Most Likely to Succeed

Sharing a few highlights from Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids For the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith.  

It’s quite striking that, almost without exception, the great contributors to civilization were educated as apprentices, not as note-takers

In short, the United States picked the wrong goal and failed at it. We opted to chase South Korea and Singapore on standardized test performance (a race we never had a chance of winning against children who spend every waking hour cramming for the tests) instead of educating our youth for a world of innovation and opportunity (a race that plays to our strengths)

Albert Einstein, who had his share of struggles with school, said, “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution.” As administrators, faculty, boards, and parents debate strategic goals,In short, the United States picked the wrong goal and failed at it. We opted to chase South Korea and Singapore on standardized test performance (a race we never had a chance of winning against children who spend every waking hour cramming for the tests) instead of educating our youth for a world of innovation and opportunity (a race that plays to our strengths) they generally dive into issues around the importance of the goals listed in Question 1 above and the precise wording of their mission statement. In so doing, they skip over a more fundamental step in the process: Is our teaching approach one that actually helps our students to learn

Even better, imagine if the school looked for skills where a student could achieve excellence, and then set out on a path to create definitive life advantages for that student applicable across a broad range of careers

two of the most important skills in the innovation economy are in thinking critically (about problems, situations, markets, ideas) and then the ability to communicate (an idea, a recommendation, a plan forward) in a way that is not only thoughtful and compelling but also in a way that influences others to take action

Today, when kids have ready access to an enormous range of written material, we should encourage them to become great readers by devouring everything they can that’s aligned with their passion—whether it’s nature, sports, or Harry Potter. But if you’re designing tests, there’s no way to standardize based on students reading mostly what interests them. Once again, the education model revolves around what makes life easy for test designers, not what’s best for kids

“The key to our philosophy is to speak, and speak, and speak some more. Programs and curricula that emphasize speaking and ‘living’ the culture from the get go can create a genuine learning atmosphere (using a variety of techniques) that will acclimate students and generate a feeling of ‘being there.

Annmarie Neal is the former chief talent officer at Cisco Systems and author of Leading From the Edge. She continues to consult to senior leadership in Fortune 100 companies all over the world, and here’s what she told us in a recent conversation: Even the most elite schools do not prepare students for the reality of work as it is today, let alone what it will become in the future. Most large organizations are undergoing massive transformations as they move from industrial to innovation-economy business models. The students that thrive within today’s education systems are achievement driven, rule-oriented, compliant, linear, singular in focus (i.e., a business or engineering major). The world of work today requires future leaders to be relationship or collaboration driven, rule-defining, creative and innovative, lateral and polymathic in focus

We need to reimagine education. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the Committee of Ten who, back in 1893, said, “Gee, we need to train millions of kids for a growing number of rote jobs in our burgeoning industrial economy.” The Committee of Ten came up with a good solution for their era. Today, we need to educate millions of kids (and adults) for the innovation era. How do we do that?

How We Got Here

Sharing a few highlights from How We Got Here: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson. 

Unwittingly, the Venetian doges had created an innovation hub: by concentrating the glassmakers on a single island the size of a small city neighborhood, they triggered a surge of creativity, giving birth to an environment that possessed what economists call “information spillover.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary cases of the hummingbird effect in modern history. Gutenberg made printed books relatively cheap and portable, which triggered a rise in literacy, which exposed a flaw in the visual acuity of a sizable part of the population, which then created a new market for the manufacture of spectacles

Hummingbird effects sometimes happen when an innovation in one field exposes a flaw in some other technology (or in the case of the printed book, in our own anatomy) that can be corrected only by another discipline altogether. But sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to measure something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring.

New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.

