Tag 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

 

 

“I’m reframing, the situation….”

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As a break from my consulting and business development work, I have been taking lessons on picture framing. My significant other is an artist, and she has commissioned me to mount and frame a number of her works for a forthcoming exhibition. Things got off to an interesting start, when I inadvertently framed the first print the “wrong” way round (see the image below). Because there wasn’t an obvious top or bottom, I didn’t realise that I hadn’t placed the image in the way she intended. But, luckily, this “error” created a fresh perspective, and I realised that I was simply doing what I do all with the time with my clients when I reframe the information, problems or situations they present.

"Eclipse" (© Margaret Manchee)

“Eclipse” (© Margaret Manchee)

Some recent examples of where I have helped my various clients to reframe a situation and make a breakthrough when they have become stuck or blocked in their own thinking include:

  • shifting from a “retail” sales model to a “wholesale” strategy that focuses on aggregators and distributors;
  • treating an employer as just one part of a mixed portfolio of clients, rather than thinking that the regular job was a barrier to acquiring more direct clients;
  • refining the sales process to avoid giving away too much proprietary information during the RFP process, but still demonstrating value by delivering the best solution in terms of quality and technical capabilities;
  • repositioning the business to leverage proprietary data and analytics to build long-term revenue streams via commercial relationships and partnerships, rather than competing for increasingly price-sensitive, commoditized and transactional work;
  • adopting a more client-centred approach when designing a new on-line product that hitherto had been viewed internally as simply a technology-driven service extension;
  • using a service-design model for developing and delivering a communication strategy that needs to engage multiple stakeholders who simply want to know “what’s in it for me?”

Another useful insight that my picture framing has given me is the use of complementary and contrasting mount boards and mouldings to emphasise certain colours, to bring out highlights, to add depth and perspective, or to the give the illusion of infinite space and/or possibilities. Again, all things which I bring to the discussions I have with my clients.

Next week: FinTech Melbourne’s latest pitch event