Robert Pearl Starks

Innovation requires new ideas and measured risk-taking but how does one stimulate innovative thinking from a group?

1. Getting comfortable with Risk - Determine within your work group how much risk is acceptable to you and to your employees.  Involving the team to discuss this will help the team understand that measured risk-taking is necessary for innovation and will help everyone get comfortable with some agreed-upon level of risk for ideas discussed.

2. Communication and Reflection - Ask your work group to communicate before, during, and after decision-making processes about problems and/or mistakes.  Reflecting on problems and mistakes and communicating… >>>

This is a presentation I have delivered to different audiences.  I am sharing it to help others learn and spread the information among their networks.  I hope you find it helpful and that it sparks your curiosity to learn more. 

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It took a life-threatening condition to jolt chemistry teacher Ramsey Musallam out of ten years of “pseudo-teaching” to understand the true role of the educator: to cultivate curiosity. In a fun and personal talk, Musallam gives 3 rules to spark imagination and learning, and get students excited about how the world works.

As a high school chemistry teacher, Ramsey Musallam expands curiosity in the classroom through multimedia and new technology.  How do you elicit the curiosity of your students?

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Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

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Being effective at solving problems in the workplace (and throughout life) requires using a combination of memory, logic and insight. Your experiences combined with your logic abilities help you determine which problem-solving method is best for each challenge you encounter but there are several practices people commonly demonstrate which can hinder problem solving.  6 practices having to do with illogical thinking are listed below:

Recognize when you, your employees, or others adopt these 6 illogical practices:

1. Speaking in absolutes, such as all, none, no one, everybody, never or always
2. Generalizing that is either unsupported or supported by only one or
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In formal training, the needs of the job dictate the required training for the job. Good formal training includes the following characteristics:

1. Analysis
Many factors can contribute to performance problems that cannot be solved by training. A needs analysis involves knowledgeable personnel who are aware of the requirements of the job and the necessary level of performance. This analysis determines whether a need for training exists.

A job analysis determines the specific tasks critical to competent performance of a job. These tasks may be frequent, repetitive, important, difficult, or error-prone. It is this analysis that provides the basis… >>>