Category Archives: Thinking

Cognition

“Productive Pause”, Intuition for Better Decisions

Everyday wisdom offers familiar advice to curtail impulsivity through slowing down and reflecting:

“Go slow to go fast”
“Sleep on it”
“Wait before sending an emotional email”
“Count to 10, think again”

Frank Partnoy

Former investment banker and lawyer Frank Partnoy’s Wait: The Art and Science of Delay provides empirical evidence on the value of delay to increase the quality of decisions and performance across investment, sports, comedy, and other disciplines. Wait

Creativity experts have demonstrated the importance of an “incubation period” in developing innovative solutions, and Partnoy suggests that similar principles provide and advantage: gathering maximum information in uncertain situations, by executing decisions and performance close to the last opportunity.

University of San Diego’s Partnoy recommends a three step approach to decision-making:

1) Determine the maximum time available to gather information and take the decision
2) Consider, reflect, “incubate” on the information as long as possible
3) Act quickly at the last possible moment

Malcolm Gladwell

His approach could be summarized by referring to Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking : “Don’t just blink but think.”

Nalini Ambady

Gladwell argues that people with expert experience and insight are often skilled at using ‘adaptive unconscious’ intuition to “thin-slice” subtle cues to filter relevant information from “noise,” a concept based on Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal’s research at Harvard.

Justin Albrechtsen

Christian Meissner

Research by Justin Albrechtsen, Christian Meissner, and Kyle Susa of University of Texas at El Paso demonstrated “thin-slicing” when they found that intuitive processing can lead to more accurate judgments of deception when compared with deliberative processing.

Kyle Susa

Gladwell and these researchers acknowledge that non-experts, and even experts, can be make erroneous decisions due to bias and prejudice that comes from automatic thinking and habitual cognitive heuristics like the halo effect.

Gerard Hodgkinson

Gerard Hodgkinson of Leeds University found that biased intuitive judgment may be mitigated by “devil’s advocacy” and applying analytical tools like multi-attribute decision analysis and root cause analysis.

He suggests that informed intuition or ‘intelligent-unconscious’ results from subconscious information storage, processing and retrieval, and has conducted several empirical studies to evaluate its mechanisms applied to developing business strategies.

Intuitive judgment was positively correlated with quality and speed of decisions, organizational financial and non-financial performance in at least five studies.

Hodgkinson’s team summarized recent advances in neuroscience, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies to explain complementary intuitive and analytical approaches to decision making instead of the overly-simplified notion of left brain vs right brain processing strengths.

He synthesized intuition attributes:

Instantaneous insight after incubation period
Subjective judgments
Based on experience, tacit knowledge, “knowing without knowing”
Arise through rapid, non-conscious holistic associations
Affectively-charged: “feels right”, experienced as ‘‘inklings’’ or ‘‘glimmerings’’
Lacking verbalization or conscious awareness of problem solving.

Cognitive neuroscientists have differentiated intuition from instinct and insight using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques.

Instinct refers to hardwired, autonomous reflex actions, whereas insight involves recognizing and articulating a problem’s structure, and may follow from intuition.

Hodgkinson’s research suggests that intuition can be enhanced by increasing:

Expertise (“prepared mind” or ‘‘deep smarts’’)
Self-awareness (feeling and cognitive style)
Reflection

Akio Morita

His team’s research supports an assertion by Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony and driving force behind its successful Sony Walkman, that ‘‘creativity requires something more than the processing of information. It requires human thought, spontaneous intuition and a lot of courage.’’

-*How have you used pauses or intuition to strengthen decision-making and advance business innovation?

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New Questions, “Senses” for Innovative Thinking and Problem-Solving

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Tim Hurson

Canadian creativity theorist Tim Hurson developed the Productive Thinking Model (“ThinkX”), a structured approach to solving problems or generating creative ideas, outlined in Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking.

