Interesting. For me, sometimes a familiar place is conducive to creativity (my office, library, favorite coffee shop or wine bar) — but I also like to go to unfamiliar, unrelated places to think on creative problems.
Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love; to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives; and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others?
The original article included gems like “There are always more things to do than there is time to do them. Startups are a continuous exercise in deciding what not to do.” And “There’s a lot of value to being likable. Good things happen when people like you. When people like you, bad things have less of a chance of being fatal. I advise being likable.” Now here are what OnStartups.com readers had to say:
The response to an earlier article “Startups: 10 Things MBA Schools Won’t Teach You” has been overwhelmingly positive. The article has now received about 150 comments across various websites (on the OnStartups.com site, in the OnStartups LinkedIn group, etc.) Unsurprisingly, many of the comments are much better than anything I could have ever come up with on my own.
So, to further the conversation and discussion, I decided to collect, edit and share some of the fantastic insights from reader comments.
This is the first in a series of tips, tricks and recipes for designers, artists and other visual thinkers working in meetings and other sessions where large amounts of complex information need to be collected and visualized. It’s a peek into how XPLANE approaches discovery and uses visual thinking to communicate key ideas.
Why we do it:
Live sketching gets people engaged in the discovery process and leads to ideas that may not have presented themselves via normal note-taking. The response to visuals being created before a clients’ or colleagues’ eyes is energetic, and that leads to a natural desire to fill in the picture, completely. The result: Understanding and alignment, quickly.
Read more »
Quite vintage-looking, but it’s always interesting to see how people work to visualize and simply concepts/things.
PICOL stands for PIctorial COmmunication Language and is a project to find a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication. PICOL is free to use and open to alter.
(Thanks Philip!)
