John Carmack talks about “antifragile” idea generation (2015) [video]
I don't believe in the 6 thinking hats methodology (I don't think it has anything to do with psychology, but I do think it has something to say about work), but I think I learned something from reading about it.I have a certain mentality where I will plan a feature, and then I will spend literally forever poking holes in that feature and thinking about all the ways it will fail. This demotivates me greatly.I think it is better to plan the happy path, then take a finite, planned amount of time to mentally test it and note corners and edges, then take a stab at iteration, then go back and re-evaluate. I think this is probably how normal people do this, but I also think it's easy to get stuck on one of those modes. One of my architects is stuck on happy-path mode, and it's really hard to get them to actually think about implementations.---Notes on the 6 hats: I think the important thing is not to get stuck on one hat. You may pick some of these as your focus, but I think it's important to have some balance as well.Hat Color - Original Theme/My themeWhite - Data/Data AnalysisYellow - Optimism/Happy Path Plan, Architectural ViewBlue - Process/ Project Manager, Task management, ScrumBlack - Pessimism/Testing view, how will it go wrongGreen - Creative/Implementation Phase (just write some code)Red - Emotion/Iteration Review, Hot wash