thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

I was down at the swimming pool this morning when a new T-shirt caught my eye. “Shift happens” said the shirt. (in a manner of speaking

By serendipitous coincidence I was thinking about the future of education and some recent conversations with educators at a number of schools.

For children and young adults school is the workplace where they spend the most time. As a parent I’m vitally interested in how that time is spent or invested.

One of the stories I particularly liked was about lunch at a particular school. One of the school traditions is that the children can’t serve themselves - they can only serve each other.

That vignette is worth any number of homilies or placards on the wall; because what people actually do is always important.

And at a school how they communicate and encourage students in a particular direction is also of great interest.

As I live in Auckland I was interested to check out a feature article on “The Best Schools” in a recent Metro article.

That feature offers up three summary questions in searching for the best secondary (high) school. These were listed as:

1. How good are the teachers?
2. How safe is the school?
3. Does it offer enough of what your child needs to make the most of their secondary school years?

I particularly liked this masterpiece of understatement at the beginning of the article.

“The major indicators of academic achievement are related to the home. Children with articulate and educated parents and a home culture that values learning are likely to do better than others, wherever they go to school.

What you’re looking for; therefore, is a school whose students do significantly better than others from similar backgrounds. A school that “adds value”.

Predictably the star students featured in the article are all wonderful reflections of their parents and their schools but upon closer review it does seem that analysis is a bit limited in scope.

I would be interested to know a bit more about the bigger picture. How the school is helping to equip students for a world that is transforming and changing at an accelerating rate. As a parent I’d like to know a bit more about educational philosophy which is a bit harder to measure on a chart.

And given that we all live in a techno-savvy world know I would have included a survey of school websites and what they might reveal about the depth of school experiences available.

For a great example of what some 7 year olds can do - have a look at Learning N’ Stuff which gives a fascinating snapshot of actual life at school complete with homework and useful links like Spelling City to make homework even more fun.

To me it is like a glimpse into the future of education in a way that bonds parents, teachers and kids right across the spectrum. Top work CS11!

Also found this paragraph by Maree Conway on Thinking Futures which in turn highlights a relevant video on some of thewider issues. It was in the context of tertiary education but all of the same factors apply right down to preschool.

“Drivers of Change
The future of universities is being influenced by a number of major drivers of change. There are ones we know well: globalisation, demographics, government policy on funding higher education, and the impact of IT developments on learning delivery. There are other drivers that are less well acknowledged.

This is a now well known video on You Tube - Did You Know? or Shift Happens. It demonstrates how things change, and we can’t assume everything will stay the same.”

The presentation comes from Shift Happens who note the universal importance of some of the themes and issues raised so far.

“We believe that the themes of Did You Know? are global in nature and apply to schools and children around the world. We want all children to be successful.

We do not view the growing importance of India and China as negative but rather as additional opportunities for everyone in the world.

We do not mean to gloss over the very real issues that countries such as India and China face, and we recognize that globalization and “flat world” factors have downsides just like other societal shifts.

We prefer, however, to focus on the positive benefits and on doing what we can to help children learn and grow so that they may become successful digital, global citizens.

We’d like your help. Everyone must be involved in the conversation if we are to come up with a system of education for our children that prepares them for the 21st century.”

(Check the suggestions area for some more ideas on discussion and next steps. Like “What implications does this have for our current way of doing things?”)

So what are you thinking about on the topic of educational futures? How important is school anyway and what are we all doing to add value along the way.

A little planning can go a long way - as Dwight Eisenhower once said “Plans are useless; planning is priceless.”

Related posts that you may also enjoy

• Professors can’t dance - mind/body rocks - Mind body
• One wiki or two? Education waking Up Wikis in education
• Changing the world with Dave Eggers. Dave and Valencia 826
• Uses, not innovations, drive technology
• Creativity & Innovation Linked Ken Robinson

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Lately I’ve been to some funerals and also lots of births in the form of kids birthday parties. At both ends of the curve there are a number of recurring questions but today really looking at just two.

One of the best questions ever is “What are you going to do when you grow up?”

I especially like it when its’ a kid asking me the question and I always take that as a compliment. The honest answer is always made up on the spot and and is usually along the lines of I’m still working that out-depending on who is asking.

After nearly 50 years I have a pretty good idea of where to focus but I still adore the exploration and rediscovery of old and new ideas and their application to the present.

(By way of background I’m ENFP or ENFJ and fit the Grey Lynn tribe profile - test yourself.)

I feel very lucky to still have an open end on most of my work/life and to be able to re-imagine the future. It seems really obvious but there is a huge difference between conscious knowledge and intelligence.

