Digital Digressions

The History of the Internet

Contrary to popular belief Al Gore did not invent the Internet. Nor did it magically just appear one day in 1992.. in fact the history of the Internet goes back much further than that, and this neat little video tells the story of all the different elements that led to what we take for granted today, or are (in the case of some of the most prolific Twitter users) addicted to!

The future of education

This movie is a great peek into how education should really be - to grab the interest, attention and creativity of kids out there. It makes such a difference to learn by doing and learn by making - and personally, after graduating from the International Baccalaureate programme and going to university - I wanted nothing more than to get out there into the real world to work on something real, to see what I actually could do and what I was good at. So I left after only 3 weeks and went to work for a children's charity

The death of traditional marketing

The world is changing at an unprecedented pace. Connectivity is changing how information is created and distributed and conversations between consumers build brands more than communication strategies do. It’s a cut throat world out there as this little video illustrates better than a 1000 worlds. So for those who still wonder why communities are so important and why companies need to learn to converse with their consumers rather than talk at them - look no further:

Anything worth doing is worth doing well

A post over at my sister-blog about the research project on defining Systematic Creativity, the unique kind of creativity that playing with LEGO facilitates. The findings will be published later this year and in the meantime here is the post. A though project, but then: anything worth doing is only worth doing well..

A monster New Year!

This little thing found its way to my inbox and what a lovely surprise indeed - reminds me I need to draw more and stop spending life tapping on a computer keyboard! Happy New Year to all courtesy of the continuously digressing crew and Stefan Bucher, creator of The Daily Monster website.

Who we are arises from what we can do

Sounds like a no-brainer, doesn't it? What's interesting about the title to this post is how our notion of what we can do becomes more elusive as soon as we take out the physical manifestation of what we can do from the equation. To almost any human activity there is the physical and mental element to the activity - the physical being what we do that is visible (and quantifiable) to others and the mental element, which is obvious to ourselves, yet invisible to others.

The trouble with this division of what we can do is that our notion of who we are becomes inextricably linked to the physical side and we let what is visible to others govern what we think is valuable to ourselves - although much of that, is not as meaningful to us as is the invisible stuff, such as happiness, focus, Flow (balance of challenge and skills) and so on. In fact, we are easily sucked into defining who we are solely by our material wealth, physical output or indeed physical limits (what we can't do) and gradually thinking what we are is solely a sum of the parts we have.

Why I'm writing about this is that this realisation has dawned on me this year, based on an intuition I started pursuing a year or so back - the idea that my transition from one field of work and expertise into another would be significantly aided by a drastic increase of physical exercise. This sounds perhaps a little odd, but research has shown that our ability to learn is dramatically improved if we couple learning with vigorous physical exercise, which means more oxygen is transported to the brain and stress hormones are diminished.

These findings come from the fact that human beings, when subjected to stress, are considerably less able to learn and remember things, than when in normal conditions. Conversely, it has also been proven that learning and memory improves with exercise. I realised that the act of changing jobs would put me under considerable stress, which, if not counter-balanced with exercise, would impede my ability to make the transition swiftly and quickly learn and internalise the new things that were part of my new job.

Now in retrospect I can say that it has certainly worked and much better than I dared to imagine and it has further led me to a hypothesis about how we can actively build our confidence in enduring difficulty and hardships mentally, by stretching our concept of what we can do physically. It seems that by meeting the goals we have set for ourselves physically and exceeding them, gives us a profound sense of confidence in our own perseverance and by having those memories to hand, we can draw upon them to positively frame a situation where we would previously have given up - even if that challenge is in another area or even purely a mental one. 

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz postulate in their book 'The Power of Full Engagement' that we build emotional, mental and spiritual capacity in precisely the same way that we build physical capacity and that to build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do. This is an interesting counter-point to all the talk about time-management and effectiveness - from this it appears that our human abilities are not about how we manage our time, but instead how we systematically build our capacity to meet challenges, managing our energy expenditure by systematically stretching ourselves and building in time to recover. Planning becomes less of an activity to try to meet all the demands placed on us, but more about staking out the peaks and troughs of our performance over time - building in time for feeding and recovering our minds, bodies, emotions and spirits as well as setting goals of when we expect to be performing at the peak of our abilities.

