Tag Archives: Decision making

How to think

Jorge in entrepreneurship, Greatness, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy, Thinking

We’re one week away from 2015, people will make their resolutions and try to keep them for a whole year; which usually doesn’t work out as planned. One resolution, an ongoing effort actually, that we should all aim for on a daily basis is that of making better decisions.

That means thinking better, which will have a cumulative effect in all else we do; including executing on our New Year resolutions.

A question I get asked often is something along the lines of , “How can I improve my ability to make better decisions?” To this, I respond with a counter question, “why do you think you make bad decisions in the first place?”

The reframing of the question, is good example of “what to do” to make better decisions. Thus, an easy way to make better decisions is to ask yourself questions, but that usually comes after you’ve done some grunt work to define a better question beforehand. …

Stagnating? Innovate how you innovate with these 5 ideas

Jorge in Innovation, Leadership

If a project has disruptive potential, it should make you uncomfortable. Throughout this past year, I’ve been having conversations with innovation leaders from a couple of BIG companies about re-inventing their innovation capability. The pattern of conversation: we’ve had a good run, but feel that our process for making innovation happen is delivering incremental results. Bureaucracy has developed, and so we aren’t taking a lot of risks anymore. How do we shake ourselves out of it?

This is a classic situation of the initial innovation enthusiasm becoming stagnant because innovation’s main killers are not kept at bay: GroupThink and ExpertThink.

One leads to consensus, and the other to unchallenged best practices. In combination both lead to stagnation. Later on, it will become more difficult to innovate because silence and fear will become the norm. Then you will really have a challenge in your hands!…

As our decision making skills decline with age, how does it affect our ability to innovate?

Jorge in Creativity, Innovation, Psychology, Question-To-Innovate, Questions

As our decision making skills decline with age, how does it affect our ability to innovate?

Much like corporations become slow and stagnant, our own skills decline as we age; unless we do something about it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in decision making……

6 simple questions that yield better decisions

Jorge in Creativity, entrepreneurship, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy

decisive book How can we become better at making decisions? There is wide literature, blogs and books on the topic of decision making , and you wouldn’t go wrong reading most of them. How and why we make the decision we make is one topic I believe we would all do well know about more because it influences everything we do.

The most recent books about decision making I’ve read is Decisive by the Heath Brothers, authors of Made To Stick and Switch. I’m a huge fan of them because they take on interesting topics, and they make the content interesting and useful to any type of reader. With that said, I’m subscribed to their newsletter and yesterday I got a nugget of information in a series of questions that appear, in some way or another, in their latest book about decision making.

Remember, everything is a matter of perspective. So, if you’re struggling with a decision, see if any of the following questions helps you see differently.

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What are the key ingredients necessary to accelerate innovation in any environment?

Jorge in Innovation, Question-To-Innovate, Questions

In any environment, what are the key ingredients necessary to accelerate innovation?

MIT’s Andy Pentland says the best decision-making environment for good ideas to spread is one with high levels of both “engagement” and “exploration.

Via the NY Times:

The best decision-making environment, Mr. Pentland says, is one with high levels of both “engagement” and “exploration.” Engagement is a measure of how often people in a group communicate with each other, sharing social knowledge. Exploration is a measure of seeking out new ideas and new people.

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