Ideas: Brainstorming in the Other Person’s Shoes

Could you get useful results from brainstorming from the perspective of a person who you have little knowledge about how he or she operates/functions? Certainly, we could expect to get a lot of useless or unfeasible ideas (especially if empathy is not a strong point) but if we remember that we are searching for a needle (idea) in a haystack type of idea, and that the centered perspective may be clouded or limited, why not consider the outside resources (if it is available)?

For example, could a student (youth) put themselves in the mindset of a teacher or school administrator and come up with a program that would be feasible, efficacious and a good fit from the latter point of view? Would consideration of an idea from this alternate perspective limit the creativity? Or would it better the chances of an idea becoming approved?

In the real product world, a product is often developed and tested by very familiar minds who quickly cannot perceive the flaws. It might take someone completely unacquainted with a product to reveal the problems.

Leadership through promotion: evangelism

My first encounter with this term was when I applied for a job at Apple, and learned that Guy Kawasaki was an Apple Evangelist.

What are my most impactful sound bites?

Better to be average (customer service)

Idea: How to Delay Obsolescence

How do you design a product or a feature which won’t go obsolete quickly? Many products today are poor copycats that look similar but do not perform well. For example, a cheap, metal soap tray will rust quickly whereas a high quality one (perhaps the original design) will last much longer. How about laptops or printer cartridges? Are manufacturers focused on future business opportunities when it comes to re-use of components and materials, rather than making re-use user-friendly?

Lesson: Using Basketball Coaching as a Teamwork Lesson

I personally know (ask my shoulder) that basketball coaching requires a lot of careful planning and precise execution. What most people probably don’t realize and I found resonating with  my primary guidebook, “Coaching Girl’s Basketball” by Sandy L. Simpson (2001) is that each practice has to be customized for a team and not individuals – otherwise you are in for an unproductive and risky activity. To run a drill, you have to make sure that it will maintain interest of the group, and be teach-able and  learn-able as a group. It also helps that the drill be upgradeable over the course of the season.

For the YCISL, we could assign a volunteer from each team to draw up a lesson to teach a basketball drill. For example, the volunteer instructor could research how to set up a basketball passing drill (chest pass, bounce pass, overhead pass), prepare the lesson, and actually present the lesson to the rest of the team. The instructor would get the experience of working on team dynamics to make sure there is full participation and teamwork. It might help if the instructor has some basketball experience.

This should probably be done outdoors; maybe head to a basketball court.

Article: How to Improve Your Companywide Meeting By Jessie Scanlon (BusinessWeek)

Exercise: Serial Progressive Brainstorming

Here’s an exercise we can use:
Divide into groups of 10 to 12 students; sit in circle. Each person starts with an sketchpad (maybe we will have a keyword in the middle). They will sketch a component (something that serves a function) or a design feature within 30 seconds. After 30 seconds, they pass the sketchpad to the next person in the circle. The next person has 30 seconds to add another component. The sketchpad has to go all the way around the circle, then the last person gets 2 minutes to look over the final sketch and then will describe what the product does.

Possible keywords:
Smart Door – a door that is interactive, user-friendly. more secure, energy-friendly (lets light in when needed), let’s air in for ventilation, emergency workers can get through without having to break it down, width-variable so large objects can through easier…
Smart Television –

Exercise: Teamwork and the Troublemaker

Idea for another exercise. Maybe start with a Dilbert cartoon.

Mark slips of paper with roles on a team. Look up roles from Leadership book.

On one slip, add a note that that person must provide conflict (disagree or question organization) or slow progress (eg, make excuses) We would then observe how the other team members react.

Scenario: the team is tasked with designing layouts for the room…eg, studying, seminar, lecturing, meeting, conference, video conference, teleconference.

Book: Uncertainty Avoidance in “Outliers”

In “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, Singapore is listed as the “culture best able to tolerate ambiguity”, or the country with the lowest UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE. This led me to http://www.geerthofstede.nl where we find more detail about this and other cultural features (termed “cultural dimensions” when quantified on a relative scale).

