Category: Blog (the archive of everything)Page 10 of 13
This week’s Weekend Engineering Works post is about Ticket to Ride winning strategies. The game involves racing against other players to build a network of railway lines across…
The facilitator comes with nothing and leaves nothing The participant comes with something and leaves with much more Oliver Broadbent
I regularly ask this question on my ‘How to Have Better Ideas’ workshops (the sequel to ‘How to Have Ideas’). It’s a short question that triggers a wide…
You are in a state of flow. The next action flows from the previous. You are in the moment. Then boom, in comes an email that sets off…
When then there’s too much going on to do your creative work then merely create something. I picked up this term ‘merely’ concept from Seth Godin in this…
In my second post on building creative surplus – the time and energy we need to invest in creative thinking – I describe the OOOOOO, an approach for…
Creative surplus is what you invest in order to create new ideas. Like operating surplus – or profit – it is what is left over when an organisation…
That’s what my 8-year-old daughter said to me yesterday. Truth be told, I’d been talking earlier in the week about ski-lift engineering as a job that combines so…
Here’s four things you can do straight away to give your project a creative boost. Write down the brief. What are you trying to do? Who are you…
You are a world class performer at living your typical day. No one else has practised the precise set of habits, in the same precise sequence that makes…
It’s a phrase I picked up a long time ago from Tim Ferriss and it has stuck. What you do is much more important than how you do…
I picked up this tip at home yesterday – thanks Mary. It’s a formula for getting to the point when writing emails. What do you want the person…
Facilitation means making something easier. It isn’t about controlling; it’s about following, listening and enabling. In a workshop setting, it’s about having the confidence to let go of…
Today I’m preparing for a session I’m giving at the University of Cambridge tomorrow on how to sell ideas. To help prepare, I’m going back through old posts…
Asking what if. It’s my go-to technique for stimulating rapid idea generation in groups. In this post, the latest in my series on creative thinking tools for projects,…
We move now in my series of posts on tools for creative thinking from gathering inputs to stimulating new connections. This is what I call ‘Turning the Kalideacope‘….
There are some inputs to our creative process that we build up over time so that we are ready to draw on them whenever we work on a…
We need creative thinking tools in our project toolkit to get the most out the opportunities that a new project offers. Projects provide a setting in which people…
I have a confession to make. Sometimes, when online meetings are getting really dull, I gaze at the globe on my desk and search for islands. My eye…
Today engineers completed work on a major new irrigation channel to bring drinking water to a major new coastal development on Sand Bay, near Weston-Super-Mare. The 60-metre-long new…
Off-topic, but I feel we rarely capture and talk about moments of grief. Between facilitation sessions today I listened to the final episode of Radio 3’s year-long Composer…
Together, the people around you know so much more than you do. In my last post for now on Filling the Kalideacope – gathering inputs for the creative…
Humans tend be to attracted to novelty – Oo, the shiny new thing – but sometimes what we need is in what we know already. This post is…
A new month, new good intentions. Just like when I started a new exercise book at school, when I would commit to being extra neat (and then forgetting…
This post is another in my series about inputs to the creative process, what I call ‘Filling the Kalideascope‘. Today’s input is visiting the site, and it cuts…
In the midst of lockdown we have created a new household tradition that brings a highlight to the week. On Saturday nights we dress for dinner, enjoy our…
When I teach I realise I am drawing on ideas that I have gathered and processed over many years, but little of which exists outside my head. If…
I wrote earlier this week about getting a TV for the first time in 13 years. It reminds me of when I took my first flight in seven…
The tools you use define your work. They lock in choices about what you turn your attention to, what you can do and what you can’t. Before you…