The Invisible Mentor

Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

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This post is the sequel to “The Secrets of Creative Problem Solving” posted two weeks ago. Don Garb, President, Engineered Awareness recently led a workshop on “The Art of Invention,” which introduced some strategies for problem solving, some of which were new to me.

Wish List Strategy

Let’s say that you are tasked with inventing something at work. It could be a new product, process or service. On a sheet of paper, start writing down all the things you could give to your client, without thinking about the practicality of it. Your client could be either inside or outside your organization.

After you have made your wish list, look closer at each item and eliminate based on how practical it is. Repeat the process of adding to the wish list and eliminating until you have generated some freebies and innovative things you can deliver to your client within budget and the time frame.

Do the Opposite Strategy

You are experiencing a pesky problem at work and you have to resolve it. Think about how others would likely resolve the problem and do the opposite. This forces you to step outside the status quo and take the path less traveled.

Channelling the Master Strategy

You have a problem to solve, think about an expert/master in the field, and ask yourself how the master would solve that problem. Whatever comes to you, follow those steps.

Change One Thing Strategy

You decide you have been doing things the same way for a long time and want to shake things up. Dissect the process you follow and change one of the steps. That’s a simple way to make a change.

Step Out into the Unknown Strategy

Picture a circle. Now imagine that the circle represents what you know. Inside the circle will be holes, which represent holes in your knowledge. There will be tears at the edges of the circle, which represent gaps, and there will be things that you know for sure. Outside your circle is what you don’t know, and the collective knowledge of humankind. To expand your circle of knowledge, you have to venture out into the unknown, then find your way back into the known.

Finding ways to step put into the unknown is not necessarily an easy task. But the way to go is to get into Alpha Brainwave State, by slowing your mind down. One way is to listen to soothing music. Think of activities that have a calming effect on you and do them.

The Three Brains Strategy

This strategy took a while for me to wrap my head around it and I am still feeling somewhat shaky in trying to describe what I learned in the workshop. I conducted additional research so that I could write about it, so here goes!

We have three brains in one: The neo-cortex which has been evolving for over 3 million years and it’s where thoughts happen and it is mainly intellectual; limbic system or old mammalian brain, which has been evolving for over 150 million years, controls your feelings/emotions; and the reptilian or lizard brain which has been evolving for over 300 million years and controls your instincts.

Connection Between the Three Brains

1. The reptilian brain is very quick, reflex and programmed for survival. The reptilian brain controls instinct (breathing, vision, bodily movement and allows territoriality, aggression, and dominance).
2. The limbic brain controls emotion (feelings, relationship/nurturing, images and dreams, play).
3. The neo-cortex controls thought (abstraction, planning, perception, language, mathematics, politics, music, religion, and so on).

Emotions and intellect live in different brains. Your limbic brain, or the feeler, is your dominant brain, but the reptilian brain is the most important one. There are more connections between your limbic and reptilian brain, the limbic and cortex brains than there are between the neo-cortex and the reptilian brain. So the neo-cortex is semi-independent from the limbic and reptilian brain, likes to think that it’s the boss, but is slow to respond under pressure and shuts down when you are stressed.

To increase your problem solving skills, you have to get all three brains to work in harmony, creating what is called a meta-self. The cortex brain loves to be in control, so it has to stop thinking that it’s the boss and act with humility. The lizard brain is big on respect and wants to be heard. One of the best ways to integrate the three brains and make them work in harmony is through meditation. When you meditate, you shut down your thoughts, and you are in the Alpha Brainwave state, which is the state where creativity occurs.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Further Reading

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Creative Problem Solving

How to Read to Problem Solve

Do You Have This Critical Workplace Skill?

Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, and a woman ahead of her time. Most may not know this, but I have a computer science diploma from Mount Royal College in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and one of my majors for my Bachelor of Commerce Degree is Management Information Systems. Even though I had computer science training I have never worked in the field. During my computer science studies, we learned about Charles Babbage, who designed a machine that would do many of the things that today’s computer does, and Ada Lovelace wrote the computer program for Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Lovelace was unable to test her computer program because it was never built. The machine was a century ahead of its time – the technology did not exist to build it. Lovelace made such a mark on the world that a day is named for her – Ada Lovelace Day.

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Name: Ada Augusta King, Countess of Lovelace

Birth Date: December 1815 – November 1852

Job Functions: Early-nineteenth-century English mathematician and scientist

Field: Mathematics and Computer Science

Known For: First computer programmer, best known for her work with Charles Babbage, an early pioneer in computing machines.

