Year: 2013

  • Portable Recording Devices

    Portable Recording Devices

    We often refer to Post-it notes as portable recording devices, just to put in perspective why we stick to using them. It’s one of the easiest, fastest ways to get a group of people to put their thoughts together and then sort them out, collectively. Quickly, a group can organize a wall of hundreds of…

  • Talk to Strangers

    Talk to Strangers

    People from other disciplines, other departments, other universities. They are interested in a domain that is not exactly your science. It may be a neighboring branch of science with obvious parallels or overlaps but still with an approach that is different from yours, or it might be from a very different universe, a science that…

  • Energy Management

    Energy Management

    It is interesting that in this day and age of climate change we are all very aware of the discussions about “energy conservation” and we make a concerted effort to turn off the lights of an empty office, to walk rather than drive to the shop, and turn down our house temperature by a degree…

  • Ideal Participant Pool

    Ideal Participant Pool

    KI’s Ideas Labs are intense and immersive, bringing together people of diverse backgrounds and disciplines in order to generate ideas for radically novel research proposals. Our process helps these extreme ideas emerge, but there’s another very important component to the success of these workshops: the collection of participants in the room. Here’s how we counsel…

  • Tolerating Ambiguity

    Tolerating Ambiguity

    It‘s usually in a moment of feeling blocked or stalled that there’s a fierce temptation to seize the nearest reasonable solution. This is when we need a tolerance for ambiguity. It means staying in uncertainty, or staying with the question, despite the discomfort of not knowing the answer, or not knowing where we’re headed. It…