How often are you blamed for things which are not your fault? Or get credit for the good things which only happened thanks to you? While in some cases people may really get negative feedback which was completely not their fault, often there is more nuance involved, where the person may not accept their responsibility. [...]
And this explains why innovating can be so hard for many of our colleagues. Sheep stick together in a herd. I saw this herd this morning, and notice how close each sheep stays to each other. They feel safer this way. If there is ever any danger or predator around, being in a large group [...]
The Sydney Opera house is one of the most iconic buildings in the world. I had the pleasure of living there for a while, and it always took my breath away. But did you know that it is one of the best examples of a project going over time and budget? Construction was originally planned [...]
The expectations we put on people can have a direct impact on their performance. Often, and authority figure placing higher expectations on someone, like a teacher having high expectations for a student, or a manager having high expectations for an employee, can result in both the authority figure and the person in question changing their [...]
Diamonds are formed under pressure There are numerous examples of companies who allowed staff to take time to work on their own innovations and creative ideas. Companies such as AT&T's Bell Labs (leading to the transistor and the laser), 3M allowing people to have 15% of their time to work on projects of personal interest [...]
Is art today being designed less about being creative, and more about trying to go viral? This is the hypothesis of an Australian artist and illustrator, Struthless, who outlined his view in this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ieq6V3o4rqM I think he makes some interesting points. Many artists have seen huge success and have gained access to an [...]
Do you ever get to the end of a working day only to become frustrated that you were unable to complete any of your work? Chances are, you may have become distracted or interrupted at some point. Either from a colleague stopping or sending you a quick message ... ... or hearing someone talk about [...]
Just how likely are you to succeed? And how unlikely is it that something bad happens to you, just because it happened to someone else? Surprisingly, most people appear to think that in the future, it is more likely that good things will happen to them, and less likely that bad things would happen to [...]
How is it possible that so many companies fail to react while they are being disrupted? It may come down to a cognitive bias called the Normalcy bias. The normalcy bias is the tendency of people to ignore the probability of a large negative event or a disaster happening to them, just because it has [...]
Can you know the truth? What if someone else's truth is different from yours? Who is right or wrong? It might seem like a simple question, but humans are inherently bad at putting themselves in the perspective of other people. One of the cognitive biases which drives this is something called naïve realism. According to [...]
