Sharing ideas is not easy

CONVERSATIONS

Exchange of thought with a Creativity Engineering Summer School participant at the Vienna University of Technology

Participant from China:

I think it’s something about personal style. Everyone has different talking and thinking style. There is nothing wrong, but you may be uncomfortable when you feel that someone says almost everything against you.
But at last we reached the common point by fully communication.
I just don’t like that, when I raise a creative idea, someone always put the black hat and try to deny it. If I can choose, I would like to work with someone who is more positive and optimistic.

Course coach:

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
I can fully understand what you mean.
I also prefer to work with positive people rather than people who are negative and try to stop everything new from happening.
I have similar experiences in some of my projects as you.

Then I received the recommendation to see negative comments as a constructive input improving my idea.
Usually negative comments are not negative comment against you as a person.
To understand this it is always recommended to look at the cultural setting a discussion happens in:
In Western culture a discussion is focused on the idea and not the person. They comment on your idea. Actually it is quite good if an idea is commented a lot, in a positive or negative way. It means that it created thought in other people.

If this is different in your own culture, it would be worth trying to convince yourself that a negative comment for an idea you raised is not about you but only about the idea. Then you don’t feel hurt and you can argue easily for your idea and proof that the comment raised is not applicable or taken into account.

I hope that my explanation was understandable and meaningful to you. Let me know if you have questions or more thoughts about this.

Thanks again – it is nice to share experiences and thoughts.

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The 3 Costs of Multitasking

Does this happen to you?
It certainly does to me. What do you do to prevent yourself from doing so?
I started to limit the time I allow for going off-track and depending on the task I work at, I do not allow myself to get off-track at all.

This is true some days, other days not at all.
Now I am trying to understand the why behind this.
It would be great to hear about your findings.

I am not a leader

CONVERSATIONS

Email Conversation from the Creativity Engineering Course at the Vienna University of Technology during the idea and team finding phase

Emma	Dear Jutta, I have an idea. I actually have two ideas. After I broke my knee and my doctor said, it will be a long time to heal… I imagined that there is a possibility, that it can never happen. At that moment I realized, that I wanted to do many things, but just postponed them like running a marathon, jumps with turns (I am an ice skater), etc… . I started thinking about “our” goals, which are mostly unrealized.I would like to design a concept of a social network.The main idea of the network would be a list of goals … (student continues to describe the idea in much detail) …. BUT there are two problems:1) I am not a leader, I am not able to get people interested. I can speak perfectly 3 languages, but English is not my strong side. 2) I don’t have time for the implementation. I saw a nice sentence once. I cannot find it now. I don’t know from whom it was. … The sentence was: “We think we will do everything in the future that may not come to pass. We have to do things as long as we have opportunities”. Thank you for your attention, Emma
Jutta	Dear Emma, thanks for sharing your ideas. I have to tell you that there is research that says the real leaders are people who say that they are not leaders :-)I think you should share your idea and see if others want to join in. A semester is much to short for implementing something like this but it is long enough to start thinking about it and maybe shape it into something that will become implementable later. Last semester I was lucky to have met such a group. They are now in the process of writing a business plan and starting as a company to implement their idea. Things become possible – there just needs to be a start at some point. The best point for starting is always now. As you have said it so clearly yourself. I do know how hard this is. Especially when there are always so many other things that have to be accomplished and done at the same time. See you tomorrow, best regards Jutta
Emma	Dear Jutta, Thank You very much!I will share my idea right now! 🙂 Best regards, Emma