Confidence is among the central pillars of behaviour change and also among the most complicated of them. Confidence can be gained, lost, and used to our advantage and to our detriment. This makes it among the most interesting and important aspects of change-making we can attend to. The latest episode of Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast …
Five years ago we were on the cusp of the Trump presidency, experienced the recent Brexit vote, and what felt like the start of a period of intense complexity in world trade and global relations. Years later those times almost seem quaint as we begin to contemplate a new era of complexity. On November 11th, …
Our future depends on our ability to change how we see ourselves and the world and act on it — and it pays to know how this works. Climate change is here (as if there was much doubt). After decades of cautious language, scientists are now speaking about climate change in unequivocal terms. The future …
We can learn much about change from our trips to the beach and how things relate to one another. Beach-going is a summer pleasure than those of us fortunate to live close to the water can enjoy as an escape and, when it’s hot, sometimes a necessity. While it might odd at first, our lazy …
‘Achieving scale’ might be the golden goose of social innovation. It’s a simple phrase, but its meaning and misunderstanding is not. “How do we take this to scale?” This common and often well-meaning question has enormous problems with it for social innovation besides the grammar. Scale might be among the most widely misunderstood concepts in …
Shifting outcomes requires shifts in our thinking about what works The science journal Nature recently published a thought piece looking asking the question: Does psychology have a conflict of interest problem? The article looks at psychologists who consult as well as research and whether or not they should declare the income obtained from the products …
Goal-directed language guides much of our social policy, investment and quests for innovation without much thought of what that means in practice. Looking at the way ideas start and where they carry us might offer us reasons to pause when fashioning goals and whether we need them at all. In a previous article, I discussed …
It is poetic irony on many levels that weeks after Leonard Cohen releases his album about the threat of death that he passes on, mere days after we saw the least poetic, most crass election campaign end in the United States with an equally dramatic outcome. This points to art, but also to the science of …
There is a point at which information ceases to increase knowledge and understand and begins to undermine it, creating a paradox. When information on nearly anything is more abundant than ever the choices we make about how to engage it become more important than ever. The Information Age has been described as the period where …
Would we invest in something if we had little hard data to suggest what we could expect to gain from that investment? This is often the case with social programs, yet its a domain that has resisted the kind of data-driven approaches to investment that we’ve seen in other sectors and one theory is that we …
