The future belongs to those that can do two things: lead and solve interesting problems.
The challenge is that the organised educational system is about compliance, accreditation and most of all, certifying that students know how to obey.
~ Seth Godin1, Entrepreneur Magazine 11/2014
In anticipation of moving my family from Singapore to London, I made several trips to the city and surrounding countryside to explore the range of schools on offer and find one that was a good fit for my soft-spoken, bookish, academically-average son. I had a standard list of questions for the admissions person and the same list for the headmaster or headmistress. Generally, I received standard answers in return. My favourite question was, “How do you teach innovation?”
My favourite answer came from the headmaster of an outstanding prep school (ages 3 to 13) nestled in the equally outstanding greenery of Kent. “That’s a great question,” he replied gesticulating enthusiastically, “but it’ll be much better to show you the answer than tell you.” Well, this was exciting and so far the most promising answer I’d had from some 15 schools already. We donned our jackets against the October chill and dashed across a frosty courtyard straight to the art room. “Look,” he pronounced, after the kids had all sung good morning to him the way good prep pupils do, “they are making Salvador Dalí inspired instruments.” He beamed. Here’s a paper mâché drum that doesn’t look like a drum at all. Aren’t they clever?” Indeed, it didn’t look like a drum, nor could a sound be wrought from it, but it was suitably Dalían.
“Wonderful! But how do you teach them to innovate?” I persisted, “To make new and useful things?” We’d come this far in the cold and I wanted answers.
“Well, you’ve just seen the art class and we have music and drama – our drama department is famous for its jazzy nativity plays. That’s very new. Our teachers are very creative, too.”
“I see. You teach art, music and drama but not innovation?” I was pushing him, he was very proud of his master’s degree in education (from Oxford) and I wanted to know how much he thought about his school’s role in promoting relevant life skills.
Unfortunately, the conversation ended shortly thereafter. His parting words were, “Innovation is a by-product of all these other things and honestly, no one can expect children to innovate at this age. If they seem particularly gifted in the arts they may choose to move on to a design college from here. Although our children generally move on to the more competitive grammar school2 sector.”
Despite visiting several more “good” and “outstanding” schools in different areas, I never received a better answer. It seems the general view is that innovation is the offspring of creative talent alone. Perhaps I visited the wrong schools? Perhaps I should have visited a technical college focusing on art and design? Maybe you agree with him, maybe you think I’m being a bit harsh? Aren’t creative subjects enough?
Innovation Nation3 2008, is a white paper setting out the blueprint for the UK becoming the most innovative country in the world.
The most innovative country in the world!
Innovation, it claims, is essential to the UK’s economic prosperity and quality of life. As such, innovative solutions are to be fostered in government, business and public services. It goes on to remind us that without innovation public services will be unable to meet their own challenges. It suggests that, education must adopt innovation at all levels, ensuring that efficient and imaginative models of innovation already developed in the private sector are recruited to the best possible purposes.
I accept that change happens slowly but that paper was published many years ago and my son only has eight years left at school. His current school just bought four 3D printers for every year group. They believe that exposure to new technologies is the foundation of innovation. The kids are having a blast printing puppies and Eiffel towers – but has my son ever come home with something new? With a new way of using a fork or a textbook? Has he been tasked with solving a new problem in a new way? Does he have a formula for doing this? No, no and no. Technology is an enabler of innovation but the spark that gives birth to a new idea has to come from somewhere.
We don’t need to remind Samsung, Marks and Spencer, Walmart, McKinsey, Mercers, Maersk, etc., that they have to continuously create. Their quest is no longer merely to solve problems through innovation but to create useful products or solutions and then drive revenue through also creating the need for those solutions.
Companies that innovate are not only stocked with artists and industrial designers but talented individuals from all different sectors and backgrounds who have learnt how to innovate. Innovation is a skill acquired in the same way as driving a car or operating an accounting package. The real question is: do schools know how to teach innovation?
The White Paper’s suggestion that the public sector adopt corporate models of innovation is a reasonable starting point. It sounds pretty straightforward, go out and find a working model that generates innovation, tweak it for your audience, say, a class of 12-year-olds. Teach it, let them experiment, teach them how to fail properly, let them experiment some more and then grade those 12-year-olds on what they were able to create in exactly the same way as you would grade a creative writing essay or teach honesty, responsibility and respect. Is this possible and if so, can it really be this simple?
