Making Innovation Happen
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 11:23PM
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers ...
Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 11:41AM We focused on flaws of intuition and of intuitive thinking, and I can tell you how it began. It began with a conversation about whether people are good intuitive statisticians or not. There was a claim at the University of Michigan by some people with whom Amos had studied, that people are good intuitive statisticians. I was teaching statistics at the time, and I was convinced that this was completely false. Not only because my students were not good intuitive statisticians, but because I knew I wasn't. My intuitions about things were quite poor, in fact, and this has remained one of the mysteries, and it's one of the things that I'd like to talk about today — what are the difficulties of statistical thinking, and why is it so difficult.
Monday, September 12, 2011 at 12:09PM When people think about creativity, they think about artistic work -- unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. But if you look deeper, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms, such as haikus, sonatas, and religious paintings, are fraught with constraints. They are beautiful because creativity triumphed over the "rules." Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome. Creativity thrives best when constrained. But constraints must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Too many curbs can lead to pessimism and despair. Disregarding the bounds of what we know or accept gives rise to ideas that are non-obvious, unconventional, or unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint and disregard for the impossible is fueled by passion and leads to revolutionary change.
Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 11:10PM 
Here is a review of Creativity from Contraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough by Patricia Stokes. Stokes is a former advertising graphic artist who became a psychologist following her desire to understand creative behaviour as she had observed it in her profession. In summary, Stokes proposes there are four main constraints to creativity - domain, cognition,variability, talent - and it is how come to understand and articulate these constraints in context that will enable the kind of creative behaviours reuired to obtain decision making breakthroughs that can be considered creative as opposed to more of the same.
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 09:56AM Whether it's choosing words to make up a sentence or walking along a crowded street, we're all capable of improvising. But musical improvisation fills us with amazement. How do musicians make the moment-by-moment decisions to create spontaneous music that's more than noise -- and what's going on in their brains to make it all happen?
