4 Principles of Design Thinking as a Strategy for Innovation - Major Digital
Design Thinking as a Strategy for Innovation No matter how creative your team may be, there will be times when ideas are running low. Use these 4 principles of design thinking as a strategy for innovation:
The 3 Key Mindsets of Great Managers by @Get_Lighthouse
When you take the leap from individual contributor to managing a team, a lot changes. Your day to day is suddenly filled with meetings and you become accountable for not just yourself, but the results of everyone on your team. Unfortunately, many of the skills you learned in being great at your own job do not translate to being a great manager. One of the big challenges you face is changing your mindset; the way you operated before and thought about your peers will not succeed as their manager. Great managers have learned to adopt key mindsets that make them and their team members successful.
Guide: Understand team effectiveness
Much of the work done at Google, and in many organizations, is done collaboratively by teams. The team is the molecular unit where real production happens, where innovative ideas are conceived and tested, and where employees experience most of their work. But it’s also where interpersonal issues, ill-suited skill sets, and unclear group goals can hinder productivity and cause friction. Following the success of Google’s Project Oxygen research where the People Analytics team studied what makes a great manager, Google researchers applied a similar method to discover the secrets of effective teams at Google. Code-named Project Aristotle - a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" (as the Google researchers believed employees can do more working together than alone) - the goal was to answer the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?”
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Once they understood what constituted a team at Google, the researchers had to determine how to quantitatively measure effectiveness. They looked at lines of code written, bugs fixed, customer satisfaction, and more. But Google’s leaders, who had initially pushed for objective effectiveness measures, realized that every suggested measure could be inherently flawed - more lines of code aren’t necessarily a good thing and more bugs fixed means more bugs were initially created. Instead, the team decided to use a combination of qualitative assessments and quantitative measures.
25 Next Gen Tools for the Inquiry Classroom
Next gen tools provide meaningful ways teachers and students can explore, question, reflect and share–leading to Deeper Learning and blended and personalized opportunities for students. Here are 25 ideas for using next gen tools this year in your classroom. Rich Content.
The Hedgehog Concept - Strategy Tools From MindTools.com
© GettyImagesMarenWinter Be a hedgehog in business, and embrace simplicity. If you could choose to be a fox or a hedgehog, which would you rather be?
Guide: Identify what makes a great manager
Google set out to determine what makes a manager great at Google. But first, a research team tried to prove the opposite: that managers actually don’t matter, that the quality of a manager didn’t impact a team’s performance. This hypothesis was based on an early belief held by some of Google’s leaders and engineers that managers are, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, a layer of bureaucracy. The team defined manager quality based on two quantitative measures: manager performance ratings and manager feedback from Google’s annual employee survey. This data quickly revealed that managers did matter: teams with great managers were happier and more productive. But knowing that managers mattered didn’t explain what made managers great.
Finnish author Linda Liukas teaches kids the poetry of coding
Linda Liukas is a 21st-century Ada Lovelace; she uses fairy tales to teach the poetry of coding. With her ginger ponytail, freckles and disarming laugh, it’s easy to see why Liukas (born in 1986) has sometimes been described as a “geeky Pippi Longstocking.” Just like that feisty, red-headed heroine in the children’s books of Astrid Lindgren, Liukas is fearless, inspiring and fiercely intelligent. When it comes to empowering kids, she does the equivalent of lifting horses one-handed (one of Pippi’s trademark tricks). Liukas breezes into Löyly, a seaside sauna bar in Helsinki. She’s excited, arriving from the launch of her latest book, Hello Ruby: Expedition to the Internet (2017), which she pulls out of her bag.
Design Deck Playable Inspiration, a 52-Card Design Thinking Deck
Is your design team in need of a new way of thinking? A different approach to tackling general problems? Then Design Deck Playable Inspiration is for you! This 52-card Design Thinking Deck will enable your design team to approach four key areas in a new light: concept, marketing, finance and production.
Giving Feedback - Communication Skills Training from MindTools.com
"Performance review." Does the mere mention of this event make your heart sink? Employees and managers the world over dread this ritual and therein lays the main problem: we have institutionalized the giving and receiving of feedback. We save up our comments and document all the things we note about a person's performance. And then, like a big cat ready to pounce, the manager brings a hapless employee into the office and springs a year's worth of "constructive criticism" onto him or her. No wonder why this process is so unnerving and fear provoking.
The Benefits of Framing Culture as a Management System
By approaching managerial decisions through the lens of culture, leaders can make a bigger impact for the organization and its employees. Corporate culture is undergoing a transformation. As organizations evolve and reinvent themselves in response to societal changes, new technologies, and competitive disruption, they’re finding that hierarchical cultures of the past must change as well.