You may be shaking your head right now and saying, “Tremaine, you’re missing the point, I’m not creative, my partner is not creative so it’s no surprise that my child is not creative. I think I’ll just skip this section on creativity.”
Not so fast.
I don’t know your child, but if you happen to believe that he or she isn’t all that creative and shouldn’t be expected to innovate, then I’m quite happy to tell you that you are wrong with a 98% probability. In fact, I’m willing to go so far as to say that you, mom or dad, teacher or caregiver, were born a creative genius. So was I – with a 98% probability.
That’s a big statement that I’m happy to make. In the 1960s Dr George Land was commissioned to devise a test to help the folks at NASA sort the most creative engineers and scientists from the rest.4 NASA were terrifically pleased with the results and what they were able to learn from them. According to Dr Land, the test was so simple even children could take it. So they did. He used the same questionnaire to test the level of innate creativity of a sample of 1,600 children aged three to five, representative of the American population at the time. What makes this exercise more valuable than most others is that those same children were retested at 10 years old, and again at 15. The results were provocative and still reverberate rather eerily today.
The percentage of children considered to have the highest level of creativity (creative genius) per age tested were as follows:
• Amongst 5 year olds: 98%
• Amongst 10 year olds: 30%
• Amongst 15 year olds: 12%
• Same test given to 280,000 adults: 2%
Remember, exactly the same test was applied at every age group.
Land’s conclusion was, and still is today, that, “non-creative behaviour is learned”. I must say, his results are both compelling and intuitive. If non-creative behaviour can be learned, then surely it can be overwritten?
You know your child will have to conform at school, will have to colour within the lines and use only the methods taught to solve maths and science problems, even if they have a better one of their own. How can you ensure that they have a skills inventory to call upon when needed to solve life’s unimagined or currently unimaginable problems in new and useful ways? How can you foster, rather than chip away, at their inbuilt creative mojo?
Counterintuitively, the very first step is not to teach them how to tap their creative juices but rather to build up the skill that they will need most when creating something new – resilience. Resilience is nothing more than the skill of failing successfully, repeatedly.
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1 The future of education and the current state of marketing, Dan Schawbel interviewing Seth Godin for Entrepreneur Magazine 3/11/2014
2 A grammar school is an academically selective state school in England.
3 Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, UK
4 Breaking point and beyond by George Land and Beth Jarman, HarperBusiness, 1993
In some cultures, struggle is a sign that I’m learning, in others struggle is a sign that I’m stupid.1
~ Dr James W Stigler, UCLA.
Did anyone ever teach you how to fail? Really fail? To find the inscrutable seeds of success planted deep within the rubble of a devastating defeat?
We diligently teach our children what it takes to succeed but do we also teach them what it takes to fail? Or do we just wing it? Overcoming failure is a survival tactic and even if you don’t specifically teach it to your children they will learn “failure” from you in the same way they pick up your accent and beliefs about the world.
I grew up on a farm in Africa. A childhood of fruit orchards, pine forests and endless rolling hills where my brother and I could ride our horses unsupervised until hunger or darkness forced us to return home. At 14 years old I graduated from riding ponies to horses and Mona Lisa, a fiery warmblood mare, arrived in our stables. She was mine and gorgeous: muscles like twisted rope lined her flank below a chestnut coat, shiny as a new penny.
Unfortunately, our relationship was fraught from the beginning. I preferred working inside an arena while she preferred working outside of it. We were equally headstrong but Mona had the weight advantage. She bolted me off almost every time I rode her in an enclosed arena. And what does a rider do when she falls off her horse? She gets back on, again and again and again. Every rider knows this. After several consecutive falls I grew anxious around my horse. Finally, she tossed me over her head into the crossbars of a jumping fence and shattered my nose and my nerves. Even then, the only strategy I had for dealing with this failure was to get back on. Except I no longer wanted to get back on. So I didn’t. Mona was sold and I never owned another horse.