Thus the notion of 'who we are' is a dynamic, continuously evolving concept that we can deliberately change based on developing what we can do - a notion of continuous growth, development, learning, acquiring wisdom and sharpening of the saw. It's funny - once upon a time I was reading the 7 Habits and thought what a drag it was to have to plan one's time simply in terms of what was important and what was urgent (balancing short term and long term benefits, which is certainly a useful skill to have). It sounded very adult and grown-up (read: sensible) thing to do, yet what I was missing, was the play.

Children cram in a ton of learning under the innocent banner of play, and despite the fact we have to grow up - the role of play as a way to rejuvenate our minds, bodies, emotions and spirits is one that is timeless. Something I got intuitively when planning my cycling calendar for the year, the time to have fun and enjoy yourself, nourishing the mind, the body, the spirit and the emotions as a counterbalance to having the training regime and the goals - this balance between have to do and want to do is key. Here routines are essential, create some positive routines and free your mind from beating yourself up about the things you didn't do.

Now those proponents of the 7 habits will rush in and correct me to say that of course the bits that fall under 'what is important' are precisely what is meant by the things that rejuvenate our mind, but I cannot help (and perhaps this is where one can blame my Christian work-ethic) but think that it is so easy to conceive of the 'what is important' purely from an external, materialistic or even work-centered perspective - and indirectly seeing the play element as something frivolous one can only engage in if one didn't have to work/wasn't married with children/was a millionaire etc.

Instead 'who we are arises from what we can do' - becomes an active choice of spending and renewing our energy reserves in all areas of life, balacing present and future benefit and ultimately, creating a sustainable source of happiness, which is intrinsic rather than extrinsic.

Did you know?

Right now I'm in the midst of a huge annual effort in the company to gather up insights, trends and inspiration to kick-off our annual innovation process - taking a starting point in a broad understanding of the world (both long-term and short-term) and making sure that insights are at the heart of how we innovate as a company.

When I say 'innovation' I literally mean 'the act of generating more value for the consumer, customer and the business by fulfilling a need or job to be done better than anyone else'. And to do that well, you of course need to understand what the needs and jobs to be done are out there - where can you be better, do more and be more relevant than you were even just a few months ago.

Of course it is a challenge to make sure you have as much relevant insight as hand as possible - but the second challenge is quite the opposite - the sheer quantity of information that is now available and the rate it also changes presents quite a task to ensure you don't drown people in information, but sift through it all - establish patterns and digest and present the insights in ways that make it workable for a wide range of people from different disciplines.(Remember: none of us are as smart as all of us, so the more people you can involve in the innovation effort the better chance you have of innovating both on small, medium and large scale and often you'll need all of those to be truly groundbreaking). So you need to create an inspiring and empowering experience, sparking ideas as opposed to anxiety (too much information, I can't handle it) or the opposite: boredom (I've heard it all before: what's new?).

One thing that I came across recently, is this 'Did you know' range of videos - which are very inspiring in how they contextualise the pace of change taking place right now. Below is the original video, which also talk about things we need to do as humanity to make sure we can keep abreast with the developments. I am told that the CEO of Coke recently used to get his team of senior leaders thinking about the pace of change. Below that is the other video, a 2008 update of some of the facts mentioned. So insights can be inspiring - in fact, when you really know what's going on - you realise we are all living on borrowed time and the more we understand that, the more likely we are to stay in business in the future too.

An Engineer Calculates Santa's Trip

This just made me laugh - a surprise from prof. Margaret Boden, an eminent authority on creativity and cognitive science I had the pleasure of meeting recently - decided I sounded too snowed under with work so sent me this - at least I can confirm that compared to Santa - I'm having it easy..

Ever wondered about the science behind the superhuman effort of Santa and his flying reindeer delivering presents all over the world in one night? What are the numbers behind this annual feat pulled off by our most beloved icon of the Holiday season? Wonder no longer as science has come to the rescue, calculating just what it takes to accomplish this task - you will come to respect that bearded man in a red, fur-lined coat with a posse of reindeer in a completely new way!

