idealawg

Can creativity be taught? Is thinking outside of the box worthy of so much attention?

Memory, left brain/right brain thinking, and creativity are some of the topics discussed in an interview of Daniel T. Willingham, author of Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. (I have blogged about the book in the past.)

If you have not read the book, you can pick up several of the points made in Why Don't Students Like School? by listening to the interview (from Library of Economics and Liberty).

Willingham explains that thinking is hard and the brain tries not to do it. It prefers to rely on memory. (In the book, he says that understanding is memory in disguise; more about that here.) Our day is full of situations when we could engage with decisions in new ways but we tend to take refuge in old ways.

What gets into our memory? He responds that things about which we think deeply and carefully, and which are connected to what we already know, will enter our memory. We remember what we think about. Your brain decides that if you are spending time thinking about something, it must be important, and thus useful in the future, so worth remembering.

Willingham said that left brain/right brain thinking such as described in Dan Pink's book is "out of fashion." We need both of what Pink calls right and left brain skills to be creative. He does not know of any effective way of teaching creativity except to to create an irreverent habit of mind

He believes thinking outside of the box can be useful sometimes but perhaps is not worthy of all the attention it is getting. The skill is to know when you should be thinking outside the box and when not. Memory often will suffice. Russ Roberts, the interviewer, said that Alfred North Whitehead thought that civilization advances as we maximize what we don't have to think about.

I hope I have given you enough tidbits to see that the interview is worthwhile. Take a break and listen.

October 15: Seminar on managing Gen Y

The workshop "Managing the Gen Y Workforce: To Get the Most from 20-Somethings, Keep Their Brains and Values in Mind" will be taught from 8:30 to 10:30 AM at

5181 Ward Road

Suite 202

Wheat Ridge, Colorado

A shift has occurred in the work environment. Baby Boomers are retiring and Gen Xers are moving into management and executive level positions. Generation Y has joined the workforce and dominates the frontline of entry level sales positions. In order to engage and motivate Gen Y (the new breed of professionals), you need to understand the generational differences and start developing a more fluid management style.

Presenters are Steve Parry and me.

Click to sign up.

Tennessee Commission on Continuing Legal Educational allows credit for coaching and seeks ways to "encourage high quality mentoring"

The Commission recently changed the definition of Ethics/Professionalism for purposes of CLE, included credit for coaching, and announced it will be investigating mentoring. From the announcement "Commission Action August, 2009":

Definition of Ethics:

... This section describes the types of sessions in courses that can receive Ethics/Professionalism (Dual) credits. Dual credits are those that can count either toward the three-hour E/P requirement or toward the 12-hour general requirement. They do NOT count twice. Under this definition, most types of E/P credit will be dual. ...

5H. Ethics and Professionalism (Dual) Credit
1. Dual credit will be granted to programs or topics within programs to the extent that the subject matter is the Rules of Professional Conduct or ethical considerations applicable to attorneys.
2. Dual credit will also be granted to programs or topics:

a) designed to sustain or increase the capacity of attorneys to strive for and to achieve the highest, aspirational levels of professionalism, including programs aimed at increasing attorney well-being, optimism, resilience, relationship skills, and energy and engagement in their practices,
b) designed to help lawyers re-connect with, strengthen, and apply their values, strengths of character, and sense of purpose toward achieving outstanding professionalism,
c) designed to protect lawyers or help them recover from the deleterious effects on professionalism of stress, substance abuse, and poor staff, financial, or time management, or
d) designed to support the development of organizational cultures within firms, law departments, and legal agencies that recognize, support, and encourage outstanding professionalism.

3. All programs accredited under this section must be clearly and primarily designed and intended for attorneys, not a general audience. 4. Programs and topics focused on advertising legal services will be denied all credit, except to the extent they deal with the ethical restrictions concerning advertising. 5. In addition to the other requirements set forth in this Regulation 5H, in order to qualify for credit, the topics must be presented in a session separate and apart from the general credit topics, with specific time allocated to only such topics.

And the coaching provision . . .

Credit for Coaching:

The Commission adopted the following new Regulation 5J:

5J. Credit for Individual Coaching
The Commission, after consideration as a body and not through staff, will give dual credit for “Courses” consisting of individual coaching sessions on topics described in 5H.2 above if:
1) The coaching sessions must be submitted in advance as a complete offering involving 

Millennials on the football field: Prima donnas? Divas?

Former Broncos general manager Ted Sundquist has researched the self-absorbed football player. From "Marshall plays a position caught up in controversy" (Denver Post):

Sundquist has studied the characteristics of the Millennial Generation and says it would behoove the NFL and its 32 teams to do the same.

"I'm not saying either side is right or wrong, or you have to change your standards," Sundquist said. "I do think the league and the clubs would be better off if they understand they're dealing with a player from a different generation. You may have to change your approach in the way you're dealing with this generation of athletes."

The Millennials, also known as Generation Y, were born between 1980 and 1999, give or take. They are offspring of the baby boomers. That means this generation began with people who are now 29, or roughly the median age of an NFL player.

To generalize, baby boomers were spanked by their parents; Millennials were sent to a timeout. Millennials are also referred to as "Trophy Kids." Meaning that regardless of whether they won or lost their youth games, "soccer moms" made sure they were rewarded for their effort with a snack after each game, and trophy after each season.

...

Understanding this generation, Sundquist concludes, would help the NFL better communicate with today's athletes.

