We all love behavioural economics, right? With their clever psychological experiments, counterintuitive insights and wonderful nudges, they throw fresh revelatory light onto our thinking and behaviour. Take for instance risk-aversion. The key insight in several of the books I’ve been perusing is that we tend to be risk-averse for gains, but the opposite for losses.
How many of us have been part of a bad brainstorm? But what if it’s not about the group but about how ‘bursty’ it is? And how can improvisation create burstiness? Creativity comes in bursts. Well, that’s according to the Adam Grant podcast ‘WorkLife’, in which he visited Trevor Noah and ‘The Daily Show’…
Demand for facilitation is rising. There’s clear value in a range of applications, from quite simple meetings, through to group sessions, to conference sessions or even entire conferences.
And as leaders in organisations grow aware of this, it creates opportunities for internal and external facilitators to help groups to have more constructive conversations and reach better (and often faster) outcomes.
There may be some good arguments for celebrating mistakes, but the fact that they lead on occasion to good outcomes is not one of them.
The occasional good dictator is not an argument against democracy, and doesn’t mean we should start celebrating military coups because now and again we’ll be blessed with another good dictator.
Much of what happens in work, either day to day or over the length of your working life, is unpredictable. It is subject to emergence – what happens as it happens, in a space of uncertainty. There is little value in pretending you know what the result will be when you don’t. An improvisational attitude invites you to trade the illusion of control for the reality of influence.
Layering is the idea of having more than one thing going on at one time in a meeting, workshop or conference. For example, displaying posters on the wall is an example of a layer beyond people simply talking to each other. Each extra layer added to a meeting, workshop or conference also provides an opportunity for the layers to be combined in new activities.
