One-handed zippers

In the great example department of how empathy drives entrepreneurial innovation, we have the problem of people who chronically or situationally cannot easily zip a zipper with one hand.

Apparel maker Under Armour has a solution. Starting this November, its clothing will include the Magzip, an ingenious zipper that magnetically clasps automatically and still provides just enough leverage for you to zip up one-handed if you need to. Trying out a sample the company sent me, I’m amazed each and every time it works. The Magzip a testament to mechanical ingenuity in the electronic age.

But the product wasn’t originally conceived for convenience. As engineer Scott Peters watched his uncle develop myotonic dystrophy, a condition notorious for attacking the strength and coordination of one’s appendages, he saw first-hand how manipulating buttons can impossible task, and even aligning the box and pin of a zipper can become daunting.

via Ingenious Zipper Lets You Zip With One Hand

The Transition From Learning To Inquiry Styles

My friend and creativity diva Michelle James posted a link to a great article this morning on how we need to rethink the assumption that students have different learning styles that must be accommodated in any pedagogy. The old conversation focuses on learning as reception of given information in any variety of media, ideally in varieties of media.

I propose that the new conversation needs to be about learning as active self-organizing based on the learner’s questions. Then we can talk about learner inquiry styles. I would favor an approach that wasn’t hierarchical but more actionable.

For example we can talk about a continuum of the quality of question variety students have in terms of the basic question forms of who, what, when, where, how, why, which, how long, how often, how many and what if.

This continuum would run from simple inquiry styles where students have only one form or type of question to rich inquiry styles where students have multiple forms. Teaching then facilitates students moving up the continuum toward increasingly richer inquiry styles.

The Radical Shift To A New Leadership Model

Information Age leaders connect people. They work from the principle that the quality of individual performance and development equals the quality of relationships people have to others in their world. This diametrically opposes the Industrial Age model based on the importance of maintaining divisions between people. In the old model, organizational hierarchies divided and subdivided people in silos. The inventions of piece work, job descriptions and controlling managers were specifically designed to prevent people from needing to interact with anyone but their boss.

In the Information Age, everyone becomes a knowledge worker. Isolation becomes the root cause of performance and development disabilities. In this world everyone becomes smarter together. Relationships rule.

In this era, effective leaders focus on building relationships within work groups and beyond. Relationship building requires a completely different set of skills and success indicators than the old model.

In the old model, the idea was that if you get everyone doing their individual best, everything will work well. That was valid to some degree in a carefully divided world where performance demanded compliance more than relationship and innovation was the domain of managers so we didn’t need the key element of creativity: relationships.

In a knowledge economy where engagement, collaboration and creativity become key, leadership focuses on relationships because relationships shape capacity for these new competencies.

Leaders who haven’t developed their relationship building skills will become increasingly irrelevant. People will continue to self-organize the relationships they know as core to their success. The leaders who will earn the most respect, have the most influence and deliver the most value will be those skilled in building relationships.

Fortunately, we now have science and practice based methodologies to support this shift. Regardless of personality type, academic training and backgrounds, gender and generation, leaders can develop their capacity as connector. It takes coached and facilitated learning and it pays off on all scales.

Organizations committed to their growth and thrivancy will do everything possible to grow leaders as connectors.

Walkable cities

How do we solve the problem of the suburbs? Urbanist Jeff Speck shows how we can free ourselves from dependence on the car – which he calls “a gas-belching, time-wasting, life-threatening prosthetic device” – by making our cities more walkable and more pleasant for more people.

via Jeff Speck: The walkable city | Video on TED.com

As it turns out, people tend to live healthier, happier, more sustainable and productive lives in walkable cities. Non-walkable neighborhoods, think suburbs, have unprecedented levels of obesity, childhood diabetes, asthma and declining longevity.

Compelling data suggests nothing less than a crisis solved by redesign of how we live. Walkability represents a dramatically significant impact on sustainability than even all common energy management practices combined.

Two possible strategies emerge: making it easier for people to move to and thrive in cities from the suburbs and retrofitting suburbs to actually make walkability more possible. Both will run as long term strategies but the alternatives show no positive promise.

