Six Thinking Hats

Six Thinking Hats is a technique to improve creativity by focusing our attention on only one perspective at a time. Useful wherever we need creativity - from retrospectives to product planning to strategic visioning.

Putting the Moose on the Table: A LEGO based retrospective

In order for teams to step into high performance. it’s critical that they develop the practice of having effective conversations about what is and isn’t working. Yet in practice, the retrospective meeting is often the least-valued of the agile events: team members feel that their retros are boring, repetitive, and superficial.

Exploring the Anti-Anxiety Toolkit

Stress and anxiety are widespread in our industry and you may have already noticed that it’s really hard to coach someone who is highly stressed or anxious. It’s also really hard for you to personally perform at your best when you’re in that state.

Brain Talk

Words direct attention. Some words will encourage superficial conversations while others will allow you to quickly get into deeper, more meaningful ones. Learn some of the language patterns used by hypnotists and other effective communicators.

Links

A variety of links off to studies and articles that support the concepts covered in this site. Unconscious behaviour, neuroscience, psychology, etc.

Body Language

The triune brain theory suggests that we have three distinct parts to our brains: The reptilian brain, the limbic system and the neocortex (conscious). When we’re talking about body language, we’re almost exclusively talking about those things controlled by the limbic system.

Apex Problem

In hypnosis, the “Apex Problem” refers to a situation where the client is cured so effectively that they don’t remember ever having had that problem.

Teddy Bear Effect

As the story goes, the computer science lab at Reed College has a rule that before you can ask for help with the programming problem you’re working on, you have to first explain that problem out loud to the teddy bear in the corner.

Leveraging the Doorway Effect

Have you ever walked into the kitchen, only to realize that you’ve now forgotten why you walked into the kitchen?

Clean Language

Our brains process an incredible amount of information through the use of metaphor (comparing one thing against another). When you listen carefully to the words we use, you will begin to notice how often metaphor is used in conversation.