Thinking Methods: Creative Problem Solving They further divided the six stages into three phases, as follows: 1. Exploring the Challenge (Objective Finding, Fact Finding, and Problem Finding), Generating Ideas (Idea Finding), and Preparing for Action (Solution Finding and Acceptance Finding). Description: Since the arrival of the now classical Osborn-Parnes structure, any number of academic and business entities have re-sorted and renamed the stages and phases of what we now call the Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS). The Creative Problem Solving Institute of Buffalo, New York, has finessed the Osborn-Parnes process to include a divergent and a convergent stage within each of the six stages. In his 1988 book, Techniques of Structured Problems, Arthur B. Mess FindingData FindingProblem FindingIdea FindingSolution Finding Where to Learn CPS
How Great Entrepreneurs Think What distinguishes great entrepreneurs? Discussions of entrepreneurial psychology typically focus on creativity, tolerance for risk, and the desire for achievement—enviable traits that, unfortunately, are not very teachable. So Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, set out to determine how expert entrepreneurs think, with the goal of transferring that knowledge to aspiring founders. While still a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, Sarasvathy—with the guidance of her thesis supervisor, the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon—embarked on an audacious project: to eavesdrop on the thinking of the country's most successful entrepreneurs as they grappled with business problems. She required that her subjects have at least 15 years of entrepreneurial experience, have started multiple companies—both successes and failures—and have taken at least one company public. Do the doable, then push it Here's another: Woo partners first Sweat competitors later
21 Awesome Quotes on Intuition Thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for finding most of these quotes. “The only real valuable thing is intuition.” – Albert Einstein“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” – Benjamin Spock“Systems die; instincts remain.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes“It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.” – Henri Poincare“Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.” – John Naisbitt“A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.” – Frank Capra “It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It’s my partner.” – Jonas Salk“All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.” - Immanuel Kant“Trust your own instinct. Image credit: financialsensearchive.com
25 Quotes on Letting Go Letting go is can be a painful yet necessary part of life. And letting go can also result in feeling free. Read these quotes on letting go. Letting go doesn't mean that you don't care about someone anymore. It's just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself. - Deborah Reber, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. Forgiveness means letting go of the past. - Gerald Jampolsky In the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself. – Deepak Chopra Letting go helps us to to live in a more peaceful state of mind and helps restore our balance. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values. – Dalai Lama Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. – Ralph Marston The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. You don’t need strength to let go of something.
Learn How to Think Different(ly) - Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen | 10:24 AM September 27, 2011 In the Economist review of our book, The Innovator’s DNA, the reviewer wondered whether genius-level innovators such as Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs challenge the idea that working adults can really learn how to think differently and become innovators. We don’t think so. Remember, it was Steve Jobs who jump-started the now-famous “Think Different” advertising campaign as a way to inspire consumers and recharge Apple’s innovation efforts. It worked. Reflecting back on the campaign, Jobs said “The whole purpose of the ‘Think Different’ campaign was that people had forgotten what Apple stood for, including the employees.” Reams of relevant research (including our own) proves Jobs right. But neither Steve Jobs nor Apple nor any other high-profile innovator or company has a corner on the think-different market. Take Gavin Symanowitz, whom we recently met in South Africa. Just do It. Shake it up. Repeat.
How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise [Video] A crowd observes the match playing on the main stage at the StarCraft 2 championships in Providence, RI. Credit: Major League Gaming If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking. The old phrase “united we stand, divided we fall” applies equally well to the mechanisms of attention as it does to a patriotic cause. When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when several goals splinter its focus, errors become unavoidable. But clear exceptions challenge that general rule. For decades, a different game, chess, has held the exalted position of “the drosophila of cognitive science”—the model organism that scientists could poke and prod to learn what makes experts better than the rest of us. This real-time strategy game demands the frenetic pursuit of numerous simultaneous goals, any of which can change in the blink of an eye. Why StarCraft But that’s just one level of play. A screenshot from a StarCraft 2 game. Indeed.
