Tag: creativity

5 Characteristics of a Play World

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Earlier this week, I tuned in to a public lecture from Laureate Professor Marilyn Fleer and her team. They presented their latest findings from the Conceptual Playlab at Monash University.

The Conceptual PlayLab is a research group. They investigate play-based models for teaching young children science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

The lecture shared insights from the last three years of research about how infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers think, create and collectively innovate in STEM.

A foundation of their research is the experience of a conceptual play world which I want to explore today.

In the lecture, Fleer outlined the five key pedagogical characteristics of a conceptual play world:

  1. Select a story for the Conceptual Playworld that considers the context of children’s development and their interests.
  2. Design a Conceptual Playworld space to explore concepts and social and emotional development.
  3. How to enter and exit the world.
  4. Plan the play inquiry or problem scenario.
  5. Plan teacher interactions to build conceptual learning in the role.

The notes above are from this overview from Professor Marilyn Fleer: The Five Characteristics of a Conceptual Playworld (Fleer, 2018). This short document also provides some elaborations and practices for each characteristic.

Design Worlds

I was struck by how the five characteristics remind me of facilitation, coaching and learning design.

I often refer to inviting people into a world for a workshop. As a group, we establish working norms or protocols (rules for this new world) and co-design a way to explore a challenge together.

When we perceive learning as a conceptual world to enter or exit. It allows us the opportunity to:

  • Talk about the talking.
  • Stand back and reflect on the learning experience.
  • Take on different roles or explore multiple perspectives.
  • Focus on the process of learning and notice our experience.
  • Explore what makes the most significant difference to how we learn.

Conceptual world-building is a useful mental model as a learning designer and facilitator.

Hold Space For Dialogue

Coaching is about holding space.

You might wonder, what are we holding on to?

For me, this is about maintaining the integrity of the dialogic space.

When I hold the coaching space, I limit judgement, remain in the question and invest in the relationship.

The PlayLab’s research supports the view that learning in a conceptual play world is an essential foundation for STEM learning. I wonder how we can apply these ideas more broadly across different areas of learning? What would be the implications for schools, teachers and students? How might we fold early childhood research into adult learning design?

Too Busy To Play

We are so busy and caught up in the ‘doing’ that we forget to take a step back, reflect and play.

The experience of change and innovation needs playful moments. When we play, we take risks, experiment and try things out. We also create the space to laugh at ourselves and let go of inhibitions.

The challenge for all of us is to find ways to intentionally create space for play.

Your Talking Points

Here are a few key takeaways about

  1. What benefits do you notice when using a play-based approach to learning?
  2. How can we create space for play in our everyday lives?
  3. How will you increase reflection, play and meta-cognition in your next workshop?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Complement this issue with articles about play and innovation from my blog:

​Finding the edges of your page ⟶

​How our creativity is shaped by our culture ⟶

​In A World of Their Own – the features of immersive play ⟶

​Using Kinectimals to Support Play in the Early Years Classroom ⟶

Let play perish and innovation will follow

David Whitebread and Marisol Basilio, in their essay “Play, culture and creativity”, explain that play is ubiquitous in humans and that every child in every culture plays.

Read more ⟶
perish

My weekly email helps educators and innovation leaders enhance their practice by sharing provocations, ideas and mental models. Join today, and get your copy this week.

5 Essential Mental Models for Boosting Your Creativity

Creativity, UncategorizedPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on 5 Essential Mental Models for Boosting Your Creativity 
Hello there! Welcome to the Dialogic Learning Weekly. It’s Friday, February 20. I’m Tom, writing to you from Melbourne, Australia. Thanks for spending part of your day with me. Reach out with comments, questions and feedback at tom@dialogiclearning.com or on Twitter at @tombarrett. If someone forwarded you this email, subscribe to get the Dialogic Learning Weekly sent straight to your inbox.
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Photo by jet dela cruz on Unsplash

In our last issue, we explored the notion of innate creative thinking. Today, we look at mental models associated with ideas, creativity, and originality.

  1. Divergent Thinking
  2. Convergent Thinking
  3. The Innovation Jolt Model
  4. The Creative Habit Model
  5. The Creative Process Model

Regardless of the model, we use to understand creativity, at its heart is a desire and an intention to be creative. Our focus will be: how we can create the right intention to be more creative.

