writing

7 July 2017

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Jackson G. Lu and al’s “‘Switching On” creativity” provides new and counter-intuitive evidence on how to boost creativity. While many focus on the negative impacts of multi-tasking, this paper demonstrates that frequent back and forth between tasks can increase one’s capacity to produce novel, unique, and useful ideas. This is because task-switching prevents “cognitive fixation”, i.e. getting the mind stuck on one path or a dead end. People do not typically select task-switching as a work method. And they don’t naturally realize when they reach cognitive fixation. So, task-switching for increased creativity needs scheduling. This is useful evidence as creative thinking is an increasingly big asset in the workplace. But as we embrace task switching, let me add two personal notes: (i) not all assignments require creativity, and (ii) the positive benefits identified by this research are valid when switching between two creative tasks (not between one creative task and [insert social media of choice]).

Maria Popova’s “10 learnings from 10 years of Brain Pickings” distills the substance of her blogging decade into 10 lessons. I am sharing these because I often find her blog inspiring: Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind; do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone; be generous; build pockets of stillness into your life; when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them; presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity; expect anything worthwhile to take a long time; seek out what magnifies your spirit; don’t be afraid to be an idealist; don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Each lesson is unpacked with accompanying book recommendations that make a good summer reading list.

My graph this week is from the World Unplugged study. It summarizes how 1000 students in 10 different countries felt after unplugging for 24 hours. Note the super high levels of negative emotions. This is old news as the data came out of a 2010 survey. But as we enter the summer season, it is a good reminder of the need for regular digital detoxes.

My quote is from Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad which is on my summer reading pile: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime”.

2 June 2017

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Nora Rosenberg et al’s “The effect of HIV counselling and testing on HIV acquisition in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review” finds that despite big investments in HIV counselling and testing, we don’t know much about its impact on prevention. That is because this impact has not been systematically evaluated: only 8 decently-designed studies were found for sub-Saharan Africa. And they show that individual HIV counselling and testing is neither consistently good nor bad for prevention. These important findings come out of a systematic review of the literature on the topic. Systematic reviews are often seen as the “poor relation” of research methods. They don’t bring academic glory. Yet, as argued here before, they produce the most useful evidence for policy makers. And with the advances of natural language processing and text mining techniques, we could automate large parts of the search process to increase our capacity to conduct systematic reviews that inform our work. I, for one, am excited about the future of systematic reviews.

I spoke to several colleagues about Mia Schaefer’s “The new kid” this week. The school-commissioned personal essay describes a 14-year-old’s mixed emotions about having a new baby brother. I thought she did a good job at articulating this. But of course, as the mother, I am biased.

My graph is from SITRA’s “This is how we create a circular economy in Finland” because it is super clear and because SITRA is hosting the World Circular Economy Forum next week. We pointed to the rise of the circular (or sharing) economy, in Horizons, two years ago. When looking at the list of speakers it struck me that all UN professionals engaging in that conversation were environmentalists. Why? There are huge opportunities for “social” practitioners in this space from restructuring service delivery systems, to reducing inequalities, to formalizing invisible economic relations, to fundraising. So I was happy to also see this week that NESTA had selected 8 organizations from the social sector to support via their ShareLab Fund.

My quote this week is from Cate Blanchett’s interview with David Miliband in Town and Country: “Being a mother was, for me, undeniably a central point of connection to the refugee crisis. Learning that more than 10 million of the world’s refugees are children, and then meeting refugee parents in Jordan and Lebanon who had fled to protect the lives and futures of their children—well, that was personally heartbreaking and galvanizing. As a parent I connected with their desire to protect their children and provide them with every possible opportunity in life: a safe home, an education—but most important, a childhood free from the horrors of war.”

And to make you smile at the end of a week full of bad world news, you get this.

26 May 2017

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Megan Roberts’ “The state of the world: report card on international cooperation” summarizes the main findings of the Council of Councils’ 2017 Report Card. It is depressing. The data come from asking the heads of 25 think tanks across the world to grade international cooperation efforts on global challenges. The 2016 overall grade is C minus, down from previous years in the aggregate as well as throughout specific issues from climate change to global health to global trade and conflict. The main driver behind this poor score is the global wave of nationalism coupled with the declining trust in institutions. The report card also ranks global risks and opportunities. Top 3 risks: conflict between states, transnational terrorism, and internal conflicts. Interestingly they are all security-related while the WEF Global Risks Report 2017 had three environmental risks topping its list this year. Top 3 opportunities: combating international terrorism, promoting global health, and advancing development. I cannot draw any comparison with the WEF report as it only looks at risks, contributing to the overall depressing feeling.