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. But it is estimated that there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer, which only Santa has ever seen.
2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
4. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
5. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
6. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy, per second,.each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity.
7. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

Risk Management for newbies or: the most terrying video ever!

In times of economic downturn we cannot but help wonder if those facing the music now could really see it coming. Some did and others stared reality in the face and laughed, only to lose their jobs the very next day. Seems there is a theme here - or potentially a skill in outlining the risks involved and understanding just how one deals with the conceptual space holistically, without getting stuck into purely debating will it or will it not happen..

Below is a great video that not only explains risk management, but also the very scary price of inaction - the price we are paying now when it comes to the economy, but when it comes to climate change or many of the other arguments out there - we are still stuck debating the 'what if?s' as opposed to the 'then what?s.. have a look and you'll see what I mean

The secret of success: finding balance and something completely different: in my case fixie building

There is something to be said for finding balance in one's life - if you do a lot of sedentary work, you need to balance it with some physical exercise, if you spend time doing a lot of strategic work and dealing with organisations and people, you need to balance it with rolling up your sleeves and doing something very practical and if you work hard you need to chill every now and then. That balance of Yin and Yang, of stimulus and relaxation, of extremes is certainly very important for me in order to keep working at a high pace and not get sick of things, despite some of the set backs and difficulties one inevitably encounters. 

This is also something I've learned since my twenties where I (like I'm sure many young people) was rearing to do stuff, work hard, prove myself and often to the detriment of both my health, sleep and the things, which help continuous learning. In fact research is coming out now proving that if you want to sustain a high degree of learning ability (and not get into information overload, which is the brain equivalent of your muscles hurting from too much exercise) you need to keep exercising, because this provides your brain with valuable oxygen and increased blood circulation, which rids the brain of excess hormones, adrenalin, cortisol etc, (formed when you are stressed), which get in the way of new neural connections forming. 

This finding is even more important when you consider how fast you need to move these days in order to stay ahead of competition - your single-most important competitive advantage as an individual and organisation becomes your ability to learn. The quicker you can do this and improve, the better your chances of staying ahead of the curve. But almost everything in our working lives is working contrary to this - we work long hours, eat badly, smoke, drink, do excessive amounts of air travel - you name it: none of these things are conducive to setting ourselves up for optimal learning and performing at out optimum.

So the responsibility to look after ourselves falls back on ourselves and our ability to identify when we need a break, something else to stimulate us and also the discipline to push ourselves to go for a spin, even when we are utterly exhausted from working long hours, has to come from ourselves. That responsibility for keeping the engine running smoothly rests solely with ourselves and I believe it's a lifelong quest for anyone to get it right, a 100% of the time. Yet, even if we can improve our lives to be a little better than before, that alone means we've done ourselves a huge favour. 

So now for something completely different! Below is a slide show of my fixie building pursuits this summer - completely different from what I do on a day to day basis, but very rewarding too - in addition to all the cycling that this encourages me to do too! 

See more on West5cycles.com

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Taking play seriously

Play is not just for kids, play is essential for creativity. An article from earlier this year in the New York Times tries hard to debunk some of the more rosy-tinted-glasses view of the role and purpose of play in the lives of children, to arrive at some interesting findings about how play is essential in developing the brain.

Margaret Boden talks extensively about exploratory creativity and the role of play in creating a map of the mind, so to speak, which allows us to not just be creative through the increased connections formed in the brain as a result, but also to arrive at solutions from many angles - much like having a map allows you many different routes to your destination. I'll write some more on this in an upcoming post, but to start off the debate - have a read of the article above.

A great reaction to this article came from Ron Meyers (below), who touches on the very important aspect of play as a means of familiarising oneself with a domain to enable creative expression or just generally learning - and that, unfortunately has slightly been lost in the article..

"Whether the ultimate function of play is conceived as preparation, flexibility, socialization or existential fortitude, one of the greatest examples of play can be found in a liberal education. No one expects more than a handful of students to become philosophers, scientists or literary critics. But the joyful exercise of reading, discussing and writing about ideas is a form of play that develops a huge array of competencies for the challenges that students will encounter in adult life. How wonderful it would be if parents and college-admissions officers would view play, rather than slavish résumé building, as a vital part of the preparation for the great play experience of a college education."

