Planning Blog

Tuesday, July, 06, 2010

Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind

Did you know that your mind is "wandering" about 30 percent of the time you are awake? No wonder things get dangerous when you add driving and cell phone into the mix! And there really is a scientific term: "zoning out." Read more.

You’d be stuck contemplating the mass of idling cars, a mental exercise that is much less pleasant than dreaming about a beach and much less useful than mulling what to do once you get off the road. There’s an evolutionary advantage to the brain’s system of mind wandering, says Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota and one of the pioneers of the field.

“While a person is occupied with one task, this system keeps the individual’s larger agenda fresher in mind,” Dr. Klinger writes in the “Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation”. “It thus serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that the other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.”

Of course, it’s often hard to know which agenda is most evolutionarily adaptive at any moment.

Labels: mind, daydreaming, mind wandering, creativity, Innovation, Learning

Monday, April, 12, 2010

Darden Business School Rediscovers Its Right Brain

Plesae scroll down to your SCUP Link, below this notice about SCUP–45.

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

SCUP Link

Darden finds a solution to teaching innovation and creativity by studying the programs in graphic arts and design schools, and schools of architecture. From Today's Campus:

Design, story, leadership, symphony, play and meaning predominate. Pink says these qualities are the new business literacy, and the MFA is the new MBA . . . Darden chose not to change a reworked MBA to an MFA, but to complement the de rigueur of accounting, finance, labor law and management with a team-based, collaborative search for creativity . . . That makes sense at a university founded by an extraordinary man who – as a horticulturist, philosopher, politician, farmer, architect, archaeologist, paleontologist, inventor, writer and U.S. president – used both sides of his brain quite well.

SCUP's Planning Institute: Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers while you engage in one of the three SCUP Planning Institute Steps. In addition to being offered on demand, on campuses to teams of campus leaders, the institute steps are also offered to all professionals at varying times and venues. Currently scheduled are:

May 22–23, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
July 10, Minneapolis, MN - Step I (in conjunction with SCUP–45)
October 2, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
January 21–22, Tuscon, AZ - Step II and Step III

Labels: creativity

Wednesday, June, 04, 2008

How to Unleash Your Creativity: Insights, Tricks, & Tips

From Scientific American comes this quite useful article about creativity and how to nurture your own: "There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. . . . The second competency is called “challenging”—giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become." 'Broadening' and 'Surrounding' sure sound like something that SCUP helps to provide its members.