Thinking about Thinking, Creativity, Innovation and Design
Where is the climate changing? If you put the words climate change into your search box and look at the images. We suspect that often you get images of polar bears standing on a small iceberg surrounded by open water, images of dry soil with cracks and crusts, and dramatic images of hurricanes, storms, bleached …
Continue reading "How images of Climate Change influence our perceptions"
We assume that the cause of the Global Warming and reduction of sustainability lies in typical Western mono-causal, unilateral, individualistic thinking. New concepts as have emerged in biomedical sciences and cellular biology as in physics are currently lacking in business and the public domain, let alone on an individual level.
Fortunately, there are some initiatives to arrive at healthier economic theories. With difficulty, because there are hardly any media that write about these new quests. Names such as ecological economics, bio-economics, eco-economics or eco-capitalism characterize them.
What have we taken for granted the last 50 years in the way we thought about how to counter global warming and increase sustainability? What can we learn from that to NOT do? What can we learn from that to do otherwise? What has been a seemingly ineffective mechanism for change?
What to do with meaningless but well intended moral calls for action?
If you think about mitigating Global Warming, and you are looking for creative solutions to, it may make sense to map out existing approaches.
For Black Swan-like events, it seems more sensible to design robust measures than to rely on scientific models that are inherently based on previous events and therefore do not apply. And even worse, they give a misplaced feeling of being in control.
How was situation awareness built up in the Coronacrisis and how have(not) considered information multiplied the blundering into disaster?
In the crucial month of February, in those weeks before the major outbreak in Europe, there was still room to stock up on protective equipment, to scale up the laboratories, to expand the purchase and production of test materials, to prepare for the removal of serum with antibodies in healed patients. Only, it didn't happen. …
Continue reading "Thinking about the Spread of the Coronavirus (2) – Concepts"
Our hypothesis is that a lack of thinking skills among governments, health institutions and the population has seriously contributed to the spread of the Corona virus
Managing organizations are in essence establishing coordinating mechanisms. Below we argue that most organizations use Control, that is setting up formal processes of assigning, evaluating, and regulating resources in order to accomplish an organization's goals. This is the generally accepted standard approach to organizing. But can we escape from that? Standard Thinking: Control Most organisations and governments …
Continue reading "The Dominant Designing Idea in Organisations and Public Administrations"
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. In our post The 4th Industrial Revolution and the Meaning of Life we suggested some thinking steps …
Continue reading "Growing Up with Connected Private Watson Machines – Meaning of Life"
This blog post is about how to obstruct problem solving by ineffective thinking. In these times of positive thinking, readers are attracted by slogans as How to Make the Impossible Possible. In spite of that, we see many times teams that struggle with attaining their goals. But they do work hard! Lots of energy is …
There is a huge difference between "engineering" and "design thinking". It comes down to that engineers are problem-oriented, a design thinker is need oriented. That's a fundamental another approach. For an engineer the problem is obvious, As you can see in the image below, it is even not mentioned at all! Design thinking does not …
In our Thinkibility nibble What Is An Interesting Book? we suggested that books with intellectual value should be categorized by the publisher into categories: Mainstream Improvement Criticism Provocation and Alternatives We propose a strong candidate for category 4: Provocation and Alternatives: The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness Subversive Dispels a …
Many teachers in analytical/critical thinking and writing clearly forbid students the use of analogies, because, in one sense, all analogies are faulty. However, as George Lakoff, known for his thesis that the lives of individuals are significantly influenced by the central metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena, convincingly argues that all our thinking is metaphorical. …
Focus defines the input of information that defines the thinking, and by that, the conclusions, solutions or opinions derived from it. In a schedule: information (A) is semi-processed in a funnel (A,B,C) of biases, assumptions and conditions to a logical solution, opinion or conclusion (C). Area A is the focus area, the area where the …
Continue reading "Focus and Group Dynamics Define the Thinking"
Earlier in the post The Charm of Imperfection we wrote about figure-ground reversal or negative space: in art it is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such space occasionally …
Continue reading "The Brilliant Failure Award – Thinkibility Nibble"
We came across a booklet that could be a good example for the kind of studies by the envisioned Thinkibility University. At its West Wing, scientists dissect the basic thinking patterns in a scientific discipline. Siddhartha Mukherjee was asking himself: If there is a science of medicine, then science has laws. Physics has laws. Chemistry …
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 …
