This week I enjoyed reading about a new surgical instrument that a parasitic wasp inspired. Not so much the parasitic wasp part 🐝, but the origin story of the innovation.
Biomimicry
A team at Imperial College London are rapidly developing a robotic, flexible needle that can bend to reach difficult locations. The mechanism is inspired by female parasitoid wasps, which use a bendable needle-like ovipositor to bore into wood to lay eggs in hiding host larvae.
Serendipity is a beautiful thing! I stumbled on the unique qualities of this particular wasp when Professor Julian Vincent, who is a friend and colleague, explained at a dinner how the curved ovipositor worked. Suddenly, I wondered whether we could mimic this attribute in robotic medical technology to improve the delivery of treatments. … we now have a medical-grade, clinically sized working prototype, which we hope will ultimately improve outcomes and recovery times for patients with brain diseases.
This is an example of biomimicry. Might you be more familiar with the classic Velcro invention story? The hooks on plant seeds that help them disperse inspired George de Mestral to create the first hook and loop fastener.
Did you know that Velcro is a portmanteau of “velvet” and “crochet” (literally, “hook” in French).
Biomimicry is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges — and find hope along the way.
Drawing inspiration from natural solutions requires a mindset ready for serendipity. The following mental model explains the reason why we often miss these moments of inspiration.
The Streetlight Effect
The Streetlight Effect can explain one block to new ideas and innovative solutions. You might have heard of this observational bias, demonstrated in the story of the drunk looking for his keys:
A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is”.
Sometimes people look for the next breakthrough idea in the most accessible place. They filter for ideas closely related to their work or too similar to their context. That search is doomed to mediocrity. At best, it was a marginal alteration and not the breakthrough they were hoping for.
It may be easier to look at what the school down the road is doing, but that limits what is possible.
The strategy that might be the key to your next breakthrough is to explore beyond your industry.
A lovely example that I often think about is the emergency doctors who consulted with Ferrari F1 mechanics to improve their intensive care unit handoff practice. The doctors at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital had their moment of serendipity whilst watching the motor racing.
Another healthcare example is Rotterdam Eye Hospital, which implemented six aviation industry innovations such as black box recording, risk analysis, patient taxi service, and valet parking.
Observations indicated that the innovations positively affected quality and safety in the hospital: Waiting times were reduced, work processes became more standardised, the number of wrong-site surgeries decreased, and awareness of patient safety was heightened.
The next time you are at the idea generation stage, hit the pause button and recognise the bias of looking for inspiration in familiar places. Identify and explore similar experiences.
Innovation is a process with a range of other ideas nested within it. When you peer inside you see creativity, curiosity, feedback and taking action. All interdependent and collectively they might be called innovation.
When you think of the “space to innovate” what immediately springs to mind? The physical environment around you? Space where you might develop ideas? Alternatively perhaps something about the time you have available?
During my work with architects and learning environment projects over the last eight years, I have started to identify a richer, more complex, set of spaces and dependencies. Beyond just the physical space we design.
Each space contributes to the culture and in particular (for this blog post at least) the conditions for innovation. Some spaces are more prominent and noticeable than others, whereas some have a more significant influence than others but cannot be seen.
For each concept, I have shared some initial thoughts, links and quotes. Each section concludes with some small steps, Protocols and Practices you might take to encourage thinking about it’s relationship to your innovation efforts. You will see these in the green blocks like this one.
To conclude the article I have shared a mental model to explore the relationship between the different spaces. I am interested in what happens when one of these spaces is missing or poorly resourced. What impact might this have on the overall Space for Innovation.?
One of the first times I consciously experienced the impact of the physical environment on my thinking was when organising some of the first Teachmeets in my region back in England.
I was able to secure a modern, purpose-built professional learning space for an inaugural TeachMeet in the Midlands and it was a considerable departure from the Victorian school buildings I was accustomed.
The physical environment signalled collaboration and connection as well as high expectations. It was an inspiring place to plan and develop the event.
Of course, the impact of the physical space on our ability to innovate can be unconsciously negative. We normalise our surroundings pretty quickly and so get used to a lack of collaboration, visibility or space to externalise our ideas.
Physical spaces for innovation have become a little cliche. Whiteboards and open spaces, you don’t have to go far to find image galleries of all sorts of workspaces squarely designed for innovation and creativity.
On a much more personal level, the physical space for innovation may look very different for each of us. Fresh air and exercise is an excellent primer for new thinking. Or perhaps you prefer the utility of the whiteboard and the proximity to abundant post-it note supplies.
