2018-07-09
昨日阅读1小时，累计阅读329小时
1.今天阅读到的有价值的全文内容链接:
Creativity— Make It Part of Your Toolkithttps://www.pmi.org/learning/training-development/projectified-podcast
2.今天阅读到的有价值的内容段落摘录:
ScottBerkun
I usually start off, when I'm asked that question,of explaining what it doesn't mean, or more precisely the way it getsmisused. In American culture and western culture we have a veryromantic idea of this word. We think of people who are gifted ortalented. Renaissance artists and geniuses, we think of them as beingcreative, that it's some kind of special, magical thing that'sdistinct from other kinds of thinking. That's a dangerous frameworkto start from. So I try to help people out of that by just thinkingabout the fact that any kind of work that you're doing, especiallyproject work, the goal is to make something. That is what you'rehired to do as a project manager, as a project coordinator -something is being made or maintained, hopefully with the idea ofimproving it. So you are creating something. You are manufacturing orbuilding something. And that's a much better way to think about theword. Someone who's working on Version 25 of some COBOL-basedaccounting package, they're still creative, they're still creatingsomething. Then you can go down the path of, okay, if that's allthat's required to be a creator, then what does it mean to make andcreate stuff that is good? Now we're on the track of how do you findgood ideas, how do you find useful things? And that's a much strongerand healthier way to think about the word than the way it's oftenused in more romantic circles, which is that it's purely aboutnovelty, that when someone in a meeting raises their hand and saysyes to an idea that no one has ever heard before, the primaryemotional and dopamine response in the brain that makes us attractedto that is simply because it's new. But novelty doesn't necessarilymean quality. Novelty is just some notion that we have culturally,that something that's new should be interesting, and that can bedangerous and destructive. So I try to offer a very humble view ofthe word. If you are making something and your goal is to makesomething good and you succeed at that, then you are creating things,you are acting creatively.
The easiest place to start is when you're workingon a project that has the goal of trying to improve thingsdramatically. If you're working on a project where the vision is tomake customer satisfaction 30% higher, then you're going to be forcedto come up with unusual or uncommon approaches that haven't been donebefore in order to achieve that. You're going to be pushing harder onwhat set of ideas is going to be in your tool kit and so that'sobvious. If your goal as a project manager, even if you are the mostconservative, bureaucratic, process oriented project manager, thatyou love check lists and you love Gantt charts and you love metricsfor everything, if your goal is to make things 30% better, 50%better, in some way, you're going to be forced to be creative andforced to find solutions and study the history of the problem you'retrying to solve. To find approaches that had been abandoned orforgotten, you're going to be pushed to go harder. I think creativitythen, in the sense of projects, falls out of the charter for theproject and what the vision that the boss or the executive has forwhat the product or thing you're making is supposed to be.
It seems like a simple question - what is good?But when you sit down with a co-worker, or a developer, or a client,or your boss, and you get to the details of things, you realize thereare some very different ideas of what is good or not. And arguablywhat a leader does - a project leader, or any kind of leader - everytime they're in a meeting, every time they're in a conversation, isthey are either fighting for or they are defending some notion theyhave of what is good enough for the project. So this becomes actuallya pivotal question to answer. You could do everything right, but ifthe team doesn't succeed it's because they didn't make good enoughdecisions, or they didn't manage the project good enough, or theydidn't spend the time to investigate enough good ideas to succeed. Ican't think of a more important question for someone who's workingproject management to be good at answering. Sometimes during anargument with important people in a room and you realise as theproject this is a waste of time, because any of the ideas beingdiscussed are good enough, so why are we spending two hours arguingabout this? A project manager that ends that conversation and says,"Look you pick this one and Sally will pick the next one,"they're helping the project by simply deciding the decision is goodenough no matter which end of it is. And the same thing is true onthe other end of it. If everyone in the room has a strong consensusto go in one direction but the project manager thinks, "This isterrible, this is so far below the expectations we've set with ourclient and customer," and they do the 12 angry men thing wherethey're going to change the position of everyone in the room, that'salso fighting for what is good. So I think that's a great question toask. There's actually a chapter in the book about what is good, TheDance of the Possible - my most recent book about creativethinking - because I think no matter how creative you are or notsomeone has the power to decide is this good enough or not goodenough? And that will determine what creative means or whatapproaches you should take in order to live up to that standard.
Absolutely. Sometimes that's more important thanwhat they decide or not. It's just having everyone when they walkinto a contentious meeting to know at the end of the meeting who thetie-breaker is, who has that kind of authority to just decideregardless of what opinions have been heard in the room. Thatclarification of who has that authority is one of the key things thata good manager or leader does, regardless of the context, creative oreven just an engineering question or quality assurance question, thateveryone knows who's going to make the call.
