Yearly Archives: 2008

Train Yourself Smarter

Sounds like the ominous beginning to a self-help book, but there is more truth to the title that what you may think. There are plenty of studies out there that suggest the positive benefits of brain training, often suggesting that doing cross-words and memorising long lists is a good way to get yourself thinking smarter, faster. However, this is like saying that simply doing curls with a dumb-bell will make you an Olympic athlete. It's not purely the muscle fitness that matters, it's the whole package, so aerobic fitness, endurance, stamina you name it – all have a part to play in what finally comes together in an explosive meter sprint for the finish line. Same with your brain.

Or put more precisely, of course intellectual stimulus helps develop your brain, but so does physical training. In fact, research published from Harvard Business Review onwards, suggests that if we want to increase our mental capacity, we have to increase our physical fitness to match. This, because the brain like any other muscle in our body depends on blood flow to do its thing and the higher your metabolism and ability to sustain physical exercise at an beyond your aerobic threshold, the better 'oiled' is the machine to deliver continuously on what makes all of us smarter – learning.

It's hard to learn anything when you are tired, it's even harder when you are stressed and learning is what allows your brain to build more connections between neurons, which can potentially fire and give you ideas, helping you be more creative, think faster or even just make the right decision ahead of the wrong one. Worst of all, many of the high pressure jobs out there today requiring continuously operating at stress-levels, make learning all but impossible, so cycles of burn-out are not uncommon. We work hard, feel under pressure to do things better, smarter, faster so we get stressed, making it harder for us to learn how to do things differently, so we then get frustrated, which of course makes us even more stressed… you know the drill.

Interestingly, it is not all out of our hands however. There is a way of being methodical about it all and making it possible for you to prime yourself for some very steep learning curves, perhaps radical career changes even or new jobs in other companies where the mix of the familiar to the new is radically turned on its head and you have to spend most of your time learning, before you can become productive. This is crunch-time for many of us. Can we not just make the transition, learn what is necessary for us to deliver on the job, but also ensure we keep learning to make sure we stay ahead and begin not just doing the usual but increasingly the extra-ordinary?

Research suggests that balancing our increasingly busy work lives with some well-developed and above all challenging exercise can help us do just that.

From bikeradar A recent study from Illinois, USA gives further evidence that exercise can augment brain power.

Using
110 students researchers looked at a battery of fitness criteria (eg
endurance run, push-ups, body mass index, etc) then selected the low
and high scoring subjects to represent low and high fitness students
[4].

All subjects were also assessed for IQ, visual cognitive
speed by presenting randomly arranged pictures and activity.
Additionally they were wired up to an electroencephalogram to measure
brain activity across various regions of the skull. This allowed
researchers to look at how fitness levels related to brain function.
Their conclusion is very telling: “We found that aerobic fitness was
positively associated with neuroelectric function and behavioural
performance in preadolescent children engaged in a stimulus
discrimination task”

Put more simply: fit children have better functioning brains. 

This
research makes promotion of active pastimes and sports something we
older humans should be engaged in for the well being of younger
generations and it’s good for you at any stage of life too. Research on
elderly subjects from 70 to 90 suggests that walking alone “is
associated with a reduced risk of dementia” [5]. Across most age groups
it appears that exercise of even a modest amount helps to keep the
brain functioning better.

The bottom line is you don’t need to
break 20 minutes for 10-miles or win a Grand Tour to gain positive
mental health benefits from exercise. As Max Ehrmann wrote in his 1927
Desiderata: “Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself”.

And this is the point exactly, to improve fitness – not accelerate your burnout. I can personally attest to both greater learning capacity and ability to sustain higher workloads since I started a regime of road cycle training. I have gone from 30km nearly finishing me off to losing over 10kg and riding 140km the other weekend at a pace many of my fellow riders had to work hard to keep up with. This is progress for sure, but what it really has helped me do is be the reset-button to hard work, crazy travel, lots of pressure and make sure I stop, get out there, blast around the country-side getting rid of adrenaline and all those nasty stress hormones that make us sleep badly, gain weight and over time get depressed. Instead, by finding an outlet that works I am happier and have made greater leaps and bounds in terms of progress in everything I do, because as the quote goes in Starwars – it brings balance to the force.