Now that’s a story you won’t find on my Facebook feed. There’s no happy ending, no triumph in the face of adversity, no lesson to inspire others. Through this my parents taught me the only thing they knew about dealing with failure: to stand up, dust myself off and get back on the horse. Ironically, if they had taught me how to fail well, I wouldn’t have felt like such a failure. If I had known how to fall well – falling off wouldn’t have been the end of my riding career, just a phase and a challenge.
On the journey to an unknowable future, your children will fall and fail in new and interesting ways. Their attempts at creativity will be judged and their innovations will be rejected before they are accepted. Strangely enough it’s the most gifted, the most well-resourced children that seem most likely to fail at failure. Dominic Randolph, head of Riverdale Country School, one of New York City’s most prestigious private schools, tells it as it is2 when he says, “People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capability to be able to handle that.”
What does failure mean to you? Is it something you avoid and prefer not to dwell on? Something you blame other people for? Something you don’t speak about because it’s too painful or embarrassing? Something that you can almost always find an excuse for? Do your children ever see you explore your own failures or do they only see the damage and hurt left behind?
Fill these in for a quick tour of your relationship with failure:
My most public failure was: ________________________________
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My most devastating failure was: ____________________________
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The failure I’m most grateful for was: _________________________
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The failure that was most important to my success was: _________
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I’m guessing you didn’t actually write anything down this time. Few people do in this section because we are talking about failure and that’s uncomfortable to even think about. Putting it in writing makes it seem so concrete. If I’d asked you about your successes, you’d most likely be all over the page with your pen. Either way, if you had ready answers for any of these it shows that you have given your failures some thought and not just brushed them under the carpet of things you have no control over. I’m not going to ask you what you learnt from these failures because we all take what we need from our own disappointments, if not we’d fail in the same way over and again. Without a doubt, failure has been important to you, yet as parents we go to extraordinary lengths to protect our children from it.
“Parents see failure as a source of pain for their child instead of an opportunity for him or her to say, I can deal with this. I’m strong,” says Madeline Levine PhD and author of The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids.3
Professor Johannes Haushofer teaches psychology and public affairs at Princeton and found that his students felt failure, when it happened, was uniquely personal to each of them. Let’s face it: anyone can look at your CV on LinkedIn and see your successes, ditto with Facebook but these only show a portion of your life’s experiences and, almost never, your failures, frustrations or setbacks. To someone who is young and new at the failure game it may well seem like everyone else is more successful than they are. To console a friend who had suffered a non-success, Haushofer created a CV of his failures. It includes every one of his research papers that had been rejected, every degree programme he didn’t get into and all the research funding that he had been denied. This alternative CV was so popular, and inspiring, that he published it online for all to see in early 2016 noting a meta-failure at the end, “This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work.”4
Both parenting lore and common sense require us to have the birds and the bees talk with our children before puberty. What if it also required the failure talk? For some parents, this would be even harder than the S.E.X talk but not quite as hard as the terrorism talk. It helps if we think about failure as a school subject with a Capital F and a lesson plan that can be adapted for different ages and maturity levels. Here are some ideas for a lesson in failure.
Subject: Failure
Objective of lesson: To impart strategies to fail well
Related topics that draw on this subject: innovation, achievement, self esteem, life
Timing of lesson: Lesson can be administered at any time or when child is experiencing a failure as evidenced through frustration, tears, strong language and mood swings or withdrawing from friends, being unusually quiet and/or experiencing low self esteem.
Lesson plan:
1. Ask the child: “What is failure? Can you give some examples?”
2. Listen to their explanation and examples then gently guide them with: “Failure is information.”
Then explain:
Failure is an incredibly rich data point and important input into being successful. If success were a cake, failure would be a key ingredient. We don’t always think of failure as an important ingredient in something good because it’s not sweet like icing sugar or fun like cracking eggs, it’s more like the bitter baking powder that interacts with the other ingredients to make the cake rise. Even if you had enough sugar, flour and egg, without a teaspoon of baking powder, you’d have a sweet, lumpy rock that would go straight into the bin.
Your failure assignment:
If failure were a school project, parents and children alike would want to know how to ace it. This is harder than you may think. How you respond to your child’s early failures greatly influences their reserves of resilience and ability to fail well. How would your parenting skills in this area be graded?
If you’re not sure, try this.
