TED Archives

Broaden the insight and creativity of your team – Use TED wisdom to stretch your thinking

Please help us to get the word out in just two clicks – click here – then click the like button

Why take this challenge?

Introduce regular wisdom sessions into your team meetings

Stimulate creativity through broad insight from loosely related fields

Encourage your team to share what interests them

Graphic image reflecting different pathways to take the adventure

There is masses of free wisdom available through the internet. The issue for most of us is sifting the nuggets of pure gold from the mega-masses that aren’t. One really good way of doing that is to find sites that are consistently good at providing quality, and one such site is TED.com.

The wisdom on TED ranges across a broad selection of topics, delivered eloquently in around 20 minutes by renowned experts in their field. One such talk (included in the Pack section below) is Tim Harford’s ‘A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity’. In it he explains how the greatest and most creative thinkers throughout time had interests in a wide range of disciplines.

As he puts it “It’s easier to think outside the box if you spend your time clambering from one box into another.” And this works also for us mere mortals; I too have found this fact to be true for me in my work.

+ Green track - taking it in your stride

+ Blue track - a bit of a workout (click to open)

+ Red track - stepping up to bat (click to open)

Developing Team Wisdom

The red track is about deliberately making wisdom sessions a part of your team gatherings for a while. This might grow to encompass all sorts of things, but to start it off we propose the following approach:

If they are not already familiar with it, introduce your team to TED.com. Then explain that over the next few meetings each of them will bring an interesting TED talk to share with the rest of the team. And create a rota.

Then in each subsequent meeting, the person on the rota shares their chosen TED video, and leads a discussion of the team using the following questions:

If we were being creative, how many relevances could we find from that video to what we are seeking to do?
Are there any ideas from this that we might want to take further in some way?

If you are concerned about taking time out of a busy schedule to do this, consider for a moment: The world is becoming more complex around us as more links are found between things. As routine is automated, our creative faculties will become increasingly key to our future success. If we simply keep our heads down and work harder and harder, it is going to be less and less fun. And the next time we look up and look around, it could be too late for us.

You may find the following resources helpful in tackling your challenge or in gaining further benefits from the skills and insights you develop

To catch up on past adventures you may have missed, feel free to browse our Adventures Library

Let us know how you get on.
Share your experience, your insights and your observation using the comments section at the bottom of the Linkedin post.

Please help us to extend and develop our community by sharing what you are doing. Click on the links below where you are most active, and then like or share the article to your network. Thank you for helping.

And share your progress and insights with the Twitter LbA community using #leadingbyadventure

Useful links:

Introduction to Leading by Adventure  |  What we mean by spirituality?  |  Why Adventure
Adventures to date   |  I did it, but it didn’t work very well   |  How do I know if it is working
Bringing this thinking into your meetings   |  Adventure & Mental Health
Leading by Adventure community   |  Explore Strategic Support options

#037 – Wisdom – A word from the wise