Tag: climate
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The Language of Creativity
Every type of science has a robust language of its own, rife with acronyms and jargon that make for efficient communication amongst peers within the field but can be confusing, misleading or off-putting to people from other disciplines. This raises our attention to the fact of how much we rely on language to convey meaning,…
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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…
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Make Room
Where you meet sets the mood for your meeting, which is why the space matters. Put people in the same old meeting room and the chances of getting the same old output are pretty good. If it’s a big open room with an inviting seating plan around round tables, with long walls of white paper…
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Female Factor
Science is a subject available to both genders and yet women, if not directly discouraged, haven’t been as encouraged to pursue it as a field of study. Girls are steered toward languages and the liberal arts, implying that maths and sciences are better left to the boys. It’s a stereotype that’s been torn down and…
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The Productive Dissident
Deviance has an important place in the innovative process. We don’t challenge norms without a little (or a lot) of deviant thinking. And the single best way to discourage inventive, out-of-the-box deviance is to prohibit disagreement and probing questions. We need a little clarifying, critical judgment now and then. The trick is to cultivate a…
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Defining Brainstorming
In 1958, Yale University conducted a study to test brainstorming and concluded that brainstorming individually was more effective than brainstorming in a group, but it was widely misinterpreted as “brainstorming didn’t work.” The Yale study created a debate that has percolated for fifty years. Does brainstorming work or not? Does a group generate more and…
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When Toys are Handy
The playful gizmos and gadgets we bring along help make the conference room look less sterile and corporate, but the toys are not just for show. If you’re a tactile person, being able to squeeze a rubber ball, or twist the beads of a wooden wand, fumble with a Rubik’s cube or stack tiny colored…