It incorporates structured questioning approaches similar to those found in Design Thinking and Innovation laboratories:

“What’s Going On?” defines the problem’s context and potential solution structure
“What’s the Itch?” generates an extensive list of perceived problems or opportunities, then distills these into problem clusters, which reveal highest priority issues
“What’s the Impact?” analyzes the issue and its implications
“What’s the Information?” provides problem details
“Who’s Involved?” identifies involved stakeholders
“What’s the Vision?” and “What’s Success?” specify desired changes in the future state using the mnemonic “DRIVE“:

Do – What must the solution do?
Restrictions – What must the solution not do?
Investment – What resources can be invested?
Values – What values must the solution fulfill?
Essential outcomes – What are other elements specify the required future state?

“What’s the Question?” defines the problem as a question through brainstorming, clustering and prioritizing
“What are Answers?” generates possible solutions through the same approach of brainstorming, clustering, and prioritizing
“What’s the Solution?” develops the suggested solution into a more robust approach using the mnemonic POWER:

Positives – What’s good about the idea?
Objections – What’s sub-optimal about the recommendation?
What else? – What else does the solution suggest?
Enhancements – How can the solution’s benefits be improved?
Remedies – How can the idea’s drawbacks be corrected?

“How are Resources Aligned?” specified tasks, timelines, milestones, deliverables, issues, mitigations, stakeholders, and project team members who execute plan.
TED Talk

Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future outlines required innovation thinking skills to solve problems using approaches like Hurson’s Productive Thinking.

A Whole New Mind He argues that contemporary world economic conditions require six conceptual, subjective, holistic “senses” to transform abundant information into meaningful and actionable implications:

Design is more important than function
Story eclipses argument
“Symphony” (collaborative integration) surpasses focus
Empathy is more relevant than logic
Play trumps seriousness
Meaning is valued above accumulation.

Seymour Epstein

Seymour Epstein of University of Massachusetts supports Pink’s argument by positing two thinking styles in Constructive Thinking: The Key to Emotional Intelligence:

Rational-analytical mind, measured by intelligence tests
Intuitive-experiential mind, associated with emotions and more intuitive ways of knowing, and measured by Epstein’s Constructive Thinking Inventory (CTI)

This “bicameral mind” model is similar to earlier notions of “Left-brain, Right-

Carol Dweck

brain”, and Dweck’s Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset

Howard Gardner

Like Howard Gardner of Harvard’s theory of multiple intelligences in Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Epstein suggests that both “minds” demonstrate unique types of intelligent knowing, and the Intuitive-experiential mind can be developed to support Emotional Intelligence competences of self-awareness and self-regulation.

These authors and their findings suggest the value of cultivating less analytic and conscious modes of knowing to enhance:

Creative problem solving
Emotional Intelligence skills: Self-awareness, social insight, self-regulation, managing conflict, collaboration, influence in interpersonal relationships.

-*What skills and techniques help you innovate problem solutions?

©Kathryn Welds

Career Navigation by Embracing Uncertainty

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John Krumboltz

John Krumboltz of Stanford echoes the message in an earlier blog post, Is Career “Planning” Actually Career “Improvisation”? in his book, Luck is No Accident: Making the Most of Happenstance in Your Life and Career

He notes that people can’t control outcomes of unpredictable life and career situations, but he advocates paying attention to thoughts and actions that hinder progress toward goals — and to modify them with small steps.

Increased mindful attention to habitual patterns can set the conditions for desired outcomes by planning contingencies for undesirable eventualities.

Part of this process is being:

Open to possibilities that diverge from an original plan
Willing to consider unexpected opportunities
Able to risk mistakes and rejection.

This may see demanding and undesirable for goal-directed people with a plan, but Krumboltz’s research demonstrates the effectiveness of these guidelines and other familiar recommendations:

Research areas of interest
Network
Ask for what you want
Keep learning

Daniel Pink

Similarly, Daniel Pink advises flexibility in career “planning” in his anime-like The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need and questions whether there can be a career “plan”, given many unpredictable possibilities.

