Presidential Blink Game

 

The following game is inspired by the book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.

There are a number of ways pair wise comparisons can be used in software development, but we've applied things here to get the "crowd" to order a list – in this case, presidential candidates – and have used a timer to, as Gladwell puts it, leverage that

"rapid cognition" – "the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good."

 

So check out
	Pairwise comparisons - 2008 US Presidential Candidates Vote on which US Presidential candidate you prefer in a series of pairwise comparisons.

 

And send us feedback at mailto: preventions@defectprevention.org

And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared

Interesting excerpt from the end of the 1994 Genrich Altshuller book "And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared - TRIZ, The theory of Inventive Problem Solving":

"Does an Inventor need science fiction?

One day a letter came to the publisher of the magazine Pioneer Truth saying that there was a debate in the classroom as to whether or not students should read science fiction stories. Many students said it was a waste of time because such stories were not real. This opinion is very common – and is a mistake. Science fiction writers are trying to see the future, even when it is so remote it is not realistic. They have described airplanes, submarines, television, and more when nothing like them had as yet existed on earth. Writers have written stories about journeys into solar systems, about robots, about the reconstruction of the human body. Today, many of these ideas have become reality. Science fiction is a searchlight into the future. Those who go to school today will live in that future. There is unreal fantasy, too, of course. But even that is very useful because it helps to develop imagination and teaches us to think freely. It is impossible to go to the moon inside a gun shell. However, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote that the first ideas about rockets came to him after reading a novel from Jules Verne called "From Cannon to the Moon". Fantasy is needed to make real inventions and discoveries.

The power of the mind

Fantasy is mobility of thought. The contemporary inventor has to read books about science fiction because they reduce the psychological inertia and increase the power of imagination. Fantasy can be developed using the methods described in this book: Operator STC (Size, Time, Cost) , MMD (Model with Miniature Dwarfs) and IFR (Ideal Final Result).

We live in an "Era of Technical Revolution." The main point is that this revolution lies not in the appearance of new machines – that has happened before. The method of developing new machines is changing. Organized ways of thinking replace the old chaotic ones. Every step in the thinking process should be as accurate as the movements of a pilot flying an airplane.

At the dawn of the human race, mankind conquered fire. Now we are learning to conquer something much greater. The power of mind capable of penetrating an unknown future."

Welcome to 42Projects

Welcome to the 42Projects Blog…

"Businesses are human institutions, not plush buildings, bottom lines, strategic analysis, or 5 year plans. They are living organisms. The company's real existence lay in the hearts and minds of its employees. (It) is a corporate culture, cohesion of values, myths, heroes and symbols that mean a great deal to the people who work there.

We need to remember that people make businesses work."

One of the challenges for a lot of organizations is that they don't have this approach to strategy. They don't think about strategy as a numbers game in which the likelihood of generating a rule breaking idea is totally dependent on the number of way-out ideas the company created at the start. In fact, most companies would like to believe that they can avoid the experiments and the semi-failed projects by putting some really smart people in a room and asking them to think really hard. This is just one myth that gets in the way of a company's innovation potential. Breakthrough thinking is everyone's responsibility.

The goal is simple: to mobilize and monetize the imagination of every single employee.