Serendipity and Learning

Science fiction can make you creative ? Of course it can... Anything can make you creative - including all the "40 ways to become creative" stuff that you see on Pinterest, but question is, are you open to the possibilities your mind creates? Is your mind trained to create those possibilities? And therein lies the answer... Any technique - preferably done over a reasonably regular timeframe - makes the mind attuned to more divergent thinking. But very often, instead of using those edges of divergent thinking, we end up softening them to make them convergent thereby negating the experience itself... Developing thought...

I stumbled upon this recently - on the Time Span of Discretion - a theory propounded by the Late Elliott Jaques . Jaques also noted that effective organizations were comprised of workers of differing time spans of discretion, each working at a level of natural comfort. If a worker's job was beyond their natural time span of discretion, they would fail. If it was less, they would be insufficiently challenged, and thus unhappy. Time span of discretion is about achieving intents that have explicit time frames. And in Jaques model, one can rank discretionary capacity in a tiered system. Level 1 encompasses jobs such as sales associates or line workers handling routine tasks with a time horizon of up to three months. Levels 2 to 4 encompass various managerial positions with time horizons between one to five years. Level 5 crosses over to five to 10 years and is the domain of small company CEOs and large company executive vice presidents. Beyond Level 5, one enters th...