RON MEYERS

New York

Cake or Death?

This is the standard question at the beginning of meetings in the cake-eating capital of Europe, Denmark - where cake eating has been elevated to an intrinsic part of any get-together.. I'm joking of course, but this wonderful rendition of Eddie Izzard's sketch about the fact that extremism and the Church of England really don't go together very well at all and if it did - it would be a question of cake or death!

Great Moments in History Captured in LEGO

Mike Stimpson has been using LEGO to re-create some classic photographs. On the BBC site is a small selection of his work. One of my favourites is this one, Marc Riboud's 1967 photograph of an anti-Vietnam protest in Washington, with a cheeky Star Wars spin to it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/08/in_pictures_inspired_by_classic_photographs/html/1.stm

To see more of Mike Stimpson’s work go to: www.flickr.com/photos/balakov/

What I'm Talking About When I Talk About Cycling*

This title is inspired by an excellent new book by one of my favourite authors, Haruki Murakami, whose first non-fiction book (for a long time anyway) talks about the balance brought about by combining work (he writes 4 hours every morning) before going out for a run (he runs 10km every day). Murakami has completed 27 marathons and talks in depth about how his life philosophies have been informed by this deliberate search for balance between the physical and mental.

For me it is very much the same, but my sport of choice is cycling as opposed to running. Not sure why I could never get my head around running (I was a sprinter at school) and sprinting I was fine at, but this jogging thing I just can't figure out. It's too slow for running(sprinting) and too fast for walking so I'm forever searching for a pace I can sustain, yet frequently end up accelerating to stop the ceaseless pounding on my knees (should you run on your toes like when you sprint and what I'm used to, or should you run on your heels like when you walk.. this I can't get right.. running on your heels just feels too harsh on your knees!). So there is a trick to running which obviously some people, Murakami included, have deftly figured out and turned to their advantage and then there are folks like me, who just can't get off on running, but are truly, madly and deeply in love with another sport instead.

Now admitting to loving cycling these days is like saying I also fully condone the use of performance enhancing drugs, bribery, lying about one's whereabouts and pretending that someone else's blood is my own. However, there is a big difference though and that is the difference brought about when you do something for a living versus doing it for fun. When you do stuff for a living, the stakes are higher and the cost of failure is huge and therefore it is reasonable to believe this stuff is not only limited to the sport of cycling, but present in any profession where you get paid for pushing your body to the limits (now in that broadest definition we can even include models, who get paid for being a size 0 (often with the help of dietary drugs or caught with some even saucier stuff at parties), but could not run to the bus or cycle up a hill, because they may be skinny, but so weak they can't even carry their own luggage. (now that IS depressing)

Back to cycling for fun though. For me that still means trying to cycle further, faster and for longer than what I did last week or the month before or even last year. It is a wonderful outlet, a kind of flow you get into, a meditation where the pedal revolutions function like the meditation chants of 'Om', but much faster and there sometimes comes a point where you forget that it is your legs making the pedals go around, it just seems like you are flying. Armstrong's US Postal team used to say it was like having 'no chain' and I sincerely believe I know what they mean.

The pleasure of getting into a rhythm, moving effortlessly, it is the childhood dream re-lived over and over again, that sense of freedom, of going where you want to go, not where parents cart you off in a car or drag you by your hand. You discover things are not as far as you thought, you discover you can go faster than you thought, from this early pushing of boundaries comes a lifelong desire to keep pushing them further, trying to overcome ourselves and marveling at how much you can achieve by simply putting your mind to it.

And your mind is sometimes the last one you should ask for advice, because whenever experiencing the pain brought about lactic acid burning in your legs going up a really steep hill, your mind (mine at least!) instantly goes into this, aah it hurts.. you should really stop now.. go on .. just a little break? lobbying to my other self that goes.. naah.. just a little further.. to that tree.. to that corner.. almost there.. stay on target.. and comfortably engaging both parts of my mind and becoming more confident at trusting the latter is something only sport can teach you. Interestingly, that same little voice follows you to other parts of your life too, making you nervous before delivering a presentation, going for a job interview, embarking on a big project, but training yourself to chew the elephant (or that hill) one bite at a time, you train your mind to not fear the effort of learning, improving and enabling yourself to celebrate and enjoy the pleasure of achievement.