Of the spaces I am exploring in this post, the Physical Space for Innovation is the most observable. Take a look around you now dear reader; you can quickly judge your surroundings for yourself in how much they are the right conditions for curiosity and ideas.
Protocols and Practices > Triage your space for what is not needed or used infrequently. > Create visible spaces for externalising and storing your ideas. > Change things up – get outside, get out of the room.
Temporal Space
A further space that often conceals the opportunity for innovation is Time. It is one of the most critical aspects of creating the right conditions for change and new ideas to flourish.
It is not just about the amount of time we have but the way we use that time. Too much haste is an emotional block to creativity and will likely push people away from exploring original ideas.
Think carefully about how the pace of thinking and work is being used to suit the needs of different people. Vary the pace to allow everyone the opportunity to share ideas and develop original concepts.
Just as “one size does not fit all” – when it comes to the Temporal Space for Innovation one pace does not fit all.
There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.
Bill Watterson
The structure of Time can be lightly resting on us, or it can create pressure. A pressure to perform, create or submit ideas by a deadline. This false-haste can have a negative impact. We need time to play.
John Cleese explains it well:
The open mode is a relaxed, expansive, and less purposeful mode in which we’re probably more contemplative, more inclined to humour (which always accompanies a wider perspective), and, consequently, more playful. It’s a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate because we’re not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play, and that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.
In schools, we organise time into a table. That enduring structure can dictate the experience way beyond the original remit. Blocks of time signal the start and end of thinking or work. Often days are punctuated by a rhythm a long way from what might be considered ideal for play, deep thinking and innovation.
We might have beautiful, creative physical spaces but time structures that do not match. We have to pay attention to them both.
Protocols and Practices > Explore different times of day for development work. > Protect longer blocks of time you have set aside for deeper work. > Look at the medium to long-term provision of quality project time.
Cognitive Space
The further we are from the Physical the more difficult it is to observe these concepts. The Cognitive Space for Innovation refers to the capacity we have for thinking in a playful, creative and exploratory way.
When our thoughts are swamped or overwhelmed with too many projects, deadlines and tasks it is very difficult to be able to commit to the challenge of innovative work.
You will always be able to pick those moments when your Cognitive Space is crowded, or when your colleagues say, “I don’t have time for that now.” We need to ensure we clear some room for the wide-ranging thinking that innovation requires.
One of my favourite mental models is the analogy of the mind used by Sherlock Holmes. He describes the (Cognitive Space) as an attic. You may have heard of Attic Theory. This passage from a Study in Scarlet explains it some more:
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these, he has a large assortment and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle
Attic Theory is an excellent example of applying a physical space analogy to the Cognitive Space between our ears.
The Cognitive Space for Innovation is something that can be hidden to us. Teachers, facilitators and leaders need to carefully uncover the signals of an overcrowded cognitive space.
My favourite method is to ask “What is on your mind?” to a group. Give it a try and then adapt what you are about to do in response.
Protocols and Practices > Identify ways to relieve the pressure so others can focus. > Pay attention to the number of active projects and programmes. > Ask “What is on your mind?” to allow the pressures to be shared.
Emotional Space
“Head, heart and hands” right? The Emotional Space for Innovation is a close ally to the Cognitive Space. The Emotional Space for Innovation for me refers to the commitment, passion and purpose each person has.
This space is about how much we care about the ideas and challenges we are exploring. Perhaps it is linked to whether the people in your team have self-selected (see Agentic) to be there or they have been told.
In teaching, we often talk about how our relationships are at the centre of what we do and how to engage students on an emotional level. Deep down this is true for creating the right conditions for innovation and creativity.
It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.
So our neurobiology dictates terms when it comes to purposeful work. Regardless of the Physical, Temporal or Cognitive Space, unless we care, we will always be working against a neurobiological tide.
Protocols and Practices > Take your time to connect to the wider purpose of your work. > Use empathy activities (like shadowing) to connect with others. > Regularly re-establish the emotional connection to the task.
Agentic Space
Many of us have experienced this particular space, mainly due to the lack of agency we have. The Agentic Space for Innovation is the room we have to define our own experience.
Put a different way it is how much license we have to implement new ideas. This type of space impacts the pointy end of any innovation process, the implementation and application of ideas.
Without agency, innovation can falter. I sit here writing this thinking I have complete agency over my work. I have control over my calendar and who I work with. As a small business owner, if there is a new idea I want to implement, I don’t need to seek permission or beg for forgiveness.