This is what the robot historian’s perspective allows us to see: the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate

The art of human invention has more than one muse

Those patents rippling across the planet are an example of one of the great curiosities in the history of innovation: what scholars now call “multiple invention.” Inventions and scientific discoveries tend to come in clusters, where a handful of geographically dispersed investigators stumble independently onto the very same discovery

Like every big idea, Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye’s idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together

may sound ridiculous to say that Bell and his successors were the fathers of modern commercial architecture—of the skyscraper. But wait a minute. Take the Singer Building, the Flatiron Building, the Broad Exchange, the Trinity, or any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility

Thanks to the antitrust resolution, Bell Labs became one of the strangest hybrids in the history of capitalism: a vast profit machine generating new ideas that were, for all practical purposes, socialized

The next time you glance down at your phone to check what time it is or where you are, the way you might have glanced at a watch or a map just two decades ago, think about the immense, layered network of human ingenuity that has been put in place to make that gesture possible. Embedded in your ability to tell the time is the understanding of how electrons circulate within cesium atoms; the knowledge of how to send microwave signals from satellites and how to measure the exact speed with which they travel; the ability to position satellites in reliable orbits above the earth, and of course the actual rocket science needed to get them off the ground; the ability to trigger steady vibrations in a block of silicon dioxide—not to mention all the advances in computation and microelectronics and network science necessary to process and represent that information on your phone.

One of the reasons garages have become such an emblem of the innovator’s workspace is precisely because they exist outside the traditional spaces of work or research. They are not office cubicles or university labs; they’re places away from work and school, places where our peripheral interests have the room to grow and evolve.

Worth Reading....

Passing along a few interesting reads.

1. The Confidence Gap (Kay and Shipman)- Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence. The article states why and what to do about it.

A growing body of evidence shows just how devastating this lack of confidence can be. Success, it turns out, correlates just as closely with confidence as it does with competence. No wonder that women, despite all our progress, are still woefully underrepresented at the highest levels. All of that is the bad news. The good news is that with work, confidence can be acquired. Which means that the confidence gap, in turn, can be closed.

2. How Failure In the Classroom Is More Instructive Than Success (Sobel)- giving students permission to fail while maintaining a high standard in the classroom

There is a popular meme called "Famous Failures," featuring quotations on overcoming rejection, failure, and loss from Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, the Beatles, Oprah, and Albert Einstein. The message is familiar: Abundant success lies on the other end of failure. Could guiding our students through their own failures inspire the next groundbreaking physicist, talk-show star, or iPhone inventor? Possible … but not likely. Even if the results end up being a little less grandiose, I think they are just as important. Learning to fail could help our students become more resilient, self-aware, innovative, and compassionate. Not bad for a bunch of "failures."

3. My First Shot At Perplexity- crafting truly meaningful math activities for primary elementary students

I found myself on Google Earth, using the measuring tool to see how far away my house is from my school in a straight line (I was bored…). It dawned on me that I could measure anything from the perimeter of Fenway Park, to the radius of Madison Square Garden. What if the students were shown a picture of something they knew with lines and no numbers. Could they ask the right questions for us to figure out the area of their school’s gym? How about the handball courts in the back of the school? Why would we need to do this?

4. Inside Google X: The New Bell Labs (WNYC)- look at the conditions Google is creating to spur invention

• How Google X Employees Deal With Failure

5. Empathy In Education (Gray)- occasioning empathy in our classrooms

It was a very grim day, when I began to notice the profound lack of empathy in education, particularly in public education. That story can be found here: Educational trauma is a term I coined to capture the lack of empathy I was noticing. It is the inadvertent perpetration and perpetuation of victimization by educational systems against consumers and producers of the system.

6. Made In The Future- explanation of how things will be made

Made in the Future is an effort to capture our musings about what a not-so-distant tomorrow might look like. Our tools—faster, cheaper, and more out of control than ever—have triggered seismic shifts in how we design, manufacture, and distribute. And that has us asking lots of questions: What new tools or technologies will we create? How will they change the way we behave and learn? How will they shape our world?