Some of this comes with age, learning style and a desire to want to keep learning and growing which sadly we all sometimes neglect. In my world view boxes are for things not people, and so while it is good to be able to see some connections it is always better to be able to really think outside the cube and even go really fractal when you need to.

Forget the box and the cube, everyday is a tesseract of opportunities. If we stay awake, and take some notes like keeping a journal for example, we will continue to discover new and exciting ways and means to develop. The life as a mystery box idea appeals to me and I was interested to hear JJ Abrams talk about this on a TED video which you can view over here.

The other question people always ask in various ways is “What do you do for a Job?”

My usual answer for the past few years has been “whatever I want to do” and yes I do have the experience and skills to do a wide range of activities quite well. However there is always a reality checklist close by especially when the car breaks down or some other bill looms large. So the dream always remains but sometimes often there are work projects we all need to do a) pay for the groceries and b) pay for the dreams.

But I really like the in between time/s when I can work on thinking and planning for a cornucopia of projects and my natural inclination is to gravitate towards the creative end of the spectrum even though much of my “education” was designed to minimize those abilities.

BTW I’ve found a new word to partly describe my general learning style and also explains why I can seemingly link a series of invisible dots - “all this stuff is connected” as Chris Anderson mentions in his 2002 Vision for TED video. Multi disciplinary views of space and time just suit me because I’m poly-chronic.

“Plans: from Time Management Basics

The polychronic person will use plans but is quite happy to be flexible in their approach to achieve the desired goal. They may flit from project to project as the mood takes them gaining inspiration from one project to utilise on the other.

Flexibility is a useful trait of the polychronic person”.

Finally an answer as to why I’m happy reading 5 books at once as well as listening to and watching lots of videos on apparently unrelated topics. My brain still enjoys the buzz and it knows what a fractal of a fractal is even if it takes me a while to catch up and articulate that stimulus into a series of useful questions for a client.

So the new answer to the perennial “What do you do?” question is that I’m a polychronic creative generalist (and divergent thinking maven) so chances are good that if you have a great project I can help at some level.

For more on the creative generalist go to Steve Hardy’s wonderful blog which is a real treasure trove of ideas. For example this recent link gives some great examples of the creative generalist concept by Larry Borsato

“I am not trying to suggest that generalists are perfect. If you are building banking software or you are launching a space shuttle, where well-defined processes are essentially repeated over and over in the building of the software, then specialists may be preferred.

However, in the Web 2.0 world we live in, where new products and APIs are introduced seemingly every other week, specialization loses its allure. Six months of experience on a particular platform might turn a generalist into a de facto specialist.

At the same time, a generalist brings a variety of hard and soft skills to the task at hand. They often have the ability to quickly assimilate a new technology or skill, and may be able to quickly accomplish tasks in unfamiliar situations. And, from what I’ve seen in the past few years working with the Web, everything is an unfamiliar situation.” (see larryborsato.com)

Snap - dude…I am also an entreprenerial marketer, product developer, planning consultant, researcher and more. On any given day I can be writing a marketing plan, developing a website to go with the brand and talking with CEO’s about their industry strategies and / or enterprise level software to go with with their orders as well.

Great to hear from other creative generalists as like OddPodz who are building a community for optimistic creative thought leaders.

Equally I’m at home brainstorming with other mavens and turning the metaphorical map upside down with a sprinkle of physics, architecture and whatever other discipline I may be absorbing at that time. Lifelong learning is not just a bright idea, it’s a way of life.

Somehow it all works out because the challenges along the way help cross pollinate the answers on other projects present and future.

There is a wonderful story that Jim Collins tells about writing down observations on himself in a little notebook “about the bug called Jim.” You can listen to the bio story over here (11mins.) (Hear Jim talk about his path to becoming a self-employed professor.* )

His description of an entrepreneur as someone who is “congenetically coded with the defect that they can’t work for other people” …entrepreneurship is a life idea…starting with a blank canvas.. carving your own path and figuring out how to do that in a unique way…”

And overall the joy of the question is something that keeps me revisiting his website and books. I’ve also learned over many years that if I listen to audio that somehow works better for me personally -which is why I’ll sometimes listen to TED videos in the background while I’m working on something else entirely.

Finally part of the reason for this post is that I have been making the equivalent of mix tapes by combining and mashing /recombining some of the 80 video clips from my “creative commons” TED collection.

Despite ranging across the full spectrum of subjects from physics, architecture, design, neurology, photography, dance, business, technology, maths, education and so on - it is not differences that I see, rather - it is the connections between all those subjects that matter most.

Off to a conference tomorrow today and inevitably will be asked by many that work question.

