Practice Notes

March Tea and Toast - Wicked Problems and Dialogue Mapping

Wicked problems are hard to define, often have multiple causes and are complex. They won’t be solved by traditional problem solving approaches. Examples include climate change, drug taking and inter-generational poverty.

So, how can they be tamed, if not solved? One useful technique is dialogue mapping. This session will examine what wicked problems are and then demonstrate how dialogue mapping works

Date: Friday 13th March 2009

Time: 8am - 9am

Venue: Boardroom, Level 5, iPayroll House (next to Boulcott Bistro) 93 Boulcott Street

Speakers: Hilary Bryan and Jesse Pirini

email: jesse@trainingpractice.co.nz if you'd like to come. All welcome and no charge.

April Tea and Toast - Be Productive: Get Organised, Be Creative and Stay Resiliant

We’re living in interesting times and improving productivity is more important than ever. This session focuses on three ways to do that. The first is a practical system to get things done. The second is about creative thinking – coming up with new responses to how you do business. The third is about how to stay personally resilient in changing and challenging times. Join us for an hour to explore these important ideas.

Date: Thursday 9th April 2009

Time: 8am - 9am

Venue: Boardroom, Level 5, iPayroll House (next to Boulcott Bistro) 93 Boulcott Street

Speakers: Hilary Bryan and Jesse Pirini

email: jesse@trainingpractice.co.nz if you'd like to come. All welcome and no charge.

Every year the Harvard Business Review publishes its breakthrough business ideas. Here are two we thought were particularly useful.

Lessons from Bees about Social Networking

Bees apparently use a sophisticated system to decide where to locate their hive. They send bees out to scout out sites and then re-group to evaluate which is the best, ie a complex system of information discovery and information integration.

Recent studies reveal that teams that regularly discover new information and then collaboratively take it on board (just like bees) are more creative and productive. For example, one organisation where some staff had extensive personal digital networks were 7% more productive than others who didn’t have these networks. But it’s face-to-face communication that best supports information integration, ie actually using the information productively.

So the lesson is clear: creative and productive work involves making positive efforts to scout out new information and then getting together with colleagues to put it to good use.

Building a Better Brain

According to Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist and business adviser, we need to break out of our deep mental ruts. He argues that our education systems and workplaces “reward competencies that are self-reinforcing, not diversifying, and they encourage people to acquire domain expertise rather than ask stupid questions and learn new things.”

His answer is to break out of the tram lines type thinking and day-to-day routines by taking up some other non work-related activity. Novel writing, wood carving and Civil War enactment are some of his suggestions, but anything is fine as long as it transcends the routine and challenges the brain.

So, there’s a challenge for us all – get out there and do something new that gets us to think differently.