Like Peter Drucker and Donald Clifton before him, Pink urges building on existing strengths and finding ways to compensate for less strong areas, rather than investing effort in remedying them.

Donalid Clifton

In addition to familiar suggestions – persist in taking on ambitious challenges while learning from them – he recommends focusing on solving problems for others, and finding a niche to deliver valuable results. Now Discover Your Strengths

This service-orientation pays dividends as a career development strategy and in “making a difference” in the community and one’s family.

Drive Pink’s later book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us , draws on Frederick Herzberg’s delineation of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.

Frederick Herzberg

People are motivated, Pink says, by career roles that provide opportunities for:

Autonomy, exerting control over work content and context
Mastery, improving skill in work over time through persistence, effort, corrective feedback
Purpose, participating in an inspiring goal

Pink’s TED Talk demonstrates his passionate advocacy for replacing traditional rewards and recognition with “Motivation 2.0” that provides opportunities for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Edward Deci – Richard Ryan

Draw on strengths

Pink cites Edward Deci’s and Richard Ryan‘s Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) that investigated variability in intrinsic motivation, and Deci’s Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation which advised managers to adopt “autonomy-supportive” behaviors to encourage employees’ intrinsic motivation.

These varied studies suggest the value of flexibility in career “planning” to capitalize on serendipitous opportunities, and seeking work roles that:

Draw on strengths
Enable intrinsic motivators like autonomy, purpose, mastery, and affiliation, instead of focusing primarily on monetary or status rewards.

-*How do you navigate your career in the face of incomplete information about future outcomes?

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©Kathryn Welds

Pattern Recognition in Entrepreneurship

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Steve Blank

Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur (E.piphany, Zilog, and more) and Stanford consulting associate professor, argues that entrepreneurs need two types of “wisdom” or cognitive processing:

Pattern recognition based on a “constrain stream of data processing in the background”
Epiphanies that “serendipitously snap together”, outlined in Four Steps to the Epiphany.

He provides examples of pattern recognition in each of the four phases toward “epiphany” in building a business:

Customer Discovery, which assesses market potential and customer preferences
Customer Validation, in early sales
Customer Creation, including strategy definition, startup launch, and iterative product experimentation
Company Building, which prepares to “Cross the Chasm” in Geoffrey Moore’s model.
Robert Baron

Robert Baron of Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute echoed Blanks emphasis on pattern recognition in his Academy of Management Perspectives article,

“Opportunity Recognition as Pattern Recognition: How Entrepreneurs “Connect the Dots” to Identify New Business Opportunities” which he said enables entrepreneurs to evaluate:

Economic value
Newness
Desirability

by comparing existing “mental models” or cognitive prototypes and real-world exemplars to new offerings.

Soren Kierkegaard

He quoted Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, “…I should …wish…for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which. . .sees the possible…”

Venessa Miemis

Venessa Miemis says that pattern recognition is a critical skill for in intelligent decision making, and cites Tor Nørretranders’s The User Illusion-Cutting Consciousness Down to Size to point out that most cognitive processing is outside of normal awareness.

In fact, his research suggests that over 99.99% of the processing in the brain happens at a subconscious level, and is therefore beyond our “control.”

Tor Nørretranders

She added to Blank’s description of “processing in the background” that synthesizing past
experience, intuition, and common sense and sorting out the “noise” can equip people with relative accurate “best guesses” about future occurrences.

However, if the filter is overzealous, individuals may overlook opportunities because “cognitive dissonance” makes it uncomfortable to integrate information that doesn’t fit with an existing mental model.

Another cognitive bias is overlooking the potential impact of “wild cards” refer to low-probability, high-impact events.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced the related idea of black swans: unforeseen rare, difficult-to-predict, high-impact, rare events – such as financial crises, natural disasters.