Divergent Thinking

Divergent thinking involves exploring lots of possible solutions to a problem. At the same time, convergent thinking looks for the correct answer to a specific problem.

Culturally, we are trained to think in ‘right or wrong’ terms and that the only way to be creative is to come up with new ‘right’ answers. When we feel like this, it is impossible to be genuinely innovative.

I often describe Divergent Thinking as a mode when we generate lots of different options. It is an expansive and open mode of thinking.

Convergent Thinking

We narrow down the options in convergent thinking, finding a smaller selection of possibilities.

Convergent thinking is often described as a more analytical and closed mode. Usually, this is done by filtering or voting on collections of ideas or datasets.

When we think in convergent thinking mode, we are not open to new ideas because we attempt to make decisions.

Example questions to encourage convergent thinking:

  • Which five ideas have the most potential?
  • Which of the questions sums up your current challenge?
  • Put a sticker on the three words that resonate with you the most?
  • Of all the places we could start, what feels like the most appropriate?
Sometimes there can be a clash of people thinking in opposite modes. Which explains much of the conflict and idea squashing that can happen. This is a dynamic to look out for and facilitate with care.

The Innovation Jolt Model

The analogy is that the moment you get a great idea is like getting hit with a large jolt of electricity — your mind becomes excited and can’t wait to get started.

When looking for ideas, this is the feeling you want, so if it doesn’t happen right away, don’t worry. Keep asking questions until the jolt happens.

The more you can get in touch with your feelings of excitement about an idea, the closer you are to being creative.

The Creative Habit Model

According to this model, creativity is a habit that requires dedication and effort. This means while great ideas may come naturally to some people, they can also be developed by anybody who knows how to practice regularly.

By practising our creative thinking every day, we gradually retrain our brains to think in new ways, increasing our ability for originality and increasing the number of ideas we can develop.

A simple exercise you can use every day is to ask "What if…" and to follow with any question you feel inspired to ask. Some examples:
> What if I didn't have to work?
> What if we didn't have to travel?
> What if the students chose when to learn?
> What if we could harness energy from the wind?
> What if we create an app that makes it easy for people to water their gardens?

The Creative Process Model

This model suggests that creativity isn’t only about understanding when and how to be creative and learning the correct type of thinking for a given situation.

Thinking of creativity and idea generation as a process also helps us manage and understand what we are doing and where we want to go.

We need to learn how to apply different types of thinking to different situations.

Your Talking Points

  • How can you use these models to bring out greater creativity in yourself and other people you communicate with?
  • What specific practices can you do daily to increase creativity in your life/work/studies, etc.?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Complement this issue with my Atomic Essays: Solution Siren Call, Walt Disney Creative Strategy, Feedback is Oxygen For Your Ideas, Willful Blindness, Counter Wooden Headedness.

Thanks for taking a moment to join me this week — drop me an email at tom@dialogiclearning.com to connect and say hi. Or you can connect with me on Twitter > @tombarrett

5 Idea Characteristics to Increase Traction and Adoption

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How to give your idea the best chance of success

I enjoyed the responses to this tweet from Nick Parker.

A whole range of technologies was shared, here are a few interesting examples:

“The idea of IoT (Internet of Things) in general. Not a single tipping point but a convergence of: (fairly cheap) sensors everywhere, better network bandwidth, better batteries, and the cloud.” ⟶ Tweet from @seanmfdineen

“Accurate mechanical timekeeping — Took 500 years to get from the first mechanical clock to Harrison’s first sea clock. A lot of technical innovations, as well as a lot of public and private investment, were needed to get to that point.” ⟶ Tweet from @AGMonro​

“Maybe mundane, but LEDs suddenly passed some sort of cost/performance barrier a few years ago and went from being the little diodes on stereos to changing the way cities look.” ⟶ Tweet from @snillockcirtap​

“Shipping containers … first used in the 1760s … became mainstream in 1960s/70s” ⟶ Tweet from @davegentle​

​It got me thinking about the tipping point or critical mass of innovation and its usefulness for understanding the broader theories of change.

For a long time, I think education has focused on the wrong part of innovation theory.

Diffusion of Innovation

Before we get into talking about the pattern or curve of adoption that a new idea takes, it is worth reminding you of the work of Everett Rogers.

Back in 1962, he wrote The Diffusion of Innovations, where he looked at the rate at which an idea spreads through a community.

