Thinking Tools

Why Brainwriting is Better than Brainstorming for Rapid Idea Generation

February 8, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Most brainstorming sessions suck. Facilitators aren’t often skilled enough to direct the creative process and overcome interpersonal and intrapersonal barriers to idea-generation. Participants are not as organized as they need to be. One or two “meeting-hogs,” who lack self-awareness and self-control, dominate the conversations with their pet ideas and shut everyone else down. And then there’s groupthink and self-censorship based on responses to earlier suggestions by others. Consequently, bold ideas seldom survive a group discussion.

If you want to buck the odds, try “brainwriting” instead of brainstorming.

In its simplest form, brainwriting has the participants quietly reflect upon an open-ended prompt of appropriate scope, for example, “how could we improve our design process,” and write down their ideas. A group leader can organize the responses by combining identical ideas, grouping thematically-related ideas, and posting them on a wall for the group to appraise them further. Then, the participants vote on their favorites, and the top ‘n’ number of ideas or priorities are identified for future discussion and exploration.

Idea for Impact: Teams Don’t Think—Individuals Do

In essence, brainwriting isolates idea generation from the instantaneous discussion and evaluation that can hamper the creative process.

Brainwriting, when followed by discussion, combines the benefits of both individual and group creativity. Studies have repeatedly shown that people think of more new—and practical—ideas on their own than they do in a group.

In my experience, this creative thinking process is inclusionary, engaging, time-effective, non-judgmental, and mostly free from pressures to conform to others’ ideas. Brainwriting is particularly useful with a group of people who are reserved and would be unlikely to offer many ideas in an open group session.

What You Learn from Failure

February 3, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One common trait among people who cope particularly effectively with failure is their ability to acknowledge the failure, put it in perspective, and seek causes, not blame. As the Dalai Lama XIV suggests in The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Inner Peace (2009,)

If a misfortune has already occurred, it is best not to worry about it, so we do not add fuel to the problem. Don’t ally yourself with past events by lingering on them and exaggerating them. Let the past take care of itself, and transport yourself to the present while taking whatever measures are necessary to ensure that such a misfortune never occurs again, now or in the future.

American investor and superstar hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio writes in his very instructive Principles: Life and Work (2017,)

I learned that everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them. I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it, i.e., a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future. I learned that each mistake was probably a reflection of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective. I learned that wrestling with my problems, mistakes, and weaknesses was the training that strengthened me. Also, I learned that it was the pain of this wrestling that made me and those around me appreciate our successes.

In short, I learned that being totally truthful, especially about mistakes and weaknesses, led to a rapid rate of improvement.

Much is written about the notion of failures as gifts, but the key to dealing with failures is to attribute those failures to weaknesses in a thought process, not to personal flaws. Failures expose a weakness in your underlying process, which you can now fix. Fine-tune your tactics until you find out what does work. Dalio instructs,

When a problem occurs, conduct the discussion at two levels: 1) the machine level (why that outcome was produced) and 2) the case-at-hand level (what to do about it.)

Idea for Impact: Don’t rationalize failures and magnify them in your mind. Fix them. Then, reflect on what they teach about what didn’t work. Inquire, “What was missing?” rather than “What went wrong?” The latter results in finger-pointing. The former opens up possibilities and results in personal growth.

Avoid Decision Fatigue: Don’t Let Small Decisions Destroy Your Productivity

January 20, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Making some decisions depletes mental resources for making more important ones

Every decision you make impacts the quality of successive decisions you’ll have to make, even in unrelated situations.

That’s because, according to the much-debated “muscle metaphor” of willpower, your mental stamina is limited.

As Roy Baumeister and John Tierney explained in their bestselling book on Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (2011; my summary), you have a finite strength of will for making prudent choices. As you go about your day, your willpower is depleted and “decision fatigue” sets in. Consequently, you’re likely to employ one of two cognitive shortcuts in decision-making: you avoid the act of deciding altogether or make a less-thoughtful, sub-optimal decision.

Don’t get overloaded with so many pointless decisions that your cognitive productivity ends up falling off a cliff.

President Barack Obama claimed that he makes deliberate efforts to avoid decision fatigue so that he can devote his mental energies to things that matter. Michael Lewis quotes Obama in the October 2012 issue of Vanity Fair,

You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits … I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. … You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.