Collective agency – coordinate with others to secure what cannot be accomplished in isolation.
Personal agency – act with intention, forethought, self-reactiveness, self-reflectiveness to secure a desired outcome.
Which do you most commonly experience during Innovation processes? I would hazard a guess that Collective Agency is the most frequent experience. This is due to the collaborative nature of innovation.
If we are relying on other people, we have very little ability to act with intention and purpose.
The Agentic Space for Innovation may well be a circuit breaker. With all others in play, we may still be waiting for the permission from others. Consider how you might de-couple teams and colleagues enough to have a more open Agentic Space for innovation.
Protocols and Practices > Establish how much agency a team has from the beginning. > Reinforce the permissive culture within the project. > B authentic about follow through and implementing ideas.
What happens to innovation when one of these spaces is missing?
The relationship between these spaces is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this work. They each depend on each other in varying forms. Let’s explore some of the potential ripple effects if we have a space that is not functioning well.
What do you think?
When you don’t have the Physical space for innovation, the process takes longer. This might be true because there is less visibility of ideas and progress, fewer opportunities for working collaboratively and poorer communication between teams.
If our Cognitive space is crowded and overwhelming us, we will likely only engage at the surface level. The commitment to the work will probably wain over time as other competing agendas and projects take their toll. Mental energy is limited.
Time is a crucial ingredient for any creative or innovation work. Without enough quality time, ideas might become less ambitious and revert to safe bets.
Without the Emotional commitment to the work, we get projects that fizzle out. We don’t see the connection to the broader purpose and start to reduce our energy and effort as the drive is not there. Fighting our neurobiology is futile.
If we are trying to innovate without Agency in a culture that historically moderates heavily from the top-down, it creates apathy. Why bother getting invested in innovation when nothing changes? Why should we care when the decision is out of our hands?
Other Spaces
This article is not an exhaustive list so let me know what different types of spaces for innovation you might add.
While I have been working on the post, I have been wondering about the Digital space for innovation as remote teams across the world build software products together.
Alternatively the Collaborative space for innovation which directly refers to the overlapping physical and digital spaces we use for creating ideas together.
From an education perspective, the concept of a Pedagogical Space for Innovation is interesting. The room provided in the approach to teaching and learning for change and renewal.
This article is an exploration of some emerging ideas, and I would be pleased to hear from you in the comments about each of the different concepts.
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Shaking off old timetabling structures will to be one of the most significant challenges our schools face in becoming more creative organisations.
On the one hand, schools are developing incredible curriculum opportunities and learning spaces for students to think and work creatively. Also, on the other hand timetabling of a student’s day remains very similar to what it was like 10, 20, even 30 years ago. I am sure you remember the tone of your school bell telling you to stop thinking and move on to your next lesson.
Many of the working norms of timetabling have not changed in line with new thinking about learning and creativity. Constructs such as time have merely lingered as part of the school experience.
The basic grammar of schooling, like the shape of classrooms, has remained remarkably stable over the decades. Little has changed in the ways that schools divide time and space, classify students and allocate them to classrooms, splinter knowledge into ‘subjects’ and award grades and ‘credits’ as evidence of learning. (Hoffstetter 2013)
“Changes in Mass Schooling:‘school Form’and ‘grammar of Schooling’as Reagents.” European Educational Research Journal 12.2 (2013): 166-175.
Hofstetter, Rita, and Bernard Schneuwly.
It would seem that some of those lingering structures might be getting in the way.
I am not proposing students spend their time with open agendas and no structure, lolling around being “creative”. We can strike a balance in school timetables between the standard lesson block structure and uninterrupted time to become more deeply immersed in creative learning.
Schools understand the need for their students to be creative, but that might mean only on a Thursday afternoon in a 50 minute period. This flies in the face of what we know about creativity.
In the recent Netflix original documentary, The Defiant Ones, Dr Dre the rap artist, producer and entrepreneur points out:
You never know when you’re going to be inspired and what’s going to inspire you. You can’t put a time limit on creativity.
Dr Dre
Unfortunately, I don’t have a beach-side recording studio to retreat to, but I can relate to how I get immersed in creative work. I am sure you will also have experienced when ideas come to you at different times. How might we adjust the learning environment to reduce the barriers to this type of immersive creative work?
The blocks to being creative are deeply connected to the time we have available to us. According to James Adams in his acclaimed book Conceptual Blockbusting, we face a range of emotional blocks to the creative process.
These behaviours and habits stultify our creative endeavours, and they are accurate in education as well as business.
