Thinking about Thinking, Creativity, Innovation and Design
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 "E-commerce and Daily Thinking – A Thinkibility Nibble"
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 …
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 …
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 idea, 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 …
Continue reading "Out of Date Concepts – Thinkibility Nibble"
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 …
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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 …
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 "So Where Is Everybody? – Thinkibility Nibble"
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 "Focus the Attention, Relax, and Feel Invisible"
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 - …
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 …
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 …
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 "More, More Information, Yes, Sure, But Relevant?"
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 …
Since we began this blog, we have discussed a range of Thinking Strategies to enhance capabilities to think about a subject. Thinking Strategies are process designs for thinking. It gives you a global approach for thinking. Thinking Strategies allow you to make a map of the thinking situation before you enter the area. It allows …
Continue reading "Thinking Strategies: It’s Time to Plan the Thinking"
This post is about patterns or logical bubbles in psycho therapy. As we will see there are some parallels with lateral thinking. There are several reasons why a person attends psychotherapy. Someone may attend psychotherapy because she is suffering because she thinks herself into a situation she doesn't want to be in. She visits a psychotherapist to …
Continue reading "I Am a Depressive Character – You’re Absolutely Right"
Always the beautiful answer Who asks a more beautiful question. E.E. Cummings The single most important habit for an innovative thinker may be to ask questions. A well formulated question stimulate and inspire. Questions leads to more questions and the question is why we focus so much attention on answering questions and so little on asking …
Recently we came across a handsome book by Jodie Newman called Business Creativity. In the chapter about Creative Toolkit, we found five tools that we clustered around the theme Change Point of View, because basically they come all down to the same principle. As we earlier pointed out each of us looks at the world …
Continue reading "Change a Point of View – Thinking Strategy"
