Brown and Antonelli use the term to describe a social, collaborative way of working. But I’m using it to name a style of cognitive investigation that mixes the concrete and the abstract, toggling between the details and the big picture, zooming out to see the wood and back in again to examine the bark on the tree.

Puzzles offer us the satisfaction of answering a question even while you’re missing the point completely. A society or an organisation that thinks only in terms of puzzles is one that is too focused on the goals it has set, rather than on the possibilities it can’t yet see.

Psychologists tend to divide the human psyche into intellect, emotions, and drives, and the major explanations of curiosity emphasise only one part of this trinity. But curiosity seems to issue from all three at once.

Curiosity is the sweetest form of dissatisfaction.

Dan Rothstein; you can read more about his foundation’s work and techniques in his book Make Just One Change.

we learn better when we find learning difficult.

Sometime in the early 1480s, Leonardo da Vinci made a doodle in his notebook. He seems to have bought a new pen and was trying it out, absent-mindedly. What he wrote was a wandering riff on the phrase ‘Dimmi’ (‘Tell me’). ‘Tell me … tell me whether … tell me how things are …’

In his compelling book on education, How Children Succeed, Paul Tough combined first-hand reporting from American schools with evidence from academic research to argue that we have overestimated the extent to which successful learning depends on intelligence, and underestimated the importance of ‘non-cognitive traits’ – put simply, character.

A fundamental challenge – in business as in life – is to integrate the micro and macro such that all things make sense. Humanities majors may well learn a great deal about the world. But they don’t really learn career skills through their studies. Engineering majors, conversely, learn in great technical detail. But they might not learn why, how, or