Deep diving for innovation

You work for the government and you have to build from scratch a dashboard that measures innovation in your agency. Never mind that your government probably hasn’t even developed a comprehensive system of innovation. Oh, did we mention that you have less than a day to do it?

Welcome to the 2011 Victoria Public Service (VPS) DeepDive^TM innovation workshop. Here, innovators from the Victoria Public Service (VPS)—and earlier in the week the Australian federal government--gathered to design systems that gauge whether their innovation efforts were delivering results. And with that one-day timeframe, it wasn’t going to be easy.

That’s where Deloitte’s DeepDive^TM comes in. An approach for rapid brainstorming and problem solving, DeepDive^TM has been used hundreds of times by Deloitte to help companies, governments, and nonprofits innovate. DeepDive^TM enables teams to create breakthrough solutions in a dramatically shorter time than conventional problem-solving approaches.

Mirror, mirror

The Bush House Telegraph
News and views from the Deloitte Center for Strategic Leadership, Bush House, London

When people select leaders, their brains it seems are conditioned into thinking "might is right." Give the impression of physical frailty and you’re immediately on the also-ran list. Isn’t it time to reverse this ancient prejudice?

Fall, or autumn as we call it here in the UK, is the season of shorter days and longer nights, barer trees, and bigger utility bills. Time to huddle round the focus of the home—the plasma TV screen—and pour yourself a glass of something restorative.

A word of warning, though: If you find yourself misty-eyed and mellow it might not be the wine—it might be the commercial break. According to research recently published by Dr Ian Cook of the University of California (UCLA), ads that feature good-looking models turn our minds—in layman’s terms—to mush.

Watch a commercial that links a product or brand with physical attractiveness and the level of activity in the emotional processing and decision-making parts of your brain falls. You’re more gullible, more uninhibited, less advertising-literate.

Dr Cook’s findings confirm what most of us already knew and they’re unlikely to keep anyone awake at night. Good-looking people influence the choices we make as consumers? You’ve probably already filed that nugget of information under “That’s Life.”