Rethinking Charity Models

TOMS shoes famously innovated the now widely copied and recently criticized practice of giving a product to people in poverty when someone buys one of their products. The critics appeal to the dependencies created by charitable giving which in places hurts local economies and anywhere does not empower people. The company now takes the lead in a more sustainable direction.

With a recent decision by TOMS to manufacture some of its shoes in Haiti beginning in January, 2014, TOMS plans to employ 100 Haitians and build a “responsible, sustainable” shoe industry in Haiti. TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie pledged that, by the end of 2015, TOMS would produce a minimum of one-third of all its giving shoes in places where the shoes are distributed to needy individuals.

via TOMS Shoes rethinks its ‘buy one, give one’ model of helping the needy

Classrooms Flipped

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates.

Clintondale was the first school in the United States to flip completely — all of its classes are now taught this way. Now flipped classrooms are popping up all over. Havana High School outside of Peoria, Ill., is flipping, too, after the school superintendent visited Clintondale. The principal of Clintondale says that some 200 school officials have visited.

via Turning Education Upside Down

Most interestingly, teachers and schools now take on flipping classrooms with the zeal of pioneers even when no one has yet amassed great volumes of data on it. It just makes sense to educators looking for new way to engage students. The evidence so far point to all around gains in academic indicators.

10,000 Honks

How often do experts actually ask regular people who actually live in cities what they envision for the future?

That’s what the Participatory Cities project from the BMW Guggenheim Urban Lab was all about. From 2011 to 2013, teams of four facilitators constructed mobile labs–temporary buildings in vacant and unused urban spaces—in New York City, Berlin, and Mumbai. Over a period of about a few months each, the public came to a wide-ranging series of events that prompted a pretty vital discussion of the trends affecting their urban lives. Part urban think tank, part community center, and part public gathering space, the spaces had about 100,000 visitors in total.

One of my favorites that emerged from the process:

The amount of honking on the congested, twisting roads of Mumbai is enough to run drivers up a wall. Noise pollution is such a problem than in 2008, Mumbai taxi drivers took an oath not to honk–an oath everyone promptly ignored. In December 2012, celebrity cricket player Sachin Tendulkar visited the Mumbai lab and proposed an awesome-sounding rule: That each vehicle would be allotted only 10,000 honks by the manufacturer. Then people would have to at least think before honking. If they needed more honks, they would have to buy them–funding noise reduction projects in the city.

via 100 Ideas For Cities, From A Department Of Listening To Pay-Per-Honk Cars

Announcing "The Power Of Circles"

You can now purchase your copy of “The Power Of Circles: The Design & Facilitation Of Engagement Where We Learn, Work & Live” in the Store here on this site. In it, I curate over three decades of work facilitating and coaching facilitators of engagement in education, organization and community contexts across the US and globally. You can read more on the book and access a sample section also directly through ThePowerOfCircles.

You might also want to consider gifting a copy to people you know who are teachers, leaders or organizers who want to grow their capacity for facilitating authentic engagement.

Also in the Store, you can register for the premier of a 6-week virtual workshop based on the book.

Turnover as opportunity space

The curse of turnover deserves rethinking. More firms now see turnover as golden opportunities to create new connections with other resources and potential collaborators outside their walls.

Conventional wisdom might say that the recent departure of Marc Jacobs from Louis Vuitton is terrible news for the company. But if you look a little more closely at the fashion industry you’ll find that turning over your talent isn’t always a bad thing.

Prada is a case in point. Between 2000 and 2010 Prada lost a lot of designers to competing fashion houses, yet its fashion collections were consistently rated as much more creative than the average.

How does that happen? In a recent study (co-authored with Frederic Godart and Kim Claes) I found that when a designer leaves a fashion house to work for competition, he or she tends to stay in touch with friends and former colleagues from the old job. These ties act as communication bridges through which former colleagues can learn what the departed designer is up to in the new job. And when several designers leave to work for different fashion houses, the colleagues staying behind build bridges to lots of companies. This provides them with a lot of creative input for their future collections.

via Is Losing Talent Always Bad?

