Thinking about Thinking, Creativity, Innovation and Design
In Ideathons, a deliberate attempt is made to create breakthrough ideas. They are tightly directed 2-hour events. The participants work together in small groups of 5 to 6 thinkers. There are clearly defined areas - not too wide nor too narrow. Areas where there is an urgent need for better ideas. For that purpose, world-renowned... Continue Reading →
Creative thinking can be learnt. How? By using thinking tools. There are many tools for creative thinking, examples can be found in the following books: Edward de Bono presents 13 tools in his book Serious Creativity Grace McGartland has 25 tips and techniques in Thunderbolt Thinking(TM) Arthur VanGundy covers 29 tools in Idea Power Michael... Continue Reading →
In an earlier post we republished Michael Michalko's The Difference between the way the average person thinks and a creative genius thinks" As Michael Michalko noticed that an average person focusses his attention on a specific information and excluding all else. In contrast, a creative genius sees the whole but would move from one detail... Continue Reading →
Nowadays, innovation is very in fashion. As a person, you should be innovative (creative?). A product should be innovative to tempt you to buy it (why?). Research should be dedicated to innovations (instead of discoveries?). Or even worse, boards of directors feel compelled to proclaim a "year of innovation" or ask their employees for... Continue Reading →
In our blog post Daily Thinking – Discovering Patterns we showed some alarming daily thinking habits, like assuming that there is a linear, unambiguously relation between a cause and an effect. For example, it is assumed that increasing e-commerce will reduce traffic. People will less go to shopping malls. However, delivering goods, ordered one by one with take-back guarantee will increase... Continue Reading →
Here a sequel to How to Get a More Beautiful Question? Defining the thinking task before beginning an idea generation session is one of the most neglected stages. Most starting questions are far too broad defined. For instance. “In What Ways Might We (IWWMW) get more clients?”. It is more helpful to break it down in... Continue Reading →
In an earlier post about focus, we stressed the importance of paying attention to the focus of the thinking. Taking a problem or challenge unquestioned as it exposes itself may lead to brilliant solutions for the wrong problem. It is therefore required to pay substantial time and effort to (re)define the focus of the thinking. The problem... Continue Reading →
Concepts occur in solid form and are often not questioned. After all, they have proved their worth and value. Concepts as an abstract or generic ideas, conceived in the mind, are generalized from particular instances. The more "solid" a concept appears the higher the chances are that the concept was conceived in the collective mind... Continue Reading →
There is a misunderstanding that conceptual thinking is abstract in nature. Conceptual thinking is seen as just playing in your head, without physical devices? Conceptual art is the physical result of conceptual thinking. In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of... Continue Reading →
Conceptual Thinking - Thinking with the help of concepts - does have a lot of advantages. concept (Wikidictionary) abstract and general idea; an abstraction understanding retained in the mind, from experience, reasoning and/or imagination; a generalization (generic, basic form), or abstraction (mental impression), of a particular set of instances or occurrences (specific, though different, recorded manifestations of... Continue Reading →
The ability to come up with a lot of alternatives is an important Thinkibility skill, reflecting "mobility" in thinking. As all skills, they have to be trained and maintained by exercises. Recently we came across a funny, but existential exercise. Since the 1950s, scientists have argued the idea that "habitable zones" around stars are the... Continue Reading →
Today, we can by using technology create situations that shows us how powerful our thoughts can be and also how confusing the boundaries between our own body and the environment can be. Below are two examples that pushes the boundaries when it comes to our concepts about thinking, the mind, body and the environment. The... Continue Reading →
With Time Fascism we mean that sometimes time restrictions are used in a way that should be characterized as oppressive, intolerant, dictatorial and/or aggressive. Babies and toddlers are expected to develop within a certain time-frame. Those who for various underlying reasons do not sit, crawl or read or should be known by the authorities, so... Continue Reading →
As an introduction to a series of blogposts about conceptual thinking we will start by paying attention to "ISH-Thinking". A concept is an abstract pattern in the brain that stands for some regular, recurrent aspect of the world, and to which any number of different words can be attached. Sometimes ago we already pointed out... Continue Reading →
Warren Berger presents in his book A More Beautiful Question a simple but effective thinking instruction to get better questions. He also argues that posing better questions become even more relevant as search engines gives a answers and at the same time offer us preset questions before we have even entered the question in full.... Continue Reading →
Will we ever discover what consciousness is? For these days of reflection at the end of 2014 we collected some TED-talks as an introduction to the subject. John Searle: Our shared condition -- consciousness David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness? David Brooks: The social animal Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness Graham Hancock -... Continue Reading →
As we last year noted, most end-of-the-year lists of books consists of books that have already been read by others and many of the lists consists of the same books. Often the lists consists of the books that have topped the sales lists during the year. The underlying message could be interpreted as “if you... Continue Reading →
According to a Dutch report, the number of people with intellectual disabilities getting paid care, increased between 1998 and 2011 fivefold (the figures for other Western countries will not be much different) The large increase is not because more people have a disability, but because the diagnosis is now made more often by changing demands in... Continue Reading →
In this blog post, as you can see in the upper left hand corner, we will focus on the quality of information, an essentially white hat thinking activity. Quality of information as a distinctive focus area or Area of Improvement (API) could be vital for many information intensive enterprises, but also for any other thinking... Continue Reading →
When we deliberately think about something, it is very important to have a precisely defined focus. What should be the outcome of the thinking? If we know what outcome we want, then it is not that difficult anymore to know what thinking steps to do.To get a good focus, it is helpful to ask for ourselves... Continue Reading →
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