Think Eco-Systems not just Issues

Take global warming or government regulation as examples – these are all very complex topics, collections of variables where solving the problem cannot be achieved through solving one issue alone, but in fact the solution rests in addressing the eco-system tying together all the inter-linked variables. In fact, seeing things on purely the issue level may in fact be contributing to the problem.

In the book Freakonomics the authors quote numerous examples of cases where seemingly complex phenomena have very simple origins, but often in an entirely different field and the eco-system magnifies the impact through all the inter-related variables and creates an impact on local, sometimes national and international levels. One of the striking examples is their analysis of crime figures in large cities in the US. The numbers were growing at epic proportions year-on year until sometime in the mid-eighties the trend suddenly stopped and began a steady decline. Experts tried to attribute this reversal to anything from an increase in spending on the police, a growth in numbers of staff, prisons, different governments, new laws etc. but the biggest impact came from the legalisation of abortion.

How could this have anything to do with crime figures you may wonder? Here the eco-system comes in: the women most likely to have an abortion back in the 60s where women in low-income households with several children already and who before the legalisation either had to risk their lives to have an abortion by often unqualified people in unsafe conditions and risk prosecution or not have one at all. Many didn’t and subsequently struggled to look after their children, who often ended up in crime from a lack of opportunity in life. As abortion became legal in many states, the numbers of these ‘unwanted’ children dropped and the sheer numbers of disadvantaged youth decreased, thus decreasing the populace likely to commit crime. It’s not to say that the other measures had no impact at all, but collectively they helped solve the problem as the eco-system of ideal conditions leading to crime gradually became more untenable.

Biofuels are another example of where eco-system thinking really needs to be applied on a much larger scale than today – touted as the solution to the West’s reliance on fossil fuels, the growth of crops destined for biofuels is now accelerating across the world, leading to an increased rate of rain forest destruction (these are our most efficient weapon in clearing CO2 from the atmosphere) as land is being cleared to grow palm oil – a crucial ingredient in biofuels. Much agricultural land previously home to food production is being converted to grow crops for biofuel, putting food production in danger. The biggest irony of all is that the process of producing biofuels has a greater negative impact on global warming than fossil fuel use – proving that there is no simple ‘solution’ to global warming, in fact simple solutions may in fact be aggravating it further, instead we need to think in eco-systems, not just locally, but nationally and internationally.

Nancy Gibbs of Time, talks in her column about the Vatican reflecting on its mortal sins for the modern age (24th March 2008) of the fact that back in the past sloth, lust, greed, envy and anger accounted for virtually all the crimes of mankind, whereas today the issues that once were the clear culprits behind our follies and misfortunes are far more complex than the 7 deadly sins alone. Causes and consequences come together to form eco-systems, where one problem feeds another and addressing consequences is meaningless without understanding and addressing
the causes. Contextualising what was once simple in our now increasingly interlinked world – Quoting Mohandas Gandhi’s version of the 7 deadly sins:

  • Wealth without work
  • Pleasure without conscience
  • Science without humanity
  • Knowledge without character
  • Politics without principle
  • Commerce without morality
  • Worship without sacrifice

The responsibility rests with the individual, but that includes the duty to take care of others as well as yourself.

Avoiding the 3 pitfalls of Innovation based on Insight

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a fierce proponent of innovation based on insight. How else would you be able to frame your innovation and understand whether what you are proposing is even relevant, unless you understand the competitive landscape in which you operate? The purpose of this post is not to question whether you need insights or delve into how innovation works
or how to fuel it, but instead, assuming you have a smooth running
innovation machine – and you work from solid consumer insight – how come things can still go wrong?

