Tag: culture

How Will Your School Community Share Your Story?

LeadershipPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on How Will Your School Community Share Your Story?

The pandemic experience is an opportunity to create a story to tell future generations.

King Lear and Cordelia (Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 7) Francesco Bartolozzi , CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

A look at storytelling and leadership, here is a summary.

Key Points

  • Story bias helps us organise, filter and remember information.
  • Storytelling is critical to successful leadership — this is especially true during disruptive change.
  • Teleological explanation helps us to understand what we are trying to become.
  • The pandemic experience gives us an opportunity to create a story to tell future generations.
  • Read more articles on leadership.

Narrative Bias

We rely on the story bias. It helps us process our experiences into manageable chunks. This cognitive bias is our tendency to assimilate experiences and information into a coherent narrative or story pattern.

We filter the masses of data we encounter. This pattern recognition lets us jettison the information that does not fit into our story view.

There is a downside. Although experiences are more memorable, we might force information into a preset mould and disregard new insights we need to pay attention to.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb illustrates how stories are more memorable when they offer layers of meaning. Compare the following statements:

“The king died and the queen died.”

“The king died, and then the queen died of grief.”

This exercise, presented by the novelist E. M. Forster, shows the distinction between mere succession of information and a plot. But notice the hitch here: although we added information to the second statement, we effectively reduced the dimension of the total. The second sentence is, in a way, much lighter to carry and easier to remember; we now have one single piece of information in place of two. As we can remember it with less effort, we can also sell it to others, that is, market it better as a packaged idea.

The second example is more memorable because the chunks of data become tied together with the story and a layer of meaning.

Lead With Stories

Peter Senge explains that leaders add new layers of meaning when they focus on the ‘purpose story’ — why do we exist, and where are we heading?

[stories] provide what philosophy calls a “teleological explanation” (from the Greek telos, meaning “end” or “purpose”) — an understanding of what we are trying to become.

Purposeful narrative, coupled with system strategy, creates a sense of continuity and identity not achievable in any other way.

Activating purpose is impossible without storytelling ~ John Coleman

Use stories to help people reflect, learn and understand the forces of change within our education systems.

Leaders in learning organizations have the ability to conceptualize their strategic insights so that they become public knowledge, open to challenge and further improvement.

We also have to figure out ways to share stories across time and create artefacts that guide future generations.

Cautionary Tales

In issue #172 of my weekly email, we looked at how tsunami stones represented the catastrophic stories of the past. Dotted throughout the landscape of coastal communities are large stone tablets, some as tall as 10 feet, that date back to the 1890s. Carved into these are the stories of past tsunamis.

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Photo by Cindy Chan on Unsplash

Some feature warnings to seek higher ground in the wake of an earthquake. Others give death tolls or mark mass graves. A few denote place names with clear messages, like Nokoriya (Valley of Survivors) and Namiwake (Wave’s Edge).

These monuments saved lives in more recent events and act as a storied artefact and cautionary tale across generations.

I challenged readers of issue 172 to reflect on the story you might tell of our current times.

What will be your community’s story of the pandemic? Will it be of the virus? Or our struggle with isolation and remoteness? Or will your community story be about compassion, empathy, generosity, resilience, innovation and relationships?

Your Talking Points

  • What stories filter your experience?
  • Years from now, how will our storytelling be instructive, purposeful and add value?
  • How will it be pointed reminders of our collective commitment to a set of values that can resist a global pandemic?

This is a snippet of my Dialogic Learning Weekly. ⚡A weekly email designed to build your cognitive toolkit and enhance your practice. It saves you time and provokes your thinking.

Exactly the nourishment I need on a weekly basis.

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Let play perish and innovation will follow

Innovation, PlayPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on 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.

A key adaptive advantage of the long period of human biological immaturity is the opportunity for play.

When writing about curiosity and discovery in the past I have read about these concepts through Alison Gopnik’s work.

She is a child-development psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Gopnik explains that humans have a longer childhood, a slower path to puberty in which we can exercise our urge to explore.

This occurs while we’re still dependent on our parents and have an unmatched period of protected “play” in which to learn exploration’s rewards.

