Articles on a variety of sources to provide people with new knowledge
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 [...]
How many people can you meet in your lifetime, and could you potentially keep in touch with? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? After all, there are people on Facebook with thousands of friends, or millions of instagram followers. According to research by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the number is actually likely closer to about 150 individuals. This is [...]
If you were at a party, and wanted to shake hands with everyone, how many handshakes would it take? Simple: it would be the total number of people at the party, minus one (yourself). That grows with the total number of people involved. But how many total handshakes take place, and how long would it [...]
Nostalgia can be a powerful force preventing innovation in companies. After all, people often would rather keep the status quo than run the risk of changing something while being unsure that the change will make things better. It also seems to imply that people often think of the past more fondly than the present, as [...]
More diverse teams have been shown to come up with better ideas than more homogeneous teams. They are also more likely to succeed at continuing to be creative in the long run. So then why is it that so many companies are full of similar-looking people? Especially when it comes to the more senior levels? [...]
We know that a lot of people have a bias towards to keeping the status quo. Or if they do see a new innovation which is fundamentally different that what they know, they might see how other people react to using it first before they feel comfortable using it themselves. Yet at the same time, [...]
In London's Royal Botanical Kew Gardens, there is a tree which has inspired the world. It is an ancient, huge oak tree. Planted in 1798 and standing more than 16 meters tall, it has long been one of the most important and well known trees in the gardens. Called "Turner's oak" after its species name, [...]
Humans are a forgetful species. While we have an amazing ability to remember complex information and patterns, our brains can be given so much information that if we remembered everything, it would be a jumbled mess and impossible to remember any specific fact. Imagine that remembering something is like finding a pair of socks to [...]
If there is one chemical in our body which can impact our well-being and creative performance, it might just be cortisol. Cortisol is a natural hormone produced in our bodies with a number of functions, but one of the primary functions is to feelings of stress. This evolved hundreds of millions of years ago in [...]
I want to tell you a story about the most clear example of failure I know of. In 2019, while I was living and working in Australia, a news story went around which was so crazy it was hard to believe. A drug dealer had been caught by the police, and had therefore lost the [...]