Connected seniors

Plenty of startups target younger consumers with sensor-embedded wristbands, watches and other gear that offer paths to a fitter physique, healthier habits and peak athletic performance. But San Francisco-based Lively wants to use sensors around the home to help the elderly preserve something that can often feel even more precious with age: independence.

Launched last year, the startup sells sets of sensors that can be attached to objects in a senior’s home to learn and share information about the person’s routines. Sensors attached to pill boxes could track when medication is taken or, clipped to a keychain, could indicate when the person leaves and returns home. Once it learns a person’s habits, it can send alerts to loved ones and caregivers when it senses deviations from the norm.

via Can sensors help seniors hold on to independence? Lively is betting on it

The problem of overeducation

When Americans aren’t fretting over being undereducated, we’re usually fretting about being overeducated.

Every so often, writers and academics start sounding the alarm about a coming glut of college graduates who will end up doomed to a life of underemployment. And, when the economy is down, those warnings can seem pretty reasonable.

That’s why the chart below, from a recent report by the OECD on jobs skills around the world, caught my eye. Though it doesn’t deal specifically with the college educated, it shows that about 19 percent of all Americans say they have more education than necessary to qualify for their job. That’s actually below average among the 22 countries listed. In Japan and the UK, the figure is around 30 percent. At the other end of the spectrum in Italy, it’s about 13 percent.

via 1 in 5 U.S. Workers: I’m Too Educated for My Job

The problem stems from the outdated educational practice of keeping students disconnected from industry mentors who can guide them in career meaningful education processes. We can impact this issue with the invention of these connections.

The smart of small in health care

Some entrepreneurial physicians have begun to take back the health care system from the ever-consolidating hospital corporations that show no signs of systemic innovation.

The attempts to “fix” the U.S. healthcare system have taken at least one well-worn market-based path: strive for economies of scale. Hospital consolidation is on the rise, a trend that shows no signs of abating as providers try to streamline back-end operations and deploy big data analytics in hopes of improving outcomes and lowering costs. Businesses try this every day.

However some primary care physicians are looking at the exact opposite approach: de-scaling and taking cost out by radically simplifying their practices as a way to make them clinically, financially, and personally sustainable.

What makes these practices different? 1) Each is based on relationship quality rather than production volume; as a result, each is smaller than the average U.S. practice; 2) Visits are longer and the doctor may provide a broader range of services with minimal support staff; 3) They have business plans that demonstrate how their model can be financially sustainable; and 4) Each used their variation on the general model to offer greater satisfaction to their patients as well as to their own personal and professional lives.

via Reimagining Primary Care: When Small Is Beautiful

The entrepreneurial revolution in Egypt

In post-revolutionary Egypt, where young people make up a quarter of the population, the number of startups, incubators, competitions, and angel investors has grown into a rapidly evolving sector.

“After January 25, we took ownership of our country, we do not wait for help from someone else,” says Gamal Sadek, a co-founder of Bey2ollak, a user-driven traffic application that won Google’s first startup competition in the Middle East and North Africa region.

via Egypt’s Entrepreneurial Revolution: A Community Of Startups Rises From The Ashes

This trend will revolutionize the culture of business and economics which forms the core of real political change.

Personalized desks of the future

Stir Kinetic Desk wants you to have a desk that adapts to your habits and transient status of well-being.

Perhaps you’ve heard: Sitting is the new smoking. For years, a growing body of research has shown sitting for extended periods of time, the way most of us do for 50 to 70 percent of our lives, can cause a host of issues from lower back pain to diabetes to an increased risk of death.

Accordingly, various models of standing and adjustable-height desks have made their way to market, mostly targeting white-collar professionals who can spend upwards of eight hours a day sitting in front of a computer. The latest of these is the Stir Kinetic Desk, a desk that automatically and strategically adjusts between sitting and standing positions based on data it collects about your habits over time.

The Stir Kinetic desk is the first product out of the Los Angeles startup Stir, whose employees include veterans from Apple, Ideo, NASA, and Disney. Stir’s CEO, JP Labrosse, who recently stopped by Fast Company’s office to give me a demo, is an alum of the original iPod team that was at Apple more than a decade ago.

via Watch: This Desk Knows When You Should Stand, Sit, Or Just Breathe

Google keeps reinventing search

Google on Thursday announced one of the biggest changes to its search engine, a rewriting of its algorithm to handle more complex queries that affects 90 percent of all searches.

