Innovation: The Who's Where's and How's

So you ask…how can video help me and my organization prosper? How can I get that pesky ROI to talk to me and my CFO? While I am fascinated by video and its entertainment potential, I am even more fascinated by its potential for education and knowledge transfer. Well, here is a hard fact confirmed by a couple of friends of mine that are both brain scientists (I know, right, cool company I keep :-)). So, here it goes. If you desire to be good at a certain activity that is recordable, learning that activity will be accelerated by 20 to 30% if you see yourselves performing that activity on video. So, let us say you are a piano player and you are having a difficult time learning a sequence. What you would do is record yourself doing the sequence the correct way and then viewing the video multiple times. Or, let us say you are a cyclist and want to improve your pedal stroke or posture, well, record yourself doing the activity the correct way and watch yourself on video. We are primarily vis...

Yeah, I know, I have written about this before: about how we need to refresh our perspective on a daily basis. I realized how hard it is to maintain this ethos the other day as I was travelling into the District of Columbia with my son at the wheel. As we go about our daily routines I think our brains fall into complacency mode. It makes sense, I suppose. Not being a brain scientist but having read research on the matter, our brains seems to accommodate to the sameness of the routine and seems to block new inputs. In any case, here is the situation. My son was driving our new Mazda 3 ( btw , an awesome "little" car) and as we entered DC and we are sitting at a traffic light he makes the observation that the light posts for the traffic signals are placed on the street corners to the left and right and do not hang over the center as in most suburban environments. While this observation may not seem radical to most, to me it is since I had missed it. First it shows that subur...