A fear to make mistakes, to fail, to risk.
Preference for judging ideas rather than generating them.
No tolerance for ambiguity or chaos.
A lack of challenge – not engaging enough.
Excessive zeal – too much speed, pace and haste.
An inability to relax and to incubate ideas.
As school leaders, we have to overcome these blocks to nurture conditions for children to be actively creative little souls and provide an environment for innovative learning and teaching design.
What might these conditions include? What principles can we use to guide us? I recently re-discovered this lovely essay on creativity by Issac Asimov, in which he offers some thoughts on creating the conditions for others to generate ideas:
Daring cross-connection
Free of responsibility
Thoroughly relaxed
Deep knowledge
Discussing something of interest
Being by nature unconventional
Organising a timetable that functions efficiently and also embraces Asimov’s conditions, providing the appropriate time and pace for our students to be genuinely creative is a complicated issue. It will be one of the most significant hurdles for our schools to overcome and is a vital component of contemporary learning design. However, changing the way we organise time might be the key to unlocking the ideal conditions for creativity in schools.
I recently started a keynote talk with the message, “You are all innovators.” This was not some empty platitude to win over the audience, and the message remains sincere for you dear reader.
After becoming pretty jaded with the polemic and doom-laden openings of most education keynotes these days – I wanted to start on a more positive idea.
Teaching and the world of learning design is one of the most creative of pursuits we have. It certainly is one of the most challenging environments to work in.
Innovation can only be defined in context
One of the main reasons I believe teachers are all innovators is that we apply new ideas, big and small, in a continuous effort to improve the learning experience for students.
Sometimes those ideas take time to implement, but often they occur at the point of learning we share with our students.
When we think of innovation as ‘renewal’ (from the Latin root ‘innovare’) – any teacher will understand the constant questioning and reflection on “what more can we do?”, “how else can we explore these ideas?”, “how might we approach this in a more accessible way?” or “where can I continue to challenge these students?”.
This type of curiosity leads to creativity and taking action. That is innovation in my book.
What needs “renewal” and what doesn’t, is completely defined by context. What is new for one region, district, county, school, department or class, is not necessarily new for another.
There are still people reading my articles on ideas I implemented over 10 years ago and sharing how interesting and exciting they are. What I perceive as innovative is defined by the context I am in, the same is true for you.
Keeping Up with Joneses
This popular idiom refers to people’s tendency to compare their own social standing according to that of their neighbours. It originated from a comic strip that went by the same name, created by Arthur Momand in 1913.
Within the frame of innovation in education, we might consider how we are influenced by the work and progress of other schools. I also think within the echo chambers of education social networking FOMO is generated, a Fear Of Missing Out.
If my class of 30 students is different to the one down the corridor, and to the school across the road / border – perhaps comparisons to other innovation stories is limited in utility.
You can gain inspiration, but whether it is innovative or not, to what degree it is a story of renewal, depends on your context.
Writing in a shared Google Doc
I have had the chance to work with lots of different schools throughout the last fifteen years. One example of innovation that sticks out is the use of Google Docs.
The ability for multiple users to simultaneously work in the same digital space, renewed the process of writing and feedback in my classroom. I was one of the first classroom teachers in the world to be using the technology with my Year 5 class in 2005-2006.
(If you go far enough back in this blog’s archive you will find those posts.)
For my class of students that technology helped with the way we were writing – it was innovative for us in 2006. Using that idea is not innovative for me any more though, it is no longer about renewal.
Since then I have worked with organisations and schools who have never used Google Docs. For them the process still can be renewed. It is still innovative for them even 10+ years after it was for me.
It all depends on our context.
The key thing is not to get caught up chasing other people’s innovative projects. They might just not be applicable for you. Ask yourself is this idea “new” for us or “new” for the world?
Pay attention to the needs of your own context and the students in front of you.
When you think of creative people who immediately springs to mind?
Da Vinci, Ive, Lovelace, Pelé?
Far from just an individual capacity, our creativity is also influenced by the environments that we live and learn in. Each of those memorable people were shaped by their culture.
our behaviour is also shaped by the culture we live in, largely through social norms, contexts that cue them, and motives that drive us to follow, reject or invert those norms.
Thomas Wolbers a Professor of Ageing and Cognition explains in his essay,”Three Pathways By Which Culture Can Influence Creativity”, that it can impact on our cognitive abilities, the creative process and the value we associate with the output.
Creative Potential
Wolbers explores the concept that our application of creativity fits the domains that our culture values.If we are products of our cultural influences then we all carry a certain bias.
