Category Archives: Lateral Thinking

The new education #3: Curiosity

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Week 3 (and final part) of “What they should be teaching at school” – Curiosity.

If curiosity is supposed to have killed the cat, then in my case, curiosity probably changed my life. Earlier in my career, I was offered the opportunity to relocate overseas. When I asked my manager why I had been chosen, he replied that I had “asked the right questions” to justify my selection. In fact, I had no idea that I was in contention for the role – I was simply interested in the new project from a business perspective. I hadn’t even considered whether I wanted the role itself – but my questioning apparently displayed the right amount of curiosity, and I was seen as the right fit for the job.

Being curious means you are less willing to simply accept something as “received wisdom”. It shows that you want to make sense of things for yourself. It helps you ask why things are done a certain way (especially if the answer is “because they’ve always been done this way…”). It demonstrates you want to find out how things work for yourself.

The downside is you may be more disbelieving, more sceptical, and prone to being suspicious. It can also mean you distrust certainty. But I would gladly take a level of ambiguity over a sense of complacency any day. A questioning nature can act as a defence mechanism against hype, cant and bullsh*t.

I hope kids learn how to take their early curiosity (and not just their knack for asking “but, why, mummy, why?”) into later life. Curiosity is how we learn to find our passions and interests outside the formal school curriculum and the set learning model. Our natural curiosity helps us to make sense of the world. I don’t think I would have developed any real critical thinking if I hadn’t strayed “off piste” and explored books that were not on the list of set texts.

Recently, I explained to a former colleague how I had participated in a number of startup and tech hackathons, even though I’m not a coder or programmer. My ex-colleague asked, almost in disbelief, “why would you do that?” Apart from being part of my journey into a new career path, my answer was simple: “Because I was curious, because I wanted to learn something, because I wanted to network and make new connections, and because I also wanted to get out of my comfort zone.”

In my view, if you stop being curious, you stop growing as a person, you stop developing your mental faculties, and metaphorically, you stop breathing.

Next week: Looking back on 6 years of blogging

 

 

The new education #2: Resilience

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Week 2 of “What they should be teaching at school” – Resilience.

Life doesn’t always turn out how we hoped. Life isn’t always “fair”. And sometimes life just sucks. In the words of The Rolling Stones, “You can’t always get what you want.”

Given that:

  • people entering the workforce now are likely to be made redundant at least 5 times during their career;
  • within the next few years, 40% or more of the workforce will be self-employed, contractors, freelancers, or employed in the gig economy, and therefore will be more reliant than ever on their own abilities to generate an income; and
  • an increasing number of today’s jobs will disappear through automation or other technology advances;

it makes sense to include resilience on the curriculum, to prepare students for the reality of the new economy.

As we are all too aware, having a degree or other formal qualification is no guarantee that candidates will get a job or role in the career of their choice. And even if they do, sooner or later they will have to consider a career switch – which may include having to make a sideways or even a backwards move in order to go forward in a new field or discipline. Plus some re-training or skill updates wouldn’t go amiss.

Resilience helps us to deal with life’s disappointments and overcome personal and professional setbacks. It can also help us to learn from those experiences – what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

While it’s important to provide a safe and supportive learning environment, I’m not a fan of  helicopter parents, so-called tiger parenting, let alone stage parents. Over-coddled kids are more likely to come unstuck (or go off the rails) at the first obstacle or challenge they face, especially in circumstances where they might not like the choices life has presented them.

I may be drawing a long bow here, but I can’t help thinking there is some sort of correlation between current concepts of modern parenting and education, and the higher incidences of allergies and mental illness – and maybe stronger resistance through greater resilience would help pupils cope with whatever gets thrown at them. Just saying.

Next week: Curiosity

 

 

The new education #1: Agility

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Week 1 of “What they should be teaching at school” – Agility.

We are used to ‘agile’ in terms of project management and software development; it’s even been applied to a style of business management itself. From the agile process, we recognise the value of continuous learning from a combination of task-based collaboration, iterative experimentation, rapid validation and constant improvement.

So it would make sense to deploy agile learning in school. Whether it’s research methods, data validation, practical experiments, rapid testing, team collaboration or scenario planning, agile thinking can foster the ability to be empathetic, consider alternative perspectives,  evaluate different contexts, and respond to new data or situations.