In the same way, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sports a limited wardrobe. He has previously declared that doesn’t waste time and energy to pick his daily outfits: “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve the community.”

Avoid Decision Fatigue: Don't Let Small Decisions Destroy Your Productivity

Idea for Impact: Establish healthy routines that can eliminate unnecessary deliberation

Life is the total of all the mundane and momentous choices you make. Being monotonous in handling the former enables you to excel in the latter. Limit decision fatigue by

putting as much of your life as possible on autopilot using routines / rituals and checklists,
limiting the choices you have (read Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less), and
delegating decision-making where possible.

Good routines can provide structure to your day, protect you from your more effective negative impulses, and bring order and predictability to your life. Besides, according to renowned career coach Marty Nemko, “modern life, increasingly defined by unpredictability, can be anxiety-provoking, and routines provide an anchor of predictability.”

How A Single Point of Failure Became The Boeing 737 MAX’s Achilles Heel

January 7, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Two thousand nineteen was one of the most turbulent years in Boeing’s history. Its 737 MACS (pardon the pun) troubles went from bad to worse to staggering when aviation regulators around the world grounded the aircraft and a steady trickle of disclosures increasingly exposed software problems and corners being cut.

The flaw in this aircraft, its anti-stall mechanism that relied on data from a single sensor, offers a particularly instructive case study of the notion of single point of failure.

One Fault Could Cause an Entire System to Stop Operating

How a Single Point of Failure, Reliance on one Angle-of-Attack Sensor, Created the Boeing 737 MAX Disaster A single point of failure of a system is an element whose failure can result in the failure of the entire system. (A system may have multiple single points of failure.)

Single points of failures are eliminated by adding redundancy—by doubling the critical components or simply backing them up, so that failure of any such element does not initiate a failure of the entire system.

Boeing Mischaracterized Its Anti-Stall System as Less-than-Catastrophic in Its Safety Analysis

The two 737 MAX crashes (with Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines) originate from a late-change that Boeing made in a trim system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS.)

Without the pilot’s input, the MCAS could automatically nudge the aircraft’s nose downwards if it detects that the aircraft is pointing up at a dangerous angle, for instance, at high thrust during take-off.

Reliance on One Sensor is an Anathema in Aviation

The MCAS was previously “approved” by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA.) Nevertheless, Boeing made some design changes after the FAA approval without checking with the FAA again. The late-changes were made to improve MCAS’s response during low-speed aerodynamic stalls.

The MCAS system relied on data from just one Angle-of-Attack (AoA) sensor. With no backup, if this single sensor were to malfunction, erroneous input from that sensor would trigger a corrective nosedive just after take-off. This catastrophe is precisely what happened during the two aircraft crashes.

The AoA sensor thus became a single point of failure. Despite the existence of two angle-of-attack sensors on the nose of the aircraft, the MCAS system not only used data from either one of the sensors but also did not expect concurrence between the two sensors to infer that the aircraft was stalling. Further, Lion Air did not pay up to equip its aircraft with a warning light that could have alerted the crew to a disagreement between the AoA sensors.

Boeing Missed Safety Risks in the Design of the MAX’s Flight-Control System

Reliance on one sensor’s data is an egregious violation of a long-standing engineering principle about eliminating single points of failure. Some aircraft use three duplicate systems for flight control: if one of the three malfunctions, if two systems agree, and the third does not, the flight control software ignores the odd one out.

Angle-of-Attack Sensor on Boeing 737 MAX Aircraft - Single Point of Failure that Contributed to Two Crashes If the dependence on one sensor was not enough, Boeing, blinded by time- and price-pressure to stay competitive with its European rival Airbus, intentionally chose to do away with any reference to MCAS in pilot manuals to spare pilot training for its airline-customers. Indeed, Boeing did not even disclose the existence of the MCAS on the aircraft.

Boeing allows pilots to switch the trim system off to override the automated anti-stall system, but the pilots of the ill-fated Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights failed to do so.

Idea for Impact: Redundancy is the Sine Qua Non of Reliable Systems

In preparation for airworthiness recertification for the 737 MAX, Boeing has corrected the MCAS blunder by having its trim software compare inputs from two AoA sensors, alerting the pilots if the sensors’ readings disagree, and limiting MCAS’s authority.