Score yourself as objectively as possible on the following, starting with 0 points:
• When your child experiences personal failure, do you remove the cause of the failure in order to protect him from its repercussions? Less 2 points.
• Do you attempt to turn the failure into a quick-fix success so that your child can return to being happy? Less 2 points.
• Do you insist that your child find the cause of their failure and guide her in how to do so? Plus 5 points.
• When your child takes too long to find the cause of the failure, do you step in and point it out because the cause is obvious and you are running out of time or patience or really just want your child to be happy again as soon as possible? Less 5 points.
• Once the cause of the failure has been identified, can your child explain, in her own words, how the fault caused the failure? Plus 5 points.
• Do you tell your child how to fix the fault that caused the failure so that he can get on with it and be happy again? Less 5 points.
• Do you teach your child how to blame others for the fault that caused the failure by pointing out others’ failures? This might include terms such as, “It’s not your fault that nobody bought your lemonade, this neighbourhood is full of selfish people.” Less 10 points.
• Do you help your child plot the steps that led to their failure and then look for the leverage point, or points, that could have changed the outcome – as illustrated in the case study below? Plus 10 points.
If you scored positively then congratulate yourself, most of us don’t get more than an F for teaching our children how to fail well.
Case study: Lonely Lemonade Stand
Jimmy wants to buy 10 packs of Match Atax playing cards – the latest football game card craze. He has no cash because he spent his pocket and birthday money on a Lego Star Wars Death Star kit. However, a prodigious lemon tree grows in his back garden and 1kg of sugar sits on the pantry shelf. Lemon and sugar is mixed with fizzy water from his soda stream machine and offered to the children in the nearby playground on Friday afternoon at 4pm. Jimmy is a shrewd business boy and knows that if he hands out too many samples, less children will actually buy the drink. He gives samples to his two best friends only. They drink it, don’t say much and move on to the swings. One mom feels sorry for Jim and buys a cup but doesn’t drink it. No one else buys any lemonade. Jimmy is devastated and goes home with big tears and a heavy heart. He tells his dad how awful it was out there in the sun. How he thought he did everything right but it still didn’t work. He also reminds his dad that, instead of asking for extra pocket money, he used his own initiative and tried to help himself but now is left with no cash to show for his efforts and flat lemonade that can’t be reused.
If you were Jimmy’s parent, what would you do next? I would be incredibly proud of my Jim boy. I’d most likely top up his piggy bank to reward his independence and efforts – clearly he deserves those Match Atax cards. I might subtract the cost of the bag of sugar though, because Jimmy should understand input costs. This would leave Jimmy with nothing to help him deal with bigger failures later on. Failure may be data of the richest kind, but unless you extract it from a situation, it remains worthless. What is this data telling us and how can we help Jimmy make the most of it? The answer is not: “I’ll ask Jimmy what he learnt from this”, because without your guidance Jimmy may only learn that he can’t rely on his friends to support him.
Try this rather...
Help Jimmy understand what variables were involved in the failure – time of day, day of week, lemonade, location of stall, taste testers, price charged, parents’ cash on hand, etc. Ask Jimmy to think about each one in relation to his ultimate goal which was to get children in the playground to buy (not necessarily drink) a cup of his lemonade.
Let’s have a look at some of those variables:
Time of day: Kids come home on the school bus at around 3:30pm. They usually have a snack and then they hit the park armed with water bottles full of cold water because it is hot, hot, hot in Singapore.
Location of stall: In the playground and very visible.
Taste testers: These were his friends and even if the drink was awful, they wouldn’t tell him because they wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.
Cash: Kids don’t carry cash. They didn’t know that Jimmy would have a pop up stall on a random Friday afternoon. He didn’t advertise. Nannies and parents usually don’t bring handbags down to the neighbourhood park and don’t really want to drag the kids back home to get 50c for a glass of lukewarm lemonade.
Can you see how Jimmy could work through each of these data points by himself and think about what he could change in order for his stall to make money? Jimmy’s dad could simply pay away his pain with extra pocket money or help him create a diagnostic template for project Failure.