I’d much rather they ask the first one about what am I going to do when I grow up—but then you’d expect a creative generalist to have that kind of an answer.

Other related posts here that you may enjoy.

• Uses, not innovations, drive technology
• Professors can’t dance—mind/body rocks
• Creativity & Innovation Linked
• Real change means more than a Heisenberg T-Shirt*
• Cultural Exploration via Art
• Rogue intellect & arts infrastructure

Update: 9th of May - a cross post over at Idealog and the beautiful tesseract at left to check out more in the magazine. “creative generalist”

About 8 or 9 years ago there was a real glut of conferences on the impact of the internet and most presenters felt obliged to talk about Moores law which applied then mostly to hardware.

In fact we are surrounded by lots of “business cycles” and ripple effect such as the innovation cycle - start something new, refine it by bringing down costs and so on over time, while expanding and changing markets in new and interesting ways.

Increasingly more people are realizing that there are parallel and social effects in other technology related areas like software and business cycles for instance.

Two of the thinkers I really like on the wider tech implications are Paul Graham and David Cowan.

Paul has a large number of very helpful essays and this one from October ‘07 really caught my eye - he was talking about The Future of Web Startups.

(This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)

There’s something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.

It’s a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there’s some device that’s very expensive and made in small quantities. Then someone discovers how to make them cheaply; many more get built; and as a result they can be used in new ways.

Computers are a familiar example. When I was a kid, computers were big, expensive machines built one at a time. Now they’re a commodity. Now we can stick computers in everything.

This pattern is very old. Most of the turning points in economic history are instances of it. It happened to steel in the 1850s, and to power in the 1780s. It happened to cloth manufacture in the thirteenth century, generating the wealth that later brought about the Renaissance. Agriculture itself was an instance of this pattern.

Now as well as being produced by startups, this pattern is happening to startups. It’s so cheap to start web startups that orders of magnitudes more will be started. If the pattern holds true, that should cause dramatic changes.

David Cowan recently speculated in a video that we are now at the stage where perhaps every 18 months or so it becomes half as expensive to roll out an application to the web in some kind of echo of Moore’s law.

The mathematical element is not as important as the key point that many more thousands of developers, entrepreneurs and business people everywhere are using the latest software tools and technologies to accelerate just about everything.

From my perspective many of these observations come across like that ancient story of the blind men describing an elephant. The elephant is large and each man describes a different part of what sounds like more than one animal.

As a creative generalist myself with extremely diverse interests and training in multiple disciplines I recognize many of these perspectives all being part of the same large elephant - as it were.

So where is all this heading? On the Paul Graham essay already mentioned he thinks:

10. Faster Advances

There’s a good side to that, at least for consumers of technology. If people get right to work implementing ideas instead of sitting on them, technology will evolve faster.

Some kinds of innovations happen a company at a time, like the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution. There are some kinds of ideas that are so threatening that it’s hard for big companies even to think of them. Look at what a hard time Microsoft is having discovering web apps. They’re like a character in a movie that everyone in the audience can see something bad is about to happen to, but who can’t see it himself. The big innovations that happen a company at a time will obviously happen faster if the rate of new companies increases.

In New Zealand there is a temptation to invent something new because we can’t find an obvious answer. It is now becoming much harder to do that and go global as many of these opportunities are already driving entrepreneurs simultaneously in multiple timezones at warpspeed. There are still advantages to be had from this though.

As David Cowan suggests it much better to come clean and stimulate the discussions by leveraging the wisdom of crowds.

The other great point in his video is that now it is possible and even desirable to move down the pyramid to innovate and invest outside of the top few large companies.

Now with the rate of change and ease of deployment across the internet it is becoming easier and more necessary to be able to provide new products and services in smaller and medium sized businesses.

The latest TED conference starts this week and runs from 27th of Feb to Sat March1. This time presenters range from Craig Venter, through Bob Geldof , Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Isaac Mizrahi to economist Paul Collier and many, many others.

On the Friday night for example there is a debate chaired by Matt Frei of BBC on “How True is Your World View?“, which is both dissecting the media and being broadcast later by the BBC as part of an extended debate.

I’d love to be there myself even though the tickets are almost impossible to get, they cost around $US 6k and then you have to get from wherever you are to Monterey (& Aspen) so there are travel and accommodation expenses also. Luckily I do know a couple of the people who are going and we hope to hear back from them in due course.

I happen to think that most of the discussions and presentations are almost priceless and I know this because like many thousand others I have been busy downloading the videos from the TED site for the past year or more.

