Work In Colour - Work. Think. Live. In Colour
Wednesday 19th January 2011 | 4 comments
There's a new buzz-work in creative thinking circles: flip thinking. It's simple. You take a process, a product, an idea or a dilemma - and flip it on its head.
In a recent article Dan Pink gave an excellent example of flip thinking. He wrote about a teacher called Karl Fisch, with an innovative approach to teaching his high school maths class.
Instead of lecturing about polynomials and exponents during class time - and then giving his students 30 problems to work on at home - Fisch has flipped the sequence. He's recorded his lectures on video and uploaded them to YouTube for students to watch at home. Then, in class, he works with students as they solve problems and experiment with the concepts.
'When you do a standard lecture in class, and then the students go home to do the problems, some of them are lost. They spend a whole lot of time being frustrated and, even worse, doing it wrong,' Fisch told Dan Pink.'The idea behind the videos was to flip it. The students can watch it outside of class, pause it, replay it, view it several times, even mute me if they want. That allows us to work on what we used to do as homework when I'm they're to help students and they're there to help each other.'
It's a great idea - other examples might be getting up in the middle of the night to write, if that's your best (and quietest) time, or doing the fun chores first and leaving the yuck stuff til last, or delivering your product to clients rather than making them come to your shop to buy it, or...?
What could you flip?
Tag: tips
Hi, Joanna! My favourite flip is writing headlines for job ads. Most people start with a blank page/screen and try to think of a clever headline first. I write the entire ad first, after which I'm so well versed with the role and the client that the headline invariably drops out like a spanner from a pack of fish and chips. Best regards, P. :)
Just the image of the spanner dropping out of the fish and chips pack has flipped my thinking :)
So glad I did your journo course, and signed up to keep working in colour ! This is another great find of an idea....wish we'd done advanced maths like that ¡!
Buying a smart phone with a fairly decent camera and signing up for 365 project where you post online a photo a day is a great way of giving me just enough pressure to think creatively a little bit more than I otherwise would during the day. I guess its like a writers blog!
Thanks as always, best wishes for 201
David, good to hear from you and I love the photo idea, thanks!