Children who are encouraged to diagnose and understand their small “starter” failures will be better equipped to deal with the bigger ones that will inevitably come later in life – as we’ve already discussed in the chapter on coaching kids to make better decisions. They don’t necessarily need to correct their past failures; maybe Jimmy decides that beverages aren’t his thing and chooses to wash the car for extra cash instead.
If failure is a rich source of data, fear is a virtual virus that corrupts our ability to read this data properly. Our lesson plan on failure isn’t complete until we look at the crippling effect of fear on our children’s ability to fail well and grow from the experience. Fear is one of two things: an automatic reaction to the perception of present or future danger that allows our body to generate either a suitable, or a learned, response to such stimuli. Humans and animals can learn to fear just about anything – real or imagined – if conditioned appropriately. The fear response is stronger than most other instinctual survival skills. Lab rats given an electric shock after food will eventually stop eating entirely and starve to death. Granted, a lab rat may not fully understand the consequence of malnutrition and I’ll sidestep the ethics of this, too, but they’ll go so far as to short circuit survival instincts to allay a fear.
My son has a wild imagination. I don’t. Many times I find myself saying to him that what happens in his stories and theories is not probable or even possible. So when he invents some new crazy theoretical contraption that will turn Saturn’s rings into sources of energy for earth, I’m quick to point out that Saturn is too far away, we don’t know what its rings are made of and besides, do we really want to go and exploit yet another planet, etc. Bad mommy, I know, but I live and breath critical thinking all day, and risk and scenario analysis are in my blood. Over time he will change his theories to ones that I approve of, more practical ideas using known elements that I can grasp because he wants me to engage with him and his ideas. His thinking will become more realistic, less inventive and less creative. Am I really helping him on his path by forcing him to explore only what is known, practical and possible? Only what I can understand with my very limited understanding of the world?
Look at these common barriers to creativity:
Fear of judgement
Fear of rejection
Fear of change
Fear of making a mistake
Fear of failure
Fear of the unknown
Fear of looking foolish
Fear of being different
Now tell me how many of these are we born with and how many do we acquire through experience? Correct;:the only fears we are born with are those that will keep us alive: fear of danger, hunger and isolation. Everything else is learned and as our children’s first and most influential teachers, we teach them to fear most of these, usually with the noblest intentions. Protecting our children from all manner of life’s nasties is easily achieved through an elevated level of fear. For example: if we teach them to fear all dogs, they will never be bitten, if they fear all strangers it will be hard to kidnap them and so on. I know a single mother who taught her son to fear the ocean. So crippling was his fear that, on a holiday at the seaside, he refused to swim with the other boys in the surf. I later found out that his mother had never learnt to swim.
Fear of failure in the classroom can be inhibiting. For many children, the more they struggle to get the right answer the more they fear not only failure but looking foolish and being judged. Especially in Western cultures “where from very early ages struggle is seen as an indicator that you’re not very smart,” says Jim Stigler, professor of psychology at UCLA,5 “it’s a sign of low ability – people who are smart, don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory.” Stigler compares a typical Western approach to failure and struggle with the Confucian heritage approach where struggle is an essential part of the learning process and measurement of emotional strength. Jin Li,6 professor at Brown University, supports Stigler’s view but takes a step back to think about how different cultures view the origins of academic excellence in order to explain these contrasting approaches to failure and struggle. She compares the widely held Western belief that intelligence is what you were born with and hence who you are – smart or not – with the widely held Asian belief that intelligence comes from what you do and how you deal with struggle and failure is part of that. Hence struggle is built into the learning process, specifically to build intelligence.
If we teach our children, implicitly or explicitly, that struggle indicates a lack of ability it will affect how they approach failure. On the other hand, if struggle indicates strength, then our children are more likely to engage with it and go the distance. This includes all manner of disappointments and failed lemonade stands.
Singapore-based education researcher and Professor, Manu Kapur, argues that if failure is such a powerful teacher, why wait for it to happen to you? Why not intentionally create situations where students can learn by failing? This seemingly unorthodox method, coined productive failure, is gaining an audience the world over as it sits in the corner opposite the traditional mode of teaching – direct instruction. We all know the latter method – teach a theory or process and then allow students to implement in practice what they have just learned in theory. We also know that this lacks two essential elements of long-term learning: curiosity and challenge.
