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January 8 - April 6, 2019
“Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” a team of psychologists wrote in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management in 2012. People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction. In contrast, having an external locus of control—believing that your life is primarily influenced by events outside your control—“is correlated with higher levels of
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We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”
Teams need to believe that their work is important. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful. Teams need clear goals and defined roles. Team members need to know they can depend on one another. But, most important, teams need psychological safety.
team leaders needed to model the right behaviors.
use: Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don’t know. They shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to re...
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Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.
it’s not uncommon in a company like Google for engineers or salespeople to be taught to fight for what they believe in. But you need the right norms to make arguments productive rather than destructive. Otherwise, a team never becomes stronger.”
Project Oxygen found that a good manager (1) is a good coach; (2) empowers and does not micromanage; (3) expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and well-being; (4) is results oriented; (5) listens and shares information; (6) helps with career development; (7) has a clear vision and strategy; (8) has key technical skills.
Reactive thinking is at the core of how we allocate our attention, and in many settings, it’s a tremendous asset. Athletes, for example, practice certain moves again and again so that, during a game, they can think reactively and execute plays faster than their opponents can respond. Reactive thinking is how we build habits, and it’s why to-do lists and calendar alerts are so helpful: Rather than needing to decide what to do next, we can take advantage of our reactive instincts and automatically proceed. Reactive thinking, in a sense, outsources the choices and control that, in other settings,
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One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see.
These people tell themselves stories about what’s going on as it occurs. They narrate their own experiences within their heads. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. They say when they daydream, they’re often imagining future conversations. They visualize their days with more specificity than the rest of us do. Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: “creating mental models.” Understanding how people build mental models has become one of the most important topics in cognitive psychology. All people rely on mental models
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“You can’t delegate thinking,” de Crespigny told me. “Computers fail, checklists fail, everything can fail. But people can’t. We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention. The key is forcing yourself to think. As long as you’re thinking, you’re halfway home.”
One was a culture they referred to as the “star” model.
The second category was the “engineering” model.
The third and fourth categories of companies included those firms built around “bureaucracies” and those constructed as “autocracies.”
The final category was known as the “commitment” model, and it was a throwback to an age when people happily worked for one company their entire life.
“Joe, please forgive me,” a lieutenant translated. “I have done a poor job of instructing your managers of the importance of helping you pull the cord when there is a problem. You are the most important part of this plant. Only you can make every car great. I promise I will do everything in my power to never fail you again.”
“There was a genuine devotion to convincing employees they were part of a family,” said Joel Smith,
“It had to be reinforced constantly, but it was real. We might have disagreements or see things differently, but at the end of the day, we were committed to each other’s success.”
Just as Mauricio Delgado and the U.S. Marine Corps had found in other settings, when workers felt a greater sense of control, their drive expanded.
wrote. “I stressed that no one at Disney needed to wait for permission to come up with solutions. What is the point of hiring smart people, we asked, if you don’t empower them to fix what’s broken?”
But, in the end, the rewards of autonomy and commitment cultures outweigh the costs. The bigger misstep is when there is never an opportunity for an employee to make a mistake.
predictions. And most surprising, a particular kind of lesson—training in how to think probabilistically—significantly increased people’s abilities to forecast the future.
This conundrum of how to spur innovation on a deadline—or, put another way, how to make the creative process more productive—isn’t unique to filmmaking, of course. Every day, students, executives, artists, policy makers, and millions of other people confront problems that require inventive answers delivered as quickly as possible. As the economy changes, and our capacity to achieve creative insights becomes more important than ever, the need for fast originality is even more urgent.
Animation Studios and cofounder of Pixar. “We think it’s something that can be managed poorly or well, and if we get the creative process right, we find innovations faster. But if we don’t manage it right, good ideas are suffocated.”
To speed things up, he suggested, they should stop trying to do something new at every turn. Instead, they should stick with conventions they knew, from trial and error, had worked in other shows. But they should combine those conventions in novel ways.
The biggest challenge, however, was figuring out which theatrical conventions were truly powerful and which had become clichés.
The method Robbins suggested for jump-starting the creative process—taking proven, conventional ideas from other settings and combining them in new ways—is remarkably effective, it turns out.
“the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge.”
“Robbins could be brutal,” said Amanda Vaill, Robbins’s biographer. “He could sniff out creative complacency and force people to come up with something newer and better than what everyone else settled for.” Robbins was an innovation broker, and he forced everyone around him to become brokers, as well.
West Side Story went on to become one of the most popular and influential musicals in history. It succeeded by mixing originality and convention to create something new. It took old ideas and put them in novel settings so gracefully that many people never realized they were watching the familiar become unique.
She didn’t want to apologize for not being perfect. She didn’t think she needed to. And she didn’t think Elsa should have to apologize for being flawed, either.
“Spinning occurs because you’re in a rut and can’t see your project from different perspectives anymore,” said Ed Catmull. So much of the creative process relies on achieving distance, on not becoming overly attached to your creation.
“You start spinning when your flexibility drops,” said Catmull. “You get so devoted to what you’ve already created. But you have to be willing to kill your darlings to go forward. If you can’t let go of what you’ve worked so hard to achieve, it ends up trapping you.”
Connell wanted to understand why nature’s diversity—its capacity for creative origination—was distributed so unevenly.
“But there had been a time when enough light had made it through that other species were able to claim some territory. There had been some disturbance that had given new plants a chance to compete.”
It seemed as if nature’s creative capacities depended on some kind of periodic disturbance—like a tree fall or an occasional storm—that temporarily upset the natural environment. But the disturbance couldn’t be too small or too big. It had to be just the right size. “Intermediate disturbances are critical,” Connell told me.
This is called “competitive exclusion.” If there are no disturbances to the environment, then the strongest species become so entrenched that nothing else can compete. Similarly, if there are massive, frequent disturbances, only the hardiest species grow back. But if there are intermediate disturbances, then numerous species bloom, and nature’s creative capacities flourish.
When strong ideas take root, they can sometimes crowd out competitors so thoroughly that alternatives can’t prosper. So sometimes the best way to spark creativity is by disturbing things just enough to let some light through.
So when I became a director, I felt like I had to listen even more closely to what everyone was saying because that was my job now.
share that sense of possibility
“fear destroys us, love heals us. Anna’s journey should be about learning what love is; it’s that simple.”
But throughout the film, those elements had been disturbed, just enough, to let something new and different emerge.
process, there are three things that can help: First, be sensitive to your own experiences. Pay attention to how things make you think and feel. That’s how we distinguish clichés from true insights.
Look to your own life as creative fodder, and broker your own experiences into the wider world.
Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isn’t a sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, it’s the condition that helps make us flexible enough to seize something new. Creative desperation can be critical; anxiety is what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways.
The creative pain should be embraced. Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to seeing alternatives. It is critical to maintain some distance from what we create.
we retain clear eyes by embracing destruction and upheaval, as long as we’re sensitive to making the disturbance the right size.
We just have to learn how to trust ourselves enough to let the creativity out.”
situation by learning which folders to consult. Experts are distinguished from novices, in part, by how many folders they carry in their heads.
