Ideas Worth Spreading

Yep, more than 1 year later and I’ll quickly pop here to share some of the videos that I have in my mind lately on approaching creativity and innovation. Nothing much to say, just wanted to share these. They are all TED Talks from different events but mainly about education, creativity and their role in the work place. I hope you enjoy and that these challenge the way you think even if you don´t agree with them.

1. Sir Ken Robinson on “Do schools kill creativity?”

2. Salman Khan on “Let’s use video to reinvent education”

3. Daniel Pink on “The Surprising Science of Motivation”

4. Steven Johnson on “Where good ideas come from” (not as entertaining as the others but a great demystification on the matter)

5. Steve Keil on “A Manifesto for Play, for Bulgaria and Beyond”

(Trying to) Explaining interactive learning

After a long period without posting I’m here to share a little of the stuff that’s going on in my thesis. I think that, even though it’s taking forever to finish it, there a few insights that are worth putting out here. Hope you agree – or that you comment why if you don’t. The first of these insights is the development of what “interactive learning” is made of, what actually is needed for it to happen.

I’ve identified in my thesis that there are 3 components that enable learning by interaction: first is that situation matters; second is that trust matters; and third is that language matters. I’ll try to explain it here not going into many technical issues. In order to do so, I’ll use an example to back up the theory.

Let’s say you play video games and that you like one title in particular. It doesn’t really matter which one, the important thing is that you enjoy it and that you want to know more about that game. You can try to work alone at your home and go through trial and error or read the game manual. Without the help of other people you simply can’t do more than that, can you? But assuming that if you own a video game you probably also own a computer and you have internet connection. Your set of tools changed. You are now able to contact other people, surf the net for tips, reports, forums, blogs, ask friends on MSN, Skype or Gtalk and so on. This is a change in the situation. The introduction of tools and / or people as resources for learning enhances your possibilities of absorbing new knowledge.

So by surfing the net you learn that if you smash the left side of the console with a hammer (just above the power button) you’ll be able to get more points in the game. How do you know you can do it with no harm to your hammer? I know this is a lousy example but it shows how trust matters in the interactive learning process. If you don’t trust your counterparts, how can you put the knowledge they give you to test and use?

Finally, you decide that the knowledge you found on the Internet seems trustworthy enough – it’s the biggest gaming forum on the web! – but it seems you’ve skipped some classes in school because you can’t understand anything people say. Incomprehensible sentences keep coming up like “omg I h8 this part cuz there iz no lulz”, “gimme the cookies plx!”, and “how come you don’t know that the dmg meters only calculate a third of the poison dmg because the math on dot’s is messed up, you nub?”.

Video game language test.

This is where we clearly see why language matters. When coming into a new group people often have to adjust the words they use and learn the expressions and concepts that are characteristic for that group. This is as true for video games as it is for medicine, book clubs, or animal psychology. Until there is a shared language at work, members of that group will find hard to make sense of each others’ practice and experiences.

Therefore in order for people to be able to learn from one another, the group needs to establish tools that allow them to connect; trust each other as sources of knowledge; and create a shared language that enables them to understand the knowledge transferred in that interaction. Any group of people should take that into consideration when developing learning strategies that include interaction.

Choking innovation

I don’t have more experience than my incoming Masters degree or my personal living among entrepreneurs and managers to say what I’m saying in this post. Nevertheless I still think it needs to be said. First because it reflects the paradox shift we are going through in management. Second because firms need to wake up and start changing their relationship with their clients and suppliers.

I first heard of it in 2009 in a meeting with some local suppliers here in Vitória, Espírito Santo state, Brazil. These are mostly medium-sized entrepreneurs that discuss their difficulties in supplying for large manufacturing companies that are located here. In that meeting, they turned the discussion to a request for providing “innovative ideas” to their contractors.

At first, it sounded to me like a great step, one that could bring lots of opportunities for them – to sell more services with embedded knowledge and higher value – and for the contractors to enhance their performance. However, I was taken by surprise when they all started to laugh. The request was somewhat considered ridiculous, even offensive to some businessmen present at that meeting. My first reaction was “why are they so defensive to change? There are lots of opportunities for them here!” but then I started remembering previous meetings of this sort. And it was indeed an insane request.

All large contractors in Espírito Santo are commodities producers and therefore their profit margin (or what they can do about it) is mostly about cost. Therefore their strategy for a long time was to pressure their suppliers to “do more for less”. It was common for the contractors to engage in joint meetings to search for unnecessary people and materials hired for the job to avoid waste of material, money and time in order to lower the price of the provided service. Even online auction to get new contracts were established: whoever do it for less gets the contract. Companies were getting clearly choked by a very visible hand.

