Tag: researcher
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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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Size Matters
Group work can be clunky and cumbersome. You have to spend longer clarifying the objectives, aligning resources and getting people on board. Sometimes, it can seem nearly impossible to achieve the consensus necessary to advance within a task. Groups are a powerful mechanism to produce innovative solutions, but getting to that product can be arduous,…
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Be Deliberate
Creative ideas sometimes come as a surprise, but they don’t have to be an accident. Instead of waiting for good ideas to arrive at random or by luck; we can hunt them down. When you use a creative process – whether it’s for a short meeting, a 2-day or week-long workshop or a 3-year project…
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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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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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The Naïve Mind
If your team is fairly expert, it might help to invite a non-expert who may be especially fluid or creative, but who’s in the dark about the subject at hand. Their questions often end up redefining the problem, and because they are unencumbered with the conventional wisdom, they are freer to think of wild and…