* Haruki Murakami: What I'm talking about when I talk about running

The Apprentice in LEGO by the Boleg Brothers

So now we know - Lee McQueen is the next apprentice and clearly no amount of fibbing on your CV or pterodactyl impressions is enough to dissuade Sir Alan that he is a worthy candidate. I do wonder how much we actually learn about the nature of business through shows like this and does seeing it on telly make it acceptable is the next question? Obviously values like honesty, integrity, pulling your weight, treating your customers with respect and the list goes on.. these are all redundant attributes in an apprentice?

Oh well, perhaps it's not worth getting too serious about the implications of this show that frequently has made me cringe over the last 12 weeks - it is actually best enjoyed as a comedy, with minifigures (or LEGO people) as highlighted by the Boleg Brothers. (not anything to with LEGO the company - just some good fun!)

http://www.bolegbros.co.uk/home.asp

http://www.bolegbros.co.uk/latest07.html

The LEGO Innovation Model

Innovation is one of those topics rife with debate and often what is innovation to one person is business-as- usual for the next. Communicating an innovation is often half the job of getting it on the shelf and innovators and designers alike, regardless of where they work, often have to be relentlesss lobbyists and use sophisticated tools of persuasion to further their concepts such as fancy presentations, multi-media, eye-popping visuals - you name it, these are the tools of the designer witch-craft. Needless to say, invariably the more skilled you are in all this, the more sought-after you are as a designer.

What we did at LEGO revamping our innovation process flew in the face of a lot of this. We recognised that some of this 'witch-craft' was getting in the way of making solid business decisions. Concepts were bought into, not because they had a solid business case behind them, but because people developed emotional attachments to them or saw it as their ticket to career advancement to push something through, regardless of the cost. To be fair, this happens all over the place, not just LEGO, but the difference is we chose to do something about it. Arguably some of this, along with the very hard work of the entire organisation in many different areas goes some way to explaining our remarkable turnaround from the doldrums in 2003 where our survival as a company was at stake. Last year, we posted our best results ever in the company's entire 75 year history. Perhaps just a little bit of that remarkable turnaround was down to this.

http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/About-Design/managingdesign/Design-at-LEGO/

The link above leads you to the full case study published at the Design Council site and it makes not only for some very good reading, but also is a timely reminder of the value a common tool can have in bringing different disciplines together working on innovation that combines design and business thinking instead of encouraging a war between the two. Having a shared language is tantamount to bringing people together and this model in particular has helped us have some hard-hitting, but objective debates about the merits of concepts and collectively understand how to improve them. Only by creating a shared foundation can you have any hope in trying to solve a problem together.

Leadership lessons from John Wooden

Something I wanted to share with you that landed in my inbox earlier and in its simplicity captures more about leadership than many books written on the subject. Leadership is not something you are born with, it is something you do to people, either well or abysmally. We all have sour memories of how it felt when someone did it badly and we may be privileged enough to know someone who really inspires us in this regard. After all, its much easier to point to who is a good or bad leader, than it is pinpointing what it is they do or don't do that makes us say that.

However, John Wooden may be able to help us. He is generally regarded as the nation's greatest basketball coach. His UCLA teams during the 1960s and 1970s won 10 NCAA men's basketball national championships and set records for consecutive victories. But since retiring in 1975, the 97-year-old coach has gained fame as a philosopher and motivator.

[From LA Times]

Wooden sat down with The Times and offered up 10 tips -- one for each of the NCAA basketball championships his players won at UCLA -- for how business owners can become better leaders.

1. Listen.

One thing that is often overlooked in leadership is the ability to listen. Listening is so important to those under your supervision.

2. Care.

Another very important part of leadership is to make those under your supervision feel that you care for them -- not just for the job they are doing for you, but you really care for them personally. You just can't tell them you do that, you have to show it.