Mentors: Charles Babbage, Mary Fairfax Somerville

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Very shortly after Lovelace’s birth, her mother, an amateur mathematician left her husband. As an amateur mathematician, Lady Byron ensured that her daughter had a solid education by developing her intellect. Lovelace studied reading, grammar and spelling, arithmetic, music, geography, drawing, and French. When she was 17 years old, she met Charles Babbage at a party hosted by Mary Fairfax Somerville. At that party, Babbage was demonstrating how to use his Difference Engine, a prototype he had built to show the idea behind his Difference Engine concept. When Lovelace saw the machine, it was love at first sight. She studied the machine very closely until she understood how it worked.

After a failed attempt to elope with her teacher, Lovelace decided to focus on her education and decided to seriously study science. She was a very smart young lady and quickly outgrew her tutors, so she continued to teach herself. In addition to her self-education she corresponded with informal tutors such as mathematician Mary Somerville and improved her mathematical skills.

The following year she got married, and within the first four years of marriage, Lovelace had three children. She loved her children dearly, but lamented because she could not pursue her intellectual interests.

Her mother, Lady Byron, an amateur mathematician, and her husband, William King, Earl of Lovelace searched for ways for her to pursue her academic interests since her desire was so strong. Lady Byron and William King made it happen for Lovelace. In 1940, the year after the birth of her third child, Lovelace returned to her study of mathematics with Augustus De Morgan, a famous British logician and mathematician. She was an impressive and keen student because she had an affinity for the subject. During that same year, Charles Babbage whom she had met at a party a few years earlier, gave a series of talks in Turin, to scientists about his Difference Engine, and his new Analytical Engine, which could be programmed by encoding instructions on punched cards.

Luigi Federico Menabrea, an Italian military engineer, summarized Babbage’s series of talks in a French article in the journal Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève. It was very difficult for Menabrea to adequately describe how the machine would work because the Analytical Engine didn’t exist, so all he had to rely on were drawings of the machine. The article was subsequently published in 1942.

Through a family friend, Charles Wheatstone, developer of the electric telegraph, Lovelace learned about Luigi Menabrea’s article. Wheatstone wanted her to translate the article from French to English for the prestigious British journal Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs. Lovelace started her translation project with zeal. When Babbage learned of what Lovelace was doing, he wanted her to write an entirely new article instead. She declined his request, but offered to add extensive “Notes” to bring Menabrea’s article up-to-date. There were seven notes in all – labelled A through G and the added notations were three times the length of the original article.

Among other things, her “Notes” explained the differences between the Difference Engine and the new Analytical Engine, and other similar machines on the market. It also included detailed steps of how Babbage’s Analytical Engine worked, explained the concept of computer memory, and presented what is now known in computer programming as a loop or subroutine (If-Then-Else, Do-For). Lovelace introduced the idea of “garbage in, garbage out” (The output of the computer is only as good as its input) and also detailed how the machine could be programmed to compute the calculation of Bernoulli numbers (According to Wikipedia, Bernoulli numbers the sums of powers of consecutive integers; named after Swiss mathematician Jacques Bernoulli (1654–1705)). The detailed plan she outlined is now regarded as the first computer program.

Without the actual machine to study, to ensure success of her now expanded translation project, Lovelace used information and formulas supplied by Babbage to determine where the calculations would go into the machine and where the answers would be displayed. Since the machine did not exist, and was never built because the technology did not exist in the early 1800s to create such a machine, Lovelace couldn’t test her computer software program to determine if it worked. Her “Notes” has secured her a place in history, and Ada Lovelace is considered to be the first computer programmer.

Her ideas and deep insights in the “Notes” about the capabilities of an Analytical Engine became a reality in computers in the Twentieth Century, and that’s a testament that she had a solid understanding of the implications for Babbage’s invention. Much later after her death, her program was tested and it had a few bugs in it, but I am confident that had Lovelace had access to a working Analytical Engine, she would have been able to debug her computer program. It is worthy to note that based on the drawing and specifications of Babbage’s design, The London Science Museum later built the machine and it did exactly what Babbage wanted his Analytical Engine to do, which show s that his ideas were sound.

Babbage and Lovelace had a disagreement about publishing the manuscript. Even though they resolved their differences, they never worked together again. For the next few years, Lovelace focused on various fields of science, reading German books, and corresponding with prominent English scientists. Her only other big scientific contribution was a book review of a French book on meteorology and agriculture, which she wrote jointly with her husband.

