September 24th, 2010
Have a great weekend.
I wanted to share a few things that I was happy to stumble across this weekend. Below are the excerpts of three interesting and insightful blog posts, click on the title to go the entire post. Enjoy and share. And be good to each other.
Homophily: #1 innovation enemy
from Clattering Thoughts
Next time you’re in a meeting and everyone is saying ‘yes’ to an obviously dumb idea, know that just because there are lots of them it doesn’t make it right. ~ Hugh MacLeod
It’s interesting how sometimes the world conspires to bring something in front of your eyes. After getting this cartoon from gapingvoid’s exquisite newsletter few days back, -along with the quote- I remembered an interesting article I read on conformity and deviance.
At meetings the members of the group adopt a soft line of criticism, often even on their own thinking. People are positive and seek harmony on issues, with no conflict to spoil the “we” atmosphere.
This is what we usually refer to as Group-think. And it has been proven that it is symptomatic of lesser creativity in the workplace. Does this mean that a group needs to be heterogeneous for innovation to be catalyzed? Yes, to some extent, but not entirely.
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Be Good To Each Other (how could I not like it?)
from Paul Smith at WTTO.
I rode my bike through a cloud of fiberglass the other day. As weird as that may sound, what is even weirder was I saw it coming.
How I saw it coming was before I left for work, I was looking out the bedroom window and I saw a piece of fiberglass insulation fly out of a dump truck riding down my street. By the time I rode my bike out of the garage onto the street, the insulation had suffered a half hour of being run over by dozens of cars, shredding into hundreds of pieces, and creating a dust cloud of fiberglass. I did not see it until it was too late, until I was right in the thick of it.
The same day that this occurred, Brian McNaught posted on his blog this interesting take on what we leave behind entitled, “Clean Up Your Calling Card”. It is all about the ripple effects of our actions. In his closing statement, Brian states,
“Attending to unwanted calling cards means keeping your eyes and ears open to what is going on, accepting responsibility to clean up after your behaviors, and proactively addressing the negative impact your bad behaviors have on others.”As I thought about this statement and the dump truck that dropped some insulation on my street, I thought about how this is one of the hardest things to do in life.
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Conformity: Ten Timeless Influencers
from PSYBLOG
The pressure to conform affects everyone. Understanding how and when puts you one step ahead of the pack.Conformity is such a strong influence in society that it’s impossible to understand human behaviour without it. Psychological experiments show that people will deny the evidence of their own eyes in order to conform with other people.
But as Professor John C. Turner says conformity is not always the norm:
“Anyone who looks outside the window at daily events around the globe will find that […] resistance, conflict and change are as normal as the sun rising.” (Turner, 2006; p.42)
Understanding when we conform has all kinds of practical real-world benefits, depending on your aims: it can help you understand your own behaviour as well as understand how others will behave under a variety of different situational pressures. Everyone should be aware of these factors and how they affect the most important areas of their social life.