While some roles aren't as big or in the forefront as others, they are still very important. I used to use this analogy: It is like having a powerful car. Now the engine, like an Alcindor [now called Kareem Abdul-Jabbar], who played for me, that's powerful. Here's another fellow who is just a wheel. And there is another fellow who is just a nut that holds the wheel on. You have to have them all. You must make every person feel that they are needed.

3. Recognize.

When I was teaching in high school in basketball, for example, [I taught that] my players must never score without thanking someone. Don't run over and shake their hand but look at them and give them a little sign or something of appreciation. Everybody likes to have a pat on the back.

4. Prepare.

[Managers should be aware of] preparation for whatever their job is, little or big, preparation is so important. Failure to prepare is preparing to fail. You must not put things off.

5. Be industrious.

Nothing can be accomplished without work. You've got to work hard. If you are looking for the short cut, if you are looking for the easy way, if you are looking for the trick to get things done, you might get them done. But you are not adding strength, you are not building.

6. Have enthusiasm.

If you don't enjoy what you are doing you are not going to be able to give it the industriousness that you should have. You must have that to inspire others to do their best.

7. Be patient.

Good things take time. And that's the way it should be. We don't want it that way but that's the way it is. I think that is a very important thing that a leader must get across to those under his supervision.

8. Have confidence.

You must believe in yourself. If you don't have confidence in yourself you can't expect those under your supervision to act with much confidence.

9. Don't fear failure.

Have initiative but don't be afraid of failure. We are all going to fail at times because we are all imperfect. When I had assistants, I always wanted them never to be afraid to make a suggestion. We don't know a thing we don't learn from somebody else in one way or another. If you do agree [with their suggestion] and use it and it works, be sure that they are the one that gets the credit, not you. Now if it doesn't work, you take the blame because you made that decision to use it.

10. Win respect.

You have to have the respect of those under your supervision. You can't obtain that respect unless you are honest with them and they can depend upon you. Don't try to sell them a bill of goods or you will lose all respect.

Some very good rules to live your life by. Enough said.

Train Yourself Smarter

Sounds like the ominous beginning to a self-help book, but there is more truth to the title that what you may think. There are plenty of studies out there that suggest the positive benefits of brain training, often suggesting that doing cross-words and memorising long lists is a good way to get yourself thinking smarter, faster. However, this is like saying that simply doing curls with a dumb-bell will make you an Olympic athlete. It's not purely the muscle fitness that matters, it's the whole package, so aerobic fitness, endurance, stamina you name it - all have a part to play in what finally comes together in an explosive meter sprint for the finish line. Same with your brain.

Or put more precisely, of course intellectual stimulus helps develop your brain, but so does physical training. In fact, research published from Harvard Business Review onwards, suggests that if we want to increase our mental capacity, we have to increase our physical fitness to match. This, because the brain like any other muscle in our body depends on blood flow to do its thing and the higher your metabolism and ability to sustain physical exercise at an beyond your aerobic threshold, the better 'oiled' is the machine to deliver continuously on what makes all of us smarter - learning.

It's hard to learn anything when you are tired, it's even harder when you are stressed and learning is what allows your brain to build more connections between neurons, which can potentially fire and give you ideas, helping you be more creative, think faster or even just make the right decision ahead of the wrong one. Worst of all, many of the high pressure jobs out there today requiring continuously operating at stress-levels, make learning all but impossible, so cycles of burn-out are not uncommon. We work hard, feel under pressure to do things better, smarter, faster so we get stressed, making it harder for us to learn how to do things differently, so we then get frustrated, which of course makes us even more stressed... you know the drill.

Interestingly, it is not all out of our hands however. There is a way of being methodical about it all and making it possible for you to prime yourself for some very steep learning curves, perhaps radical career changes even or new jobs in other companies where the mix of the familiar to the new is radically turned on its head and you have to spend most of your time learning, before you can become productive. This is crunch-time for many of us. Can we not just make the transition, learn what is necessary for us to deliver on the job, but also ensure we keep learning to make sure we stay ahead and begin not just doing the usual but increasingly the extra-ordinary?

Research suggests that balancing our increasingly busy work lives with some well-developed and above all challenging exercise can help us do just that.

From bikeradar A recent study from Illinois, USA gives further evidence that exercise can augment brain power.

