Think! And! Feel!

Time to kick off a brainstorming session. How to do that? – Reminding everybody about how brainstorming works? Focussing people on the topic at hand?
Fortunately, I ran across this nice article “Twitter Strangers” just in time. I re-told the article (admittedly in a creative interpretation), roughly with the following key content: about the tendency to get stuck in the same associations, about the challenge to be really creative and about a simple experiment that shows the value of unexpected contributions. It was just the material I needed to wake everybody up, establish some cliff-hangers and so on to bring some spice back into the heads.
In the workshop summaries, the resulting brainstorming was repeatedly highlighted for its energy level
For me, this proves once again: The success of any kind of group activity is determined by the ability to put everybody into the same frame of mind.

Image Credit: kevindooley / Flickr

You may remember the candle experiment from the recent post “Motivation 2.0: Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation“. The whole point of the candle experiment is to demonstrate that overcoming functional fixedness can not be accelerated with carrots and sticks – on the contrary.

Here, I’d like to give three real-world examples for overcoming functional fixedness. Or actually… one example for, two examples against it.
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… from the “anecdotes for project managers” series …

This time, the story comes from ShadowCulture’s BugBash. It’s so nicely written that it can well stay there.

Enjoy!

Last Friday, I’ve spent quite a chunk of time on the “E=H2O” simulation that IEEE Spectrum had organized together with the Institute for the Future.

Actually, it earned me a “Heisenberg award”.
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Every once in a while, I get delusions of grandeur and think I can understand the world.
Given the latest major pieces of news about Twitter, I get the impression it’s that time again.

The other day, I was studying “Inside the Tornado” once again. (See Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets)

With that fresh in my mind, latest news about Twitter seem to ring a bell…

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