Andrew Mayeda’s “World Bank’s star economist is sidelined over war on words” recounts how the World Bank’s Development Economics Group staff mutinied against chief economist Romer and his rough demands to make research more straightforward. Romer requested that researchers connect their work to public debates, define clear purpose for each publication, and make emails shorter. He also had strong views on style, asking for less convoluted wording and more use of active voice while tracking frequency of “and” in reports (which he would not clear if above 2.6%). From this story it seems that requests were conveyed in a painful way. This aside, the rules seem pretty good to me. Especially as I recalled this World Bank research showing that while the Bank spent one quarter of its country service budget on reports, one third were never downloaded and only 13% were downloaded more than 250 times in their shelf-times.

A little extra this week as it is a long week-end for some of us and Bill Gates just shared his summer reading picks. I read two. Homo Deus which I recommended here as a good cerebral trip. It was no surprise to see it in the list as Gates had loved the prequel. What was surprising to me was to see Maylis de Kerangal’s The heart which is more of an emotional trip. de Kerangal is a great writer who can make a page turner out of the science of building a bridge. In The heart, which was entitled “mending the living” in French, you follow a heart being extracted from the body of a young man killed in a car accident to its transplantation in the body of a middle age woman dying of a heart malfunction. It is about grief and how every person around these two protagonists deal with it. It is powerful. I enjoyed it.

My map this week is from Fred Stolle’s “We discovered 1.8 million square miles of forest in the desert”. Stolle and colleagues counted trees on satellite images and found the equivalent of a whole Amazon worth of trees hiding in drylands and deserts. This is good news for the planet. But it also good news for the 2 billion people, most of whom very poor, who live in drylands and depend on these trees for their livelihoods.

My quote this week is from Dame Helen Mirren’s “Tulane commencement speech“: “We do need you to fix things, to make things right, to answer the big and troubling questions of this extraordinary modern world. How is it that we have figured out how to put everything from our resting pulse rate to every book or song we’d ever want to read or listen to on our iPhones – and yet for six years we haven’t found a way to stop little children in Syria from being murdered by poisonous gas?”

5 May 2017

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The Financial Times Foreign Affairs chief Gideon Rachman published “Easternization: Asia’s rise and America’s decline from Obama to Trump and beyond”. I have not read the book but this interview gives the gist of the argument. It is not new, it strengthens the message around a trend that many have documented. What was interesting to me was Jessica Mathews saying that she was not convinced because (i) global leadership takes more than global economic (and even military) power; (ii) China has to balance between global, regional and national hot issues; and (iii) there are other forces in “the East”, such as the rise of India, that are still looking West. And what was equally interesting was to read, in parallel, Danny Quah’s (Eastern?) perspective. In “Can Asia lead the world?”, Quah agrees that it takes more than a growing economic, military and population footprint to lead globally. He argues that Asia’s leadership strategy should focus on soft power and that its driving values could be different from liberal democracy. Ultimately, he says that Asia will only be able to lead if it has a story. For him, that vision does not exist, yet.

Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson’s “Writing that works” is the book I recommended when a colleague asked me for guidance on improving writing skills. I love that book. It identifies the most common writing weaknesses and gives specific tips that you can use to practice, practice, and practice until you get it right. I don’t, so I go back to it regularly and am never disappointed. They give guidance on how to write memos that get things done, plans that make things happen, proposals that sell ideas, and resumes that get interviews. It is a good way to spend 11 dollars. At one point, I also had Josh Bernoff’s “10 top writing tips and the psychology behind them” pasted on the wall next to my desk so that I could check it from time to time. I should put it back.

My graph of the week is from NYU Center on International Cooperation’s Global Peace Operational Review which, among other things, tracks the new Secretary-General (SG)’s senior appointments (USG and ASG) throughout the system by gender and nationality. 17 male vs 14 female so far in 2017. That’s for his new appointees. Overall, at this level, the situation today is 71% male vs 29% female. Not great. The SG committed to reaching parity at senior level by 2021 and across the system before 2030 and he asked his Gender Parity Task Force to come up with a plan to get there. Let’s watch and see.

My quote this week is from 80-year old Nobel Prize Daniel Kahneman: “There are studies showing that when you present evidence to people they get very polarized even if they are highly educated. They find ways to interpret the evidence in conflicting ways. Our mind is constructed so that in many situations where we have beliefs and we have facts, the beliefs come first. That’s what makes people incapable of being convinced by evidence. So education by itself is not going to change the culture. Changing critical thinking through education is very slow and I’m not very optimistic about it.”