Linus Blog

One of the people I admire a lot, Rolf from Norway, wrote in his blog a couple of weeks back on the way that people react to ideas, based on an interaction he had with some of his colleagues. His post really got me thinking about the way that your ideas, concepts, and thoughts are reacted to.

I am a person who will have a lot of ideas, some of them good, some of them not so good, most of them having lots of obvious flaws when they come out of my head for the first time. When you are sharing about these ideas with people I think you meet (at least!) two basic responses.

The first one (and sadly a very common one) is based on exposing the flaws, critiquing the idea or saying that it won't work. People will generally start "That is a great idea, however did you think about problem X,Y,Z with it". This approach I identify as the approach that Rolf described as having the result of "killing enthusiasm". I can very much relate. When I'm approached with this way of thinking I generally become impatient, maybe even annoyed, or frustrated ...

It's easy to converge on things, we feel a need to become specialists, to get good at something, to feel like experts. And I agree, it is important. However, there's an equally important process, that's so easy to forget, and that is the process of divergence. When we explore new things, see something different, tread outside of what is familiar, something happens in our heads, new ideas can be born, new thinking emerge.

It might not always be easy to see the point of the divergence - the relevance of it might not be clear, and we don't see how it relates to what our real job is. However I'd argue that it has all the impact in the world on our real job, because it gives us new ideas, perspectives and a way to solve problems better or even at all.

I think my lack of blogging the past few months has been a clear sign of too little thinking outside of what my main focus has been - which is to lead and manage AIESEC in Sweden (not that I ever stop exploring completely - it's one of my favorite hobbies!). When in such a ...

As a leader of a non-profit organization (AIESEC) driven mostly by volunteers, you get to see and learn a lot of interesting things about motivation. Since there is no direct monetary profit of being a part of the organization (unlike business etc. where I've also worked), The reason for investing your time and energy into it and making it grow, needs to come from other places.

Our international president, Aman, recently posted a question to all the other presidents from AIESEC in different countries about what this motivation really is, and he posted two videos on TED (Science of Motivation and Why We Do What We Do) as input to the discussion.

In the discussion some early comments came up that there is a major difference between people who are leaders and have stayed a while in AIESEC, and people who are new to AIESEC. Many shared that they felt that as you spent more time in the organization your motivation changed - from initially being focused on what you can get - you tend to move to a focus on what you give.

I think this shift in focus comes from the fact that you become aware of and connected ...

Yesterday I spent the day connecting around the topic of entrepreneurship with other delegates and corporate partners of AIESEC in a space we created called "Youth to Business Forum". We spent the day in open space discussions, panels and workshops to evolve our understanding of entrepreneurship and develop the actions that we need to take to develop entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship in our organization and societies.

Together we asked questions such as how we could support the creation of more entrepreneurs, how we could create businesses with social impact, what our role could be in transforming education, technology and the world through new business ideas, and many more like that.

After all these discussions - our chair of the conference raised an important challenge. He pointed out that we often looked at these discussions in the strict context of AIESEC and AIESEC's relevance. This is important, and it's crucial that we see it from our organization's perspective, however it's not nearly enough. We need, especially as young people, to be able to tackle the big hairy questions - the questions about how we will create a radically better world, the questions about the revolutions we need and can create ...

Throughout the next weeks I'm attending an international conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This conference brings together the leadership of AIESEC in the whole world - over 500 delegates in 107 countries.

During the first few days of this experience we've covered topics such as what leadership is, how our organization creates leadership and where we want to go in the future. One of my reflections that I had throughout the sessions was the importance of believing. Many of us here are leaders who have been in the organization for a number of years - we've seen the ups and downs, and - particularly - we've see the things that recurringly don't work. When faced with these it's easy to become cynical and close your mind. However, the only real way to create change is to find a solution together and then taking the leap of faith to trust in that solution. Only when we do that (and we might not be successful immediately - meaning we need to rinse & repeat...) will we be able to find the truly transformative solutions we need.

I see this happening not only in AIESEC - but in many other organizations & even societies as ...

During the past week I have been a part of the team that have hosted a conference called Scandinavian Leadership Seminar (ScaLDS). This is an annual conference that has for the last few years been set up by AIESEC in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. Together with them we ran this conference bringing together about 100 leaders from all over the Scandinavian countries and abroad.

At these occasions one of the main parts of the content and reason why people are there is the connections, dialogues and reflections that all participants have with each other, and after the conference these are often the things that had the most impact / are remembered the most.  

This, however, has always previously left me slightly frustrated. I am a very action-oriented person and because of this my view of conferences has often been: yes they're critical for our performance - but at the end of the day they're also a distraction from the things we "should be doing".

Lately, my perspective has been changing. I read somewhere that at the end of the day, our core deliverable as knowledge workers is new knowledge. A major way to generate new knowledge is through ...

A couple of years back I was heading "into the wall". For a long period I had been working too much, resting too little and in general having a quite unsustainable lifestyle. This lead me into a condition where all my executive functions was affected - my short-term memory got bad, I couldn't access things from my long-term memory, I had a hard time planning or even structuring my activities and so on.

This is not all that uncommon today, there are an increasing amount of people who are having sick-leave from work due to stress related illnesses or injuries. Stress in the workplace is so pervasive that it sometimes seem that everyone should go through a period of burn-out through our working lives.

So, what causes it all? Well, the obvious triggers are too much work, too little relaxation, etc. However, since experiencing it myself I've wanted to understand it from a broader perspective than that. One explanation that I've really been able to connect with is that stress is due to our working memory becoming overloaded.

Our working memory is the part of our memory which we use to store temporary information in. This memory is ...

I find regular reflection being one of those habits that are really helpful, even crucial once you practice - but quite hard to implement. It's a bit like exercise - when you need it the most, in busy or stressful times, you tend to practice it least. When I do reflect regularly I find that I come up with much more new ideas, I feel more in control over what I'm doing and more content with the thoughts I'm having. 

The first step is just making space for it, having time to sit down and look through what you're doing, what you're thinking and what you're feeling. This is hard enough - when don't you have a million other pressing things to do? For me, I'm trying to at least make it a part of my weekly review. Then I know I have a time that I've set aside when I'm going to do it.

The second step is knowing how to do it. Some people I've worked with have found it really hard to sit down and think about these things, they schedule the time for reflection, but then sit down ...