The change, which represents a new approach to search for Google, required the biggest changes to the company’s search algorithm since 2000. Now, Google, the world’s most popular search engine, will focus more on trying to understand the meanings of and relationships among things, as opposed to its original strategy of matching keywords.

The company made the changes, executives said, because Google users are asking increasingly long and complex questions and are searching Google more often on mobile phones with voice search.

“They said, ‘Let’s go back and basically replace the engine of a 1950s car,’ ” said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land, an industry blog. “It’s fair to say the general public seemed not to have noticed that Google ripped out its engine while driving down the road and replaced it with something else.”

Google announced the new algorithm, called Hummingbird, at an event to celebrate the search engine’s 15th birthday. The event was held in the garage Google’s founders rented when they started the company. Google revealed few details about how the new algorithm works or what it changed. It said it made the change a month ago, though consumers may not have noticed a significant difference to search results during that time.

via Google Alters Search to Handle More Complex Queries

Curing the food waste problem

Doug Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe’s, is determined to repurpose the perfectly edible produce slightly past its sell-by date that ends up in the trash. (That happens in part because people misinterpret the labels, according to a report out this week from Harvard and the Natural Resources Defense Council.) To tackle the problem, Rauch is opening a new market early next year in Dorchester, Mass., that will prepare and repackage the food at deeply discounted prices.

The project is called the Daily Table.

A brilliant reconceptualization of food use to reduce expensive and unnecessary waste.

via Trader Joe’s Ex-President To Turn Expired Food Into Cheap Meals

How power reduces capacity for empathy

Neuroscientists have found evidence to suggest feeling powerful dampens a part of our brain that helps with empathy.

Vladgrin/istockphoto.com Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You’ve probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they’re a little less friendly to the people beneath them.

So here’s a question that may seem too simple: Why?

If you ask a psychologist, he or she may tell you that the powerful are simply too busy. They don’t have the time to fully attend to their less powerful counterparts.

But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates.

Obhi and his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, have a new study showing evidence to support that claim.

via When Power Goes To Your Head, It May Shut Out Your Heart

The Habits Of Supremely Happy People

From a Huffington Post compilation of happiness research: They surround themselves with other happy people. They smile when they mean it. They cultivate resilience. They try to be happy. They are mindful of the good. They appreciate simple pleasures. They devote some of their time to giving. They nix the small talk for deeper conversation. They uphold in-person connections. They look on the bright side. They get spiritual. They make exercise a priority. They go outside. They spend some time on the pillow. They LOL.

The Habits Of Supremely Happy People

Generation flux and the end of degrees

The cost of college tuition has risen faster than nearly any other good or service in America for more than three decades. A bachelor’s degree at New York University, the most expensive university in the country, will now set you back $244,000.

The average student loan borrower pays much less but still walks away almost $27,000 in debt for an undergraduate degree. Student loan debt has outpaced credit card debt in this country, and the percentage of people who default on their loans after just three years just rose to 13%.

Mid-level skilled clerical and managerial jobs, the kind that our industrial-era education system was optimized to prepare workers for, have disappeared overseas or are increasingly handled by software. You need a specialized set of higher-order thinking skills, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, creativity, design thinking, a sense of humor, and a killer social-media profile to compete in the job market today. The problem is, you can’t rely on developing most, or even many, of these qualities from a traditional college syllabus.

Kio Stark, who has a background in interactive advertising and also teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, published an ebook last year titled Don’t Go Back to School. She interviewed more than a hundred successful independent learners who had either dropped out of college or had skipped grad school to instead do what they loved to do—whether it was computer programming, writing, business, acting, fine art, journalism, or even philosophy. “A lot of the people I spoke to felt that they had no autonomy over what they were learning in college. They were taking tests rather than getting to do more independent thinking,” she says.

via Fast Company’s Guide To The Generation Flux College Degree