99 Quotes About Risk to Inspire You to Great Things Throughout the ages, many have tried to put into words exactly what risk is and what it means to them. Some have been more successful than others—cutting to the heart of the matter, appealing to sensibility, or just putting an idea that’s difficult to explain into words we all can understand. Today, I want to share 99 quotes that have had the greatest impact on me and how I think about the concept of risk. I’m a big fan of quotes because they have the greatest signal to noise ratio of nearly any communication. And now I’ll get out of the way and let the words speak for themselves. Don’t listen to those who say ‘you taking too big a chance.’ The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead. – Albert Einstein Unless you choose to do great things with it, it makes no difference how much you are rewarded, or how much power you have. – Oprah Winfrey You can measure opportunity with the same yardstick that measures the risk involved.
Realistic Lateral Thinking Puzzles Lateral Thinking Puzzles, unlike most puzzles, are inexact. In a sense, they are a hybrid between puzzles and storytelling. In each puzzle, some clues to a scenario are given, but the clues don't tell the full story. Your job is to fill in the details and complete the story. You can try solving these puzzles on your own -- that's certainly a legitimate way to go about this -- but usually you can have more fun if you involve other people. Warning: For some reason, these puzzles have a tendency to be rather morbid. The scenarios given on this page are realistic, if unlikely.
design principles Defeating an enemy; overcoming an obstacle; surviving in the face of adversity: success and failure are at the very core of the game-player's experience. Games offer players a number of choices, some of which lead to success and some of which lead to failure or non-success. Together with the challenges presented to the player, the fact that the player might fail lends significance to the player's choices and actions. Although failure can be a negative experience, it is also the very thing that makes success meaningful. There are two kinds of failure in games. One kind of failure concerns the player's inability to satisfy a particular success condition that nevertheless remains satisfiable, and another kind of failure takes place whenever the player encounters a particular failure condition. The manner in which a game responds to player failure is essential to its design. Progress is defined as the act of moving forward toward a goal. Further reading:
Analysis Of Neurotech Industry - News Markets Why do You Turn Down the Radio When You’re Lost? You’re driving through suburbia one evening looking for the street where you’re supposed to have dinner at a friend’s new house. You slow down to a crawl, turn down the radio, stop talking, and stare at every sign. Why is that? Neither the radio nor talking affects your vision. Or do they? “Directing attention to listening effectively ‘turns down the volume’ on input to the visual parts of the brain. He's talking about divided attention, or the ability to multitask and pay attention to two things at once. Your attentional capacity can be taken up by inhibiting (tuning out) distractions, dividing your attention across multiple things, or even sustaining your attention on one thing (vigilance). How to Divide Your Attention More Effectively Do very different tasks. So, you’re not nuts to turn down the volume when you’re lost.
Brain Workshop - a Dual N-Back game Declarative Memory (Explicit Memory) and Procedural Memory (Implicit Memory) - Types of Memory Long-term memory is often divided into two further main types: explicit (or declarative) memory and implicit (or procedural) memory. Declarative memory (“knowing what”) is memory of facts and events, and refers to those memories that can be consciously recalled (or "declared"). It is sometimes called explicit memory, since it consists of information that is explicitly stored and retrieved, although it is more properly a subset of explicit memory. Procedural memory (“knowing how”) is the unconscious memory of skills and how to do things, particularly the use of objects or movements of the body, such as tying a shoelace, playing a guitar or riding a bike. These different types of long-term memory are stored in different regions of the brain and undergo quite different processes.
Brain is not fully mature until 30s and 40s (PhysOrg.com) -- New research from the UK shows the brain continues to develop after childhood and puberty, and is not fully developed until people are well into their 30s and 40s. The findings contradict current theories that the brain matures much earlier. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said until around a decade ago many scientists had "pretty much assumed that the human brain stopped developing in early childhood," but recent research has found that many regions of the brain continue to develop for a long time afterwards. The prefrontal cortex is the region at the front of the brain just behind the forehead, and is an area of the brain that undergoes the longest period of development. Prof. Blakemore said brain scans show the prefrontal cortex continues to change shape as people reach their 30s and up to their late 40s. Explore further: Study: Our brains compensate for aging