Although telecommunications and digital technology later co-opted this model to explain why your Dad doesn’t use a smartphone, the original innovation Rogers studied was in agriculture.

He looked at the shift from farmers using particular variants of crops and livestock to more widespread adoption of a new way of doing things.

What encourages the adoption of a new idea?

Rogers proposed five main factors that contribute to the rate of adoption.

He hypothesised that there is a direct relationship between the characteristics of the innovation (relative advantage, compatibility, observability, complexity and trialability — how easy it is to try out) and the percentage of people who adopt it over time.

It is these characteristics that I find the most fascinating and which are often overlooked:

#1 Compatibility

Why would your father want to have a smartphone? Because his friends, family and colleagues already do! Technology has to be a good fit for people’s lives and interests. Innovation must be compatible enough with existing beliefs, values and practices.

#2 Trialability

The ratio of effort it takes to try something out versus the benefits gained from doing so. In an interview exploring these ideas, Rogers stated that “the more convenient a test is for you, the less involved or complicated it is to get into a trial, the easier it is going to be for you to make up your mind about trying a new idea”. This suggests a threshold effect — you’ll try something if there’s little risk and the benefits outweigh whatever barrier might exist between thinking about trying and doing it.

#3 Complexity

The more complicated the idea, the more time and effort to try it out. If there is a choice of which new thing to try out, this factor suggests that people choose the more straightforward option. Rogers says that an innovation will be adopted when it is “simple enough to understand and use, but complex enough to offer challenges”.

#4 Relative Advantage

This one also gets considered in behavioural economics through concepts such as loss aversion (people are far more risk-averse when it comes to losing something than gaining the same thing). This is probably the one we most want to understand of all the factors. It is, after all, the idea that anyone adopting a new technology must have more to gain than they have to give up.

#5 Observability

I find this factor fascinating because it suggests that whether people take up the idea depends less on its benefits than how easy it is for them to see other people using it. This one is fascinating in the context of education. We all know that using the latest technology in class isn’t enough; people also have to see it used well and learn how to get started with it themselves.

Adoption Curves

Rogers proposed that a new idea or technology would typically follow a bell curve to diffuse through a community. This is referred to as the S-curve, adoption or diffusion curve. The emphasis was on members of a social system and our labels for them.

There was a time when every education keynote — yes, even mine — provoked an audience to think about the different groups of people that adopt an innovative idea.

The segment names directly illustrate the group’s propensity to adopt an innovation.

  1. Innovators
  2. Early adopters
  3. Early majority
  4. Late majority
  5. Laggards

Over time, these groups adopt an innovation at different rates and represent different community proportions.

slide team, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

While this pattern of adoption is not universal, it happens often enough that we can use it as a general way of understanding how people will accept new things.

Focusing on labelling people and their response to the idea is a dead end. It is much more helpful to think about the characteristics of your idea that might be changed to encourage adoption and acceptance.

Your Talking Points

I have two key provocations for you to ponder and reflect upon.

  1. Within the theory of diffusion, we are not attempting to change a person’s label from one to another. It is not people that change but the innovation itself as, over time, it improves, changes and diffuses throughout a system.
  2. Identify a new programme you are starting this year — your innovation — and score it according to the five essential characteristics: relative advantage, compatibility, observability, complexity and trialability. How could it improve?

Reverse The Polarity Of Your Ideas

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Last time out, we had a look together at three mental models to improve your thinking and educational innovation. Today I share the opposite ideas or at least guide you to stand in a different place and consider the three mental models from a different perspective.

Of course, you did the pre-reading of last week’s issue, right?! But if you didn’t, here is a quick primer. After all, we need these to be points of comparison:

  • Critical mass – the threshold of a large enough number or proportion that triggers a change.
  • Reciprocity – when people tend to treat others the way they are treated.
  • Leverage – the action or process of using an advantage to multiply force.

So, what are the other ways of looking at these three models if we reverse the polarity? What counterpoints or alternative concepts do we need to be aware of? If we commit to these three mental models as part of our educational innovation, what are the biases that emerge?

Social Proof

Critical mass describes a threshold, a number of people that represents a tipping point in a group. Social proof is a mental model that suggests people are more likely to do something if they see others doing it.

So if critical mass is the line to reach, social proof is a mechanism to help us achieve that point. Social proof is something we can leverage when we design new projects and implement innovations.