What you can learn from Ada Lovelace

• Her ideas were over 100 years before their time.
• She went against traditional Victorian society by studying mathematics which was a discipline few women attempted.
• Lovelace knew how to work the system. Her husband who was 11 years her senior, was very supportive of her academic endeavours, though people of their class felt pursuing such interests were beneath them. To live in both worlds, Lovelace signed her Notes A.A.L. Thirty years after the paper was published her full name appeared as the paper’s author.
• She also predicted the use of mechanical mathematical devices for such purposes as music composition and the production of graphics.
• Lovelace’s tutors fostered her early interest in systems as well as her desire to understand how things worked.

Lovelace did not obtain widespread recognition until the historian, Lord B.V. Bowden, rediscovered her “Notes” in 1952 and had them reprinted the following year – 110 years after their original publication. In 1980, the United States Department of Defense named its Ada programming language after her.

Interesting Information: Even though Lord Byron didn’t get to see his daughter again after his wife left him, he wrote about her in some of his poems.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Third (excerpt)

George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child!

Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?

When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smil’d,

And then we parted–not as now we part,

But with a hope.–Awaking with a start,

The waters heave around me; and on high

The winds lift up their voices: I depart,

Whither I know not; but the hour’s gone by,

When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.

Source: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/344.html

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Further Reading

Ada Lovelace Day 2011 – Innovation and Gaming

Works Referenced

Computer Sciences

Encyclopedia of World Biography

New Dictionary of Scientific Biography

Mathematics

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Related articles

• Ada Lovelace Day: Celebrate Women in Technology (GeekDad Wayback Machine) (wired.com)
• Ada Lovelace Day of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)
• Wisdom of Life: Charles Babbage, Father of the Computer</li>

When you think of ING DIRECT, you think of that bank without branches and tellers. But did you know that in Toronto ING DIRECT offers a collaborative workspace at the corner of Shuter and Yonge Street in downtown Toronto? The ING Direct Downtown Cafe is very open, orange in colour with free wireless internet service. The space offers high tech facilities for entrepreneurs to come together and share ideas.

I got a tour of the facilities at 221 Yonge Street and I was very impressed. As someone who works from a home office I could see myself having a client meeting there. You can rent a workspace for $20 a day or $100 a month and there are two small offices where you can have meetings with about five people to each room. There is also an open area which sits about 40 people. The place is fully equipped with the latest technology and you can have presentations there.

There is also a cafe that serves fairly traded coffee and organic food. Every day, whatever food is left over, the ING Direct staff delivers it to shelters so that the food is not wasted. And they also swing by the offices of Google, not too far away, and other places nearby to collect their perishable food as well.

ING DIRECT is also working with local businesses helping to promote them. For instance, while I was on the tour, they had some bicycles on display from a neighbourhood cycle shop. ING DIRECT purchased the bikes for over $600 and are selling them to customers for $200 less. The money will be donated to help underprivileged children.

So whenever you feel like you need a change from you home office, or are feeling stuck and would benefit from meeting other people, drop by the ING DIRECT Downtown Café at 221 Yonge Street, and experience the new wave in collaboration. And it’s a great way t expand your networks.

Is this collaborative workspace a wave of the future? If it’s as affordable as The ING Direct Downtown Cafe, it may very well be at that price!

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

One of the questions that I ask when I interview people for this blog is, tell me about your biggest failure and how did it translate into a great success? Like most people in life, I like it when things work out in the end. In life, things do not always work out, but that should not stop us from being hopeful. Though there are many times when what seemed like a sure failure, mistake or whatever you’d like to call it, turned out to be a major coup. Here are seven accidental discoveries:

1. Champagne: A popular story about how champagne was first created suggests that a monk named Dom Perignon was trying to make white wine and instead created a wine with lots of bubbles of carbon dioxide. Wikipedia disputes this popular belief and clarifies that it was the first sparkling champagne that was accidentally discovered by Dom Perignon.  
2. Saccharin: This artificial sweetener was discovered in 1879 by Ira Remsen and Constantine Fahlberg. They were working with coal tar derivatives, and they discovered the sweetness of saccharin because they didn’t wash their hands properly.
3. Viagra: Pharmaceutical juggernaut Pfizer originally developed sildenafil citrate as a heart medication to help men who were suffering from chest pains. The results were not promising so they stopped the studies. But when they looked at the published data, they realized it would be an appropriate treatment for erectile dysfunction. The medication was re-evaluated and the rest they say is history.
4. Band-aid: In 1921, Earle Dickson discovered band-aid at Johnson and Johnson. His wife was always cutting herself in the kitchen while cooking, and he was simply trying to find a solution to keeping the cut germ free while allowing her to continue to do what she was doing.
5. Penicillin: This antibiotic was accidentally discovered in 1928 when Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist left bacteria cultures uncovered for several days.
6. Frisbee: Walter Fredrick Morrison and his wife used to toss a cake pan on the beach in California, and he wanted to find a way to make the pan “fly better”  and the modern day frisbee was born.
7. The sandwich: The creator of today’s sandwich is unfairly credited to John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. There are conflicting stories on the internet about the origin of the sandwich, but the most interesting one is that John was very fond of playing cards and would do so for an entire day. He did not want food to interfere with his game so he asked his cook to prepare him a meal that would be easy to eat. She presented him with today’s version of a sandwich.