Using a productive failure approach, students are given a problem that they don’t know the answer to and don’t know how to find it and then allowed to work on it for some time, conceptualising and trying different solutions that may or may not work. This promotes curiosity about both the problem and its solution. The idea is not necessarily for them to solve it but draw on prior knowledge, and each other, to understand what they are dealing with. Sounds like real life, doesn’t it?
From his research7 Prof Kapur has shown that presenting problems back to front like this results in deeper and more flexible learning. He argues that integrating new and old knowledge, while grappling with a challenge, leads to a much deeper understanding of the issues as well as the final solution. Of course it also creates curiosity about what the actual solution is. Think about it, if you’ve been working on a problem that you couldn’t solve, wouldn’t you want to know the answer? Above all it encourages sustained thought and the ability to work on something even though there may not be a feel good reward waiting at the end.
If you’re still not convinced that a little failure goes a long way then Astro Teller, Google’s “Captain of Moonshots” and the grandson of the theoretical physicist Edward Teller will remind you that, “being afraid to fail is a glass ceiling on the level of success that can be achieved”. And he should know because failing several times over on the same project is considered a key ingredient in Google’s success and hence creating a culture of successful failure is top of his agenda.
So next time your son is struggling to set up the tent under the stars for your night out camping, try not rush in and help him out. Give him only a few pointers and be ready to answer his questions. Or when your daughter has just been booted off the selection for the We’ve Got Talent competition, help her work through the steps leading up to the “failure” and look for the leverage points where she could have done something different or come to a different conclusion about her talents.
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
~ Thomas A. Edison
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1 From Dr. James W. Stigler EdTalk entitled, “Struggle in the Age of MOOCs--Implications of Learning Research for the Design of Online Education filmed at the ASU+GSV Education Innovation Summit, 19/05/2014
2 What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? By Paul Tough, New York Times Magazine, 14/09/2011
3 The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine, Harper Perennial, 2008
4 Why it feels so good to read about this Princeton professor’s failures by Ana Swanson, The Washington Post 28/04/2016
5 Dr. James W. Stigler is Professor of Psychology at UCLA. He is co-author of The Teaching Gap (with James Hiebert, Free Press, 1999) and The Learning Gap (with Harold Stevenson, Simon & Schuster, 1992).
6 Dr. Jin Li is professor of education and human development at Brown University where her research focuses on learning models, children’s learning beliefs and their socialisation across different cultures and ethnic groups. For more information see: https://vivo.brown.edu/display/jili
7 Dr Manu Kapur is an Associate Professor in the Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Academic Group and a researcher at the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore. For more on Productive Failure see his website at www.manukapur.com and his upcoming book Productive Failure, Springer.
Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. But then we started inventing – electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important – I’m not taking anything away from that – but innovation is the real driver of progress.
~ Bill Gates, Rolling Stone, March 2014
In the spirit of productive failure, I challenge you to invent a method of innovation that could give your child a structured approach to creating something new – to be an inventor. Jot down your initial thoughts here before moving on.
Now don’t be shy, write down what you’re thinking. No one has to know, my lips are sealed.
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Let’s have a look at your method.
I imagine it started in the neighbourhood of identifying a problem, then it may have sat down at the table of brainstorming solutions or even stepped out to gather information and data. It most likely ended in the prototyping lab where each new iteration inched it closer to a global patent. Did I guess correctly – at least for some of the steps?
Most models of innovation that our children are exposed to include similar steps. As you can imagine, the more inherently curious and creative children will excel at this, so will the extroverts and more popular girls and boys. The process of actually finding that initial good idea, that spark of genius, is traditionally ensconced in the brainstorming section. This is not a process that takes a child, or anyone, by the hand and says: “This is how you think up something new.” Rather it says: “Go on then, just come up with something, anything, no matter how crazy it might be. Think BIG.” When you’re in middle school and you haven’t had much exposure to new ideas and technologies then just thinking big is a pretty daunting task.