Social proof is a powerful bias we have to keep in mind. The tendency can be harmful and positive, and it fuels the way we see trends, fashion, commerce and why many people are likely to follow the crowd.

Critical mass and social proof are two sides of the same coin. They’re both about alignment, an idea of community and public validation.

Social Debt

When we explored reciprocity in educational leadership and innovation last week, we emphasised the links to relationships and collaboration.

The mental model of reciprocity is a valuable provocation as it challenges us to think about how our actions influence others and the expectations we frame as a result.

An alternative way to consider reciprocity is to think of ‘goal setting’ as a behaviour change strategy to make a public, discrete and shared commitment. In contrast, reciprocity is an internal mechanism or exchange, an implied obligation.

Social debt is another way to frame the reciprocity mental model. An important element to add to our understanding because

people who feel indebted tend to experience more negative emotions and feel stressed rather than uplifted, because they are worried about repayment.

How to Say Thanks Without Feeling Indebted

When we have built our social capital through positive reciprocal interactions with others in learning networks and communities, it becomes an asset to leverage for future action.

The Bias of Permanent Multipliers

What are the biases associated with leverage?

Think of leverage through the idea of multiplication (i.e. by using the advantage, we multiply the force). Then, once again, our human bias is that this multiplier will not disappear or change.

The bias of permanent multipliers is to see something as fixed when it is not. The way to challenge this bias is by considering shifts in your context and the fluid nature of change over time.

For example, you leverage the support and advocacy of senior members of your team to kick off a new project. When you consider this initial influence dissipates over time and is not fixed, we are more likely to lead a sustainable innovation.

Reverse The Polarity

This study of opposites is a strategy you can use in any of your projects. By looking at the opposites or counterpoints, we have reversed the polarity, a creative thinking technique that Marty Neumeier uses.

Related to reversing the polarity is to start from a different place, and the work helps us practice this creative routine.

When you grab for the “correct” solution, brilliant solutions will elude you. You’ll get stuck in the tar pits of knowledge, unable to free your mind of what you already know. The easiest way to escape this trap is by rejecting the correct solution—at least temporarily—in favor of the “wrong” solution. While the worst idea can never be the best idea, it will take your imagination to a different starting place.

Marty Neumeier

Take this idea into your workflow by going to a place opposite to how you usually think or start. If your thinking is generally linear and sequential, go for a spiral instead. If you typically jump in with an answer, try a question this time around.

Your Talking Points

  • What do you struggle with in terms of creativity and innovation at the moment, and how might these mental models help to shape your response?
  • How can you challenge your thinking about the assumptions of permanent multipliers?
  • Where else might we experience this bias in education and beyond?
  • On reflection, what would you add? What other advantages and ideas do we need to consider in our practice to reduce these biases before they emerge?

My weekly email helps educators and innovation leaders enhance their practice by sharing provocations, ideas and mental models. Join today, and get your copy this week.

Counter Wooden-Headedness and Break Your Echo Chambers

Creativity, Decision MakingPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Counter Wooden-Headedness and Break Your Echo Chambers

This article explores the importance of ‘good conflict’ in idea generation, decision making, and leadership teams. Add some mental models to your cognitive toolkit to help you develop collective intelligence.

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Photo by Bruno Aguirre on Unsplash

Break Your Echo Chambers

For the first time in my life, the England football team made it to a final of a major competition, the European Championship.

The last time was 1966 when we won the World Cup. Fifty-five years of waiting. (update: still waiting, congratulations Italy)

A lot of attention and credit has gone to Gareth Southgate, the manager of the England football team. I enjoyed Matthew Syed’s article about his leadership and multi-faceted team.

Syed explores the limitations of a homogenous team of like-minded experts.

You would have an echo chamber. They would reflect each other’s assumptions back to each other. It would be comfortable, chummy and consensual. It would also be monolithic and non-creative.

The FA Technical Advisory Board has been advising on performance and development since 2016 and consists of a broad range of different backgrounds:

  • Kath Grainger, an Olympic rower
  • Stuart Lancaster, the rugby coach
  • Manoj Badale, a tech entrepreneur
  • Sir Dave Brailsford, a cycling coach
  • Colonel Lucy Giles, a college commander at the Sandhurst Military Academy
  • David Sheepshanks, the mastermind behind the St George’s Park national football centre.

the group is capable of offering fresh insights on preparation, diet, data, mental fortitude and more. This is sometimes called “divergent” thinking to contrast it with the “convergence” of echo chambers.