He observed that these occurrences are often explained away when hindsight reveals individual and collective “blindness” to uncertainty and its large role in these rare historical events.
His book recent book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, posits that randomness enables strengthening processes under pressure and can catalyze positive change.

He celebrates volatility as a sign that recalibration may be more achievable than after long periods of stability enable risks to accumulate until a catastrophe.

Applied to career choices, he argues that a seemingly “secure” corporate job disguises dependency on a single employer – often an “at-will” employer, though he discounts the value of “economies of scale” in this work arrangement.

As a result, the unlikely possibility of unemployment leads to cataclysmic reduction in income.
In contrast, occupations with variable earnings, like sales or professional services, acclimates the individual to cyclic or unpredicted income reductions, and practice enables mitigation planning.

This perceptual bias impairs people’s accurate anticipation adaptation to changing.

Pattern recognition can be increased by mindful attention to thinking processes, and frequent self-reminders to scan for perceptual bias and unconscious cognitive processing.
However, other people’s unconscious cognitive processing can be an advantage for marketers, according to Douglas Van Praet, who suggests taking advantage of these via six steps to robust marketing in Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing

Interrupt the Recognized Pattern
Create Comfort
Lead the Imagination
Shift the Feeling
Satisfy the Critical Mind
Change the Associations
Take Action.

©Kathryn Welds

How to Change Habits

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William James, father of American psychology and brother of novelist Henry James wrote in his 1890 The Principles of Psychology, “Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.”

Though James seemed to look favorably upon the conservative element of habit, the drawbacks of thoughtless habitual actions are clear when people consume more calories than required to complete daily activities, purchase unneeded items, react with predictable emotions in contentious situations, and keep disadvantaged groups without advantages enjoyed by powerful groups.

Charles Duhigg’s bestseller, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, argues that habits are a significant part of most people’s daily activities – about 40% – and that even brain injured people can form habits.

He outlines the A(ntecedant) – B(ehavior) – C(onsequence) model, initiated by a cue or a trigger that signals automatic or habitual behavior.
In a novel situation, the person shifts to a problem-solving mode to develop an appropriate response — which may require creative thinking .

However, in a more typical situation, the person executes the habitual physical, mental, or emotional behavior or “routine,” which is then rewarded — often with a reduction in anxiety or discomfort.

Duhigg shows how dysfunctional habits can be analyzed for the cue, routine, and reward, then changed by modifying the antecedent, behavior or reward.

The A-B-C approach was popularized by Albert Ellis in his Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (RET), and outlined in his more than 50 books including Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Duhigg provides examples from marketing campaigns for well-known consumer products in the U.S., including Pepsodent toothpaste and Febreze air freshener.

Like Duhigg’s model’s reference to earlier behavior modification approaches, Timothy Wilson of University of Virginia’s Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, adapts principles of Aaron T. Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to change habitual interpretations, attributions, narratives and personal stories that lead to social problems including alcohol and drug abuse, teen violence and pregnancies, and social prejudice.

Wilson extracts and renames three empirically-validated behavioral techniques:

Story editing, to craft a more optimistic, hopeful story or interpretation about a situation, often using writing exercises
Story prompting, in which another person provides alternate, more optimistic interpretations based on data or “social proof” from experiences in a similar situation
Do good, be good, by “acting as if” the new behavior is a well-established habit, often through serving others in volunteer work.

RSA talk

Another look at habitual, even unconscious thinking in daily life is featured in a related post, Pattern Recognition in Entrepreneurship.

This discussion shares Douglas Van Praet’s guidelines to capitalize on unconscious cognitive processing and automatic buying behavior in Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing

An earlier post, Hacking Human Behavior: “Tiny Habits” Start, Maintain Changes showcased BJ Fogg’s work on “tiny habits” as hooks to behavior change.
His approach draws on many of the same behavior modification principles featured in Duhigg’s and Wilson’s recommendations to analyze habitual cues, routines, and rewards.

-*How do you analyze and modify habits?