7. How To Do One thing Really Well (Renwick)- a principal pushes the envelope in his school

While the two of us were becoming more learners than teachers, we also wanted to move our students to become teachers for each other. Our learning environment needed more balance. We kicked off our new week by showing students how to create tutorials using Screencast-o-matic, a free web-based tool.

Constantly Innovating

Yesterday while the family was discussing interior design at the Anthropologie store in Chelsea Market, I made my over to a small newsstand located near the 9th Avenue entrance.  While browsing the selection I came across a recent release from Fast Company about the world's 50 most innovative companies.  I figured the trip through Anthropologie could take some time so I bought the magazine and started reading through the piece about the 50 most innovative companies.

I was somewhat surprised to see that in their estimation Nike was the most innovative company for 2012.  However, Fast Company presented a compelling argument as to why Nike has such an impressive year.  In 2012, Nike's experimentation yielded two breakout hits in the FuelBand and Flynit Racer sneaker.  The FuelBand is an electronic bracelet that measures your movements throughout the day.  Buttons on the device will tell a user how many calories one has burned, the number of steps taken and generally assess your activity level.  The Flynit Racer is a revolutionary shoe that is ultralight and because of its construction method could reduce long-term production costs.  

Throughout the article several prominent Nike employees were interviewed.  Nike CEO Mark Parker was one of those quoted in the piece.  During Parker's tenure which started in 2006, Nike's profits are up 57%, its market cap has more than doubled along with the fact that Nike owns half of the running market and 92% of the U.S. basketball shoe business.  For me, there are two memorable moments from the article both attributed to Parker.  One, Parker states the need for Nike to be innovative and not solely rely on celebrity endorsements and the culture of the swoosh to boost sales.  In talking about this point, Parker says the following:

One of my fears is being this big, slow, constipated, bureaucratic company that's happy with success.  Companies fall apart when their model is so successful that it stifles thinking that challenges it.

The other enduring segment was contained in a discussion about the disruptive potential of the Flynit Racer.  According to Parker, the Flynit Racer is one of those technologies that has incredible potential, not only within running, but across multiple categories.  The innovation lies in how the shoe is constructed. Fast Company explained the change in the article.  

The old Nike model involved cutting rolls of prewoven material into pieces, and then stitching and assembling them.  But with Flynit, a shoe's upper and tongue can be knot from polyester yarns and cables whicc gets rid of all the unnecessary excesses.  The Flynit Racer is 5.6 ounces, roughly an ounce lighter that its counterparts with Nike only using as much thread as it needs in production.

We have also been reminded over the past couple of weeks that yesterday Michael Jordan's 50th birthday.  As Jordan literally and figuratively soared above the NBA, the swoosh became the most recognizable symbol world-wide.  Even with the end to Jordan's playing career a decade ago, Nike has continued its international dominance (also helps that Basketball has become more of an international game in large part to Jordan and the 1992 summer Olympics).  Despite Nike's popularity, it is clear that the Company and its CEO feel the pressure to push the envelope of design and innovation.

Parker's commentary about an organization becoming constipated frames the argument for prototyping and experimentation.  Furthermore, the Flynit Racer reinforces the ideal that we should embrace disruptive innovations.  While there is plenty to criticize about Nike and in particular its well documented suspect labor practices, the article pushes each organization to consider the potential harmful effects of complacency and fear of disrupting what is familiar.

Worth Reading...

Sharing some posts I have come across.

1. If You Could Only Teach Ten Points, What Would They Be? (McIntosh)- 

some compelling research showing how much more learning takes place when students work collectively in a team, coaching each other to create a team-based product of learning with individual accountability built in. The effect of cross-age or cross-ability coaching is equivalent to every student, not just the one "being coached", having one-on-one teacher coaching

2.  Generation Flux (Boyd)- learning how embrace and thrive with instability

Everything in the corporate world is set up for security, so you can get to the next review. People who are willing to be uncertain will be more likely to be able to move ahead. People ask me, Are you afraid you're going to get fired. That's the whole point: not to be afraid. That doesn't mean I want to get fired."

