Problem Solving Psychology

For decades, alarms have sounded about declining engagement. Yet companies continue to struggle with toxic cultures, and the low productivity and unhappiness that go with them. Why is "culture" so difficult to improve? What makes so many good employees check out? Neuroscientist Paul Zak shows that innate brain functions hold the answers. It all boils down to trust. When someone shows you trust, a feel-good jolt of oxytocin surges through your brain and triggers you to reciprocate.

Truth: A User's Guide explores how we can guard against the noise of competing truths, in business, in our personal relationships, and within ourselves, but also how we can use them to our advantage. Written with authority and humour, this is an accessible and illuminating narrative that will find a wide audience among listeners in search of understanding why the meaning of "truth" seems to have gone completely haywire.

Enhance your logic, reason, judgment, and wisdom. Increase your ability to create concise and reasoned arguments using data and evidence to get a genuine conclusion. The Systems Thinker: Analytical Skills aims to raise the level of your mental performance by focusing on the fundamentals of how to use your mind effectively.

In spring 2018, England cricket had a performance problem. The Test team hadn’t won a Test match overseas for nearly two years. Recently crushed in the Ashes, England teams were world ranked 5th, 4th and 2nd across the three formats. The England and Wales Cricket Board approached Ed Smith, asking him to bring in a whole new philosophy. Over the next three years, England’s teams won 7 out of 10 completed matches—better than England had ever performed in the board’s history. Making Decisions shares Ed’s approach to finding success.

Whether you run your own business or work for someone else, you’ve probably got a lot on your plate. Along with the portion of your work that you truly feel like doing comes a generous helping of things you’d rather not do. As consultants, Steve Levinson and Chris Cooper have seen countless clients struggle - and often fail - to do the many success-producing things they know they should do but don’t feel like doing. The Power to Get Things Done will teach you how to consistently turn your good intentions into action so that you can be as successful as possible.

Sharing stories and advice rooted in the science of evolutionary psychology, father and son authors Doug Kenrick and David Lundberg-Kenrick pinpoint the dangers of stone-age problem solving for our lives today, and present a new, systematic way to survive and be happy in the modern world.

The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psychology and other fields, Cass Sunstein casts a bright new light on how change happens.

A design process presents a series of steps, but in real life, it rarely plays out this neatly. Navigating Ambiguity underscores how the creative process isn’t formulaic. This book shows you how to surrender control by being adaptable, curious, and unbiased as well as resourceful, tenacious, and courageous.

Think back to when you were in school. Do you remember learning how to think critically? You were probably taught these skills in your English class while learning how to read and comprehend information. And while now you may do it automatically, at the time it was a process. A sometimes slow, painful process. Why is that? Because unfortunately, many educators do not know how to properly teach critical thinking skills (because they weren’t taught either).The improved intellectual quality of work happens when critical thinking is taught and nurtured in developmental stages.

Research shows that people often wildly misunderstand the state of the world, regardless of age, sex, or education. And though the internet brings us unprecedented access to information, there's little evidence we're any better informed because of it. We may blame cognitive bias or fake news, but neither tells the complete story. Bobby Duffy draws on his research into public perception, offering a sweeping account of the stubborn problem of human delusion: how society breeds it, why it will never go away, and what our misperceptions say about what we really believe.

How do people come up with truly original ideas? The answer is to think outside the box - way outside. For the past decade, Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade, professors of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School, have studied inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and artists. These people, or “aliens,” as the authors call them, are able to make leaps of creativity, and use five patterns of thinking that distinguish them from the rest of us.

We solve countless problems - big and small - every day. With so much practice, why do we often have trouble making simple decisions - much less arriving at optimal solutions to important questions? Are we doomed to this muddle - or is there a practical way to learn to think more effectively and creatively? In this enlightening, entertaining, and inspiring book, Edward Burger tells us how we can become far better at solving real-world problems by learning creative puzzle-solving skills using simple, effective thinking techniques.

Leadership is a set of abilities with which a lucky few are born. They're the natural relationship builders, master negotiators and persuaders, and agile and strategic thinkers. The good news for the rest of us is that those abilities can be developed. In The Leader's Brain: Enhance Your Leadership, Build Stronger Teams, Make Better Decisions, and Inspire Greater Innovation with Neuroscience, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative Director Michael Platt explains how.

Why do we lose money? It's easy to blame the economy or the financial markets - but the real trouble lies in the decisions we make. As a financial planner, Carl Richards grew frustrated watching people he cared about make the same mistakes over and over. They were letting emotion get in the way of smart financial decisions. He named this phenomenon - the distance between what we should do and what we actually do - "the behavior gap". He found that once people understood it, they started doing much better.

What is the best way for a company to innovate? That's exactly the wrong question. The better question: How can organizations get the maximum possible value from their innovation investments? Advice recommending "innovation vacations" and the luxury of failure may be wonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. But this audiobook addresses the innovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. They want fast, frugal, and high-impact innovations.

Who are the greatest innovators in the world? You're probably thinking Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford - the usual suspects.

This book isn't about them. It's about people who are just as innovative, entrepreneurial, and visionary as the Jobses, Edisons, and Fords of the world, except they're not in Silicon Valley. They're in the street markets of Sao Paulo and Guangzhou, and the rubbish dumps of Lagos. They are pirates, slum dwellers, computer hackers, dissidents, and inner city gang members.

The creative mode in your brain is like a butterfly. It's beautiful and erratic, hard to catch, and highly valued as a result. If you want to capture it, you need a net. Enter the executive mode, the task-oriented network in your brain that helps you tie your shoes, run a meeting, or pitch a client. To succeed, you need both modes to work together - your inner butterfly to be active and free, but your inner net to be ready to spring at the right time and create that "aha!" moment. But is there any way to trigger these insights, beyond dumb luck?

Apply systems thinking in your problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning without the need to become a technical professional. Think in Systems is a concise information manual offering high-level problem-solving methods for personal and global issues. The guide presents the main features of systems thinking in an understandable and everyday manner, helping you to develop this skill top analysts and world leaders use.

How "Aha!" really happens....When do you get your best ideas? You probably answer "At night" or "In the shower" or "Stuck in traffic". You get a flash of insight. Things come together in your mind. You connect the dots. You say to yourself, "Aha! I see what to do." Brain science now reveals how these flashes of insight happen. It's a special form of intuition. We call it strategic intuition, because it gives you an idea for action - a strategy. This new book by William Duggan is the first full treatment of strategic intuition.

We've decided by consensus that consensus is good. In In Defense of Troublemakers, psychologist Charlan Nemeth argues that this principle is completely wrong: left unchallenged, the majority opinion is often biased, unoriginal, or false. It leads planes and markets to crash, causes juries to convict innocent people, and can quite literally make people think blue is green. In the name of comity, we embrace stupidity. We can make better decisions by embracing dissent. Dissent forces us to question the status quo, consider more information, and engage in creative decision-making.