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Companion Animals in the Workplace

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Technology companies like Autodesk, Google, and Amazon made news when they permitted employees to bring companion dogs to work. Dog at work

This policy was viewed as an employee benefit or “perk”, but a recent study published in International Journal of Workplace Health Management indicates that bringing a companion dog to work can lower stress levels, increase productivity and make work more satisfying.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health conclude that companion animals can lower individuals’ cholesterol, trigylcerides, blood pressure, heart rates, weight, stress, risk of heart attack, social isolation, inactivity, and overall healthcare costs, all of which benefit organization’s operational costs.

Randolph Barker and collaborators from Virginia Commonwealth University examined a service-manufacturing-retail company in North Carolina with 550 employees and between 20 – 30 companion dogs.

Randolph Barker

Researchers measured 76 employees’ stress levels via surveys of attitudes toward animals in general and in the workplace.
Equal numbers of employees perceived dogs’ presence as increasing or decreasing work productivity.

Employees’ perceived stress levels, measured by cortisol in saliva samples, were significantly lower and job satisfaction was higher on days when dogs were present at work.

Companion dogs at work appeared to boost interpersonal communication, organizational engagement, and morale when employees who did not own dogs asking dog owners to interact with dogs or take them for a walk.

Considerable research around the globe suggests that the stress-reducing effect of companion dogs is tied to an increase in oxytocin when humans and dogs interact.

Kerstin Uvnas-Moberg

Kerstin Uvnas-Moberg of Uppsala University and author of The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, And Healing, reported that women and their dogs experienced similar increases in oxytocin levels after ten minutes of friendly contact, and women’s oxytocin response was significantly correlated to the quality of the bond they reported in a survey taken prior to the interacting with their dogs.

The Oxytocin Factor

Likewise, JS Odendaal and RS Meintjes, then of Pretoria Technikon, showed that friendly contact between dogs and humans release oxytocin in both and Miho Nagasawa‘s team at Azabu University found that amount of oxytocin among dog owners increased with the amount of time they shared eye contact with their dogs.

Suzanne C. Miller’s research group showed that oxytocin increased among women but not men after greeting their companion dog when returning home from work.

Christopher Honts

Christopher Honts and Matthew Christensen of Central Michigan University extended findings on stress reduction to evaluate trust, team cohesion and intimacy among teams collaborating on tasks when a well-trained, hypoallergenic dog was present.
During a collaborative creative thinking exercise, participants rated teammates higher on trust and teamwork than those without a dog.

Teams with a dog during the prisoner’s dilemma measure of trust and collaboration were 30% less likely to betray teammates accused of being co-conspirators in a hypothetical crime scenario.

Hiroshi Nittono

Hiroshi Nittono and team at Hiroshima University demonstrated improved performance on problem-solving, attention, perceptual discrimination, and motor performance tasks after volunteers viewing images of baby animals compare with adult animals or food, reported in Public Library of Science .

Despite evidence that companion animals in the workplace reduce stress, increase perceptual and problem-solving capabilities and health indicators, barriers include:

Cultural objections to dogs and other animals
Allergies to companion animals
Animals without proper obedience and social skills training for the workplace

-*What do you think about potential financial and morale benefits of companions animals in the workplace?

Gromit

<-Will this

Miss Sarah's Guide

Miss Fido Manners

be replaced with this? <—————>

©Kathryn Welds

Effective Questions as Change and Innovation Catalyst

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James Thurber

American humorist and cartoonist James Thurber reassured his readers that “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers,” a dictum supported by philosophers, mindfulness meditation practitioners, psychotherapists, scientists, artists, and creative others.

Given the importance of questioning, many resources are available to refine skill in inquiry: Understanding others’ questions, framing high-impact queries, responding to others, and using questions to catalyze individual and organizational change.

QBQ John Miller’s sales-oriented QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life advocates understanding the intent of statements phased as questions by crafting “What?” and “How?” questions instead of defense-provoking “Why?”