Uncertainty Avoidance
Uncertainty avoidance deals with a society’s tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, different from usual. Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious level by a belief in absolute Truth:  “there can only be one Truth and we have it”. People in uncertainty avoiding countries are also more emotional, and motivated by inner nervous energy. The opposite type, uncertainty accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many currents to flow side by side. People within these cultures are more phlegmatic and contemplative, and not expected by their environment to express emotions.

Also from the website…”Because values are acquired in childhood, national cultures are remarkably stable over time; national values change is a matter of generations. What we see changing around us, in response to changing circumstances are practices:  symbols, heroes and rituals, leaving the underlying values untouched.”

In this search, I also found CultureGPS (http://www.culturegps.com) by sales-genetics (http://www.sales-genetics.com) and downloaded it onto my iPad via the App Store.

Perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to show the values of the various cultural dimensions and see if they are expected among the youth participants. It would also be interesting to see whether aiming change at youth (by youth and among youth) has greater influence on promoting a value change.

Uncertainty Avoidance, Power Distance and Individualism Values from CultureGPS Lite (listed in order; downloaded 5/4/11; no version number):

Thoughts: On the Skill of Interpretation

Is there a more important, fundamental and useful skill than interpretation? How many people understand this importance and dedicate much of their (brain) energy into optimizing their interpretation skill?

Starting on the level of computers – drawing from some notes I made for my lectures on Environmental Informatics, we can compare and contrast syntactic interoperability and semantic interoperability – extending it to human communications (not necessarily human-to-human linguistics). The syntactic type simply requires channels for communications and flow in those channels. The semantic type extends this by requiring that the information exchange have unambiguous meaning. Human-computer interaction is largely semantic, although the semantic weight is more on the programming end (have to follow the computer language reference model), and there is significant syntactic weight on the user end (ie, the computer program doesn’t check whether you understood the information).

There are various human-to-human interpretation frameworks we can also consider. At the most familiar level, there is communication between different languages or dialects – we train ourselves to become familiar with the syntax, and a small portion eventually become acquainted with the semantics. Even within the same language, there can be significant variability in interpreted meaning and sometimes it is due to cultural constraints where direct meaning is not permitted (see description of KAL 801 crash by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers”, Chapter 7).

I would also note, as another example, the art/skill of data interpretation that scientists are regularly engaged in. In the aqueous geochemical computer modeling that I was engaged in, interpretation of numeric output was (and still is) subject to limits of confidence. Take for example, calculated saturation indices for multi-component systems – it was impossible to predict with absolute confidence whether precipitation would occur, lest a supersaturation condition. This relates to the relationship between uncertainty and risk; risk is greatest when there is maximum uncertainty. Similarly, we find ourselves with divergent (but hotly contested) interpretations of earth temperature data, amidst close-to-maximum risk and uncertainty.

OK, back to the topic of youth and leadership. How do we think youth perform with regards to managing information streamed to them via  various channels (eg, in school by lecture, in school by books, through the broadcast media, through the internet, from friends and family)? Do they interpret efficiently and with accurate meaning? Do youth develop good reference frameworks that both interpret and filter well?

As an example, think about communication between a parent and his/her newborn child. The child often cries and/or screams to communicate something, whereas the parent utilizes “baby talk”. There is something instinctual and yet highly ambiguous about this. From this starting point, we must realize that youth interpretation skills need to be developed – but like creativity, do we squander the opportunity?

The Sustainable Leadership that is one of the objectives of this program relies heavily on highly developed interpretation skills. At the highest level, a leader needs to be able to communicate (vision, tasks, …) with others and learn (from colleagues, staff, …) from others. So, in order for youth to achieve sustainable (ie, long term and developing) leadership, one should understand the importance of interpretation – and we can do that by encouraging creative interpretation of things they observe (eg, the divergence test described in “Outliers”).