Acclaimed HBS Professor Linda Hill makes a regular practice of choosing a particularly promising 22 year old to co-author her books with her. Talk about appreciating the perspective of a novice!…

The Picasso Museum in Barcelona is one of the coolest places I've ever visited. I was stunned to learn that Pablo Picasso created over 20,000 pieces of art in his career…

I was struck by a revealing criticism in Henri Poincaré’s otherwise glowing recommendation of Albert Einstein for an academic position in Zurich. It spoke to me of how subtly a conventional paradigm can sneak into our thinking about exploration…

One of the quirks of the creative process is that it's accelerated by "premature sharing.

We often see this in design workshops, especially among working professionals. We come to a "share out," where we are going to review folks' work, and ask for a show of hands: "Who feels ready to share with the group?" Almost always, not a single hand in the house gets raised…

I may end up doing a short series on the fantastic "A Technique for Producing Ideas" which is, page-for-page, the single greatest guide for the practice of generating ideas that I have found. In it, James Webb Young give voice to what every individual pursuing a creative end has experienced: sometimes it feels like the answer will never come. He explains that hopelessness is every bit as important a step in the creative process as any other…

A hallmark of the "not done, but begun" mentality is regular, disciplined practice. It's how we improve in any skillset, and creative thinking is no different.

From the fantastic "A Technique for Producing Ideas"…

Speaking of gardening...

One of the things that's truly special about Amazon is their ability to build new businesses. You might even say it's their competitive advantage, the ability to build new businesses that seemingly have little to do with the original vision. Much has been written about this phenomenon, so I won't go into too much detail here…

For all of the important benefits that the notion of "the design sprint" has conferred upon the corporate world, I think it has done the practice of innovation one great disservice: it has unintentionally implied that great ideas are easily come by, and are the function of episodic, momentary bursts of effort.

Nothing could be further from the truth…

I was talking with a good friend of mine the other day, the CEO of a 100,000+ employee organization. We were talking about the challenge of designing space for spontaneous meetings in the midst of a pandemic which has most office building shuttered…

I've observed that a divergent mindset is something that many folks like to get out of as quickly as possible. As soon as a reasonably good idea comes up, there's almost a collective sigh of relief which says, "Whew! We did it! Mission accomplished!" …