The Pursuit of Tinkering

I was just reading an article from Fast Company titled Innovating with Meaning: You Reap What You Sow. The article describes the author’s belief that business performance can be enhanced by improving core competencies in creative thinking, strategic thinking, and transformational thinking among employees in support of innovation. Interesting stuff and a worthwhile article.

While I was reading it, I was struck by the thought that we may not need this type of business advice if we just did a better job of sowing the seeds of creativity in our children to begin with. Is it possible that corporations are trying to make up for our shortcomings as parents?

The article describes nine seeds of creative thinking. I’ve taken the first two and replaced business/employee language with family/child references. It really resonates with me:

Seed #1: Believe in Creativity
It is not enough for a leader parent to simply encourage “creativity” and creative thinking. Everyone must believe in their own creative thinking abilities. They Parents must also be willing to unlearn some of their old habits in order to truly participate in the innovation agenda and become an integral part of the organization’s family’s innovation engine.

Seed #2: Be Curious
The foundation of creativity is the curious mind. Without a curious mind, many great opportunities will simply slip by unnoticed. Employees Children should be encouraged to broaden their perspectives and look for ideas beyond their particular department, organization, and industry home, school and neighborhood. Innovative organizations families encourage their employees children to ask questions and challenge “the way it’s done in our industry family.” It is important to note that employees children can be encouraged to ask questions while still respecting the essence and realities of organizational familial life.

If Gordon McKenzie is correct in his observation that kids lose their ability to be creative between kindergarten and sixth grade, it seems sad that corporations are trying to then re-develop those same skills later in life.

Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m getting at with this post. As the parent of child that just entered kindergarten, my gut tells me that we need to protect her creative instincts as adamantly as we protect her safety.

What do you think?

After reading the Obama Administration Plan for Innovation, Science & Technology, Bruce Nussbaum feels that Barack Obama has a grasp on technology, but fails to “get” innovation. So what does he think Obama should do?

…he actually needs to appoint a Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) because change is as much about sociology as technology, as much about creativity as science. And that translates into more money for art and design education in K-12 and college as well as more funding for science and math.

Personally, I think Obama gets innovation. The way he ran his campaign is evidence. But that doesn’t diminish the truth of what Nussbaum writes about the importance of creativity. Here is another snippet:

It’s important to give students “high order thinking skills including inference, logic, data analysis, interpretation, forming questions and commnication,” as the Plan says. It’s also important to give students the skills of empathy, imagining, intuiting, collaborating, iterating, learning from failing, visualizing, disrupting, engaging, even playing. These are the skills of creativity and we need creativity to build a new sustainable social model of economic growth.

Good stuff. Go read the full post, Does Obama Really “Get” Innovation? Not Really., on the BusinessWeek NussbaumOnDesign blog.

Just ran across this post from Judith E. Glaser. When her children were in elementary school she coordinated the publication of an annual book that contained stories and pictures from all 550 students in kindergarten through 5th grade. In regards to organizing the content she writes:

Something amazing seemed to drive the process at an almost invisible level. It was as though each year there was something in the air that each child was breathing - some aromatic that they could all sense. This unique essence showed up in the patterns and substance of the student’s expressive art work and writings. Each year it was different - each year a larger story emerged and - once we saw it - mystified those of us working on the project.

Looking back on the success of the project, Judith writes:

My feeling is that we all have bonding instincts. We have the need — a strong instinct — to connect with others and make music. When validated and fulfilled, our connections elevate us to higher levels of growth, wisdom, creativity and insight.

I LOVE Judith’s idea and her story. Read the full post: Children’s World - The Emergence of Self Expression

Parenting Experts Laura and Malcolm Gauld have a new post about the importance of qualities such as leadership, responsibility, initiative, creativity and flexibility to both parents and future employers of our children. They point out, however, that schools and parents typically fail when it comes to coordinating the education of our children around these critical skills. They go so far as to compare the parent/school relationship to that of divorced parents on bad terms:

Contact between schools and parents is often similar to divorced parents who share custody of children, but are not on particularly good terms. Each needs the other to take significant shared responsibility for raising the children, but it is an overwhelming matter to consider wading into communication about shared goals, common routines, and values.

Interesting stuff… And their “attitude over aptitude” approach to nurturing  these critical characteristics is equally as interesting.

However, their post caught my attention for another reason. They give several examples of how leadership, responsibility, initiative, and flexibility are cultivated in their classrooms. Creativity, besides prominent mention in the headline, was missing. Why?

Perhaps it is simply because a 400-word post cannot be comprehensive. Or, perhaps it is because creativity is a tricky beast. My guess is the latter. Unlike the Gaulds, I’m no expert. But it seems to me that structured educational systems impede creativity, rather than nurture it. Is that true? If yes, what can we do about it? If no, why might my perceptions be wrong?

Final thought on this: I could never argue against leadership, responsibility, initiative, and flexibility as critical skills for success. But there are days when I would argue that creativity is more important than all of them. Especially in the 21st Century.