Tool

Stop&Think Tool Bicycle Example (Excel)

Valuing Information White Paper

 

 

 

Definitions

  • Ingenuity – creative simplification, which can be valued two ways:
    1. technologically (actualization of reason) – untangling complex problems.
    2. socially – increasingly complex problems create a need for cooperation.
  • Insight – deep understanding.
  • Fusion – synthesis, distillation, mashup.
  • Cause – anything that changes a state (person or thing, place, time).
  • Effect – change of state.
  • Feedback - information regarding a change of state.
  • Innovation – the introduction of new things.

 

Complex Adaptive Systems

  • Many problems and situations have the characteristics of CAS:
    1. Causality as the primary feature.
    2. Interdependence of components – a change in one component may affect many components. Also, systems can be nested within systems.
    3. Feedback which can alter causes.
    4. Synergy – the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (example: automobile).
    5. Non-linear chaotic behavior -  owing to interdependence and feedback a small change can create a large effect.
    6. Openness to (and affected by) the outside world.
  • The study of CAS is an accepted scientific method – for example, chaos theory and the environment:
    1. Weather – the often cited “beat of a butterfly’s wings” may create large weather disturbances over time.
    2. Ocean and atmospheric interactions – The Atlantic Ocean water “conveyer belt” moves southwards from the North Atlantic approximately 20 million cubic meters of cooled water every second. This water makes its way from the South Atlantic east into the Pacific, where it is warmed then returned west to the South Atlantic where it makes its way north. Once in the North Atlantic this flow releases a large amount of heat into the atmosphere, roughly 25% of the solar energy absorbed in this area.
  • CAS mapped causally can be defined by tags and keywords. This grammar supports the creativity used in fusion plus is useful in subsequent project and document management.

 

Reasons for the Causal Flow (Cause-Effect) Diagram

A Causal Flow Diagram..

  • ..is the most direct expression of causality because timing is involved.
  • ..makes best use of our abstracting and sequence-finding mind. We have approximately 14 billion neurons in our cerebral cortex area devoted to categorization.
  • ..encourages forward thinking (considering the future possibilities of causes and their interactions) which leads to efficient task assignments (finding the actionable “sweet spot”).

 

Reasons for Fusion

Fusion..

  • ..is a natural process based on interactions and feedback (example: genetics) that identify information to be fused.
  • ..simplifies by distilling (discarding and combining) and enriching facts. Creative thinking, particularly opposite logic, uses the expressive power of opposites to suggest new contexts for further refinement.
  • ..creates a best practice for organizational knowledge capital and group creativity.

 

Uses of the Ingenuity Tool

  • Problem-solving.
  • Information simplification.
  • Lean Process re-engineering – kaizen.

    • and many others…