One key takeaway from the MCAS disaster is this: when you devise a highly reliable system, identify all single points of failure, and investigate how these risks and failure modes can be mitigated. Examine if every component of a product or a service you work on is a single point of failure by asking, “If this component fails, does the rest of the system still work, and, more importantly, does it still do the function it is supposed to do?”

Some Lessons Can Only Be Learned in the School of Life

November 19, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How Anil Ambani Learned the Ropes of Doing Business in India

In the Fall of 1982, Anil Ambani, scion of one of India’s wealthiest family, returned home to Mumbai, then Bombay, after attending the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Anil had fast-tracked through his two-year MBA program in less than 15 months.

He met up with his father Dhirubhai Ambani and announced, “Look, Dad, I’ve become an MBA, and I’m going to take a break since I worked hard. I will see you in the New Year.”

Dhirubhai asked, “I am very happy and delighted that you accomplished this. Since I did not go to any formal school or college, I do not have any degree, why don’t you tell me, from your learning at Wharton, what does an MBA stand for?”

Anil Dhirubhai Ambani - MBA from the School of Life

Smug and self-satisfied, Anil replied, “That’s simple. Master of Business Administration.”

Dhirubhai countered, “An MBA represents Manē Badhā Āvō che,” (Gujarati for “I am know all.”) He explained,

You are entering India, and you need to Indianize your MBA … at Wharton School, did they teach you about customs duties, excise duties, income tax, sales tax, Parliament?

Do you know about a zero-hour question, a call-attention motion, and the difference between a starred question and an unstarred question in the Indian Parliament?

If you don’t get to know all these things, let me assure you, all your formal education is not going to help you. You need your practical Indian MBA. And I am going to create that learning environment for you so that you can get the exposure.

A formal education doesn’t necessarily teach you everything about how to navigate the real world

Dhirubhai Ambani, the prototypical crony capitalist that he was, was highlighting the importance of learning the ways and means of doing business in pre-liberalization India.

One must note that Ambani’s extraordinary rags-to-riches story was a blend of cunning, street smartness, audacious risk-taking, and an unparalleled knack for bending the rules through powerful politicians and bureaucrats. As controversial as he was, Ambani must be understood in the socio-political context of India’s post-Independence industrial milieu. He artfully exploited the opportunities those times offered.

Idea for Impact: Formal education cannot complete the kind of real-world operative skills that you need

If you’re truly serious in your desire to get ahead in business, you will need a broader grasp of your chosen discipline than you can get from formal education.

Look, listen, learn. Every industry, company, organization, and team has its own culture. Spend time observing the winners: what does success look like? Who holds power, and how are they persuaded? What are the traits of people who get ahead? Emphasize developing skills in line with the winners.
Develop a network of people who can potentially lend a hand or bail you out of a jam. Invest in the people who will listen to your ideas and support your ambitions. Get to know peers at all levels to build a support base. Any person may have the knowledge and the allegiances that they can put to work for you if they’re so inclined.
Discover how to make the most of the circumstances you’re dealt with. Don’t manipulate others for your own devices in a Machiavellian sense—although, occasionally, you may need to use duplicity for respectable purposes, i.e. where certain ends can justify certain means.

Remember, the political payoff for fostering and nurturing relationships, and for developing a vast reservoir of skills and experiences, may take months, years, or even decades.

Lessons from the Collision on Tenerife, the World’s Worst Aviation Disaster [Book Summary]

November 5, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Jon Ziomek’s nonfiction history book Collision on Tenerife (2018) is the result of years of analysis into the world’s worst aviation disaster on Tenerife Island in the Canary Islands of Spain.

Distinct Small Errors Can Become Linked and Amplified into a Big Tragedy

On 27-March-1977, two fully loaded Boeing 747 passenger jets operated by Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines collided on the runway, killing 583 passengers and crew on the two airplanes. Only 61 survived—all from the Pan Am jet, including its pilot.