Using 110 students researchers looked at a battery of fitness criteria (eg endurance run, push-ups, body mass index, etc) then selected the low and high scoring subjects to represent low and high fitness students [4].

All subjects were also assessed for IQ, visual cognitive speed by presenting randomly arranged pictures and activity. Additionally they were wired up to an electroencephalogram to measure brain activity across various regions of the skull. This allowed researchers to look at how fitness levels related to brain function. Their conclusion is very telling: “We found that aerobic fitness was positively associated with neuroelectric function and behavioural performance in preadolescent children engaged in a stimulus discrimination task”

Put more simply: fit children have better functioning brains. 

This research makes promotion of active pastimes and sports something we older humans should be engaged in for the well being of younger generations and it’s good for you at any stage of life too. Research on elderly subjects from 70 to 90 suggests that walking alone “is associated with a reduced risk of dementia” [5]. Across most age groups it appears that exercise of even a modest amount helps to keep the brain functioning better.

The bottom line is you don’t need to break 20 minutes for 10-miles or win a Grand Tour to gain positive mental health benefits from exercise. As Max Ehrmann wrote in his 1927 Desiderata: “Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself”.

And this is the point exactly, to improve fitness - not accelerate your burnout. I can personally attest to both greater learning capacity and ability to sustain higher workloads since I started a regime of road cycle training. I have gone from 30km nearly finishing me off to losing over 10kg and riding 140km the other weekend at a pace many of my fellow riders had to work hard to keep up with. This is progress for sure, but what it really has helped me do is be the reset-button to hard work, crazy travel, lots of pressure and make sure I stop, get out there, blast around the country-side getting rid of adrenaline and all those nasty stress hormones that make us sleep badly, gain weight and over time get depressed. Instead, by finding an outlet that works I am happier and have made greater leaps and bounds in terms of progress in everything I do, because as the quote goes in Starwars - it brings balance to the force.

LEGO Play - Constructing knowledge and transforming the world

Every now and so often I get these questions  like 'explain the meaning of life on one page', which get your head spinning and are entirely possible to answer, but never without spending a long time meditating on that answer first. For that particular question I have an answer, which you may or may not agree with, which is: Happiness, but I digress.. This particular question though was on the subject of explaining LEGO play, which although simple in some ways: you put a bunch of bricks together in any way you imagine - can actually be pretty complex if you delve into what is actually happening between the lines so to speak.

So if you ever wonder about that question, here's my take on an answer.. and discuss!

Most of us automatically associate childhood with play more than anything else. Children play as often as they can; play is fun. Play also contains in its very foundation all the most important elements that allow us to learn[1], to make sense of our experience and find our place and voice in the world.

 Give the mind a hand, and give the hand a system (or pattern, or language, or logic)

 LEGO play champions a “low floor, high ceiling and wide walls”[2] approach – meaning the threshold to begin play is low, but only the sky is the limit by virtue of literally endless combinations possible with LEGO bricks. The wide walls is about supporting a broad range of open-ended exploration and discovery, yet underpinning it is a shared build system creating an intuitive set of constraints challenging one to think up iterations to an originally conceived idea. It is the familiarity of this System in Play and its capacity to support infinite variation in expression that encourages exploration of the unknown and a mindset open to growth.

From the day we are born, we learn, thrive and grow in relation to others. Vygotsky in particular emphasizes the role of language and other artefacts in mediating human interaction. Children’s extraordinary talent as learners comes largely from their ability to set the stage allowing them to safely project themselves into the unknown through their imagination[3]. In expressing ideas or giving them form through building with LEGO, we make our ideas tangible and shareable with others which, in turn, helps shape and sharpen these ideas further and in that process we build our knowledge and our view of the world through our own personal experience.[4]

Creativity (as opposed to mere novelty) occurs when you think a thought that is outside the space of thought even conceivable to you[5].

Ultimately LEGO play is not just a matter of giving form to ideas, making them tangible and shareable. It is also a matter of bringing ideas and forms to life by making ourselves part of the play by acting out scenarios, events and stories. Treating our creations as if they were the ideas they stand for is what brings them closer to our mind’s reach and enables us to immerse ourselves with the situation at hand and allows us make a creative leap, in effect transforming our view of the world[6].

