If you want something done, give it to a busy person. I remember this quote from my childhood, and it is meant to show that people who work the hardest are likely to be the ones who are best able to complete additional hard tasks. Since then, there has been an explosion of the productivity [...]
How would you feel if someone told you that you needed to sit silently in a chair and not use your phone for 30 minutes? To just sit there and "think"? I expect that like many people, you would probably think that you would be bored out of your mind. Being bored has numerous benefits. [...]
In order to win a game of Scrabble, you need to know a lot of words. Because you never know which combinations of 7 random letters of the alphabet you will get, the player with the largest vocabulary has more possible words, and more potentially longer and higher scoring words, to choose from. That is [...]
A new survey of 20,000 by Microsoft shows how little trust most managers have in their teams. When asked "Do you feel productive when you work remotely?”, 87% of workers said they felt as productive or more productive working remotely than in the office. Yet when managers were asked "Do you have confidence that your [...]
Sometimes, innovation teams will attempt to show fake success in order to hide their real struggles. Have you ever heard of a Potemkin village? According to historical stories, in 1787 Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tauricheski of Russia was tasked with settling more Russians into the land of Crimea, which at that time had just been annexed [...]
In today's episode of the Idea to Value podcast, we speak again with author Todd Henry about his new book Daily Creative. By the time this podcast launches, the book has already been #1 on Amazon, so congratulations Todd. You may remember Todd from the previous podcast interview where we talked about the Motivation Code. Today [...]
It was inevitable. Not long after new Artificial Intelligence software began producing images based on users' text input, someone has now used it to win an art prize. Digital Artist James Allen recently won First Place at the Colorado State Fair digital art category, with this painting titled Théåtre D'opéra Spatial. Théåtre D'opéra Spatial, [...]
It is common to hear Start-ups talk about the desire to keep hierarchies "flat". This means they do not want multiple layers of management, bureaucracy and red tape getting in the way of people actually doing their most innovative work. Instead, in a flat organisation everyone is more or less on the same level and [...]
When it comes to getting creative work done, sometimes your brain needs to shut out external information in order to focus. This is especially true for information which your brain previously noticed but deemed unimportant, and so begins to ignore. Examples of this include you not seeing the outline of your nose in front of [...]
For years, I have been wondering about how curiosity evolved. It may be a silly question. After all, curiosity brings all sorts of benefits, especially when it comes to making us more creative. But if you look back millions and billions of years to when the first life was evolving, there was real danger to [...]