These two flights, and a few others, were diverted to Tenerife after a bomb went off at the Gran Canaria Airport in Las Palmas, their original destination. Tenerife was not a major airport—it had a single runway, and taxi and parking space were limited. After the Las Palmas airport reopened, flights were cleared for takeoff from Tenerife, but the fog rolled in over Tenerife reducing visibility to less than 300 feet. Several airplanes that had been diverted to Tenerife had blocked the taxiway and the parking ramp. Therefore, the KLM and Pan Am jets taxied down the single runway in preparation for takeoff, the Pan Am behind the KLM.

Tenerife airport disaster: Pan Am and KLM Aircraft

At one end of the runway, the KLM jet turned 180 degrees into position for takeoff. In the meantime, the Pan Am jet was still taxiing on the runway, having missed its taxiway turnoff in the fog. The KLM pilot jumped the gun and started his take-off roll before he got clearance from traffic control.

When the pilots of the two jets caught sight of each other’s airplanes through the fog, it was too late for the Pan Am jet to clear out of the runway into the grass and for KLM jet to abort the takeoff. The KLM pilot lifted his airplane off the runway prematurely, but could not avoid barreling into the Pan Am’s fuselage at 240 kmph. Both the jets exploded into flames.

The accident was blamed on miscommunication—breakdown of coordinated action, vague language from the control tower, the KLM pilot’s impatience to takeoff without clearance, and the distorted cross-talk of the KLM and Pan Am pilots and the controllers on a common radio channel.

Breakdown of Coordination Under Stress

Sweeping changes were made to international airline regulations following the accident: cockpit procedures were changed, standard phrases were introduced, and English was emphasized as a common working language.

In Collision on Tenerife, Jon Ziomek, a journalism professor at Northwestern University, gives a well-written, detailed account of all the mistakes leading up to the crash and its aftermath.

The surviving passengers’ first- and second-hand accounts recall the horror of those passengers on the right side of the Pan Am jet who saw the lights of the speeding KLM 747, just as the Pan Am pilot was hastily turning his airplane onto the grass to avoid the collision.

Ziomek describes how passengers escaped. Some had to make the difficult choice of leaving loved ones or friends and strangers behind.

Dorothy Kelly … then spotted Captain Grubbs lying near the fuselage. Badly burned and shaken by his jump from the plane, he could not move. “What have I done to these people?” he yelled, pounding the ground in anguish. Kelly grabbed him under his shoulders and urged “Crawl, Captain, crawl!”

Recommendation: Read Jon Ziomek’s Collision on Tenerife

Some of the bewildering details make for difficult reading—especially the psychological effects (post-traumatic stress syndrome) on the surviving passengers. But Jon Ziomek’s Collision on Tenerife is important reading, providing a comprehensive picture of the extensive coordination required in aviation, the importance of safety and protocols, and how some humans can freeze in shock while others spring into action.

The key takeaway is the recognition of how small errors and problems (an “error chain”) can quickly become linked and amplified into disastrous outcomes.

Many Businesses Get Started from an Unmet Personal Need

October 21, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Many successful entrepreneurs never set out with the goal of launching a large company, let alone hiring scores of people. They are motivated enough to develop solutions to a direct problem they are facing. Before long, they discover that they are not the only ones with that problem—and, like so, a successful business is born.

How “The Cult of Lulu” Got Started

How 'The Cult of Lulu' Got Started Consider the genesis of Lululemon, the Canadian athletic apparel company (from The Atlantic‘s narrative of how sports changed the way Americans dress.)

In 1997, a retail entrepreneur in British Columbia named Chip Wilson was having back problems. So, like millions of people around the world, he went to a yoga class. What struck Wilson most in his first session wasn’t the poses; it was the pants. He noticed that his yoga instructor was wearing some slinky dance attire, the sort of second skin that makes a fit person’s butt look terrific. Wilson felt inspired to mass-produce this vision of posterior pulchritude. The next year, he started a yoga design-and-fashion business and opened his first store in Vancouver. It was called Lululemon.

[Yes, that’s the Chip Wilson who gained notoriety for blaming in-poor-shape women for ruining their Lululemon yoga pants by rubbing their thighs together too much. “Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work for it [his apparel],” he condescendingly declared on Bloomberg TV.]

At present, Lululemon has the highest sales-per-square-foot of any American apparel retailer. Its pricey workout clothing has become a wardrobe staple, prompting other retailers to launch competing apparel lines to cash in on the growing market.