I have now watched something like 60 x 18minute videos. Some are much longer like that early Bono one (Who was going to tell him to stop!) They are almost always fascinating and would be keynotes at a wide range of conferences in a host of disciplines.

A recent video release by Chris Anderson the TED curator on the vision for the conference filmed in 2002 makes for great viewing now as he explains some of the back story and the vision for the future.

In the latest TED some of the key questions are:

Who are we?
What is our place in the universe?
What is life?
Is beauty truth?
Will evil prevail?
How can we change the world?
How do we create?
What’s out there?
What will tomorrow bring?
What stirs us?
How dare we be optimistic?
And the point?

As a creative generalist myself …I find the TED sessions wonderful to watch on video. I keep around 40 TED videos in various formats.

For a while I loaded them as QuickTime movies on CD’s for friends, as you are allowed to do under the Creative Commons license but from experience it much better to convert and save them onto DVD’s as not everyone is that savvy with managing video files (unless they are Mac owners.) And watching them on a TV is also much better!

Here are the details of TED for use in the classroom and beyond.

For example :

“5. If you’re a teacher, consider incorporating TEDTalks into your classes. They are distributed under a Creative Commons license, and are freely available for such use, so long as you credit the source and do not distort the speakers’ intended meaning.”

For this conference there is also an invitation to a live session from TED organisers see below.

“First and foremost, we are opening up one complete session of TED free to the world, streamed live over the web. It’s the dramatic session tomorrow evening when three remarkable individuals each unveil their TED Prize wish. (”One wish to change the world. No restrictions. Think big. Be creative.”)

I invite you to join a global audience as Dave Eggers, Neil Turok and Karen Armstrong share their inspiring visions, followed by the uplifting music of Vusi Mahlasela.

You can see the live TED conference video feed here on Thursday, starting at 5.15pm US Pacific Time and lasting a couple of hours. You’ll probably need a broadband connection to see the video properly. There’s a button below the video to select a full-screen view.”

After checking my World Time clock I can see that @ 5:pm (15mins before) is 2pm Friday 29th for NZ and other locations are as shown below.

Enjoy. If you are going to TED and want to report back on what you liked - please let us know your impressions as we’d love to post any insights here.

Many years ago I studied law and even completed my law degree, however my view then and now is that commercial business law is far too important to be left to lawyers.

In short the legal considerations of law in business need to be very pragmatic and practical as part of an overall solution.

My observations since then show that the very best legal advisers are those who understand the wider business context and can help with that.

Since 1993 I have had the pleasure to watch a master at work and now some of that hard won wisdom is available to all of us. Noric Dilanchian has completed a 18 page manifesto on the practical legal considerations of deal making.  Let’s Make a Deal - the full version is freely available for download and it contains a template of 7 essential deal making principles.

As Noric outlines in the beginning of his manifesto.

“Deal making should be led by process, as well as practical and commercial considerations, not purely legal considerations. It is helpful to think of deals as blueprints for living outcomes, not just glue to bind relationships.

The seven principles in this document help minimize risk and maximize returns from deal making activity. The principles are guidelines and simplifications.

They are relevant to all legal regimes. In this document they are grounded on business law in legal jurisdictions derived from the law of England, often called “common law jurisdictions” (these include Australia, Canada, England, India, Malaysia, India and the United States).”

The area I like the best is at the very end. In many respects the most important part of any deal is often the exit clause/s. While everyone has the best of intentions at the outset there needs to be much better ways to recalibrate as key variables change and a smart deal allows you to do this wisely.

In my book that relates to performance issues. Noric has devoted Principle 7 to that area.

PRINCIPLE 7: SET PERFORMANCE CONTROLS
“This final step in deal making process improvement involves effective implementation of deals. Unlike the previous principles, its practical implications apply to all the six previous principles.

Our era is characterized by major shifts in business practices, models and circumstances caused by a tide of technological and business ingenuity. In most contemporary markets there is what we might call a “performance challenge.”

This challenge includes constant market demands for enhanced customer relationship management, more sophisticated products and services, and innovation at many levels. A solution is quality performance control.”

Noric is one of our featured blog links as his entire site offers many other valuable snips of legal and commercial information. His site is also one of the top law sites in Australia.

If you are unfamiliar with ChangeThis you should also check out the other 200+ manifestos there all freely available under Creative Commons licence to anyone who is interested.

“ChangeThis is a vehicle, not a publisher.
We make it easy for big ideas to spread.

While the authors we work with are responsible for their own work, they don’t necessarily agree with everything available in ChangeThis format…..”

“The copyright of this work belongs to the author, who is solely responsible for the content. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License.”

And by the way I have found having a legal background very helpful in business since all roads lead to a deal of some kind or another.