Tag: deferring-judgment
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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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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…
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Just Say Yes
The KI method depends on a unique skill that scientists may be unaccustomed to: deferring judgment. It is the capacity to set aside your opinions temporarily and accept a new or odd idea and take the time to develop it before dismissing it. If you can overlook the flaws of a suggestion and play with…
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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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Right, then.
Still there you are in some meeting, ostensibly about cultivating novel solutions to a chronic problem and the standard assumptions are upheld – sometimes even defended – usually by the person who thinks they know better. The person who needs to be right, gets to be right – but often at the expense of novel…
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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…