Think back to when you were a child, were there games you played that you invented? Are there projects that you abandoned because you didn’t get the results that you sought? Can they be used in different ways? What would you like to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right side) by email or RSS Feed.

Further Reading

The Accidental Innovator, Sarah Jane Gilbert, July 5, 2006, Harvard Business School

Photo Credit: Google via Apture

How creative are your ideas? How many creative ideas do you get? And what process do you use to generate creative ideas. The ability to think creatively, or generate creative ideas might just be the skill that gives you a competitive edge. Below is a model which is a combination of Graham Wallas’ and James Webb Young’s creativity models (Based on my life experiences, I have added information to the models). What can you add to the model to make it better? If your project is just for fun you do not have to follow all the steps, especially the ones in data collection (for example interviewing subject matter experts and conducting focus group interviews). Some of these steps are more appropriate for a work project.

Step 1: Preparation (Gathering Information)

1. Describe your topic of  interest
2. Develop a set of decision criteria to judge the quality of the ideas

There are two types of information to gather:

Specific

1. Gather as much information as possible on the topic of interest
   1. Look for  case studies in your industry and unrelated industries
   2. Conduct research on the internet
   3. Conduct research using commercial databases, you can access many through your public library portal
   4. Interview subject matter experts
   5. Brainstorm with colleagues
   6. Conduct focus group interviews
2. Read all the information gathered and synthesize them
3. Write down the information on 3×5 index cards, one item per card
4. Classify the information by sections of the topic of interest

Read the post How to Analyze Information to evaluate the quality of the data you gathered.

General

1. This is an ongoing process throughout your life
2. Record any interesting information you come across in a scrapbook or other filing method that makes sense for you
3. Use your cell phone if you have one, or a camera to capture any interesting scenes that you see, both photos and videos and create a file on your computer in which to save them
4. Attend speeches, workshops, seminars and so on that are unrelated to your work just because they interest you and take notes
5. Visit the websites How Stuff Works and Ted.com often and read for a while
6. Every so often, pull up the information and review them

Step 2: Working Over the Information in Your Mind

1. Look at the information you gathered from many different angles
2. Synthesize the information
3. Merge two facts and see how they fit together
4. Connect the information with what you already know, nothing exists in a vacuum
5. As tentative or partial ideas come to you, no matter how crazy or incomplete, document them on the index card, one idea per card
6. Do not stop until you have at least one partial or incomplete idea
7. When everything is a jumble or it is pointless for you to do additional work, it is time for the next step

Step 3: Incubation

1. Turn over the problem to your subconscious mind
2. Take a break or work on an unrelated task or do something which stimulates the imagination and emotions

Step 4: Illumination – Eureka! I have It

1. When you least expect it, the idea comes to you (You have an aha moment)

Step 5: Verification/Implementation/Shaping & Developing the Idea

1. The idea will unlikely be ready to be implemented as is
2. Subject it to criticism – test it, then refine it
   1. Use the criteria you developed in Stage I to judge the quality of the solution
   2. Refine the idea if you have to
   3. Implement the idea
   4. Evaluate the idea
   5. If you find that the solution doesn’t work, go through the process again

Along Yonge Street in front of the Eaton Centre in Toronto, Canada there are always people who are very creative in earning money, what are your thoughts? What have been some of your most creative ideas to generate some extra cash? Did any of these translate into a viable business?

Man Playing Drums in Front of The Eaton Centre, Toronto from Avil Beckford on Vimeo.

Man and Boy Playing Drums from Avil Beckford on Vimeo.

Please keep the conversation flowing, click on the comment link below and leave a note for me. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the left side) by email or RSS Feed.

Photo Credit: Avil Beckford