An interesting article on creativity, from Newsweek:
“With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.”
It seems like there are a lot of areas where creativity is celebrated with much less enthusiasm than following a prescribed plan.
Metacool says the first principle of innovation is:
“constantly seek to experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world”
Certainly learn from others, but it reminds me of #9 in Bre Pettis’s Done Manifesto:
“People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.”
To make real advances, to innovate and to learn, will require that you try, fail, and try again. It’s called experimentation. And as they said at Grumman Aerospace in the 60′s, “1 good test is worth a 1000 expert opinions”.
Amen.
“The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and re-learn.” — Alvin Toffler [via @jalam1001]
Illiterate may be too strong of a word, but the sentiment is correct. The key talent for people today is no longer to master a trade or a specific skill, but to become adapt at adapting to change. If you can anticipate change and react to it faster than your competitors, it doesn’t just put you a little ahead, it puts you an order of magnitude ahead.
When I started college, they said that 90% of the jobs we would be taking when we graduated 4 years later, hadn’t been invented yet. And you know what? They were right. If change is happening even faster now, what long-held perspectives must you shift to keep from being left in the dust?
Mark Pesce in his book The Playful World:
“For [the millennial child] the act of knowing something has become inseparable from the act of reaching for knowledge. She searches for what she needs to know; in a moment’s time, the answers are at hand. And anything known to anyone anywhere has become indistinguishable from what she knows for herself.”
Memorizing certain things has it’s value, but if you have the skills to find the answer to anything in 30 seconds using the smartphone in your pocket, what things are really worth memorizing? There are two things we should teach: the skill of searching and finding (ie, how to learn) and the skill to evaluate the quality of your sources. That’s it. Research and critical analysis.
Matthew E May (who wrote about Toyota’s production system in his book, In Pursuit Of Elegance) has some nice tips for innovation. My favorite is the first on his list of 10 tips for unleashing innovation:
“Let Learning Lead. Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first. Learning is defined as the creation of new knowledge through experimentation.”
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