Syed concludes by explaining that:

The key is to bring people together whose perspectives are both relevant to the problem, and which are also different from each other. This maximises both “depth” and “range” of knowledge — leading to “collective intelligence”.

Your Talking Points

⟶ How are you creating “depth” and “range” in your team recruitment?

⟶ How are you exploring beyond your industry for insights and innovations?

Euros 2020: What all of us can learn from Gareth Southgate
Part of Gareth Southgate’s success could be his willingness to turn to football outsiders to help prepare his England…www.bbc.com

Counter Wooden-Headedness

The acceptance of divergence and good conflict led me to think about the Tenth Man Principle. This is a mental model or dialogue protocol that has resonated with me for a long time.

The Tenth Man is a devil’s advocate. If there are 10 people in a room and nine agree, the role of the tenth is to disagree and point out flaws in whatever decision the group has reached.

This approach originated after the Yom Kippur War (known in the Arab World as the Ramadan War) in 1973. The Israeli Defence Force’s Intelligence Directorate created a Red Team, a devil’s advocate team that can challenge prevalent assumptions within intelligence bodies.

We have three intertwined mental models or structures we might use.

  • The Tenth Man Principle
  • A Red Team
  • The Devil’s Advocate

You will be familiar with the Devil’s Advocate, a discourse convention of prefacing a dissenting viewpoint with, ‘just to play Devil’s Advocate.’

A Red Team — terminology from the world of security systems — is set up to deliberately challenge and stress a plan or structure to identify weaknesses. We can use this idea to explore alternative viewpoints or offer critique on a proposed project.

The author, William Kaplan, finishes with broader brush strokes. He extends the Tenth Man concept beyond military intelligence and frames the problem in the words of historian Barbara Tuchman as ‘wooden-headedness’.

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists of assessing a situation in terms of preconceived or fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. ~ Barbara Tuchman

The Tenth Man Principle and the Red Team or Devil’s Advocate Team are protocols to counter fixed or closed-mindedness.

The purpose of the Tenth Man Principle is to:

  • Challenge conventional and received wisdom;
  • Look at things creatively, independently, and from a fresh perspective;
  • Engage actively with and reconsider the status quo;
  • Search for information and arguments that contradict theses;
  • Provide a sounding board for anyone who wishes to raise issues;
  • Explore alternative assumptions and worst-case scenarios.

This list is a robust set of critical thinking intentions, which in the aggregate, define open-mindedness. We need to increase our open-mindedness to develop innovative solutions to complex problems.

Your Talking Points

⟶ How is your team identifying your assumptions and actively challenging the status quo?

⟶ Discuss the potential trap of missing the best solution because you seek harmony and consensus.

How Israeli intelligence failures led to a ‘devil’s advocate’ role
The October 1973 Yom Kippur War, known in the Arab World as the Ramadan War, showed the risks to Israel of…www.thestar.com

The Value of Dissent and Conflict

When we generate ideas, conventional wisdom encourages a zero feedback zone. We often withhold criticism and feedback as we are sharing ideas. But perhaps that is not always the best technique.

According to research by Charlan Nemeth, and her team, a degree of conflict can increase the number of ideas we generate.

The approach they outline is to encourage open debate and feedback as ideas are shared. Participants are encouraged to communicate freely and not limit any reaction or contribution.

They describe a 25% increase in ideas generated from a debate and critique approach than straightforward brainstorming tasks.

The paper offers some connected insights to our exploration of the value of conflict and diverse teams. Here are some highlights, the second quote directly links to the Tenth Man Principle:

The notion that groups perform better when they share and even confront differences bears some resemblance to the research on the value of dissent and diversity. Diversity is often found to aid the quality of decisions, presumably because of the multiple perspectives that it provides.

in more naturalistic settings, there is evidence that groups with a dissenter make better decisions. Organizations fare better when dissent is valued and expressed.

A further detail referenced in the paper offers some insight into whether it is better to generate ideas on your own or within a team:

individuals working separately generate many more, and more creative (as rated by judges) ideas than do groups, even when the redundancies among member ideas are deleted.

This insight emphasises the importance of designing time to work solo before other team structures for idea generation.

Your Talking Points

⟶ Is there enough trust in this team to use deliberate debate? (see link below to explore this further)

⟶ How do you provide individual time to generate ideas alongside team sessions?

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