Yet while other animals play mainly by practicing basic skills such as fighting and hunting, human children play by creating hypothetical scenarios with artificial rules that test hypotheses. Can I build a tower of blocks as tall as I am? What’ll happen if we make the bike ramp go even higher? How will this schoolhouse game change if I’m the teacher and my big brother is the student?Such play effectively makes children explorers of landscapes filled with competing possibilities.

Whitebread and Basilio explain that this longer childhood provides a critical foundation for thinking, establishing:

the basis for the ‘flexibility of thought’ (Bruner, 1972) which underpins the astonishing problem-solving abilities and creativity of humans.

What do you know about the links between curious children and how playful they are? How do you see children engaging in more purposeful exploration? What value does playfulness have in problem solving?

The impact of playfulness

I was interested to read of the wider implications of developing the creative problem solving capacities in children and young adults. Beyond simply the obvious value, creative problem solving skills have importance for both the individual and the wider society.

Children and young adults who are creative problem solvers have been shown to have better coping skills to deal with everyday problems and crises, and this skill is increasingly important in the ever-more complex and rapidly changing modern world.

Typically we focus on the intrinsic value of creativity, or the importance of young adults exercising that skillset in the workforce. We want those entering work to understand their own creative skills and be well equipped to apply them purposefully.

However we rarely look at the increased coping skills and resilience of creative problem solvers, as highlighted here by Whitebread and Basilio. That link between creativity and resilience is a new insight for me.

Playfulness and creativity have a strong relationship. The essay presents a range of studies that reveal the connection.

These go back as far as the 1960s, with the early studies of Wallach & Kogan showing that creative children were more playful than less creative ones (Wallach & Kogan, 1965). Subsequent studies have shown that playfulness predicts scores on divergent thinking tasks (Howard-Jones, Taylor & Sutton, 2002; Lieberman, 1977).

The ‘divergent thinking tasks’ are often used as devices to measure creativity. Divergent and convergent thinking modes are essential throughout an extended creative/innovative process.

I think there is an ebb and flow between these different modes or thinking states. An awareness of these and how we remain cognitively flexible enough to switch from one to the other, without diminishing efficacy, is a typical characteristic of those with effective creative problem solving skills.

As part of a previous article, I asked why we marginalise the conditions for children to be creative. I recognise that part of this is the reduction in opportunities for play in primary schools. Even in pre-school.

In comparing my experience from England I have noticed that classrooms in Australia don’t have as much resourcing around pretend play. Dress up and role play resources, everyday objects, sand, water and messy trays were always so plentiful in the early years classrooms I led and worked with.

It worries me to see early learning experiences morphing into readiness for future grades or preparedness for higher year groups.

If playfulness has such a strong impact on developing creativity, why are opportunities for play in school diminishing? How might we protect play environments in the classrooms in our schools? How might we help broaden the understand of this area of research?

Pressured play

One of the key challenges for early childhood practitioners, raised by Whitebread and Basilio, is the pressure of covering a prescribed curriculum.

They go on to suggest that this exists in all urbanised cultural regions and is especially evident in the Far East.

A review of attitudinal studies on play and creativity in Hong Kong and mainland Chinese societies revealed that,

a cultural emphasis on narrowly conceived academic achievement was deleterious to developing playful, creative school environments (Fung & Cheng, 2012).

Not only is the word “deleterious” a wonderful new addition to my lexicon, but I also think that this statement holds true for education systems. What do you think?

The latter part of the essay explores the impact of parents and teachers on the development of the child and early achievement. An important element of this is that “specific practices by parents and teachers consistently over-ride broader cultural influences.”

The authors conclude by focusing on the importance of the school experience and the impact of parenting.

while there are clear challenges for human culture on our increasingly crowded planet, we must believe we can overcome these, and playful, creative approaches to parenting and schooling are clearly likely to be very helpful in this endeavour.

Takeaways

Here are a few key ideas, insights and provocations that stood out to me.

  • The challenge set out by the writers to ensure that what we can control of the experience in school, nurseries or where learning happens, is a creative and playful one.
  • The influence of creative teachers as a leveller of achievement for students from different social classes and backgrounds.
  • Children with creative problem solving capacities are more resilient.
  • Creative children were more playful when they were younger. Would an increase in opportunities for different types of play help develop more creativity? How might we sustain access to play in our primary classrooms?

If we want innovation we need creativity, if we want creativity we need playfulness.

