Instead of forcing creativity, recognise when the structure itself is limiting new ideas, writes Barbara Salopek Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits our ability to see novel uses for ...

Any five-year-old has no trouble turning an old blanket and a couple of chairs into an impenetrable fort. But as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ...

"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Marshall McLuhan The most challenging aspect about innovating is rooted in a concept called fixedness. Fixedness is the inability to realize ...

When the average person thinks of what an IT consultant does (as often as they are likely to think about it) they generally picture what they see in movies: a somewhat nerdy guy (it’s usually a guy, ...

“Thinking outside the box,” has become the annoying phrase we hear in commercials and bad business meetings. It stems from an actual psychological concept called functional fixedness. Funnily enough, ...

Hacking is often misunderstood as simply “breaking into computers.” But at its core, hacking is something broader and more fundamental: Hacking means making a system do something it was not meant to ...