Another Year of Potential

As Big Ben struck 12 o'clock, another new year dawned: a year full of potential to do good or bad, to help or hinder, to get stuck in or give up.

And yet with all this potential in front of us, we are probably still reeling and recovering from the previous year and its activity, demands, successes and failures.

If we are to adapt to the ever-increasing rate of change in our world it will be our ability to recognise the changes, be open to them and respond to them. It will be an ability to work together with our colleagues and friends. It will be our ability to be open to new ideas, to work with new people (perhaps even those we don't like) and be prepared to engage and increase our creativity for problem solving, product identification, relationship building, selling ... or whatever aspect of life impacts us most.

There is great potential in our schools, colleges and universities to inject passion into our students, to find new ways which enable them to discover their own talents and abilities, and not least, find new ways to resurrect and increase our own passion for what we do.

I'm excited by all that 2008 holds ... challenges and triumphs ... hope you are too.

I wish you all a very happy new year.

Stuart

The creative paradox

For decades we have been educating and training people to be academics. Those who succeed take the highest places of honour, those who don't ... well, we'd rather not talk about them.

But who are the REAL losers in these systems. I think the short answer is ... everyone!

We focus on training people to become thinkers, but at the same time deprive them of a key aspect of their intellectual capacity ... creativity.

Creativity isn't just something done by a small subset of people, locked away in a special 'creative room' that most of us never see. True creativity is something in which everyone of us can engage and comes when we apply all of our intellectual faculties ... reasoning, emotions, feelings ... when we allow our whole brain in on the party.

Think about an athlete preparing for a key race. We wouldn't expect them to exercise only one leg and one arm. We may laugh at the idea, but our traditional education systems do exactly that with our brain ... one part thrives and the other part atrophies.

And worse still, what if our brain doesn't connect with these logical, deductive learning processes? In two words: we struggle. Worse still, we become convinced of our own failure because we don't hit the academic standards (which after all are only set against one dimension of criteria).

There are many amazingly creative people who fall by the wayside because they are never allowed to achieve their full potential. Even the so-called 'academic successes' fail, as critical areas of personal development involving the emotions, interactive skills and basic team player skills have been squeezed through the academic mangle and been left behind.

Business cries out for creative people but is rarely in a position to get any: it doesn't really know how to recognise and test for creative people within its own walls and the end-products of university or college education rarely have the necessary skills or abilities.

It's a sobering thought ... one I will be looking at further. But what do you think?