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What “work” looks like

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: What “work” looks like

#231

Post by anotherrandom »

spfzero wrote: post #217

Collaboration may be attractive to management teams due to reasons apart from productivity. Management may even know and accept that productivity suffers. A brilliant idea coming from an individual is less trustworthy than a mediocre idea coming out of a group effort. Management has little idea how to judge the quality of a new idea, and worse, the risks of adopting it. When the idea comes from a group, it is much "s…

>management has little idea how to judge the quality of an individual idea

This is a management-being-incompetent problem, which is likely not a universal problem

Re: What “work” looks like

#232

Post by rapjr9 »

rpastuszak wrote: post #73

I agree with the sentiment, but brainstorming is a difficult skill and most teams are not really good at it. Some things can be coached or solved with tools but 99% of the problems I experienced boil down to the people involved, team dynamics. Some problems can be surprisingly easy to solve with a decent facilitator, e.g. the loudest voices can be balanced a little bit. The hardest problem (imho): sacrificing creativ…

I've always loved brainstorming sessions but I have also noticed they often don't produce much in the way of results. I attribute this to the fact that nobody else (except me) would prepare for the sessions. Ideally the session would be announced a week or a month in advance, and people would be told to think about the problem and come up with some possible ideas or interesting aspects of the problem. Then at the actual session there is something to discuss. Too often people felt overwhelmed with meetings and would just show up and try to come up with ideas on the spot, which never worked well. Retreats are closer to my ideal and they seem to work better than brainstorming sessions. Weekly brainstorming sessions when you have months to come up with new ideas can work well also since they tend to start building on the best ideas that come up.

Re: What “work” looks like

#234

Post by marmot777 »

lqet wrote: post #77
Test0129 wrote: post #16

I've had more ideas come to me after hiding in my office to take a nap than sitting at my desk. It got to be such a gold mine of solutions that I still to this day allocate 30 minutes of my day to a nap. Non-negotiable. So many hard problems that have been brought to me, or complicated needs for architecture, etc were solved by simply turning my active brain off. When I was in graduate school I'd regularly get stuck…

The three fundamental ideas of my PhD came to while: 1.) Sitting in a park sketching solutions on a notebook. 2.) Laying at the beach on vacation. 3.) Playing Legos with my daughter. Without these ideas, I doubt there would've even been a PhD, or even a paper publication. (There was a period of 2 years in my life where I did not have any significant ideas, at all. During that time, I was employed at a company which o…

Many top novelists, scientists, engineers, etc., have come up with ideas doing something other than work. We’ve all had ideas at odd times and contexts. Sometimes good and occasionally outstanding ideas or solutions.

Re: What “work” looks like

#235

Post by tpoacher »

lqet wrote: post #147
mr_gibbins wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snap. Whenever I sat down to cast about for ideas on how to develop the initial form of my PhD, nada, zip. Deliberate concentration on one thing was a shortcut to procrastination. The 'big idea' came when I was on campus, standing outside smoking. Hit me like a bombshell. I literally ran to see my supervisor, blurted out IT'S JUST A F**G MOLECULE, cleared off his whiteboard and spent the next hour sketching out what…

I also vividly remember the moment I had idea 1 from my list above. It was such a nice warm autumn day in the last months of a very turbulent year: I struggled finding something worth doing a PhD on, and in the 10 weeks before, I got married, my wife got pregnant, was rushed into emergency for a suspected ectopic pregnancy a few days later, which then suddenly turned out to be a completely normal pregnancy. I also ha…

Yeah man, don't leave us hanging!

Re: What “work” looks like

#236

Post by sarcoplasmic »

mr_gibbins wrote: post #140
lqet wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The three fundamental ideas of my PhD came to while: 1.) Sitting in a park sketching solutions on a notebook. 2.) Laying at the beach on vacation. 3.) Playing Legos with my daughter. Without these ideas, I doubt there would've even been a PhD, or even a paper publication. (There was a period of 2 years in my life where I did not have any significant ideas, at all. During that time, I was employed at a company which o…

Snap. Whenever I sat down to cast about for ideas on how to develop the initial form of my PhD, nada, zip. Deliberate concentration on one thing was a shortcut to procrastination. The 'big idea' came when I was on campus, standing outside smoking. Hit me like a bombshell. I literally ran to see my supervisor, blurted out IT'S JUST A F**G MOLECULE, cleared off his whiteboard and spent the next hour sketching out what…

This is similar to that ai researcher, Kenneth Stanely, and his talk/book about how planning and having an objective sabotages reaching it. "Greatness cannot be planned" I think was the title.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI

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