J.H. Everett Per our conversation at lunch on streamlined thinking, I am posting a link to an article that contains several jumping off points on the issue of slow versus fast, or efficient vs. inefficient thinking. By implying time (or speed) in terms of qualities of thinking, without actually dealing with the issue of the time it takes to actually digest and process new information suggests that such lines of reasoning (results based thinking?) miss the opportunities opened by messy, open, "blue sky," or what I call - slow thinking.
