A brief history of (ancient) systems thinking « Framework 21 - Daniel Montano

Systems thinking is not new. I have been thinking about its ancient history and so far this is what I have gathered: * 600 B.C. – philosophers used systems thinking to organize their thoughts (e.g. Lao Tze) * 2,700 B.C. – Egyptians, like Imhotep, showed evidence that he was using systems thinking during his roles as architect, physician and engineer in Egypt. * 4,000 B.C. – Cuneiform, a system of writing appears thanks to the need to keep track of multiple economic transactions. * (date pending) – the beginnings of economic (value exchange systems). My assumption here is that value exchange systems were designed by systems thinkers. * (90,000 B.C.) – the beginnings of organized belief systems. You can find traces of these belief systems going back as far as 90,000 B.C. [1]. Rather than being “designed” the earliest belief systems may have emerged at the individual level. People may have organized, and synthesized them into coherent systems.

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Do Tight Deadlines Make You Less Creative? « Creativity & Innovation - Keith Sawyer

In fact there’s been a lot of research on this topic. For the most part, I’ve cited a study by Teresa Amabile of Harvard showing that when people feel more time pressure, they are less creative. Now I’ve read a new study* by Marcus Baer and Greg Oldham, that extends this finding. One difference is that they examine a special kind of time pressure: “creative time pressure” which is, specifically, how much time pressure you feel when engaging in the more creative tasks at work–in contrast to deadline pressure for a more ordinary, non-creative task. A second difference is that they separate employees into two personality groups: one that is high in openness to experience (which suggests they will have a broader repertoire of ideas and concepts) and one that is low; and, they separate employee context into “high support for creativity” and “low support for creativity.”

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Devising An Opera On-line Using Crowdsourcing.

This is one of the most creative online endeavours I have seen - devising an opera on line using the crowdsourcing method. It is worth just visiting the web site to watch the project unfold.

Creative Leaders Get Their Hands Dirty - John Maeda & Becky Bermont - Harvard Business Review

In the last few decades, technology has encouraged our fascination with perfection — whether it's six sigma manufacturing, the zero-contaminant clean room, or in its simplest form, " 2.0." Given the new uncertainty in the world however, I can see that it is time to question this approach — of over-technologized, over-leveraged, over-advanced living. The next big thing? Dirty hands. Let me explain. A couple weeks ago I spoke at Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco to a packed audience of tech-savvy talent. The most interesting moment of the conference for me happened in the green room. While my fellow speakers were busily checking their email and tuning their presentations, I found a small audience of young innovative technologists who were curious about my recent change in coordinates from the MIT Media Lab to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)

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The Aha! in the Brain - The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight

A sudden comprehension that solves a problem, reinterprets a situation, explains a joke, or resolves an ambiguous percept is called an insight (i.e., the "Aha! moment"). Psychologists have studied insight using behavioral methods for nearly a century. Recently, the tools of cognitive neuroscience have been applied to this phenomenon. A series of studies have used electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural correlates of the “Aha! moment” and its antecedents. Although the experience of insight is sudden and can seem disconnected from the immediately preceding thought, these studies show that insight is the culmination of a series of brain states and processes operating at different time scales. Elucidation of these precursors suggests interventional opportunities for the facilitation of insight..

Click here to read this new paper from John Kounios, Drexel University and Mark Beeman, Northwestern University