Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers — The Year of the Looking Glass. Brilliant: The New Science of Smart Newsletter. Utopic_US Global. See The Workspaces Of 14 Leading Creative Minds.
How To De-Urgent Your Life. One common misconception about design is that it's all about finding solutions to problems, as if they were math equations.
4 Little-Known Reasons Martin Luther King Was An Amazing Leader, Human. Martin Luther King Jr. seems more legend than man.
The Art And Science Of Building Confidence Under Pressure. And The Power Of Negative Thinking. Editor's Note: This story contains one of our 11 New Years resolutions you can actually keep in 2014.
For the full list, click here. It sometimes feels as if the "happiness industry"--the self-help books, motivational speakers, corporate consultants and the rest--makes its money by being useless. El design thinking ya no es lo que era entonces. "Design Thinking" Isn't a Miracle Cure, but Here's How It Helps. [This is a follow-up to Helen's previous article on design thinking, The Seven Deadly Sins That Choke Out Innovation ?
Ed.] Recently, Kevin McCullagh of British product strategy consultancy, Plan organized a two-day event for executives to wrap their heads around the concept of design thinking? And, in particular, to think about how they might go about implementing it within their own organization. Kevin invited me along to give an overview of some of the things I've been thinking recently. Why You Can Never Finish Anything And How to Finally Change It. The law of inertia tells us a body in motion stays in motion.
And the same goes for projects, creative ideas, daily tasks, half-written emails, and that thing you stopped working on to read this article. When you interrupt a task, it can be difficult to pick it up again. And we are interrupted nearly every three minutes, according to Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at University of California, Irvine. How Einstein's Brain Was Probably Different Than Yours, And Why He Was So Creative. In 1905, at the astoundingly young age of 26, Albert Einstein came up with the quantum theory of light, proved the existence of atoms, and created the theory of special relativity.
If you're wondering how so much genius could possibly be jam-packed into one head, a new study just published in the journal Brain, provides a clue. It turns out that Einstein had a killer corpus callosum--a large bundle of fibers connecting the left and right hemispheres to each other. "The corpus callosum keeps each side of the brain informed about what the other half is doing," says Dean Falk, a professor of anthropology at Florida State University, who contributed to the study. You Have To Stop Meeting Like This: How To Un-Process Your Counterproductive, Soul-Crushing Processes. If you’re employed, you’re likely among the 99% who struggle daily with processes and systems that are broken.
From too many hours spent in meetings to mandated “proprietary tools” that don’t actually lead to better work, they can throw a wrench into the day, the week, the month. They made sense to some smart someone(s) when they were created, originally intended to do awesome things like get to better solutions, save time and money, bring order to chaos. They helped solve problems until they became the problem. The Science And Psychology Behind What Drives Serial Entrepreneurs. Ask any entrepreneur how much blood, sweat, tears (and soul) they’ve put into their startup, and you’d get an imprecise answer at best.
The long hours, the lack of resources, the simultaneous product and customer-network building--not to mention fundraising--often make the venture a one-time enterprise. For some, the slip into a steady gig feels less like success and more like a life sentence. They prefer to exit stage left and start all over again. How Google's Flexible Workspace Ignites Creative Collaboration (On Wheels) Editor's Note: This video is featured on our list of the most valuable, blunt, and slightly unconventional business lessons of 2013.
Click here to see the full list. On our second trip inside the Google Garage--or what Program Manager Mamie Rheingold calls Google's "hacker maker design space"--we discover the elements required for the ultimate collaborative environment. Perhaps most important? Good times. Empathy Is The Most Powerful Leadership Tool. Anything we’re trying to make happen as a leader involves other people, and the fact is, most people don’t have to follow us.
They don’t have to believe in our great ideas, buy our great products, or do what we want them to do. Even when we have authority--as parents of teenagers will tell you--our power doesn’t go very far without others believing that what we want them to do is in their best interests. The pull of connecting to others and their interests is far more powerful than the push of control, especially when we find the intersection between their interests and our goals. How do we know what’s truly in someone else’s interests? “Become the other person and go from there.” Why Teaching Makes You Smarter. We tend to think of thinking as something super solitary--but as Annie Murphy Paul observes in the Brilliant Report, cognition is a two-way street. How so? "Students enlisted to tutor others," Paul reports, "work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively.
" The result is a phenomenon called the protege effect: students who teach their study material to others perform better on tests than kids learning for the sake of learning. Realizing that, innovative educators are setting up situation where students can teach young students, the most awesome of which may be happening at the University of Pennsylvania--a "cascading mentoring program" in which college undergrads teach computer science to high schoolers who teach CS to middle schoolers. Perhaps not surprisingly, the factor the most accelerates the learning in a teacher is a kind of emotional intelligence. Want To Advance Your Career? Then Work On Your EQ ⚙ Co. In case you don't yet feel it, emotional intelligence--the ability regulate emotions in one's self and identify emotions in others--is a predictor of workplace success, both for employees and managers. Over at Black Enterprise, Amanda A. Ebokosia notes that high emotional intelligence--a topic we've been on for 13 years--leads to higher job satisfaction, better decision-making, and more ready goal-completion for employees, while managers lacking emotional intelligence have difficulty with social interactions and nurturing professional relationships.
"Emotions do matter," Ebokosia writes, citing a pair of studies. Relationships that make you smarter. Relating makes us smarter Learning, and thinking, are deeply social activities. This is not the traditional view (Rodin's iconic sculpture, "The Thinker," is conspicuously alone in his chin-on-fist musings), but it's the view that is emerging out of several decades of social science research. How To Decide What Ideas To Prototype. Not All To-Do Lists Are Created Equal. How Productive Meetings Are Like Bonsai Trees. Models for Decision Making. How Serious Play Leads To Breakthrough Innovation. How Reframing A Problem Unlocks Innovation.
5 Paths To Doing Great Work At A Terrible Company. Design Thinking. 5 Weird Habits That Make People Successful And Awesome. Editor's Note: This is one of the most-read leadership articles of 2013. Click here to see the full list. Yes, we all need to heed our callings, follow our north stars, and not settle for jobs, but pursue careers. Thing is, during anyone's career, sometimes it gets weird—and getting weird can pay off. Over at Forbes, Jason Nazar gets it done. Einstein's Problem-Solving Formula, And Why You're Doing It All Wrong.
From Google Ventures: 4 Steps For Combining The Hacker Way With Design Thinking. Implementing Design Thinking: A Blog Series. Resources and events. Creativity. Design Thinking Network. What The Wacky Sport Of Chessboxing Teaches You About Creativity. Radical Openness - Issue 17. Frog Creates An Open-Source Guide To Design Thinking. Visual Thinking. Are You A Planner Or Spontaneous? When And Where Each Personality Type Thrives At Work.