Mark October 15 on your calendar: Seminar on managing the Gen Y sales force

I am pleased to be teaching this program with the talented and engaging Steve Parry. This class will be held from 8:30 to 10:30 AM, at 5181 Ward Road, Suite 202, in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. More information later. Today I wanted to give you advance notice so you can hold the date.

NeuroLeadership Summit 2009: Speakers and topics

Here's a list of speakers from the brochure (linked to below):

• Daniel Siegel – author of best seller ‘The Developing Mind’, co-director of UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center
• Warren Bennis – one of the greats of leadership development
• Werner Erhard – founding father of transformational leadership
• Jonah Lehrer – neuroscientist and author of recent bestseller ‘How We Decide’
• Marco Iacoboni – leading mirror neuron researcher
• Naomi Eisenberger – leading social neuroscience researcher
• Yi-Yuan Tang – leading attention researcher
• Matthew Lieberman – founding father of social neuroscience
• Evian Gordon – leading brain researcher, building world’s largest database of brain research
• John Joseph – expert on teaching kids about the brain
• Dr Al Ringleb – Director, CIMBA Business School, Italy, co-founder, NeuroLeadership Institute
• David Rock – author and global leadership consultant, co-founder, NeuroLeadership Institute

And some of the topics to be covered:

• Mindfulness and the integrated brain
• How we make decisions
• The neuroscience of flow
• Making decisions in groups
• Emotional regulation and the brain
• The neuroscience of motivation
• How we know each other
• The social brain
• Learning from the masters of change
• Making leadership development stick

More in this NeuroLeadership Summit brochure [pdf].

Blog Glob: Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask

Excerpt:

One of my partners, Mats Lederhausen, recently shared with me a mentorship framework, first inspired by wellness guru, Deepak Chopra, that he's evolved and used over the years. The framework is an amazingly simple-yet-powerful set of five critical questions. ... These five questions, when asked in the order presented, form an effective diagnostic tool that can provide better guidance to mentees, employees, or generally anyone with whom you are playing the role of a counselor. Additionally, they can serve as a self-diagnosis of one's own capabilities and opportunities.

Here are the questions:

Click to read the rest of Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask (Harvard Business Publishing blog).

Active listening: Is it helpful? Insulting? What?

When people find out that I sometimes teach listening to lawyers and mediators, they often ask if that means active listening (where the listener paraphrases or reflects back what the other has said — "What I hear you saying is ...") and "I" messages (stating what one wants or feels rather than concentrating on the other’s faults — "I would like some quiet" rather than "You are too noisy"). I say an emphatic "no."

Although I learned these techniques in the various counseling courses I have taken, I have never used them (except in the classes) or taught them. I agree with Stephen Covey when he says in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that active listening or reflective listening is “mimicking what another person says. That kind of listening is skill-based, truncated from character and relationships, and often insults those ‘listened’ to in such a way.”

John Gottman and his colleagues had long recommended active listening to couples seeking counseling. They studied 130 couples for six years to find ways to predict marital success and failure. This study did not support the efficacy of active listening in resolving conflict or improving relationships. They write, “We need to convey how shocked and surprised we were by these results for the active listening model.” After learning that active listening occurred infrequently in the resolution of marital conflict, they studied tapes and transcripts of stable, happy couples.

They found that these couples “were not paraphrasing their spouses very often. [They] also found that

Interviews of Bruce Tulgan, author of NOT EVERYONE GETS A TROPHY: HOW TO MANAGE GEN Y

Excerpt from the first interview of Bruce Tulgan, a non-practicing lawyer:

...I've been conducting in-depth interviews with young people in the workplace steadily since 1993. That was shortly before the oldest Gen Yers—those on the cusp of Generation X—started arriving in the workplace as teenagers. Since then, we've followed Gen Yers as they have become the new young workforce and have been developing a comprehensive picture of who they are, how they became that way, and what motivates them. Of course, the identity of any generation is very complex and is always constantly changing. When I describe GenYers, I am making vast generalizations about tens of millions of people. Every individual has his or her own unique story. But there are broad trends in attitude and behavior that shift with each generation.

Generation Y is the generation of kids where every kid did get a trophy, just for participating. So many so-called 'experts' have jumped onto the bandwagon of this topic, but our research shows that most of these so-called 'experts' have got it all wrong. In many recent books and articles, many of these 'experts' argue that, since Gen Yers have always gotten a trophy just for showing up, maybe

Ready, aim ... fail: Another article on the downside of goal setting

With such an emphasis on goals in the US, cautionary words about setting and using them are always for me a welcomed balance. A Boston Globe article this morning takes a look at the pros and cons of setting goals. From "Ready, aim ... fail: Why setting goals can backfire":

[A] few management scholars are now looking deeper into the effects of goals, and finding that goals have a dangerous side. Individuals, governments, and companies like GM show ample ability to hurt themselves by setting and blindly following goals, even those that seem to make sense at the time. These skeptics draw on a broad array of large-scale failures - the design of the Ford Pinto, the Enron collapse, the rash lending practices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - as evidence of the pernicious effects of goals. Outside the workplace, these thinkers point to the unintended consequences of high-stakes testing in grade schools, and psychological literature showing that goals and other incentives can constrict our thinking. Even the scarcity of cabs on rainy days, some argue, illustrates the ways that goals can blind people to their own best interests.

The argument is not that goal setting doesn't work - it does, just not always in the way we intend. "It can focus attention too much, or on the wrong things; it can lead to crazy behaviors to get people to