Imagine your manager gives you a new project to manage and you are required to develop a strategy for the next year. A few other requirements are identified and you are sailing along great until it happens. You realize that the program requirements have now put you in a “box” where all the parameters areRead… Read more »
Do your meetings have a creative killer? Newsrooms call them “story killers,” the naysayers at meetings who repeatedly shoot down stories while unsuspecting victims are trying to generate new ideas. Creative killers assassinate ideas, breeding fear and limiting impact for hundreds, maybe even thousands. These idea deaths never get investigated and their potential never getsRead… Read more »
More specifically, do you need help embracing your creativity? I can hear some of you saying right now, “what creativity”? Relax, you’ve got it. Even if you don’t think you use it often, it’s there. Let’s figure out how to brush it off a bit. Ready? If you haven’t read the book referenced in thisRead… Read more »
In the middle of cold winter days, what could be better than making a roaring fire? But you’ve probably been building an inefficient fire. It’s probably hard to start. You have to keep adding logs and moving them around to get good burn. The edges of the logs don’t burn. It takes a long timeRead… Read more »
I’ve been taking a course on innovation on Lynda.com, an online training and learning community. The course, Business Innovation Fundamentals with Drew Boyd, focuses on how to innovate using Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method based on several techniques to innovate on demand. It has been an interesting course, and one of the elements really caughtRead… Read more »
Returning from long holiday weekends and vacation get-a-ways can often remind us of the places in our lives we feel stuck: in a job, a community or a relationship. Are you feeling like this little turtle? A few month’s ago, a dear friend and I were walking along a lake shore when we stumbled uponRead… Read more »
You might be asking from the start, “what does that graphic have to do with thinking right?” Well, it depicts the problem of adversarial thinking and unfortunately, it’s the most common form we are exposed to and poison for an organization. Such thinking plays out in front of us every day in politics and religionRead… Read more »
There’s No “I” in Team – But There is a “ME”! Why Teamwork is Overrated Let’s all work together! Sounds great, right? Well, sometimes it is. But if you want to create an environment where creativity, imaginative problem solving, and attention to detail flourishes, you may need to let some of your team members workRead… Read more »
Originally posted at www.cpsrenewal.ca. Voices have been asking how government could take advantage of interesting models such as gamification, crowdsourcing, nudges, etc., looking for opportunities to innovate. I’ve tended to think that, if there is value in such approaches, the better question would be “Why are we not already using them?” And there’s a reasonableRead… Read more »
Part of my regular reading includes posts written by Matt Cheuvront. He’s the founder of Proofbranding based out of Nashville. Matt has a blog, Life Without Pants, and also writes on Medium.com. You’ll likely see me reference some of his posts here on #govlife. He recently wrote a new piece recently called The Crippling EffectRead… Read more »