His approach is applicable in organizational management and change situations, and argues for increasing personal accountability while decreasing blame by focusing on the underlying work concerns like achieving revenue targets, deliverable timelines, customer satisfaction goals, cost savings.

Like Miller, Eric Vogt, Juanita Brown, David Isaacs advocate “What?” questions in The Art of Powerful Questions: Catalyzing Insight, Innovation, and Action.

This team asserts that high-impact questions in business situations are valuable because they

• Evoke the listener’s curiosity, imagination, creative problem-solving, new possibilities
• Stimulate reflective conversation
• Provoke thoughtful consideration of diverse perspectives, contributions
• Clarify underlying assumptions
• Generates energy, progress, improvement
• Focus attention on issues and alternatives
• Memorably resonate with meaning
• Articulate progress toward shared understanding
• Suggest more questions

Dennis Matthies

Dennis Matthies, Chief Questioning Officer of Training organization Vervago supplies the “how” of questioning by helping business participants refine skill in formulating seven types of “precision” analytic questions, drawing on formal logic and critical thinking disciplines:

Assumption Questions, including existence, uniqueness, measurement, possibility, value, audience, time constancy, category, similarity
Basic Critical Questions (BCQ), including data, source
Questions of Clarification, including ambiguity/vagueness, “pivot table” segmentation for granular analysis
Go/No Go Questions, including “meeting basics and participation”, participant motivation analysis, inquiry focus

Vervago advocates “precision” responses to questions by:

Referring to the question
Answering briefly
Anticipating and addressing underlying concerns embedded in the question.

David Cooperrider

David Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve University broadened the vision of effective questioning’s potential impact when he developed Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as an affirmative approach collaborative organizational change.

This approach reduces resistance by focusing on desired change instead of the perceived problem, outlined in his book, with Diana Whitney, Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change.

Appreciative Inquiry AI’s “4Ds” of organizational change share some similarities with Design Thinking Processes:

Discovery Phase – Appreciating strengths and best practices of the current situation
Dream Phase – Envisioning the value and benefits of a proposed change
Design Phase – Defining processes and organizational structures that can deploy demonstrated strengths while moving toward a defined change state
Destiny Phase – Strengthen the organizational system’s capacity to sustain ongoing positive change

-*How do you use questions to clarify direction and initiate change?

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How Can Dance Inform Business Thinking?

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Peter Lovatt

Peter Lovatt founded the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire, which combines his performance experience as a professional dancer with his training as a research psychologist.

In several TED talks, he marvels at his career trajectory because he “was rubbish at school,” and was relegated to Special Education classes, probably due to his undiagnosed ADHD.

His career demonstrates an innovative synthesis of disciplines with his current research agenda investigating the impact of dance on problem solving using divergent thinking and convergent thinking strategies.

Peter Lovatt at TED

Lovatt’s experiments demonstrated that volunteers who engaged in improvised dance movements solved divergent thinking problems more quickly than when they performed more structured dance maneuvers, or no movement at all.

Similarly, his work showed these volunteers increased their speed of solving convergent thinking problems after they engaged in choreographed dance moves.

These findings may not imply that innovation teams should engage in structured and unstructured movements at work, but it does support the positive impact of dance movement on neural processing speed and problem solving.

Lovatt extended this work to patients with Parkinson’s disease, known to disrupt divergent thinking processes, to validate his findings with normal volunteers.
He demonstrated that Parkinson’s disease patients improved the divergent thinking problem solving after they engaged in improvised dance sequences, and hypothesized that these patients develop new neural pathways to “work around” dopamine-depleted blockages.

Peter Lovatt leading dance experiment

Lovatt’s group found increases in self-esteem among participants in dance styles that:

Include more improvisational elements (“high degree of tolerance for not getting it right”),
Are gender or culturally neutral
Raise the heart rate
Are repetitive
Encourage looser fitting clothes (in contrast to ballet)
Are non-competitive

Related Post on impact of dance:
Oxytocin Increases Empathic Work Relationships, Workplace Trust, Generosity

Twyla Tharp

MacArthur Fellowship and Tony Award-winning choreographer Twyla Tharp discussed innovation and collaboration through the lens of dance in two books with lessons applicable to business.