Lululemon kindled the prevailing fixation on a healthy appearance. Its brand continues to be an elite fitness status symbol for the skinny and wealthy set. More broadly, over the last two decades, Lululemon has redefined how the current generation dresses and lives. The company pioneered the “athleisure” fashion revolution, which has blurred the lines between yoga-and-spin-class outfits and regular street clothes.

Sara Blakely’s Personal Undertaking Morphed Spanx into a Big Business

Sara Blakely's entrepreneurial journey for Spanx In a similar vein, entrepreneur Sara Blakely started the Spanx hosiery company after searching for a solution to improve the way she looked in a pair of her cream-colored pants. Blakely started her wildly successful entrepreneurial journey by making sure that the specific type of undergarment she ideated to solve her clothing problem did materialize commercially. From her biography on Wikipedia,

Forced to wear pantyhose in the hot Floridian climate for her sales role, Blakely disliked the appearance of the seamed foot while wearing open-toed shoes, but liked the way that the control-top model eliminated panty lines and made her body appear firmer. For her attendance at a private party, she experimented by cutting off the feet of her pantyhose while wearing them under a new pair of slacks and found that the pantyhose continuously rolled up her legs, but she also achieved the desired result.

Idea for Impact: Learn to Pay Attention to the Subtle Clues to Opportunities All-Around

Many entrepreneurs initially got their start by first recognizing and responding to a personal need or a localized problem and later discovering that they struck a universal chord.

If you want to become an entrepreneur, find out if you can solve a problem that you’ve personally experienced. Uncover opportunities that you may otherwise have missed by asking, “Does this have to be time-consuming, arduous, expensive, or annoying?” “How can I improve on this?” and “Can I do this better or different from the other fellow doing it over there?” Then expand your opportunity by asking, “Who else may be experiencing the same problem?”

Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect [Cognitive Bias]

September 3, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect In the context of decision-making and risk-taking, the “overconfidence effect” is a judgmental bias that can affect your subjective estimate of the likelihood of future events. This can cause you to misjudge the odds of positive/desirable events as well as negative/undesirable events.

As the following Zen story illustrates, experience breeds complacency. When confidence gives way to overconfidence, it can transform from a strength to a liability.

A master gardener, famous for his skill in climbing and pruning the highest trees, examined his disciple by letting him climb a very high tree. Many people had come to watch. The master gardener stood quietly, carefully following every move but not interfering with one word.

Having pruned the top, the disciple climbed down and was only about ten feet from the ground when the master suddenly yelled: “Take care, take care!”

When the disciple was safely down an old man asked the master gardener: “You did not let out one word when he was aloft in the most dangerous place. Why did you caution him when he was nearly down? Even if he had slipped then, he could not have greatly hurt himself.”

“But isn’t it obvious?” replied the master gardener. “Right up at the top he is conscious of the danger, and of himself takes care. But near the end when one begins to feel safe, this is when accidents occur.”

Reference: Irmgard Schlögl’s The Wisdom of the Zen Masters (1976.) Dr. Schlögl (1921–2007) became Ven. Myokyo-ni in 1984, and served as Rinzai Zen Buddhist nun and headed the Zen Centre in London.

Charlie Munger’s Iron Prescription

May 22, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Intellectual inquiry is effortful, and you need a durable internal push to engage in it.

An inflexible approach impedes critical-thinking. I’ve discussed previously (here, here, here, and here) that a sophisticated critical-thinker considers alternative world-views that may cause him/her to philosophize differently.

For example, if you cling rigidly to a “raise taxes on the wealthiest people” position, you are possibly unwilling to contemplate that, among other problems, higher taxes disincentivize productivity, promote economic behaviors to dodge taxes, and contribute to class warfare. Examining all sensible inferences and considering a variety of possible viewpoints or perspectives may help you to arrive at more moderate, practical positions that are conceivably within acceptable limits.

Charlie Munger’s Iron Prescription: Avoid Intense Ideology

One of the central wisdoms of Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice-Chairman and the distinguished beacon of multi-disciplinary thinking, is to keep an eye open for dangers that accompany in submitting to a particular ideology.