And then, with no changes, with their margins near to zero, all of sudden the contractor asks: “hey! We need new ideas and innovation! And we need you to do it with us!”. Of course suppliers should laugh. Innovation is costly and uncertain, requires trials and errors, and it is time-consuming. The reward is high, of course, but also is the investment. And without balancing the relationship – which is clearly centered in achieving lower costs – suppliers will laugh at such requests.

What is needed is to hear what’s behind the laugh and find common ground where the collaboration can be fruitful for both sides. Contractors need to stop listening only to what they want to, and start paying attention to their partners’ voices. After all, in many industries, the suppliers are also the most important resource for innovative ideas. Loosen up the grip is very important to reestablish trust and initiative.

Even so, suppliers also need to take the leap and understand that, without innovative initiatives, they might also be trapped into an ever tighter pressure to “do more for less”. One that can only be broken with creative solutions to break from the competition that can be reduced to an online auction…

Temporarily offline

Hello everyone,

by now I guess everyone noticed (if anyone follows this blog) that I’ve been away for a while and it will probably still be like this for a little longer. I’m trying to finish my master thesis and time is running short to dedicate to this blog. I’ll be back when I’m done with this struggle.

Just want to leave here a few interesting links to give you some thoughts about creativity and innovation:

Digital Media and Learning: the power of participation – http://dmlcentral.net/

Creative Class – http://www.creativeclass.com/

And an interesting video to motivate you to get things going: http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2010/01/the_eight_irres.shtml

Hope you have a great, fresh start in 2010 and find what really matters. See you soon!

Yeah, blame Video Games!

I’ve been thinking about this post for quite some time now. Looking for the right approach and how to balance pros and cons about the theme. Truth is, at this point, there is no general accepted final answer about video games. They are a relatively new form of entertainment compared to other forms such as television, radio or movies. And the fast track that video games took made them carry the burden for a bunch of contemporary problems in our society.

For example, video games have been blamed for the disaster of Columbine in 1999 and in Helsinki in 2007 [1]. They’ve also been blamed for kids that don’t want to go to school or bad school performance; childhood obesity, and the list keep growing. However, more and more research shows that video games have hardly anything to do with most of them. Kids that suffer from any of those have shown psychological backgrounds that explains better their problems than “video game addiction”[2].

In fact, I share the opinion that only troubled minds get addicted to video games. In our current society we only praise successful people, stories, and those who became rich and famous. I’m not a psychologist but I like to question the kind of pressure we put in people these days. Advertisement, movies, TV series, cartoons, and, more concerning, in magazines, newspapers, TV news reports everyone has some special powers that make them better than the average man or woman is. And hardly have we seen their failures. And not only kids are affected by that.

I heard once from a Human Resource consultant that “we are supposed to know to dance like Astaire, to choose wine like a professional sommelier, to sing like Sinatra, and to excel in every aspect of life but we are failures if we are learning how to do these things”. Have you ever considered that perspective? And how long does it take to learn all those things? Truth is that in virtual worlds offered by Video Games we accomplish a lot more in less time than in real life. And this reward, in troubled minds, can lead them to focus on virtual worlds rather than the real one. In a way, video game accomplishment offers an alternative to the mediocrity that daily life scrapes on our faces everyday – taking school exams that you have no idea what’s that course for, paying bills, paper work, fixing the door bell, or changing a flat tire. They offer us those special powers and allow us to dance like Astaire, or play guitar like a Guitar Hero (pun intended).

I don’t want to celebrate mediocrity. But I think we might as well value the process and the learning involved in trying – and not turn every mistake into failure. Because if we want to do something different (innovate) we are incurring into a great chance of making mistakes in the process. And if we do not take advantage of those and punish mistakes as we do today, how are we to ask for people to innovate? Video games instead, when you die you get new chances, and you can question what you are doing wrong, go to the internet to find out about it and so on. There is learning after dying – because there is purpose and a clear goal.

There’s a lot to be said about video games and some points are quite controversial. But this is just a first post of a series I’ll try to write discussing their use in many other fields that not only entertainment. Video games offer a far more interesting interface than regular software and some are aware of that power and willing to experiment with them. Here I just want to make the point that video games are not evil or responsible for the collapse of virtues and values in society. Those opinions are just facing a hard time in accepting the new as generations ago had as the following illustrates: “A pastime of illiterate, wretched creatures who are stupefied by their daily jobs, a machine of mindlessness and dissolution”. While this might illustrate the type of attacks that video games suffer today, it was actually said more than 70 years ago about the movies – which today are considered a form of art[3].

So instead of blaming them, perhaps we should look more carefully into them.

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[1] David Edery and Ethan Mollick (2007) Changing the Game: How Video Games are transforming the Future of Business. FT Press.

[2] and [3] Steven Poole (2004): Trigger Happy: Video games and the entertainment revolution. Arcade Publishing.