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 development.
The overriding tendency in the West is to box things in binary ways. Human life has got so much more potential if the story is explained by making connections and seeing synergies. Life isn’t by definition “done” in a certain way.
Think ACES before applying SMART
I have always done a lot of goal setting and strategic planning in organisations. Immediately people ask me to introduce the SMART-principle for goal setting and there is nothing I dislike more. It is such an overused term and doesn’t fit our times anymore, if it ever did. It’s based on factual thinking and concerns itself with rules and regulations and this-is-how-we-have-always-done-it attitudes. Narrowing options rather than widening them. That’s no way to go into the future.
The S stands for Specific, immediately followed by Measurable. If your life is at a certain point from which you would really like to move on, then it is impossible to be specific let alone know how to measure anything. If you want to move your business on, you can’t do so based on the specifics of what you already know. Equally, you cannot know at that point what’s Achievable, Relevant or indeed what Time factors there are involved here.
S-M-A-R-T is step two. Not insignificant, but it follows another principle. What comes first is A-C-E-S.
A – AWARENESS C – CREATIVE BRAIN E – EXPERIMENT S – SOLUTIONS
Every opportunity or problem today needs an increased awareness of human behaviour. During the awareness phase, you look from different angles, through different eyes. You allow yourself to be informed to get the widest possible understanding of what’s going on and what is needed in the bigger picture. Awareness is followed by a playful engaging with the creative brain. Flip-thinking, stepping outside the comfort zone, trying things on for size, coming up with various plausible scenarios, ideas, initiatives, innovations.
Experimentation is all about real life testing without all the risk and the investment. It creates a freedom to play and give things a shot. It will soon emerge what survives the experimentation phase and which option therefore can be instrumental in defining the best solutions. These can then be defined by SMART.
The human brain is an incredible instrument. Decide to put it to use wisely. Don’t get too hung up on what certificates or experience you have – those will act as limiting filters. It’s about your talent and what you can do with it tomorrow. The creative brain will enable you to imagine things that haven’t happened yet. You can visualise the outcome you want to see. You can turn things inside out, if you can silence the practical brain and ignore its questions about who, what, where and how much.
It’s a game of two halves; it’s a 50-50 deal. I’m not saying that the creative brain is more important. It’s just that the world we grew up in has not acknowledged it for its valuable contribution. With the knowledge that we are so much more skilled and left-brain trained, it would always be my advice to give the creative brain visualisation a bit more space. For planning, goal setting and especially for actioning your every-year itch, base yourself in bigger picture visualisation first. Of course, you need to plan practically, measure improvement and know how you have done, but get immersed in figuring out what you want and who you really are first.
Immobilising thought patterns in the imaginary plaster cast
What’s the practical application of this? I know through working with hundreds of clients that the words only penetrate one level of understanding. Clients almost immediately come back with the “Yes, but” response. They seem to get it on one level but the moment they have to engage in a short exercise all that nodding goes out the window. They like the theory, but theory only never changed lives. In applying it, people meet obstacles almost immediately.
If you have done a certain thing over and over, then it’s understandable that you will struggle. The faculties that you have relied upon will moan and complain, even question why things have to be done differently. You can’t get rid of them because you need
