Wave. You Can’t Multitask. I can only think about one thing at a time. Any girl reading this just going to roll her eyes and think, “Of course. You’re a guy!”. But it’s not just true for me, it’s true for everyone. It’s true for you. And not in that way. At first, this claim can sound fantastic. We can talk on a cell phone while driving to work, and we can compose complex sentences while typing. In both cases the extreme situation frustrates your habits and forces you to actively think about what you are doing at the expense of your other task. Still not convinced? Want another experiment? Software often requires us to actively think about two things at once: like needing to know if the current content of the clipboard is important (when you should be thinking about the edit you want to make), or whether the “predictive” text entry on cell phones has incorrectly guessed the word you want (when you really just want to be writing your message).
Time for another experiment. What’s the lesson to be learned? EtherPad: Realtime Collaborative Text Editing. Deadline: Reminders through web, email, jabber, mobile and more. Brightidea, the Leader in Innovation Software and Idea Managemen. Thoughts on Google’s 20% time. Everybody loves to think one little trick can make their organization transform into a super creative powerhouse. With the rise of Google, no single tactic comes up more in innovation circles than their concept of 20% time. Simply put, employees get 1/5th of their time to work on projects of their own choosing.
For the myths of innovation book i spent time studying lots of concepts, models and approaches similar to 20% time, and even talked to a few Google employees about how they see the idea. What follows below hits on most of the erroneous assumptions I’ve heard people make about the concept. Here’s a short report: Google’s 20% time is more of an attitude and culture than a rule. 20% time experiment: Atlassian, a software development shop, just announced a serious 20% time experiment, adopting the idea in their culture and blogging about it as they go. BIF-3: Dan Heath - Think Inside the Box. Take a sheet of paper and write down everything you can think of that’s white. You have 15 seconds, go. Done? Good, now take 15 seconds and write down everything that is or could be in your refrigerator that’s white.
Finished? Raise your hand if had better luck with the second list. Dan Heath, who co-authored the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die with his brother Chip, started his talk at BIF-3 this afternoon by asking the audience to complete the exercise I described above. We’ve all heard the term “thinking outside of the box,” Heath told the audience. Improv actors, said Heath, have long utilized the benefits of inside the box thinking. Inside the box thinking is found all around business in the form of what Heath called a “high concept pitch.” The box can inform many decisions taking place throughout an organization. “The idea that we need to think out of the box is wrong,” concluded Heath, “instead we should go box shopping.