chapter looks at the bigger picture of what has made us so fact-focused. It’s threatening to take all life out of our imagination. Any new plans may suffer the overbearing burden of this way of thinking, which could lead to never coming out of the starting blocks.
This chapter will offer the helicopter-view, a greater awareness to help you see this for what it is. It’s conditioning and certainly not who you are.
Measuring success
Most of us have had the relative privilege to enjoy an educational system, where brain development in the form of learning is supposed to take place. This is also where –certainly at the moment–the logical, factual and measurable brain emphasis is considered superior. Children spend their time learning facts and figures, appropriate for their age, against a pre-determined time frame. Creative activities such as art, music and sport are part of the curriculum but they aren’t in the spotlight. They don’t require testing. It is great if you are good at these skills, but almost immediately the question on everybody’s lips will be “what are your marks for maths and English (or equivalent)?”.
In his popular TED talk “Do schools kill creativity?”, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for different types of skills and intelligences and the fact that children learn in individual ways. In this, the arts, he says, mustn’t be underestimated as a way of unlocking children’s potential. They can in fact play an essential role for children to find their way of learning and being in their element.
We have all been shaped through school life and the subsequent selection processes which have of course focused on testing to meet certain requirements. Inevitably that means that people fall into one of two categories, smart or not, a brainy person versus a practical work-with-your-hands kind of person, intellectual versus vocational. Scores in these kinds of tests are seen as high or low. And a high score would always be more favourable than a low score.
This is what has shaped many people’s judgement of others as well as themselves. Even in the world around us, much of life is filtered in ways that could be measured against a standard. Depending on the scores you would consider yourself a success or not and you would judge others in the same way.
For many years I worked with a client who was hugely successful in business but had a chip on his shoulder due to his lack of traditional education and his inability to express himself very well with words. However, in his business he was an outstanding talent, a great networker and endlessly recommended as the go-to person. Working in the building trade he was intimidated by people who appeared to be “educated” even though he was far more successful than all of them put together.
The world we live and work in has advanced far quicker than we have been able to adapt to it. Intelligence was previously seen as a way of retaining facts and knowledge (IQ). Daniel Goleman talked about Emotional Intelligence (EQ), the ability to understand and communicate feelings, your own and those of others. Emotional intelligence has been termed a crucial ingredient to success by having empathy. Therefore it might be more accurate today to define intelligence as the ability to adapt. It’s no longer all about the survival of the fittest, but of the most agile.
INTELLIGENCE: "MENTAL ACTIVITY DIRECTED TOWARD PURPOSIVE ADAPTATION TO, SELECTION, AND SHAPING OF REAL-WORLD ENVIRONMENTS RELEVANT TO ONE'S LIFE."
PSYCHOLOGIST ROBERT STERNBERG
You cannot use old measuring standards in a fast-changing world and box everything neatly in an orderly way. It also doesn’t capture the human experience which is so rich and diverse. Tests don’t measure learning, profit doesn’t measure engagement, diplomas don’t measure talent, rules don’t measure experience. But people are so shaped by it, that it has become the very fabric of our success evaluation system.
Over the years I have worked with many people who go back to that early point in time where they had to choose what they were going to do for a living. If choosing was even an option. Some people’s journeys were pre-determined by the fact that they were considered “not academic”. Their school life was painful, and they probably would have done anything to get out of it. Others did some simple life-maths and concluded to either do something sensible or escape the whole learning environment and roll into work. I have had clients say to me that they chose accountancy because it was sensible, or that parents made them do something with their hands so they “could always fall back on something”.
To this day doing a university degree is still considered the sure way to a steady future, even though high percentages of graduates are out of work. A shocking 54.8% of students in the US will complete college with a diploma, leaving a huge group either in education for longer than six years or not qualifying at all. In the UK the number of drop-outs is smaller but rising year on year.
TESTS DON'T MEASURE LEARNING, PROFIT DOESN'T MEASURE ENGAGEMENT, DIPLOMAS DON'T MEASURE TALENT, RULES DON'T MEASURE EXPERIENCE.
Unlocking the creative brain
It appears that in a world where technology has caused an explosion of entrepreneurship and huge diversification of ways and manners in which to make a living, we still revert back to simple school and college results to assess ability. In this, adaptability doesn’t officially feature, yet it is a hugely important skill. Equally creativity and innovation are not recognised in conventional school results. It still comes down to the piece of paper you hold which is still based on a pre-technology era.
It leaves the abilities of the creative brain hugely undervalued. I stumbled across this in my early years of working within organisations. I was working on a project with a group of managers and explained to them about the creative abilities of the brain. Before translating this into how it could affect and enhance their approach, I gave them a “disassociation” exercise. You describe an object to others, but you do so imaginatively. In other words, you are not allowed to refer to what the object is actually for. I knew beforehand that their imaginations needed a bit of warming up, but I wasn’t prepared for the awkwardness and downright failure of the whole exercise. The room was filled with “Uhm – uhm” and people looking over to me as if to say: “Help!” Some gave me the deathstare with the subtitle “What is this all about? Are you making fun of us?”
I told them if you got a 5-year-old child to do it, they would have a field day with it. The fact that they were so conditioned by factual and measured thinking meant that my so-called silly exercise didn’t seem to have any value. Holding a bag as an object, their brain would be screaming “It’s a bag!” whilst they were trying to imaginatively come up with other suggestions. Just imagine applying that to a work scenario that needs a different approach or solution. You wouldn’t get very far.
We repeated the exercise. With the understanding of it, they improved. What had changed was the energy in the room. People were trying to be creative, there was lots of laughter. Practice would have made a real difference.
I used this experiment in many different organisations and with individual clients. Everywhere I found there to be the same blockage. People were unprepared to try something new. They wanted to know the process and do well immediately.
You can’t have a pre-determined system for everything. Not everything is a system. The potential of the human brain is far greater than that. Unlock the creative brain and the diversity of human experience. Next to measurement and systems stand innovation, vision, meaning. You can’t get to your itch, unless you consider the whole spectrum.
YOU CAN'T CALCULATE FOR
EVERYTHING.
THE BROTHER OF MEASURING
IS MEANING.
CYNICAL SELF ALERT
You might be thinking that it is genetic predisposition the way you think and tackle problems. The nature–nurture debate is more or less negated, because although we all start out with a certain DNA, it’s the environment that determines