This bias is perhaps towards applying our creativity in domains that continue to affirm what our culture deems as important.
For example, Korea with its strong cultural valuation of status and interdependence is the world leader in the industry of massively multiplayer simulation games, which involve accruing and using status and maintaining coalitions
Individuals may be more creative in some domains than in others because their cultural background values those domains and focuses the individual’s cognitive and motivational resources.
I wonder what those domains are for me? I suppose in some way sharing content, thinking and understandings through my writing is a direct consequence of the culture my professional life started in.
When I say direct result, I mean I worked in the opposite direction. Much of the expertise, sharing and learning was in closed and stagnant systems. That was a norm I wanted to invert.
In what domains do you apply your most creative self? How are those choices influenced by the cultural cues you have experienced?
Creative Process
Most people don’t think that creativity has a process. It can be often viewed as a magical act of serendipity for special talented people.
This is a long way from the truth. Creative processes are much more rigorous than we think. Those processes can be clearly defined and described. Also true is the ability to describe the salient conditions for creativity to flourish.
Wolbers explains that creativity usually involves two types of processes: the flexibility pathway and the persistence pathway.
Cognitive flexibility refers to the ease with which people can switch to a different approach or consider a different perspective, and cognitive persistence represents the degree of sustained and focused task-directed cognitive effort.
The reference to cognitive flexibility and agility here reminds me of the type of language we often see defining divergent thinking.Our ability to see a challenge from a different perspective is an important creative trait.
The cognitive persistence pathway refers to a more incremental, cautious, and analytical processing in an attempt to be incremental and cumulative.
Our cultural norms and cues will push us towards these pathways differently. What is valued in our society, in our culture, directs the process we apply in generating new ideas.
“inventions result more frequently from projects with incremental objectives in Japan (66 percent) than the U.S. (48 percent), and less frequently from projects with breakthrough objectives in Japan (8 percent) than the U.S. (24 percent).”
It is one thing to look at inventions in the US, it is another to look at the professional culture of teaching in the UK or Australia. On reflection the professional culture that I spent ten years working in was a risk averse culture.
The majority of breakthroughs and shifts in education are incremental, cumulative, glacial.
I may have a preference for more significant, higher-risk ideas as part of my process, but I think the culture around me wants me to slow down.
What do you think? Does education covet the paradigm shift, but really just wants slow change?
Creative Output
The value we place on ideas can be vastly different depending on the perspective we have.
Creativity is often defined as generating ideas that have value. Wolbers points out that this can be very subjective and wholly dependent on the culture of the beholder.
A famous example is the reception of Ang Lee’s movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was acclaimed by Western film critics for its stylistic innovations, whereas Chinese critics judged it as Ang Lee’s weakest movie, presumably because they had seen many similar movies before.
Over the years I have spent countless hours talking with different groups about how we might judge different ideas as part of the process of design thinking.
All of this time perhaps our cultural preferences have been influencing what we consider has value. Wolbers explains that Chinese culture values usefulness more than novelty, whereas Western culture values novelty more than usefulness.
individuals with an Eastern background may be more concerned with usefulness than originality and engage different implicit or explicit standards to downplay or elaborate ideas and insights than their counterparts with a Western background.
As a primary school teacher I certainly had both in mind. I think the culture around me, in the schools I worked in and the wider education system valued usefulness over originality.
Original ideas were entertained on the fringes.
How does our definition of value influence the emphasis we put on certain ideas? Do you think you value originality or usefulness, or both?
Takeaways
A few key takeaways for me have been the three areas highlighted by Wolber. It is a succinct collection of elements we might consider in our own contexts.
Creative Potential — where we apply our creative capacity
Creative Process — how we go about generating ideas
Creative Value — what we value most about our ideas
As I have been exploring this work I have also been thinking how school culture might influence creativity. However you could replace school with company, organisation, club or whatever you like. When I say school culture I mean the implicit and explicit values, beliefs, and norms that surround each student.
Some takeaway questions spring to mind to ponder on further:
How might school culture influence each student’s creative potential and the domains in which they apply their creative capacity?
How might the culture at school dictate the type of creative process that is adopted by teachers and students (all learners)?
How might we explore what value systems we use to judge creativity in our schools?
This is the first in my thinking series exploring the Cultures of Creativity essays published by the LEGO Foundation, and their relevance to schools and learning organisations.
Next in my series is “Play, culture and creativity” by David Whitebread & Marisol Basilio.