While it’s important to learn core foundational facts and key conceptual frameworks, we can’t remain rigid in the face of new information. But the rate at which our knowledge is changing (new science, new data, new discoveries) also means it’s a challenge trying to keep up. Therefore, agile thinking is essential to being able to gather appropriate information, process and interpret the data, construct and validate innovative theories, and apply them to new situations, based on the available evidence. This approach should also foster greater creativity, build stronger reasoning skills, and see the development of logical thought processes.

Next week: Resilience

 

 

Expert vs Generalist

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My recent blog on the importance of experts prompted one reader to comment that he preferred the term “specialist” (in a non-medical sense) to “expert”. This got me thinking about the notion of “experts” as distinct from “generalists”, and whether we need to re-evaluate our assessment of skill, competence and aptitude when assessing someone’s suitability for a task, project or role. (And these days, is “generalist” itself something of a pejorative term?)

A few days later, I was having coffee with a strategic consultant who is known as a future thinker. He describes himself as an “extreme generalist” (with no hint of irony), because he has wide-ranging and multiple interests, some of which, of course, he has deep domain knowledge and experience. But because his work and his curiosity take him into different realms, he maintains a broad perspective which also allows for the cross-pollination of ideas and concepts. (I think we all recognize the value of analogy when problem solving – taking the learning from one discipline and applying it to a new scenario.)

Separately, but in a similar vein, I was discussing career options with a senior banking executive, who did not want to be pigeon-holed as a banker, because her core skills and professional experience would lend themselves to many industries, not just financial services. So in her case, this expertise would best be applied in a particular type of role, not in a specific domain, or a specialist capability.

And during an earlier discussion on leadership with yet another futurist, I found myself debating the notion of situational styles, as opposed to structural models – both of which require skill and expertise for CEOs and managers to be successful. But broad experience will be just as important as formal methodologies, and general business knowledge just as valuable as technical specialisation. (On reflection, as with so many constructs, it’s not a case of either/or – more a question of adaptation and dynamics.)

As a result of this ongoing dialogue, I was challenged to develop what I might describe as a 3-D model, comprising the following axes:

“Generalist”/”Specialist”: In product management terms, for example, the generalist understands the full end-to-end customer life cycle and the production process. Whereas, a specialist might know their particular part of the process extremely well, but has little to no awareness or understanding of what might come before or after. (Think of those frustrating customer calls to utility, telco and insurance companies – in fact, any business with highly siloed operations – where you get passed from one “specialist” to another, often revealing contradictory information along the way.) At the extremes, this dimension might be described as the difference between knowing a subject “a mile wide and an inch deep”, and knowing it “a mile deep and an inch wide”.

“Novice”/”Veteran”: This is probably obvious, but I don’t necessarily mean seniority, age or tenure in a specific role. When it comes to new technology, for example, someone who is new to the role, but who has just been trained on the latest software and equipment, may have better technical ability than someone who has been doing the same role for several years (and thus, has more knowledge and experience), but has not refreshed their skills. Although I concede that in many situations the incumbent veteran may have better developed problem-solving, trouble-shooting and decision-making capabilities. This axis is also really important to consider when transitioning older employees to new roles within the same organisation or team – if they were younger, they would probably be given more time to adjust, adapt and grow into the role. Whereas, an older employee may simply be expected to “pick it up” much more quickly, with less leeway for learning on the job, because of assumed expertise.

“Broad”/Narrow”: Here I am thinking about aptitude, rather than the degree of specialisation. Drawing on the idea of using analogies, someone with wide experience and a broad perspective (sees the big picture, displays both critical and design thinking) will have quite different qualities to someone with a very narrow focus (especially within a very specific domain or area of practice). Based on the particular context, do you need an all-rounder, or a placekicker? This axis also relates to the age-old issue of organisations only wanting to hire square pegs for square holes – it might make sense in the short-term, but risks stagnation and lack of fresh thinking over the long-term.

Assessed along these three dimensions, we might see that an “expert” could be qualified according to how highly they rate based on their overall “depth”, measured by criteria such as experience, knowledge and reputation, as well as formal qualifications.

Next week: Making an Impact at Startup Victoria’s Pitch Night