It is for most adults I work with. I find that many of them have had their biggest ideas deflated through company politics, rejection or an overbearing boss. During a systems thinking session at a central bank in Asia, I met a young chap who was not only charming, smart and quick on the mental draw but also a tremendous team player. A natural leader that knew when to lead his team from the front or herd more shy participants from the side. It was clear he was popular and on a fast track into a senior management position. When it came time to solve the final and largest challenge in the programme he excused himself from his team, sat outside in the elevator lobby and worked away at a solution alone. Of course I was curious about his behaviour but equally curious to see what he would produce. Was it arrogance that led him to the lobby or a mistrust of his team’s ability? Everyone took offence.
Unsurprisingly, his solution was tremendous, unlike any I had seen before or since. I actually wasn’t sure if it was “right” simply because I didn’t know enough to evaluate it. I asked him afterwards why he had chosen to work alone and not share his idea with the group that he had unofficially coached and led for two full days.
If I may paraphrase his answer from memory it went like this, “Well, my solution was either going to be really good, or really bad, either way it’s so different it would be seen as extreme – an outlier. Something so uncomfortable and risky that the whole team would never buy into – they’re a pretty conservative bunch of analysts and economists – no offence! I would’ve had to compromise on many fronts and my idea would have been reduced to an average fix that everybody could feel comfortable with.”
In my corporate work, I spend a tremendous amount of time undoing the damage wrecked by the status quo. A particularly pervasive norm is our unquestioned tradition of running every problem through a brainstorming session. Brainstorming is an interesting social experiment but, as far as problem solving goes, it remains a blunt instrument, especially in groups peppered with mixed abilities or confidence levels. It’s a well documented blunt instrument with decades of research telling us to avoid it like the MSG in Chinese takeaways. With the increased focus on teamwork at schools, brainstorming is, unfortunately, still the main tool used to undertake problem solving. I’d love to rant on and toss the research about but I’ll resist rehashing what others have already said and merely re-iterate that brainstorming is not the way to go. But if I remove brainstorming from your child’s innovation process, then there’s a gaping hole in it, isn’t there?
Of course there are several enhanced brainstorming processes that improve its hit rate and reduce the effects of groupthink. IDEO’s popular Design Thinking process is one such candidate. I taught it for many years and was always amazed at the crazy but useful stuff my students could come up in the “solutions” part of the creative thinking process. But even an improved brainstorming exercise doesn’t provide the genesis of a great idea, something that, till now, we’ve left up to some idiosyncratic talent that can’t be quantified or serialised.
Perhaps it’s true that the method of innovation is the greatest invention of all. So I went looking for the inscrutable idea behind an idea and I found it between the covers of corporate literature in a process that has come to light thanks to the meeting of two diverse minds.
Jacob Goldberg and Drew Boyd are the co-authors of Inside The Box,1 a resource promising “a proven system of creativity for breakthrough results”. Their system is delivering on that promise so well it can now be read in 13 languages around the world. Through extensive research and their own experience across the corporate and academic sectors, Jacob and Drew show that any one of us can innovate using what we already know and have access to. They call their process Systemic Inventive Thinking or SIT. It proved so user friendly to adults that Drew wondered if children would be able to innovate using the principles of SIT, too.
While Drew has a deep corporate pedigree, his co-author Jacob leads their research as marketing professor at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, Israel and as a visiting professor at Columbia University. I had the opportunity of chatting with Drew from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, where he is the executive director of the Master of Science in Marketing Program and assistant professor of Marketing and Innovation. In his 17 years with Johnson & Johnson before that, Drew founded their Marketing Mastery Program, an internal “marketing university” benchmarked by companies such as GE, P&G, Kraft, and Merck. One of the things they taught employees there was how to systematically invent new medical products and integrate these inventions into long-range strategic plans. You read that right: they taught them how to innovate. Drew believes anyone can innovate with the right system and encouragement, including children.
“The corporate world,” he says, “is very good at adopting new methods to generate increased revenue for shareholders. Schools however don’t have the same motivation to do this. It’s expensive to adopt new subject matter and technologies. They certainly recognise the need for creativity, but they aren’t really sure how to implement it.” Drew offered to teach an innovation programme, How To Be An Inventor, at his son’s school. His offer was rejected initially as the administrator felt “it would set too high an expectation of their children because creativity can not be taught – to anyone”.
Drew persisted and when his offer was finally accepted, it proved so popular with mainstream school children that he expanded it to work with special needs children, “who,” he adds, “innovate just as capably as everyone else once they are taught how.”
