The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Berger: Companies should replace mission statements with 'how might we' questions
“Companies should forget about mission statements. They should have a mission question. And the mission question should begin with how might we And whatever it is they're trying to do in their field that they haven't gotten to yet, the really big thing, the rea…”
Berger: Romanticizing failure as positive is unrealistic and ignores human nature
“I think there's a little bit of a false thing out there now around failure that, that we should be happy about failure and we should just Embrace it like it's the greatest thing that ever happened to us. You know, I, I'm sorry, that does not strike me as reali…”
Berger: Isolating creative teams tells remaining employees they are not creative
“I think that everyone is creative. And I think if you create a division within an organization that says these people are creative and the rest of you aren't I think it's a, it sends a bad message to .”
Berger: Open offices are primarily real estate cost cuts disguised as culture
“A lot of times when companies are doing this, it's a real estate decision too. I mean, you know, it's a lot easier to put an office together that is an open office because you need a lot less space, you know?”
Berger: Constant information flow dampers creativity by trapping people in react mode
“One of the biggest issues confronting or putting a damper on creativity now is all of the stuff that's coming at us all the time. And I think to me, that's the, it's an enemy of creativity. You know it can at times inspire create creativity because you can com…”
Berger: Creators need committed three-to-four-hour uninterrupted blocks for flow
“I really think we need to create those blocks somewhere in our day and then really stick to them. Like don't get up and leave. If, you know, if in the first hour you're having trouble because you have to sort of commit to the three hours or the four hours. And…”
Berger: Early Conditioning Rewards Having Answers Over Asking Questions
“The message we send to children at a very early age is that the reward goes to the person who has the answer. Not to the person who asks the question.”
Berger: Clayton Christensen said business leaders view questioning as inefficient
“Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School used when he was, you know, I talked to him about questioning and he said the attitude among business leaders is that questioning is inefficient.”
Berger: Perceived Knowledge and Expertise Actively Suppress Questioning
“What conspires against questioning is knowledge, you know, knowledge. Is if we feel we know something, then we don't have to ask.”
Berger: Naive Outsider Questions Often Force Experts to Rethink Decades of Assumptions
“The outsider can come in and ask the totally naive why question the way a four-year-old child would ask it, and it's amazing how often that leads to something dramatic. That can lead to that can just cause people to step back and say, whoa, wait a minute, you …”
Berger: Innovators Distinguish Themselves by Taking Ownership of Questions
“Ownership of a question is, is what every innovator does. Every innovator starts out with a question like why hasn't someone come up with a better way to do X? Okay. And most of us, when we ask that question you know, we're using our snow shovel and it doesn't…”
Berger: Proliferation of digital outlets has devalued freelance journalism
“What has changed for the worse is, I think, a devaluing of the content. Because it's so easy to get yourself out there, because there are so many outlets it feels to me like you know, the content is often seen as not being worth as much As it was years ago, yo…”
Berger: Optimal creative thinking requires mildly immersive, low-distraction activities
“It seems to be, you need to do kind of some kind of a low a low an activity that, that immerses where you become immersed in the activity, but not so much. That you can't think and daydream. And so that's sort of the sweet spot, you know, finding those activit…”
Berger: Museums trigger epiphanies by offering inspiration without cognitive overload
“Museums are the custodians of epiphanies. And so he, what he was saying is that, well, he meant that on two, in two ways. Number one, museums are full of things that were epiphanies for the people who created them. But at the same time, you have epiphanies in …”
Berger: Questioning is at the core of design thinking and problem-solving
“As I started to analyze design and design thinking, I kept coming back to questioning. It always seemed like questioning was at the center of everything. It was how designers tended to think. And how they how they solve problems and how they framed a challenge…”
Berger splits his workday into online mornings and offline afternoons
“What I do is I now try to separate my day into an online portion of the day and an offline portion because I found I can't do, I just find the online part of my day just takes over and it will dictate my behavior in ways that I can't even control. So, so what …”
Berger: Rough ideation works better on paper before drafting on computers
“I feel more creative on paper and I don't know why I've heard other people say that too. I just feel like when I'm in that really rough stage of things, I want to be able to scratch things out. I want to be able to use arrows to point this over to that. And it…”