Interestingly, cognitive science can help us here, specifically the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who three decades ago explored the benefits and risks of heuristics, or shortcuts in thinking. Heuristics help to explain the time we get it wrong even when having been presented with all the reasonable information and insight, which presumably should have led us to make the right conclusions rather than the wrong ones. There are three errors, which are common when this happens:

Anchoring error - This is when you seize on the first bit of information and basically make your mind up before you have heard the whole argument, even when some subsequent findings may be contradicting what you seized on initially.

Availability error - This is when some surprising findings emerge that remind you of a dramatic past case and you mistakenly apply mental models or conclusions from that case to new findings and rationalise them in the same way, again leading you to potentially make the wrong conclusion.

Attribution error - Despite getting a ton of insight, it can sometimes be very tempting to group these findings into stereotypes and grossly generalise, to see information as ways of confirming what you already know, rather than seeing the little inklings that your stereotypes aren’t correct. Here again the information may be correct, but your use of it incorrect.

These mistakes are all very human and can easily happen, but research in other fields are showing just how dangerous these mistakes can be. In the engineering field these errors can lead to countless hours spent hunting for a technical problem in the wrong place, in the medical fields the very same mistakes can lead to gross misdiagnosis and potential patient deaths and of course in design, to redundant products and solutions. To err is human, but to err without learning from your mistakes is plain stupid.

Debunking Popular Myths about Creativity

Like innovation, there are plenty of misconceptions about creativity out there, which makes it all the more confusing when people are extolling the importance of creative skill in the 21st century. To continue my quest to unravel these complex topics this instalment is all about explaining what creativity is NOT.

  • You have to be an artist to be creative There are many creative engineers, scientists, financiers etc. creativity is not a privilege reserved to poets and artists alone. Nor is it a characteristic of loners, misunderstood geniuses or crazy people. It is about invention and innovation, often by teams!

  • Creativity is a talent that some have and others don’t
    Viewing creativity as a talent is one of the best excuses for doing nothing. True, some people have a natural curiosity; an active imagination; a relentless energy; and a desire to think differently. But these qualities can be learnt!
  • Creative people are mostly rebels (won’t play the game, play mostly by their rules) As we begin to understand the ‘game’ of creativity, we know how minds form patterns [in which they then get caught] and what it takes for people to move across patterns to generate new ideas (serious play). You don’t need to be a rebel to enjoy the sense of freshness that arises from unlocking stifling thought-patterns.
  • Creative people are ‘liberated’, free-spirited and child-like. The ‘liberation’ myth is based on the notion that freeing people up from their inhibitions, and encouraging them to be playful and child-like will unleash their creative fibre. Comparing adult creativity with the playfulness of children is difficult. Children are endowed with a creativity bourne out of innocence because their minds have not yet formed as many stifling patterns. The minds of adults, on the other hand, are filled with many useful patterns to be cracked and bridged for the purpose of innovation.
  • Tools and techniques are confining This myth rests on the notion that systematic tool-use is contrary to the nature of creativity, which must be ‘free’. According to this view, materials should be malleable (like clay) and user-friendly (like clay). Contrary to belief, however, materials with an integrity (a ‘logic’ of their own) are often more useful in boosting a maker’s creativity – provided, of course, the maker is a fluent user of that tool!
  • Creativity occurs as a single burst of genius Despite the plethora of myths pertaining to this, extensive research into both artists’ most famous works and numerous inventions attributed to a single stroke of genius have shown that instead, ideas emerge through a process of fabrication that evolves over time and through hard work

Instead creativity:

  • requires both divergent and convergent thinking
  • is not a matter of left brain vs. right brain alone
  • involves both problem-solving and problem-setting
  • balances tradition and innovation, continuity and change
  • combines/blends individual and collective contributions
  • involves making the familiar strange and the strange familiar

For those interested in finding out more, have look at  Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation by Keith Sawyer, which gathers all the most recent findings in the field of creativity research and also outlines how different disciplines view creativity.