LEGO play welcomes young and old, experienced builders and novices, but above all it presents everyone with opportunities for creativity that are dynamic and malleable. The experience of flow[7] often associated with LEGO play is the balance between existing skills and the challenge at hand as well as between the anxiety and impatience in realising your idea.

Much like knowledge is an experience to be actively built, both individually and collectively[8], LEGO is a product that isn't finished when it leaves the factory; your imagination makes it complete. It is a creative material, a catalyst in enabling us to influence the world by building and experimenting, pushing our cognitive boundaries and advancing our collective thinking by growing us as individuals.

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[1] Hans Henrik Knoop, The Danish University of Education

[2] Prof. Mitchel Resnick, MIT

[3] Prof. Edith Ackermann, MIT

[4] Prof. Seymour Papert, MIT

[5] Prof. Margaret Boden, University of Sussex

[6] Prof. Edith Ackermann, MIT

[7] Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Claremont Graduate University

[8] Prof. Seymour Papert, MIT

Think Eco-Systems not just Issues

Take global warming or government regulation as examples - these are all very complex topics, collections of variables where solving the problem cannot be achieved through solving one issue alone, but in fact the solution rests in addressing the eco-system tying together all the inter-linked variables. In fact, seeing things on purely the issue level may in fact be contributing to the problem.

In the book Freakonomics the authors quote numerous examples of cases where seemingly complex phenomena have very simple origins, but often in an entirely different field and the eco-system magnifies the impact through all the inter-related variables and creates an impact on local, sometimes national and international levels. One of the striking examples is their analysis of crime figures in large cities in the US. The numbers were growing at epic proportions year-on year until sometime in the mid-eighties the trend suddenly stopped and began a steady decline. Experts tried to attribute this reversal to anything from an increase in spending on the police, a growth in numbers of staff, prisons, different governments, new laws etc. but the biggest impact came from the legalisation of abortion.

How could this have anything to do with crime figures you may wonder? Here the eco-system comes in: the women most likely to have an abortion back in the 60s where women in low-income households with several children already and who before the legalisation either had to risk their lives to have an abortion by often unqualified people in unsafe conditions and risk prosecution or not have one at all. Many didn't and subsequently struggled to look after their children, who often ended up in crime from a lack of opportunity in life. As abortion became legal in many states, the numbers of these 'unwanted' children dropped and the sheer numbers of disadvantaged youth decreased, thus decreasing the populace likely to commit crime. It's not to say that the other measures had no impact at all, but collectively they helped solve the problem as the eco-system of ideal conditions leading to crime gradually became more untenable.

Biofuels are another example of where eco-system thinking really needs to be applied on a much larger scale than today - touted as the solution to the West's reliance on fossil fuels, the growth of crops destined for biofuels is now accelerating across the world, leading to an increased rate of rain forest destruction (these are our most efficient weapon in clearing CO2 from the atmosphere) as land is being cleared to grow palm oil - a crucial ingredient in biofuels. Much agricultural land previously home to food production is being converted to grow crops for biofuel, putting food production in danger. The biggest irony of all is that the process of producing biofuels has a greater negative impact on global warming than fossil fuel use - proving that there is no simple 'solution' to global warming, in fact simple solutions may in fact be aggravating it further, instead we need to think in eco-systems, not just locally, but nationally and internationally.

Nancy Gibbs of Time, talks in her column about the Vatican reflecting on its mortal sins for the modern age (24th March 2008) of the fact that back in the past sloth, lust, greed, envy and anger accounted for virtually all the crimes of mankind, whereas today the issues that once were the clear culprits behind our follies and misfortunes are far more complex than the 7 deadly sins alone. Causes and consequences come together to form eco-systems, where one problem feeds another and addressing consequences is meaningless without understanding and addressing the causes. Contextualising what was once simple in our now increasingly interlinked world - Quoting Mohandas Gandhi's version of the 7 deadly sins:

• Wealth without work
• Pleasure without conscience
• Science without humanity
• Knowledge without character
• Politics without principle
• Commerce without morality
• Worship without sacrifice

The responsibility rests with the individual, but that includes the duty to take care of others as well as yourself.