First of all, I'm a tech sceptic. I've written alot of books about innovation and how progress happens and I'm proudof all the technological achievements we have made in the world, butat the same time I'm very dubious about our ability to predict, A,what progress will happen and, B, what its impact will be. I knowthat in the case of AI every time I use auto-complete on my iPhone ina text message, I'm really dubious about AI taking over the world. Ithink that you should look at these cases where you even havecontrolled systems which AI is supposed to be great at. Language is acontrolled system, typed language especially, and we have the premiercompanies in the world with billion dollar valuations still failingto make these things work at a reliable level that isn't annoyingalmost as much time as it works. I'll run with the hypotheticalthough. So let's assume that AI does continue to progress, it doesget smarter and smarter, I think that one of the key things thatanyone working in AI will tell you about the limitations of the kindof AI work that's done is the nuance of human relationships. This isnot something that is easy to understand, this is not something thatis programmatic. There's so much nuance to body language and facialexpression and understanding different cultural contexts that I haveto think it will be the last thing that any kind of super intelligentAI could even figure out. And I didn't even get to the point aboutcreativity yet. I think the role that project managers play of beingthis combination of intuition about human relationships and formingconnections and making good decisions and leadership, it's this skillset that I think will be very very hard to replicate or to eliminate.Creativity falls in the same way because to be creative in a usefulway means not only are you capable of coming up with good ideas, butyou're able to do it in a way that solves problems and you're able todo it in a way that convinces people of their merit and that requirespersuasion skills and knowing a lot about the people that you'retalking to and having a sense of humour and using different elementsof human expression in order to convince people that something isworth following. All of those things, I think on the spectrum of whatAI and technology are likely to take away from possible jobs forpeople, I think are on the far end of that spectrum. I feel like as awriter, as a speaker or even as a project manager, all three of thosejobs are relatively safe from the oncoming threat of automation.
I think at greatest risk are people whose job isdefined by a process. If my job is to follow a check list or to dothese 10 steps every day, you're already doing something that'shighly automated. It's just that you're the one who's following thesteps and those are the roles and jobs that are the easiest toautomate, the easiest to develop a programmatic way to replace, or toreduce the need for human interaction. So that's on the other end ofthe spectrum - things that don't require any nuance, any empathy orable to read between the lines of what someone says. So that's theopposite end of the spectrum I think.
There's lots of people who hate Microsoft productsso becoming a technical sceptic if you're at Microsoft is your onlyexample. I think it's understandable for a lot of people listening tothis broadcast!
My first answer was going to be it depends on thekind of projects that you're doing. But then I realized that's alwaysbeen true, that even 40 years ago, we like to think that the pace oftechnological change has gotten so fast now that everything happensso much faster than it did in the past. Even 40 years ago, you hadprojects, some engineering projects, some organisations with fiveyear plans, and other smaller projects that were two months long, Ithink there's always been a tremendous spectrum and there still is.There's this ongoing wave of the web speeding everything up. Projectsare now a week at a time, people using kanban boards to track thingsover week to week and sure, there's different skills that you need,or a different attitude or psychology you need to mend short, fasterschedules versus long, marathon projects. But all projects, in allshapes, size, form and budget, there's still this need to have goodideas for every part of the process. There's some decision that needsto be made about, okay we have the requirements document, but now howare we going to design something that fulfils these requirements?What are the best five alternative concept sketches we can make forhow this thing is going to work? What are the best 10 concepts weshould consider? There's some point in the process where ideageneration is the central thing that has to happen and it's often astereotype of project managers that they're terrible at thoseprocesses because they work against the stereotype, the stereotypebeing that project management is a command and control process, thatyou're always looking to optimize, you're looking to be efficient,and idea generation is never efficient. Idea generation is always bydefinition exploratory process. A lot of the time you spend vettingand considering and looking for different ideas is going to be, quoteunquote, thrown away. You're only going to use one design for thehome page of the website even though you may consider five, or 10, or15 different versions. So that's the skill set where finding aproject manager that knows how to switch gears, that knows that whenthey're doing an idea generation, when the goal of part of theprocess of this part of the schedule, the idea generation, they haveto wear a different hat. And they have to be less concerned aboutefficiency and less concerned about logic and be more open toexploring things and to trying things out and, my favourite word,which is probably a word I like much more than creativity, is torealise that they need to experiment.
3.今天阅读的自我思考点评感想
(1)Novelty doesn't necessarily mean quality. If you are making something and your goal is to make something good and you succeed at that, then you are creating things, you are acting creatively
(2)Start creativity from the project you are working on. Creativity in the sense of projects falls out of the charter for the project and what the vision that the boss or the executive has for what the product or thing you're making is supposed to be.
(3)Team success means a good creativity for the project.
(4)T be creative in a useful way means not only are you capable o fcoming up with good ideas, but you're able to do it in a way that solves problems and you're able to do it in a way that convinces people of their merit.
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