The Myth of the Brainstorming Session. Over dinner a couple months ago, one of my friends said he needed some help coming up with a name for a new website. He told me a bit about the site and asked if I could help think of something over dinner. He also asked my other friends to join in so we could get a whole bunch of ideas on the table and choose the best one. From my experience working at an agency, as a designer, and at ooomf, coming up with ideas from a single brainstorming session like this one is usually not the most effective way.
Many people I’ve come across, including the most creative ones, need individual time to let ideas marinate before the best concept reveals itself (even if it’s something that seems as simple as naming a website). I encouraged my friend to take some time to do the same — to play with his concept a bit more before bringing it to anyone for more input. After this experience, I wondered why the group brainstorming session is often the default choice when we’re pressed to find that perfect idea? 1. How to Have a Meaningful Conversation. Everybody knows how to have a conversation because they've been having them since they were toddlers. However, most people develop bad habits that almost guarantee that their business conversations will sometimes be meaningless wastes of time. Here's a simple four step process for making certain that every work conversation that you have is both meaningful and worth having. 1.
Know WHY you're having the conversation. Every conversation must have a point, or there's no point in having it. With friends and family, the "point" is often to simply enjoy each other's company. In business, though, there's always an agenda to every conversation, even if it seems as if the conversation is only to "get to know" you better (or vice-versa), until such time as your co-worker becomes a friend or a family member.
Therefore, whenever you start a conversation with a co-worker (and this includes customers, bosses, colleagues, and the guy who empties the trash), have an explicit goal in mind. 2. 3. 4. Diálogos. Why You're Talking Past Each Other, and How to Stop - Judith E. Glaser. By Judith E. Glaser | 12:00 PM December 20, 2012 Twenty-eight years ago I began my first experiment in what I call conversational intelligence. I was hired by Union Carbide to work with 17 high-powered sales executives in danger of losing a bid for a key contract. My job was to figure out how they could raise their game and beat the other seven competitors. For more than two weeks I had them role-play potential conversations with “customers” and I charted what they said. Having spent thousands of hours observing executives in similar, real-world situations — from prospecting to performance reviews, business development to innovation — I can tell you this is a common problem.
There is a biological explanation for this: when we express ourselves, our bodies release a higher level of reward hormones, and we feel great. These are natural impulses. Recognize your blind spots. Stop Start. De MTh: Arquivo. De MTh | Conhecimento e sabedoria. . De MTh | Tudo depende do ponto de vista adotado… . Mapping Dialogue: Essential Tools for Social Change (9780971231283): Mille Bojer Marianne, Roehl Heiko, Knuth Marianne. The Echo Chamber Revisited Transcript. BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone, with another examination of the evolving media echo chamber. We all know the Internet is a moving target, and so our concerns about it can yo-yo. The fact that we can now choose among myriad information streams allows us to cherry pick our media diet, so we encounter only news that reinforces our world view.
Back in 2004, University of Chicago Professor Cass Sunstein, who now works for the Obama administration, said that we should be afraid, very afraid. PROFESSOR CASS SUNSTEIN: The greatest danger of the echo chambers is unjustified extremism. So it's a well-known fact that if you get a group of people who tend to think something, after they talk to each other, they end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before. And the danger of that is you can make a situation where people demonize those who disagree with them. And that's an ongoing threat to our democracy. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble. Dialogue and conversation in Online Education and Learning. “AH, you’re a professor. You must learn so much from your students.” Yet latent in the sentiment that our students are our teachers is an important truth. We do in fact need to learn from them, but not about the history of the Roman Empire or the politics of “Paradise Lost.” There were many good stories illustrating how people teach doctors how to cure diseases, or lawyers learning a lot from the cases they dealt with the clients.
It makes good headlines to claim that MOOCs and their ilk signal “the beginning of the end” for higher education. As I have shared in my previous posts, the x MOOC has decimated the connectivist MOOC but not the LEARNING associated with the connectivist MOOCs. True learning is a dialogue,” it is clear to me that he has never taken an online course. I am “tired” of the debates between the two, mainly because there are many pros and cons with each approaches. Jesse argues in this post: “MOOCs are like books, good when they’re good and bad when they’re bad. Convergence and Contrast in Dialogue Conversations. From photography to music to dance, contrast seems to be a key component of the arts.