“In the future we will all need to become better at solving problems,” he explains. “Everyday problems, personal as well as corporate problems. Almost every area of society will face global challenges – our children will have to innovate in order to be successful and those that know how will be better at it.”
Through their desire to spread word of their method to as many parents, teachers and carers as possible Drew gave me permission to share the basic steps of it with you. This will get you started but I urge you to visit their website at www.insidetheboxinnovation.com. There you will find a generous array of free resources for both corporates, parents and teachers, PowerPoint slides, course syllabi and loads of other fun stuff to support and add depth and colour to your own efforts.
I bet you’re ready to hear about that method of innovation now?
In the SIT method subtraction is the process of eliminating an essential component of a system to create something new or at the very least reframe the problem at hand. Hang on, why would we do that? Well, an iPhone without a phone is an iPod, a travel agent without an actual agent is online booking, a book without pages is an ebook. See where this is going? Subtraction is a powerful and popular method of creative innovation that isn’t that hard to do with an open mind and a touch of mental bravery. Drew and Jacob advise that we write down all essential components of the system or problem we are working with and eliminate each of them one-by-one to re-imagine the system. Then ask who would use such a thing and why.
Let’s re-imagine our lemonade stand from the previous chapter using subtraction.
An inventory of essential components would include: lemonade, cups, a table, a cashbox, a sales person, customers and a sunny day in the park. Let’s begin by subtracting the lemonade. Well, that wouldn’t work too well because then we wouldn’t have a lemonade stand at all. So let’s leave that well enough alone and move on to the cups. Could I subtract the cups? Of course, but how would we serve our lemonade? My son’s solution was little plastic bags with a straw in them, tied with twine that seals the bag closed around the straw and then loops to form a little handle.
Lemonade that you can’t put down!
Who would want this? Kids on bicycles or skateboards in the park or cycling home from school on a hot day with empty juice bottles. They can hang these little juice packets on their handlebars and sip as they zip along. Living in Asia, this wasn’t a far stretch of the imagination at all as this is exactly how local drink stalls sell their drinks to go. In bags with straws that won’t ever spill as you commute, but this market has never been tapped for kids, or in the West.
OK, what’s next? How about the table? If we don’t have cups, do we need a table? No, we can bring a clothes rail or hang our pre-filled bags of lemonade on the branches of the cotton tree in the centre of the park. Wouldn’t that attract attention? We could probably either eliminate or substitute each of the essential components in our lemonade stand with something that we have readily to hand.
Using only what we already have access to is an important principle of the SIT method named the Closed World Principle. The best and fastest way to innovate is to look at what is readily available in our environment. We all know the feeling of coming across a genius or nifty solution that seems so simple yet had eluded us until the moment we saw someone else create it for the first time.
Those things that are available to your child right now, the things that you generally don’t give a second thought to as you sail through your day, are the things that can be used as raw materials in your child’s innovation efforts. Do you usually have to go out and buy specialist bits and nifty bobs every time your child needs an interesting costume for book character day or a quirky contraption for the science fair? With this method you may not need to at all.
Research in this area is plentiful and conclusions agree that creative inventions come from inside the box. The box here being our immediate environment. So when substituting out an essential component, look for a replacement that is already to hand. Substituting plastic bags and string for cups or the cotton tree in the park for a table is an example where we could use what was at hand to make our product more interesting and practical for kids cycling around the park. In short – more creative.
TIPS AND TAKEAWAYS FROM CHAPTER 9
1. Research shows that we are born creative and learn to be uncreative as we age.
2. Understanding that failure is a rich source of data and being able to extract that data from failures will set your children up to fail well and withstand the blows that inevitably come bundled with the innovation process.
3. Innovation requires the ability to create something new and useful – often from existing materials and ideas. Creativity certainly helps this process along but a lack of creative smarts isn’t a deal breaker as far as innovation goes.
4. Innovation is a process and can be taught using a method of innovation such as Systemic Inventive Thinking or IDEO’s Design Thinking.
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1 Inside the Box by Boyd, D & Goldberg, J, Simon and Schuster, 2013. See also: www.insidetheboxinnovation.com