At his celebrated commencement address to the graduates of the University of Southern California Law School on May 13, 2007, Munger affirmed,

In my mind, I got a little example I use whenever I think about ideology and it’s these Scandinavian canoeists who succeeded in taming all the rapids of Scandinavia and they thought they would tackle the whirlpools in the Aaron Rapids here in the United States. The death rate was 100 percent. A big whirlpool is not something you want to go into and I think the same is true about a really deep ideology.

I have what I call an “iron prescription” that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say, “I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it.” I think only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.

…

This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is a very very important thing in life if you want to have more correct knowledge and be wiser than other people. A heavy ideology is very likely to do you in.

In the era of social media and group polarization, it’s easy to slip into confirmation bias by committing yourself to a self-imposed ideology.

As I’ve mentioned previously, studies have shown that associating with likeminded folks can make you even more disdainful of contradictory viewpoints. Nothing will ruin you faster than an ideology burrowing deeper in a closed mind.

Idea for Impact: Nothing deceives you as much as extreme passion

Stay away from intense ideologies until you’ve examined the opposing viewpoint. Don’t ignore the counterevidence. Consider the other side of any thought as carefully as your own.

Postscript: Munger’s other iron prescription concerns avoiding the victim mentality: “Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life… Feeling like a victim is perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can—the so called iron prescription—I think that really works.” See my previous article on Charlie Munger and lessons on adversity.

Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas

November 1, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Seek fresh eyes. Ask new employees and interns to make a note of every question they have about how things get done in your organization. If anything—reports, approvals, meetings, reviews—doesn’t seem sensible, let them record those inefficiencies. After a few weeks, when they’ve become familiar with the organization and its workflow, have them reassess and report their observations. The best improvement ideas come from people who aren’t stuck in the established ways.
Notice something? Fix it quickly or delegate. Never walk absentmindedly by something that could be improved. A cluttered instruments cabinet in a warehouse? A loose tile in a walkway? A broken link on your customer service website? Don’t take inconveniences and unpleasant situations for granted.
Explore the outsider’s perspective. Notice how trivial stuff can really frustrate you when you’re standing in line at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles or dealing with a slow bureaucracy? While running errands, do others’ rules, regulations, and procedures annoy you? Bump into something that doesn’t have to be laborious, arduous, expensive, or annoying, but is? Examine if your business imposes any of those inconveniences on your customers.
Make it easy for customers to complain. Seek customer feedback in such a way that it encourages people to share their negative experiences. As I’ve illuminated before, many innovative ideas have their roots in prudent attention to and empathy with customers’ experiences.

Idea for Impact: Problem-finding is one of the most significant—and overlooked—parts of innovation. Learn to pay attention to the subtle clues to opportunities all around.

Thinking Tools

Idea for Impact: Teams Don’t Think—Individuals Do

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Making some decisions depletes mental resources for making more important ones

Don’t get overloaded with so many pointless decisions that your cognitive productivity ends up falling off a cliff.

Idea for Impact: Establish healthy routines that can eliminate unnecessary deliberation

Wondering what to read next?

One Fault Could Cause an Entire System to Stop Operating

Boeing Mischaracterized Its Anti-Stall System as Less-than-Catastrophic in Its Safety Analysis

Reliance on One Sensor is an Anathema in Aviation

Boeing Missed Safety Risks in the Design of the MAX’s Flight-Control System

Idea for Impact: Redundancy is the Sine Qua Non of Reliable Systems

Wondering what to read next?

How Anil Ambani Learned the Ropes of Doing Business in India

A formal education doesn’t necessarily teach you everything about how to navigate the real world

Idea for Impact: Formal education cannot complete the kind of real-world operative skills that you need

Wondering what to read next?

Distinct Small Errors Can Become Linked and Amplified into a Big Tragedy

Breakdown of Coordination Under Stress

Recommendation: Read Jon Ziomek’s Collision on Tenerife

Wondering what to read next?

How “The Cult of Lulu” Got Started

Sara Blakely’s Personal Undertaking Morphed Spanx into a Big Business

Idea for Impact: Learn to Pay Attention to the Subtle Clues to Opportunities All-Around

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Intellectual inquiry is effortful, and you need a durable internal push to engage in it.

Charlie Munger’s Iron Prescription: Avoid Intense Ideology

Idea for Impact: Nothing deceives you as much as extreme passion

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?