When this was pointed out to me in a conversation with a painter from Barcelona, I started to notice how much our daily conversations rely on contrasting concepts. I observed people searching for the opposite in order to understand and define. Initially I thought this might be our cultural devotion to Hegelian dialectics (thesis – antithesis – synthesis), but later I wondered if it is not part of our need for a reference point, a need for contextualisation. An idea would be clear when we can claim similarity or opposition to another that is already part of our daily conversations. It might be our eagerness to understand, to settle in known grounds the novelty landing in our territory. The division can become a debate based in a dichotomy (splitting into two non-overlapping parts), a discussion in search for middle ground or for dialectical transcendence as in some forms of dialogue.
Community Trust and Effective Decision-Making. Participatory design becomes real in a sense of community – creating community and building on the social fabric is essential for trust to emerge among stakeholders and towards the whole process. Trust in community and in the process makes effective participatory design. We are talking about social systems, but this understanding also applies to PD in IT, architecture, etc. Searching for Community In a community relationship, representative decision-making also only works when there is trust. Democracy today has a lot of representatives making decisions in the name of others and at some level this seems to be rather effective, loosing power only when decisions to be made are not based on agreed principles drawn from collective design. The creation of collective strategies are learning to pay attention to context and have all sorts of skills to problem-solve what community is facing today.
We need space for trust to emerge. Living Room Conversations | Different Viewpoints Welcome!
Luiz Algarra. The Art of Thinking Together. According to William Isaacs, professor, author and co-founder of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT alongside Peter Senge, dialogue is a vehicle for creative problem identification and solving. However, it is different than what is normally conceived as problem solving. The usual modality to tackle problems is discussion. We are used to expose our points of view, enter into a dialectic exchange and sometimes debate. In any of these cases, we are defending our ideas. Dialogue allows for the identification and solution to a problem by “thinking together.” As supported by science and personal experience, the speed of change in the world has accelerated greatly.
Isaacs developed a model showing how a conversation evolves from its inception into two major paths, one of dialogue and the other of discussion. Isaacs speaks about creating the container for dialogue. Boundaries and sensitivity are essential to dialogue. Read other posts by Jorge Taborga. Conversion by café | Planet under Pressure. By Ninad Bondre, Science Editor for the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Secretariat. They say that sometimes you find what you are looking for in the places you least expect it to be. For more than a decade I have been yearning for the ambience of the outdoor canteen of the University of Pune, my alma mater in India. Imagine my most pleasant surprise, then, at stumbling upon it at a scientific mega-conference in London. Back in Pune, while studying geology well over a decade ago, the most interesting discussions often took place outside the classroom and laboratory. It was perhaps the incipient gnawing of a growing vacuum at the core of my being that coaxed me into my first ever World Café on Whole System Solutions for Sustainable Development.
So why am I waxing eloquent about these sessions? The experience of participating in these events was not only empowering and inspiring, it was also humbling. Like this: Like Loading... GOOD Ideas for Cities Draws a Crowd, Highlights Creative Talent, Sets Stage for Future Action | nextSTL. Sharing knowledge is the key difference between humans and chimps, say scientists | Space, Military and Medicine.
Children are more likely to help the group than chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys. Picture: Martin Dean Source: AdelaideNow Monarto Zoo's Soona enjoys a fruit and vegetable ice-block with pal Galatea. Picture: Chris Mangan. Source: The Advertiser THE ability to share knowledge and learn from each other may be the key difference between people and chimpanzees that helped humans to dominate the modern world, scientists suggest. The research in the journal Science aimed to discover what has allowed humans to establish what is known as cumulative culture, or a gathering of knowledge that ratchets up with technology improvements over time.
While previous studies have shown that chimps can learn from each other, none have compared their abilities to humans in the same tests, and scientists have long debated what exactly is needed to build up increasing complex cultural knowledge. That kind of sharing shows that humans understand the need to advance for the greater good, suggested the study. (2) Conversações Matrísticas e Patriarcais. How to Manage an Online Student Discussion. The concept of blended learning has gone viral on the Internet and in classrooms. For those who aren’t familiar, blended learning is a method that takes traditional in-class teaching and interlaces it with an online element. The beautiful thing about blended learning is that it prepares students to be a digital citizen, which is a must-have skill in a society full of technology. One vital element to digital citizenship, and what is considered to be a 21st century skill, is the ability to communicate effectively.
To be a great conversationalist, students must learn the ability to participate in deep, authentic discussions, and learning to do so online is just as important as face-to-face dialogue. Image from iStock Blended learning is a fantastic approach to building online communication skills. However, teachers often find it very challenging to boost student engagement and “get the ball rolling” in online discussions. Limit your involvement and commentary.