3. The Labor Day Manifesto of The Passionate Creative Worker (Hagel)-  ideals for living life passionately

As we consider the free information and universal connectivity that is now available, we are struck by the potential that each individual has to impact the world. And as we reflect on our past progress and the opportunities still ahead, we recognize that the most valuable resource we have is the human creativity and ingenuity innate in every person. 

4. The Eight Pillars of Innovation (Wojcicki)- guidelines for nurturing innovation by Google

The greatest innovations are the ones we take for granted, like light bulbs, refrigeration and penicillin. But in a world where the miraculous very quickly becomes common-place, how can a company, especially one as big as Google, maintain a spirit of innovation year after year?

5. What Bill Clinton Wrote vs. What He Said (Atlantic Wire)- copies of Clinton's prepared remarks against his speech at the 2012 DNC

6. Tim Brown urges designers to think big



7. A Japanese Approach to Khan Academy

Change by Design

I want to share a few personal highlights from Tim Brown's Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.  If you have not read Change by Design I would encourage you consider adding it to your list of must reads.  Among other critical points, Brown demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of design.  Brown uses examples from his role as CEO of IDEO to promote the need to fuse together individuals from diverse backgrounds into a design team.  Additionally, Brown's discussion of ethnography and divergent thinking could serve as talking points for a global conversation amongst a faculty.

What we need are new choices—new products that balance the needs of individuals and of society as a whole; new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education; new strategies that result in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone affected by them.

Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols.

A competent designer can always improve upon last year’s new widget, but an interdisciplinary team of skilled design thinkers is in a position to tackle more complex problems. From pediatric obesity to crime prevention to climate change, design thinking is now being applied to a range of challenges that bear little resemblance to the covetable objects that fill the pages of today’s coffee-table publications.

The reason for the iterative, nonlinear nature of the journey is not that design thinkers are disorganized or undisciplined but that design thinking is fundamentally an exploratory process

There is a popular saying around IDEO that “all of us are smarter than any of us,” and this is the key to unlocking the creative power of any organization

A culture that believes that it is better to ask forgiveness afterward rather than permission before, that rewards people for success but gives them permission to fail, has removed one of the main obstacles to the formation of new ideas

Insight is one of the key sources of design thinking, and it does not usually come from reams of quantitative data that measure exactly what we already have and tell us what we already know. A better starting point is to go out into the world and observe the actual experiences of commuters, skateboarders, and registered nurses as they improvise their way through their daily lives

In a design paradigm, however, the solution is not locked away somewhere waiting to be discovered but lies in the creative work of the team. The creative process generates ideas and concepts that have not existed before. These are more likely to be triggered by observing the odd practices of an amateur carpenter or the incongruous detail in a mechanic’s shop than by hiring expert consultants or asking “statistically average” people to respond to a survey or fill out a questionnaire   

Although we will never, I hope, lose respect for the designer as inspired form giver, it is common now to see designers working with psychologists and ethnographers, engineers and scientists, marketing and business experts, writers and filmmakers   

By testing competing ideas against one another, there is an increased likelihood that the outcome will be bolder, more creatively disruptive, and more compelling. Linus Pauling said it best: “To have a good idea, you must first have lots of ideas” 

Worth Reading

Wanted to share some interesting articles, posts and videos I came across.  All are welcomed to comment.

1. Teacher As Travel Agent (21st Century Collaborative)

Learning is personal knowledge construction fueled socially where we schematically connect ideas and concepts as we do things and discuss them with others. Just like we shouldn’t eat until we are hungry, I believe learning should be natural and likewise fueled. Give children a rich, interesting environment or scenario filled with beautiful literature, authentic problems to solve, and places to explore or create a journey and you will have kids who are motivated to learn and engaged. A steady diet of force fed content with no authentic application goes against the natural way were designed to learn. The way we learned in Kindergarten.

