Tag: ideas

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review

Nathan Reads: Gamestorming

Books Books Books

There are some great, helpful books on PhD topics (and vivas too, including my own short ebook on viva preparation, Fail Your Viva!) and about once a month I’ll post a review of a book which I’ve found really valuable, and which I think could be really valuable to PGRs in general.

The first up is “Gamestorming” by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo. This is a book that I have found invaluable in the kind of work that I do, and I think that it is something which can really help people in lots of ways.

Using a Heuristic Ideation Technique, which I saw first in Gamestorming.
Using a Heuristic Ideation Technique, which I saw first in Gamestorming. Picture taken at a workshop on blogging I delivered several years ago.
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creative thinking

Creative Thinking Tuesday, 14th October 2014

What Inspires You?

Starry Night, photo by me
The Starry Night, photo by me

On my honeymoon, my wife and I were fortunate enough to visit MOMA and have a good morning of wandering around. It began with The Starry Night, which to my humble untrained eye is the most amazing piece of art ever. Whenever I look at it I feel refreshed, alive with possibilities: it gets my brain turning over, and gets me wondering… What if…?

There are lots of creative thinking processes and tools to aid idea generation (see my post on DRC, for example), but if these are the tools for the job, it’s still important to have raw materials. Inspiration – something that makes you go “Hmmmmmm…” – can come from lots of places. Where do you get your inspiration from? It comes from somewhere, so where is it?

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10 Questions For The Next Year Of Your PhD

Starting another year of your PhD?

Congratulations! I’ll bet it’s been tough so far, but you’re making progress I’m sure. As you start another year it’s a good time to take a step back and reflect. Here are ten questions to get you started.

What have you done in the last year? List all of the different things that you have accomplished, in particular things that you have done which have a direct impact on your thesis. Take some time listing these; you have probably done a lot more than you first think of.

What’s been the most difficult thing that you have achieved? Think carefully about what was really tricky and what you did to overcome it. Something like this might crop up again in the future, and you’ll know how to tackle it then.

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10 Questions To Ask Yourself At The Start Of Your PhD

So you’re starting a PhD! Congratulations!

October is a time of year that heralds many new starters in postgraduate research. It is ten years to the day that I arrived at Room 524, my office, sat down at my desk and wondered, “What the hell am I doing? What am I supposed to be doing here? Should I just read through my Masters notes until my supervisor calls for me?”

Three interesting questions… But I can think of three better questions to ask yourself at the start of a PhD – in fact I can think of ten! It might be useful for you to work through these and make some notes. They can form the basis for later plans and review.

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creative thinking

Creative Thinking Tuesday, 30th September 2014

Start

Just as every fortnight on a Monday I will be rounding up half a dozen articles or posts that I have found interesting, approximately every two weeks I’ll share a few quick creative thinking tips that I find useful. Today I’m focussing on a few simple ways to capture ideas.

Always carry something to write on: I’ve tried lots of things over the last ten years, from notebooks to Post Its, from napkins to phone apps, and all have had their advantages and disadvantages. I’ve settled on 5” by 3” record cards, plain white or ruled coloured depending on my mood (the former if I am just out to capture and doodle, the latter if I have something particular in mind). These cost around £2/£2.50 for a pack of 100 in stationery shops. They are great as they have just enough space to capture the outline of an idea. If you’re generating lots of ideas you can write each idea on a separate card. They are meant to be discrete things, but if you have lots of ideas relating to a project then you can later set them out on a surface to show how they connect – or you can put them in some kind of organised sequence.

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series

KISS – Complex ≠ Awesome

Today’s post is the last in my series on acronyms and ideas that have really helped me – and that I’ve seen help others. It will also be shorter than the other seven in this series. My hope is that these posts have been clear, and that they are straight forward for people to apply.

You can use INTRO to start a talk or think through your work, set objectives with SMART and use 5W1H to dig into problems. DRC is a simple process for generating ideas and PMI is great for critiquing them. STAR is an effective tool for thinking about and communicating your strengths and BOOST helps people give feedback that others can base future actions and development on.

All of these can help, and I don’t think they are difficult ideas to pick up. You will have heard of other great concepts and useful tools, and in coming months I’m planning to review a book each month that I think has some great ideas or techniques. There are tons of blogs and people and products and services that aim to take the load off, or give you a way to get something done.

BUT

Above all else, whatever you do, KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Make any system, tool, resolution, goal, task, interaction related to your work as simple as it can be (without impairing it). Engaging or completing anything is a function of will, time and work – the simpler the expression, the easier it is to do. Life is complex, and it is easy to take a simple idea and spin a web of confusion around it. Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

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series

BOOST – The Best Feedback

Ugh

What’s worse: giving or receiving feedback? Does it make a difference in either case if you know that the feedback is going to be positive or negative? No-one likes to be the bearer of “bad” news, and negative feedback could always be taken that way, even if we want to frame it as constructive. If we are receiving feedback we want it to be in a form that means we can do something with it (whether it is positive or constructive). Hopefully if you have to deliver feedback you want it to be something that the other person can then do something with. In either case then…

What does effective feedback look like?

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series

PMI – Evaluating Ideas Easily

Previously, on this blog…

I finished last week’s series of posts with DRC – Dreamer, Realist, Critic. It’s easy, I think to be a Critic, but much harder to be a Critic in a rigorous or fair way. Today’s acronym gives a way to do that. PMI or Plus, Minus, Interesting is a thinking tool made popular by Edward de Bono. One can think of it as an improvement to Pros & Cons lists that people make when they’re trying to make a decision.

I’ve used it a lot over the last few years, because it is a neat and simple approach to getting information for evaluating ideas. Simply, it delivers three lists of points about factors that people find positive (Plus), negative (Minus) and things that people find Interesting, or find curious in some way. For example, an idea that I have heard about recently is that of scheduling specific times when I read and write email, rather than be open to it through the day (which is how I generally engage).

I am trying to decide about whether or not to practice this behaviour now, so it makes for a good example.

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series

DRC – Directing Reliable Creativity

That’s not what it stands for

In the first post next week I want to share a great concept for evaluating ideas; to round out this week’s posts I thought I would share something that has had a profound impact on the way I approach creativity over the last few years. I’ve heard feedback from lots of people who say that this simple process has transformed the way they look for ideas.

DRC stands for Dreamer, Realist, Critic: it came from research by Robert Dilts, who was looking at the practices of companies that succeed. At Disney he found that there were three steps – three deliberate steps – taken to ideas and creativity.

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series

5W1H – Uncovering Useful Information

How do you approach problems?

Whenever I get stuck on any kind of problem, typically my first thought is “Cup of tea?” – and actually there is a really neat and direct way to start examining the problem and figuring it out.

Whenever we start to think about problems we are often thinking about EFFECTS: we see symptoms, but we may not know what the root cause is. It may be that when we come to solve a problem that if we can treat the symptoms, that will be enough; more often though, we need to address those root causes if we are to have some lasting solution.

We see a similar situation if our problem is more along the lines of not knowing what the next step is in a process or piece of research. How many times have you sat down to do something but not known what to do? How many times have you wondered what you should do next but just gone blank?

Above all other acronyms, mnemonics and mental shortcuts, 5W1H is the thing for you.

Is that even an acronym?

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