This is full of great wisdom that’s probably not new to this crowd, BUT IT’S JOHN CLEESE. John Cleese is another brilliant person that just happens to be a comedian. Interestingly, the last couple things he says sound like they came right from Ackoff.
However, compare the main point Cleese has, about creating an uninterrupted environment for creative thought, to the point Steven Johnson made in the last post. They are two sides of the same coin, and perhaps Cleese is a bit shortsighted to leave this out. Heavy interaction with people is a great source of ideas and validation of your ideas, just as quiet contemplation is also a great source of ideas and validation of other people’s ideas.
It reminds me of my post sharing Visualizing the Creative Process because it’s sort of trying to say the same thing. It’s a two sided process that many people think is one sided. It’s an iterative process. It’s about synthesis and analysis.
You may have seen this image or perhaps even one of the more impressive YouTube videos. So many people have convinced themselves this is amazing.
WHO KNEW AN ELEPHANT COULD BE SO SELF-AWARE AS TO DRAW THEMSELVES. THIS MUST SHOW THEY ARE REALLY MUCH MORE INTELLIGENT THAN WE THOUGHT. THIS IS MIND BLOWING.
Nothing is amazing about this at all. It’s about as amazing as teaching a dog to run through an obstacle course. The elephant is nothing more than a trained performer.
Some of you may have already realized this, perhaps even from the beginning. Well I would argue the same is true for Alex the parrot. Alex was trained to perform simple logic puzzles. Alex had no idea what they meant, but we see what we want to see. What true ability Alex did have that actually is comparable to early human development just isn’t that impressive.
I think Alex shows not so much how amazing parrot intelligence can be, but how simple certain parts of human intelligence actually are. I would bet that most animals can achieve that kind of “intelligence” with training. Parrots just happen to have a convenient way to test it: speaking.
Eric Mazur showed us that we often can’t even properly test our own mental capabilities. We think kids are learning physics when really they’ve just learned how to follow a meaningless procedure. It’s all an illusion. Just as those kids aren’t actually learning physics, Alex is not actually intelligent, and elephants are not actually creative.
Just another data point that creativity is inherent in us all, but, at least in the states, we’re doing a great job at stifling it. Insert obvious link to Ken Robinson talk here.
It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.
I wish this whole talk was in a single video because there aren’t a lot of talks online about Daniel Pink’s previous book from 2006, A Whole New Mind. This section quickly introduces the premise of the book, which revisits the left-brain/right-brain idea and builds on the fact that the 20th century was intensely based on left-brain thinking. That’s linear, analytical thinking typified by engineers, MBAs, lawyers, accountants, and doctors.
The argument of the book is that this is no longer sufficient. As far as western society, we’ve created enough of a surplus of left-brain thinking that it’s no longer competitive. Instead, we need to cultivate right-brain thinking. That’s holistic, empathic thinking exemplified by artists, designers, philosophers, and other more “liberal arts” professions. “High-touch and high-concept” thinking will be the differentiator in the 21st century, which seems to be supported by the increasing focus on fields like user experience, “soft” sciences, and the social dimension of problems.
Very recently, Ken Robinson’s follow-up talk at TED was posted online. Four years later and he is still championing the same important idea: we need an educational revolution. While I’ve seen firsthand an enormous amount of activity, startups, initiatives and the like that were heavily influenced by his first talk and are doing amazing things for education, our formal education system remains unchanged.
He says reform is not the answer. It’s much like Ackoff would say: correcting deficiencies in a system doing the wrong thing is only doing wronger. We need a fundamental shift in our concept of education, and Sir Ken Robinson shows us where to start.
Hopefully by now we’re all familiar with our school system being developed in the industrial age, for the industrial age, modeled after the industrial assembly line. Ken Robinson says we have to go from the linear, one size fits all manufacturing model to an organic, personalized, more agricultural model. “Create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”
Our education system is like fast food: it’s designed to be reproducible and standardized so it’s roughly the same everywhere. He suggests we are in desperate need of the local restaurant equivalent for education: customized to local circumstances, personalized for the people of the area. And because of the tremendous diversity of talent, intelligence, and creativity that we need to cultivate in people in order to take on the challenges of our near future, that should be the dominent model for education.
Despite much of the vision of Vannevar Bush coming true, we still have information overload and less time for “mature” creative thought. This is compared to German philosopher Josef Pieper’s worry of overworking and losing time for “leisure,” which he defined as the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion in the real.
Parts of this talk parallel the idea of focusing too much on efficiency and not enough on effectiveness talked about by Ackoff and Drucker. Here is the best 25 minutes covering his problem statement, which was more interesting than his solutions, but you can continue watching here.
Ken Robinson’s talk was the first video TED released online. It’s now 4 years old and is still one of the best ones. Here is Robinson’s book relating to this talk: Out of Our Minds
