Stats for nerds
4recommend
13mentions
4people
2007–2023years
85% recommend15% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Edward de Bono, Serious Creativity: How to Be Creative Under Pressure and Turn Ideas into Action (Paperback). March 5, 2015 https://www.amazon.com/Serious-Creativity-Creative-Pressure-...
The book cited above is to help with 1. and 2. in your list.
YouTube video: Edward de Bono 'How to have a beautiful mind' at Mind & Its Potential, 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbsKQQGwsMg
The video above features Dr. Edward de Bono talking about the thinking processes and creativity.
- While the article is making some good points, I don't agree with the overall article or its conclusions. A lot of the arguments in the article made against brainstorming are what I would consider implementation failures.
The corollary to Production Blocking occurs when a person realizes that the supposedly crazy idea that they were holding on to themselves for fear of being judged is not as crazy as they thought it is when they hear another person in the room say the same thing. It might even build allies and consensus leading to offline collaboration outside of the brainstorming context.
Evaluation Apprehension is a real concern. If a brainstorming session is run well, the facilitator would have established the ground rules (no interruptions, no judgments etc.,) and would quickly bring any conflicting behavior to an end.
The most important benefit of brainstorming, imo, is the fact that introverts are not drowned out by extroverts or junior team members being overruled on the spot by experienced people. This is not a bug, it is a feature.
In many scenarios, the person who comes up with the idea is not the same one who implements it. For eg: an end user of a system, a software engineer, a product manager etc., Having a diverse group where individuals play different roles tends to bring out differing perspectives. If you can't bring them out in the open in the early stages of idea generation, you are clearly missing out.
Edward de Bono, the person who coined the term Lateral Thinking has developed a lot of tools for creative thinking. His book, Serious Creativity changed my mindset and taught me that creativity, the kind we use every day as opposed to artistic creativity like painting/acting etc., is something that one can practice everyday and get better at. One such method / tool that he developed is Six Thinking Hats. In the book, he goes on to explain that the underlying cause of perceived lack of psychological safety is the human brain's ability to get into conflicting thinking modes for eg: when one person is in creative mode, another person is in evaluation mode or what de Bono calls as Green Hat and Black Hat respectively. Much of his work in Six Thinking Hats is around getting the entire group in the same thinking mode, what de Bono calls as Parallel Thinking. Here's a nice video of him explaining some of the thinking processes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbsKQQGwsMg
Recognizing this (different thinking modes) is key to having a productive group brainstorm and avoiding pitfalls.
- + 100.
the idea that sustained practice till you become fluent in the use of specific mental models is missing in much of the literature.
Just like learning any other skillset, using mental models effectively takes a lot of work.
This is often the missing key to effective use. It is one thing to read about a mental model (say Donella Meadows's systems thinking), and be able to recall the material from memory and quote it and so on. It is quite another to be able to apply that model (here systems thinking) to real life situations and get useful results.
I know many people who can quote chapter and verse of literature about mental models, but their thinking remains confused and ad hoc when it comes to dealing with real life problems.
To practice, one can also apply mental models to case studies/situations from the past and compare to the outcome predicted by the model and the actual outcome.(To be fair, there is a risk of making mental models fit the known outcome here, so one has to be aware of that)
EDIT: (not the same as mental models, but since someone mentioned ARIZ/TRIZ above) Edward De Bono's "Serious Creativity" and "Lateral Thinking for Management" (yes terrible title) are full of thinking tools that can be practiced systematically. Most of his books are repetitive and have varying ratios of fluff to core material, but these two together have most of his useful ideas.
- - "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" - probably the most influential book I've read in my life, profoundly changed the way I think. It's a collection of LessWrong essays on science and rationality.
- "On Intelligence" and "I am a Strange Loop" - how mind works.
- "Rework", "Zero to One", "Start Small, Stay Small" - insightful startup advice.
- "Atomic Habits" - by far the best book on developing habits. Thought it was just another one of those self-help books, but turned out to be very insightful and well written.
- "The Obstacle Is the Way" - amazing introduction into stoic philosophy, by Ryan Holiday (author of Trust me I'm lying). He summarized everything I wanted to learn about the subject, and explained it extremely well. Absolute best book to read in hectic/stressful situations, audio version is great too.
- Fun autobiographies: Ghost in the Wires (Kevin Mitnick), iWoz (Steve Wozniak), Catch me if you can (Frank Abagnale), Just for Fun (Linus Torvalds), Elon Musk, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
- How companies work: Creativity Inc (Pixar), In the Plex (Google)
- On writing: Art of fiction/nonfiction by Ayn Rand, Story (and Dialogue) by Robert McKee, Save the Cat, Step by Step to Standup Comedy.
- Grokking Deep Learning - by far the simplest and clearest introduction into deep learning, starts from scratch and takes you through the whole thing, without any of the scary/overwhelming math.
- Refactoring UI (design tips), Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics, Master Algorithm - still reading these books, but they look REALLY good.
- Other: The Selfish Gene, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Serious Creativity, Hackers & Painters, Hacking Growth, Angel (on angel investing, by Jason Calacanis).
Also collections of essays by Paul Graham [1] and Scott Alexander [2]:
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/2no0sqybnxurpcd/Paul%20Graham%20-%...
[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i43lqpdyd4qa255/The%20Library%20of...
- - "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" - probably the most influential book I've read in my life, profoundly changed the way I think. It's a collection of LessWrong essays on science and rationality.
- "On Intelligence" and "I am a Strange Loop" - how mind works.
- "Rework", "Zero to One", "Start Small, Stay Small" - insightful startup advice.
- Fun autobiographies: Ghost in the Wires (Kevin Mitnick), iWoz (Steve Wozniak), Catch me if you can (Frank Abagnale), Just for Fun (Linus Torvalds), Elon Musk, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
- How companies work: Creativity Inc (Pixar), In the Plex (Google)
- On writing: Art of fiction/nonfiction by Ayn Rand, Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat, Step by Step to Standup Comedy.
- Other: The Selfish Gene, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Serious Creativity, Hackers & Painters, Hacking Growth, Angel (on angel investing, by Jason Calacanis).
Also collections of essays by Paul Graham [1] and Scott Alexander [2]:
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/2no0sqybnxurpcd/Paul%20Graham%20-%...
[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i43lqpdyd4qa255/The%20Library%20of...
- - Read PG's essay on coming up with startup ideas (http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html) and books on startups (Start Small Stay Small, Lean Startup, Rework, Zero to One, Abundance).
- Read Edward DeBono's "Serious Creativity" - the most brilliant book about generating ideas I've ever encountered. Not about startups or apps in particular, but very interesting.
-There are startup ideas threads on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836508
and https://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/
- If you're good at android development - please, PLEASE build a good text editor. It is the most important app for me, the first thing I look for in any new device, and all android text editors suck SO MUCH. I would easily spend $10-$30 if you would build something like Editorial, that would be convenient to use on android smartphone.
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- Think if there's something in your life that's missing, some tool that you would like to use, and build that.
- If that fails - think about the perfect niche, about people you like and respect, who use technology and/or could benefit from it; understand them deeply, identify their goals, problems, challenges; and build something for them.
- If that fails - look for a different not tech-related hobby. Like music or writing or woodworking or something like that. Whatever makes you the most curious. That will help you with burnout, and will give you a great niche to work in. Then identify the problems you're facing, and solve them with technology.
- If that fails - talk to other people and ask if there's anything they might need, if there's any problems they have, etc.
- Also - check out new mobile OS'es, like Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, etc. These are new, emerging ecosystems, where there's plenty of apps to build. You can simply look at the most successful iOS/Android apps, and copy them to these platforms.