2. The Six Myths of Creativity (Fast Company)- A new study (2004) will change how you generate ideas and decide who's really creative in your company. 

The fact is, almost all of the research in this field shows that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some degree of creative work. Creativity depends on a number of things: experience, including knowledge and technical skills; talent; an ability to think in new ways; and the capacity to push through uncreative dry spells. Intrinsic motivation -- people who are turned on by their work often work creatively -- is especially critical.

3.  Young at Heart: How to be an innovator for life (Stanford d. School)- Tom Kelley, general manager at the world-renowned design firm, IDEO, presents five core practices that enhance creativity.

4. Olin College SCOPE Program (Olin College)-

SCOPE is the culmination of Olin’s project-based curriculum.  Seniors work in multidisciplinary teams of 5-7 students on challenging, full-year engineering projects for partnering corporate sponsors.  Olin works closely with companies and technology clients to develop SCOPE projects that provide exceptional value to the sponsors while providing an important educational experience for our students.

  

5. JR: One year of turning the world inside out (Ted Talk)- Street artist JR made a wish in 2011: Join me in a worldwide photo project to show the world its true face. Now, a year after his TED Prize wish, he shows how giant posters of human faces, pasted in public, are connecting communities, making change, and turning the world inside out.

6. Make It Count- two guys, one camera and a bunch of airline food

 

Creating Innovators

I wanted to share highlights from Tony Wagner's Creating Innovators: the Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.

The solution to our economic and social challenges is the same: creating a viable and sustainable economy that creates good jobs without polluting the planet. And there is general agreement as to what that new economy must be based on. One word: innovation

And 77 percent agreed, “the greatest innovations of the 21st century will be those that have helped to address human needs more than those that had created the most profit

Disruptive or transformative innovation, on the other hand, is about creating a new or fundamentally different product or service that disrupts existing markets and displaces formerly dominant technologies

Finally, Brown writes that design thinkers are, above all, collaborators: “The increasing complexity of products, services, and experiences has replaced the myth of the lone creative genius with the reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaborator.

People who are successful at Google also have a bias towards action—you see something broken and you fix it. You are smart enough to spot problems, but you don’t whine about them or wait for somebody else to fix them. You ask, ‘How can I make things better?’ And collaboration is so essential to everything that we do—we prize the ability to recognize and learn from people around you, who have very different kinds of expertise.

 Too many teachers and employers still reward the “old school” behaviors of deference to authority and striving for “success,” conventionally defined—and count on carrots and sticks for motivation. The result is that many in the Innovation Generation are skeptical of adult authority and the institutions that their elders have presided over. School is a game the Innovation Generation knows they have to play to get “credentialed,” but they do it with as little effort as possible

The sense of purpose can take many forms. But the one that emerged most frequently in my interviews and in the interviews by the authors of “the Innovator’s DNA” is the desire to somehow “make a difference” 

“To me, empowerment means students can go out and apply what they’ve learned to the problems that they’ve never seen before with parts that they’ve never used before.” 

Apple is run like a start-up. It is a company that is continuously innovating, through rapid prototyping and iterating. Rethinking what the future will be. Yes, you have to make a profit to build a successful company, but real success means putting that profit back into continuous innovation. 

The D-Lab philosophy is very much experiential—real projects for real people and real feedback on your projects. Too often students don’t get meaningful feedback on their work. In terms of design, our focus is on people who live on less than two dollars per day. We also believe in building the capacity of people we work with in the developing world—foster the belief that they are creators, designers—and that our students should value indigenous knowledge. 

Instead, we need to encourage students to give voice to their beliefs and to support their intrinsic empathy and commitment to justice 

But I don’t see these young innovators buying into being the “twice as” generation. They are defining their own, different American Dream—one that values passion and purpose, in which their priority is making a difference more than making money. As one young innovator said, “I want to live a meaningful life with just enough money to support myself and a family.