Get your brain in motion
In his TED talk, statistics guru Hans Rosling, makes a stunning presentation on broad social and economic trends. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be boring; but in Rosling’s hands trends come to life.
Rosling’s presentations are based on solid statistics, illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends intuitive and clear.
The idea that Creativity is needed only by artists and dreamers is long gone. Nowadays managers are aware that to run a business, an administration, an office a lot of skills are required: flexibility, intuition, vision, inventiveness. In one word what managers need is Creativity.
Hubert Jaoui understood that almost thirty years ago and is spending his life explaining to others what creativity is and how useful it can be.
Here is an interesting definition by Hubert Jaoui:
Creativity is neither imagination, nor the opposite of rationality: it is a multi-logical approach
A lot of interesting demonstrations of how Creativity is an essential tool for managers can be found on the site: http://www.gimca.net/, e.g. the 6 pillars of management: human behaviour, motivation, delegation, time management, creativity.
image source: Mr Fish in http://loft22.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/cognitive-dissonance-over-creativity/
Italian folklorists tell the story of three workers cutting stones in the hot sun. When the first was asked what he was doing, he replied, “I am chipping these stones to make them just the right size.” The second replied, “I am earning my wages.” To the same question the third replied: “I am building a cathedral.”
image source http://goo.gl/YXhbU
The theme of Diplocalendar 2013 was inspired by Mark Twain’s quotation that: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them”.
Diplomats, like many other professionals, must read, understand, synthesise and make sense of newspapers, magazines, emails, official reports and so many other things related to their daily work. But there is so much else to read both for pleasure and to deepen our knowledge.
The selected book suggested for the month of April that supports professional development and is relevant to management in diplomacy is Michael J. Gelb’s Think Like Da Vinci
What leadership lessons may we learn from the great English playwright and poet?
In her article, published in a monthly series focusing on business and leadership lessons from prominent figures in history, Laurie Kulikowski describes the inspirational process that changed the way people looked at literature.
Here are some of the key points:
Read more on http://goo.gl/A3CWj
Image Source: http://goo.gl/VtwvM
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson, speaking for TED talks, makes an interesting case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
Creativity is, according to him, the process of having original ideas that have value and it is possible only if we are not afraid of being wrong!
Children are not afraid and for this all children are creative. But schools teach them not to make mistakes and so they begin to stigmatize mistakes…
Elizabeth Gilbert in a recent Ted Talk shares the idea that all of us “have” a genius, an artistic flair.
In this surprisingly moving video she describes creativity like a divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source…
Inspiration is always a surprising visitor – John O’Donohue
Photo credit: Ed Gelbstein
Another Repost from Tommaso Coniglio’s Blog http://synapseburning.com as a follow up to the previous post on ideas from books: The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps (part 1)
“In my previous post I explored the concept of mind mapping and the theory behind its effectiveness, based on Tony Buzan’s approach. Now I want to touch on a related topic, to which Buzan dedicates the second part of his mind mapping book: success! Chapter 3 is literally titled: The ultimate success formula (we are definitely in cliché “self-help” territory, and if I didn’t have so much respect for the author, a phrase like that would have stopped me from reading further…)
So what is this special formula for success, and what does it have to do with mind maps?
The “goal of goals”
In 30 years of teaching, Buzan has discovered that most people seem to think that the path to success – the “goal of goals” – is to get better with every trial. This is a deeply flawed formula, because it implies that we should progress in a linear fashion, and that errors, especially after many trials, represent heartbreaking failures. In other words, Buzan maintains that most people are wrought with the fear of failure, which ultimately translates into fear of success, because there can be no success without experiencing a certain amount of “failure” all along the learning path – a path that is everything but linear.
This is why Buzan introduces his own formula for success, which is meant to mirror the way the brain works in learning and adapting to the universe: to learn with every trial. This formula acknowledges that learning is a complex process with a few ups and many downs, and with long periods when it seems like we are making no progress at all. It also puts errors is the proper perspective: they are the conduit for success or, conversely, success is the byproduct of our errors. [….]
Here is a Repost from Tommaso Coniglio’s Blog http://synapseburning.com
Tony Buzan is widely considered the “father” of Mind Maps – a revolutionary way of representing ideas and their interrelations – so I thought it fit for SynapseBurning.com to discuss this powerful tool by exploring his beautifully illustrated book, The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps. I am particularly passionate about the subject since I’ve used mind maps for over 10 years, and they have helped me enormously in writing, planning and problem solving (as a matter of fact, rarely does a week pass without me having the urge to produce a mind map for one reason or another).
Mind maps are extremely simple: starting from a central concept in the middle of the page, you branch out by drawing all the related ideas that come to mind. Each idea, which is represented by not more than a few words, is linked to others through a parent-child relation or through a sibling relation (take a look at the mind map I generated to create this post!).
The creation of a mind map typically consists of two phases: the brainstorming phase, when a very large number of ideas is generated; and the organizing phase, when these ideas are grouped into logical units. Each phase activates a distinct part of the brain (the principle of synergy): in the brainstorming phase, it’s the right side – the creative, intuitive, holistic, imaginative one; in the organizing phase, it’s the left side – the logical, analytical, relational one. This distinction is however mostly theoretical, since in practice brainstorming and organizing occur in rapid sequence or even simultaneously (i.e. organizing as you brainstorm). I personally prefer to keep them as distinct as possible, to free the brainstorming from the constraint of having to organize, which tends to stifle the process (it’s called “going wild”!).
There are three main uses for mind maps.
1. Creating. Whether our endeavor is writing or speaking, mind maps can assist us much better than the most common tool, the linear outline, which narrowly focuses on the organizational aspect and is thus less conducive to brainstorming, which requires absolute freedom to write down ideas without any type of constriction. The productivity guru David Allen said it best when he described his anguish as a child: during a writing assignment in class, he stared at “roman numeral number one” of his outline, without knowing what to put down first! He was waiting for a truly great idea to come… The truth is that at the beginning of any creative endeavor we probably don’t know what is to come first; good ideas won’t jump at us immediately, but that shouldn’t keep us from moving on. The only way to get good ideas is to have many ideas, and mind maps are the most powerful idea-generators. They are also remarkably effective in helping the writer discover connections between the ideas he has generated; he can then “move” them around until he is able to fashion them into a (hopefully) coherent stream of thought. This flexibility is amazing and… truly liberating!
2. Planning/problem solving. If an event or a project needs to happen, we have to find solutions that address all the possible “moving parts” so as to avoid the embarrassing “oops factor” (i.e. “I planned every thing but I forgot to consider x”). Again, thanks to their twofold nature, mind maps can help us dig out heaps of ideas and organize them into logical units that can be in turn broken down into manageable tasks.
3. Learning. When we are confronted with new material, the key is to understand the main ideas and separate them from the details. Mind maps help us do just that. The main branches represent the key points of a book, chapter, lesson etc, while the smaller branches contain less important information, which should be assimilated in relation to the central ideas. There is nothing like seeing both the big picture and the details, all in one. This “juggling” between ideas and their interrelation favours retention thanks to its innate reinforcing mechanism and the activation of both parts of the brain. That’s why it’s so much easier to learn something from a mind map that you’ve created than from flipping back and forth through a book you’ve underlined or notes you’ve scribbled.
Apart from explaining what mind maps are, their uses and why they work, Buzan provides some very useful complementary tips for boosting creativity, learning ability and for being successful, which I discuss in my next post.
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