Big, hairy problems with no instruction book (Part 2/4)
Dear Packy -
So if the world needs innovation, is it possible to teach kids to innovate? Absolutely. You are surrounded by innovators every day - watch carefully and see how they approach problems. At its core, innovation is really just creative problem-solving - just on big hairy problems that don’t have an instruction book because they have never been solved before.
It's complicated because it actually requires lots of component skills. Here's what I think those skills are:
A process (AKA “figure-it-out-how”): if the problem hasn’t been solved before, then it’s going to require a process to solve it - a process that involves identifying the problem, brainstorming solutions, prototyping solutions, testing them, evaluating them, and repeating the process until a solution is good enough. Ideo appropriated a process humans have used to solve problems since the bow and arrow (HMW kill an animal from far enough away to avoid being killed ourselves?) and called it design thinking. That's fine - it’s a good process and a vocabulary helps understand and improve the process.
Facility with the process - In addition to the process, your child needs both the confidence and the competence to deploy it repeatedly and effectively.
The ability and inclination to learn - Given the speed with which the world is evolving and the types of problems that need to be solved, there is no static body of knowledge that will support creative problem-solving. Solving any problem new to your kid will require learning new skills and ideas. So she needs to know how to learn as well as have the expectation that she will have to learn throughout her life. It might help to maintain a childlike sense of wonder and curiosity about the world (which school manages to crush - but that’s a different essay).
A body of knowledge - Having a wide base of knowledge and being able to see interconnections between disciplines helps solve problems. It helps to know about history, science, physics, economics, statistics, current events, psychology, and on and on. So at some point, she needs to define (or have it defined for her) and learn a body of knowledge about the world.
Know-how - This is different from “figure-it-out-how”. Know-how is simply the knowledge of how to do practical things in life. Partially as a joke, my family made a list of these skills, calling it “Skills for an Adventurous Life”. Some are hard skills like speaking a foreign language, tying a bowline, docking a boat, driving a stick shift, shooting a gun accurately, packing for a trip, planning a week of meals, evaluating a mortgage and credit cards, and creating a budget (just to name a few). Some of them are soft skills, like being a good conversationalist, being charming, getting a room to like you, blending into a different culture, keeping a cool head in emergencies, and taking a task seriously, but not yourself. They don’t know this, but I pull it out occasionally to see how we are doing. Having lots of know-how will give your child confidence she can add new skills.
Working with others - It’s unlikely that she’s going to be able to solve big hairy problems by herself, so she needs to be able to work with others during periods of ambiguity and stress. This includes managing her emotions as well as the emotions of others.
Communications - Finally, she is going to need to be able to recruit people to those teams, explain the problem she wants to solve, as well as explain what she did and how she did it to the world. So she needs to be able to communicate in writing, in video, and in speaking as well as adapt to new ways of communicating that are invented (which become new problems to be solved).
The next question is how do you learn creative problem-solving? The same way you learn everything else--practice. Through a thoughtful presentation of challenges that gradually increase in difficulty and complexity presented by a teacher who understands how to teach YOU. So you can gradually develop that process of creative problem-solving, the confidence and competence to deploy it and the base of knowledge and skills to support it.
And this is where it gets really hard. Because that’s not what our schools are designed to do.
Ted Dintersmith described most of our schools in his book “What Schools Could Be”:
“This type of school made sense in the era of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Prepare young adults for an economy dominated by large, hierarchical organizations with employees performing to job descriptions. Equip students with citizenship skills suited to democracy with trusted news sources informing us about civic-minded leaders. But Dwight D. Eisenhower died in 1969, taking a simpler era with him to his grave. The students at Eisenhower High look good on paper. But their skill sets are useless in the innovation era, and they will be limited by their mind-sets. As toddlers, they brimmed with creativity, curiosity, and audacity. But these traits are gone, sacrificed in the crusade to produce transcripts that glimmer. These schools, these students, are the fool’s gold of America’s education system. They’re museum artifacts in the innovation era, the context that will define the adult lives of these children.”
The vast majority of schools were designed to create different skills for a different age. As parents, what do you do? My conclusion is that school is necessary but (any school) is far from sufficient. It’s mostly up to you.
Up next - how do you teach creative problem-solving?
Parker