Thinking about Thinking, Creativity, Innovation and Design
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... Continue Reading →
In 1968, Dick Fosberry won a gold medal in high jumping at the Summer Olympics. Instead of diving with his belly over the bar and landing on his feet, he did it reverse, jumped over the bar with his back and landed on his back. Nearly two thousand years since the Olympics in Athens, mankind... Continue Reading →
Providing people with more facts is not going to improve making sense of the world. Instead, we need to look of other solutions to break the hold of groupthink.
In "Education - 21 Century Challenges" about "What should we teach children?" we posed two additional questions: What advice should young people follow? Who or where should they turn for advice when adults’ wisdom may only be outdated biases? We suggested two (visual) approaches; one that departs from the current situation and one that departs from 2050.... Continue Reading →
Who owns your medical data? The aim of this series of posts is to sketch possible thinking steps that might help us to get a solution or at least a direction for one of today's urgent issues as identified by Yuval Noah Harari in the book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (see the blog... Continue Reading →
In 1968, Dick Fosberry won a gold medal in high jumping at the Summer Olympics. Instead of diving with his belly over the bar and landing on his feet, he did it reverse, jumped over the bar with his back and landed on his back. Nearly two thousand years since the Olympics in Athens, mankind invented... Continue Reading →
In a recent post What’s (not) an Innovation? we mentioned that an innovation consists of a new combination of a function - the innovation has the purpose of satisfying a need a principle - there is a mechanism or idea how to deliver that function a market - the innovation has a value that can... 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 →
A new adage is blowing around in the world of innovation. According to Wikipedia, The term "big data" often refers simply to the use of predictive analytics, user behavior analytics, or certain other advanced data analytics methods that extract value from data, and seldom to a particular size of data set. Analysis of data sets can find... Continue Reading →
In 17th and 18th centuries England, France, and Spain contested the Dutch domination of world trade and the control over the seas and trade routes. After initial English successes, the war ended in a decisive Dutch victory. In 1667 Lieutenant-Admiral Michiel de Ruyter sailed up to the river Thames and attacked the British Royal navy... 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 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 →
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 a Reversal, the usual supposed cause-effect relation between objects or subjects are turned upside down. For example, it is supposed that the establishment of a permanent observation post increases the safety of recreational sailing. A Reversal could set up that the establishment of a permanent observational post rightly effective decreases the safety of sailors. The... Continue Reading →
Ultra-Solutions, first coined by Paul Watzlawick, are solutions that in a previous situation worked brilliantly or at least to your satisfaction. Then you try the solution in another context and it turns into the opposite. The solution is worse than the disease. It is a way to fail most successfully. NASA built silos for rockets against corrosion. The... Continue Reading →
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Thinking about Thinking, Creativity, Innovation and Design
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