Download the essay here: “Play, culture and creativity” by David Whitebread & Marisol Basilio.

This is the second 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 “Building cultures of creativity in the age of the Knowledge Machine” by Michael Wesch.

How our creativity is shaped by our culture

Creativity, FeaturedPublished onUpdated on2 Comments on How our creativity is shaped by our culture

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.

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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?

Download the essay here: “Three pathways by which culture can influence creativity” by Thomas Wolbers.

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.

Escaping old ideas and the bias that erodes your creative culture

Creativity, Innovation, LeadershipPublished onUpdated on1 Comment on Escaping old ideas and the bias that erodes your creative culture

I recently discovered the above quote from John Maynard Keynes, an influential English economist, about the challenge of thinking creatively.

It got a bunch of attention on Twitter and seemed to really resonate with people, as it did with me, so I thought I would spend a little longer considering what he is saying.

The creative process continues to be a passion and fascination of mine. What that process continues to rely upon is a creative culture within an organisation. When strong it is supportive of new ideas, when weak it erodes them.

John Maynard Keynes points us to the challenge of “escaping” old ideas, a direct reference in my opinion to two things. (1) The creative culture those new ideas are born into, (2) the mindset of those attached to existing ideas.

A 2010 study by the University of Pennsylvania points to an underlying negative bias towards creativity when we feel uncertainty. New ideas may often be generated in times of change and when things are in flux, and the sense of uncertainty may actually be getting in the way of being open to new ideas. As Maynard Keynes states escaping old ideas is harder and the bias research sheds some light on this.

Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty, or feel uncertain generally, this may bring negative associations with creativity to mind which result in lower evaluations of a creative idea.

Back to thinking about culture. If there is such a bias, implicit or otherwise, we have to mitigate against this within our schools and organisations. Familiarity with constant change and development is key, creating a new norm. If we can reduce the negative bias by increasing our level of collective comfort when faced with uncertainty we might recognise and encourage more creative thinking.

This makes me think of Dear Mr Judgy Pants, my open letter to those judgemental types who shoot down ideas too soon. Those people, and I know many of us have encountered them, are showing a fear of the wider uncertainty that is in fact forcing us to think creatively in the first place.

I just wanted to let you know that there are thousands of idea headstones carved because of people like you. We mourn those precious little sparks, those little glimpses of something new, different and unexpected. We still think about those ideas and the fleeting moments we had with them.

James L. Adams refers to the “Inability to tolerate ambiguity; overriding desire for order; ‘no appetite for chaos’” as one of a number of emotional blocks to creativity. When it comes to complex development and problem solving the ability to tolerate some chaos is vital.

You must usually wallow in misleading and ill fitting data, hazy and difficult-to-test concepts, opinions, values, and other such untidy quantities.

 The key thing I have been pondering on, since I shared that tweet, is about better understanding the people in our organisations and so better understand the creative culture.

Perhaps if we were to extend the research to create a measure of people’s tolerance of ambiguity <a> and compare this with a measure of their propensity for divergent thinking <b>, we would have an interesting +/-differential <c> that we could explore further.

If we were able to gather individual or collective measures we might be able to better understand the collective creative culture and make plans to support and encourage positive change.

Of course we can easily hypothesise that those individuals who are able to generate new ideas and have a high level of divergent thinking, coupled with a high level of tolerance for ambiguous and uncertain developmental states, may prove to be the most innovative.

Across an organisation these values may be carried by different people at different times and the make up and balance of our teams is something else to consider.

As much as it may feel odd to attempt to measure the artful design of innovative culture, I think there is huge value in exploring the science of it too.

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Maybe a further thinking matrix or framework might look like this.

I am grateful to have had the provocation from that quote this week to think more deeply about the individual contribution we make to a creative culture. As always, let me know what you think and how you help yourself and others “escape old ideas”. I think that is the next step to consider, what are the practical tools that allow us to escape.

TEDx Talk: What we learned from 5 million books

Data, Google, MathsPublished onUpdated on3 Comments on TEDx Talk: What we learned from 5 million books

I discovered the Google Ngram Viewer from this TED Talk by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel who are both fellows at Harvard University and Visiting Faculty at Google. They created the tool to analyse the millions of books being digitised by Google to allow them to search for cultural trends.

Using the Ngram Viewer would certainly be an interesting data handling lesson for children!