Think! And! Feel!

Brainstorming with an Anecdote

Josef — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 20:37:26 +0000

Time to kick off a brainstorming session. How to do that? – Reminding everybody about how brainstorming works? Focussing people on the topic at hand? Fortunately, I ran across this nice article “Twitter Strangers” just in time. I re-told the article (admittedly in a creative interpretation), roughly with the following key content: about the tendency [...]

Functional Fixedness: Real-world examples

Josef — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:33:27 +0000

You may remember the candle experiment from the recent post “Motivation 2.0: Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation“. The whole point of the candle experiment is to demonstrate that overcoming functional fixedness can not be accelerated with carrots and sticks – on the contrary. Here, I’d like to give three real-world examples for [...]

Aunt Sara

Josef — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:27:54 +0000

… from the “anecdotes for project managers” series … This time, the story comes from ShadowCulture’s BugBash. It’s so nicely written that it can well stay there. Enjoy!

Heisenberg award!

Josef — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:41:51 +0000

Last Friday, I’ve spent quite a chunk of time on the “E=H2O” simulation that IEEE Spectrum had organized together with the Institute for the Future. Actually, it earned me a “Heisenberg award”. While I’m extremely happy about that recognition of my contribution, the Heisenberg award could be a mixed blessing: It is awarded to “The [...]

Twitter beyond the Tornado?

Josef — Tue, 25 May 2010 22:23:45 +0000

Every once in a while, I get delusions of grandeur and think I can understand the world. Given the latest major pieces of news about Twitter, I get the impression it’s that time again. The other day, I was studying “Inside the Tornado” once again. (See Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving [...]

Motivation 2.0: Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Josef — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:01:50 +0000

The other day, a friend of mine recommended another TED-Video to me: “Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation” (~18 Minutes). I think everybody who’s into management and/or leadership should have seen it. It’s clearly worth watching, because Daniel is a truly gifted speaker. Still, for the hurried reader, here are the core points [...]

Lost+Found quote: “What’s going on in the project” (Ward Cunningham)

Josef — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:01:14 +0000

For questions like, “What’s going on in the project,” we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what’s not important about what’s going on in the project. What’s important about the project is the stuff that you don’t anticipate. (Ward Cunningham, founder of the first [...]

Everybody, Somebody, Nobody. Anybody?

Josef — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:50:10 +0000

I think everybody knows the following story. Still, it has turned out both fun and useful for me. Regularly. This is a story about four people: Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was this important job to be done and everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure that somebody would do it. Anybody [...]

Image and Reality

Josef — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:08:33 +0000

One frequent mishap in larger organizations is exaggerated confidence in KPIs. It is interesting to note that the literature on management, spends little to no attention on the accuracy of the measurement, while the literature on leadership barely mentions such KPIs at all. When discussing topics that are easy to measure, like manufacturing, taking the [...]

Anecdotes for Project Managers: Cargo Cult

Josef — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:32:15 +0000

Another anecdote that is really working miracles is Richard Feynman’s story about Cargo Cult. I have to admit that I’m telling my own version. I’ve researched it on my own and massaged it a little bit to focus on the point I’m trying to make. The situation where this anecdote works best is at milestone [...]