In The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life she asserts that creative expression requires perseverance, practice, hard work, “showing up,” and cultivating systematic habits to act upon innovative initiative.

This echoes the action-orientation advocated by Malcolm Gladwell in his observation of 10,000 hours of practice to develop virtuoso performance and by sports psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, summarized in these related posts:

Tharp’s The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together discusses both how collaboration can change the participants, and practical approaches to collaborative creation – which she acknowledges has not been completely smooth in some of her work with luminaries including Richard Avedon, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bob Dylan, Milos Forman, Norma Kamali, Frank Sinatra.
Two related posts on Collaboration are:

Dance provides a fresh perspective and metaphor for business challenges including problem solving, innovation, and collaboration.

-*How do you react to Lovatt’s and Tharp’s application of movement in problem solving, collaboration and innovation?

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Design Thinking to Address Social and Business Problems

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Design Thinking integrates structured creative problem-solving and “systems thinking” methods in design, engineering, business, educational, and non-profit settings by drawing on:

“Empathy” for the problem context, often using ethnographic field research
Creativity in developing solutions
Rationality in aligning solutions with the context

David M. Kelley

David M. Kelley, IDEO founder, applied “design thinking” to business, based on Rolf Faste’s discussions Stanford of Robert McKim’s foundational book, Experiences in Visual Thinking.

Design Thinking has been categorized in seven stages:

Define the problem, audience, criteria for “success,” priority
Research the issue’s history, obstacles, previous efforts, stakeholders, end-users, thought leaders
Ideate via brainstorming to identify end-users’ needs, wants
Prototype with combined, expanded refined ideas, solicit feedback from end users, others
Choose solutions after reviewing the objective
Implement after determining, planning tasks, resources, assignments, execution timeline
Learn by gathering end-user feedback, evaluating whether the solution met its goals, document successes and areas for improvement
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, discussed the cycle of Inspiration-Ideation–Implementation by applying such complementary processes as analysis and synthesis, and convergent and divergent thinking in Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.His TED Talk characterizes Design Thinking as a collaborative, participatory, human-centered process to solve problems innovatively by integrating opposing ideas and constraints and balancing among:
user desirability
technical feasibility
economic viabilityThomas Lockwood’s Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value, echoed Design Thinking’s use of careful observation, field research, graphic representation of solutions, and prototyping.He augmented the familiar framework by contributing an additional recommendation: Concurrent business analysis, to accelerate innovative business strategy development and implementation.
University of Virginia Darden School of Business professor Jeanne Liedtka added to Design Thinking process structures with her four-phase, 10-step framework in Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers, organized around key questions:
What Is?
What If?
What Wows?
What Works?
Frog Design’s David Sherwin and Robert Fabricant developed Collective Action Toolkit, well-suited for young people in developing countries to become involved in developing solutions to pressing community problems.The process helps them develop important life skills:
Critical thinking
Listening to others
Asking effective questions
Generating innovative ideas
Active collaboration
Creating high-impact, motivating stories
Sustaining collective action
CAT activities draw on design Thinking Principles in six areas:
Imagine New Ideas
Make Something Real
Plan for Action
Build Your Team
Seek New Understanding
Clarify Your GoalOutputs are documented according to:
What We Did
What We Learned
What We’ll DoNext
Frog’s Collective Action Toolkit was field-tested with girls Bangladesh and Kenya, who reported increased self-confidence to engage in community development activities, and increased involvement and leadership in community building initiatives.-*What are some ways that Design Thinking can solve problems you see in work and life?

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Action Beats Visualization to Improve Performance

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Richard Wiseman

Richard Wiseman of University of Hertfordshire, and a magician before becoming a psychologist, debunked the notion that visualizing desired outcomes achieves results more effectively than direct action in Rip It Up: The radically new approach to changing your life: The Simple Idea That Changes Everything

Citing research by Lien Pham at the University of California, who asked student volunteers to visualize earning a high grade in an upcoming exam or to visualize adopting better study habits.
Pham reported that students who visualized the outcome of a high grade actually received poorer outcomes that those who visualized a better process to achieve a higher grade.

Similarly, Gabriele Oettingen of New York University asked students to record the duration of fantasies about leaving college and starting a “dream job”.
She found that students who spent more time imagining these positive outcomes, but had lower expectations of actually achieving these goals received fewer job offers and lower starting salaries.

Wiseman uses these findings to argue that action rather than imagined rehearsal, fantasy or visualization leads to successful performance outcomes.

Napoleon Bonaparte

This principle was implied by Napoleon Bonaparte more than two centuries ago as he anticipated battle: On s’engage et puis on voit, translated as “You commit yourself; and then, you see”

In the 1880s, William James, brother of novelist Henry James and considered “The Father of American Psychology,” asserted that action precedes emotional experience: “You do not run from a bear because you are afraid of it, but rather become afraid of the bear because you run from it.”

William James

This notion contrasts popular concepts, which led to numerous books encouraging people to change their thinking to change their behaviors and feelings.

Since the 1970s, research has focused on whether changing behavior can change feelings.
To test this relationship, James Laird of Clark University asked volunteers to create an angry expression by drawing down their eyebrows and clenching their teeth and to create a happy expression by drawing back the corners of the mouth.

James Laird

Participants reported feeling significantly happier when they forced their faces into smiles, and much angrier when they were clenching their teeth.
“Acting ‘as-if’ and “faking it until you make it” are examples of initiating behaviors to drive emotional and attitudinal change.

Wiseman offers ten behavioral modifications that can lead to feeling better and improved performance.

INCREASE:

Happiness: Smile as widely as possible, extend eyebrow muscles slightly upward, and hold for 20 seconds.
Willpower: Tense muscles – Make a fist, contract biceps or press thumb and first finger together
Health Eating: Eat with non-dominant hand to increase “mindful” awareness of eating, based on research by Neal, Wood, Wu & Kurlander
Persistence: Sit up straight, cross your arms, from research by Ron Friedman of University of Rochester.
He found that volunteers who sat up straight and crossed arms persisted in working to solve challenging problems nearly twice as long as volunteers who didn’t assume this posture
Confidence: Adopt expanded chest posture
Sitting down, lean back, look up, and interlock your hands behind your head.
Standing up, place your feet flat on the floor, push your shoulders back, and your chest forward.
Negotiation Effectiveness: Use soft chairs
Joshua Ackerman of the MIT Sloan School of Management conducted simulated negotiations for a used car, and found that volunteers who sat on soft chairs were more flexible in their negotiations and likely to pay higher prices than those who sat on firm chairs.
Persuasion: Nod
Gary Wells of Iowa State University reported that when volunteers nodded their heads, they were more easily able to learn and retain information with which they didn’t agree or that wasn’t true.
Love: Open up
Robert Epstein of the Cambridge Centre for Behavioral Studies found that eye contact, self-disclosure, sharing vulnerability increase perceived liking, loving, and closeness.

DECREASE:

Procrastination: Start for Five Minutes – Do the task for five minutes, and ask yourself if you want to stop or continue at the end of the time.
Often, it is easy to continue after 5 minutes.
If not, stop and begin again for 5 minutes several hours later.
Guilt: Wash your hands
Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto found that volunteers who carried out a perceived immoral act, then cleaned their hands with an antiseptic wipe felt significantly less guilty than others who didn’t wash

These varied streams of research support the call for intentional action over contemplation to improve mood and initiate positive behavior changes.

-*What counterarguments would you offer to Wiseman?

See related post on “bias for action”:

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

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