Outsider

Lately, policy makers don’t stop saying that innovation is “strategic”. Do they really mean it?

If that is the case, then we are in need of a workforce trained to engage into an innovation-ready mindset. Let me call this kind of mindset the “transforming mode” (or “the transforming cognitive style”, or even “the transforming mind state”, if you will).

You are into transforming mode when:

• You stop taking for granted everything you see, and you start questioning everything.
• You stop judging and filtering your thoughts before they are formulated, and start generating a lot of possibilities, no matter how weird or implausible they might look, leaving judgement for later.
• You enjoy mutating things: you can easily think of a lot of alterations that could be applied to anything.
• You enjoy recombining things: you find it easy to make things acquire elements or properties of other foreign things (or disciplines).
• You enjoy mutating and recombining the work of others, and helping others mutate and recombine your own work.

(it is not a coincidence that mutation and recombination are both tactics of natural evolution).

Do you think our education and training systems are teaching us to get ourselves into transforming mode?

I don’t think so. On the contrary, they tend to teach us get into “conforming mode”. They train us to:

• Accept anything given by the authority, and don’t dare to question it, circumvent it, or even adapt it to present circumstances (when was the last time you were given a problem in an exam, and you felt this conflict between doing what you believed was best to solve the problem, or rather do what you thought your teachers expected you to do, even if it didn’t feel like the right thing?)
• Try to make things as close as possible to a given canon. Identify deviations from the canon and regard them as errors. Repeat until your work is error-free (i.e. your work conforms to canon).
• Exert critic upon your own work and the work of others. Prepare yourself to confront critic. Make your work critic-proof before you show it to others.
• Value individual authorship, if only because it makes individual evaluation possible. Don’t cheat by letting others contribute to your individual work. This would distort its evaluation.
• Think into disciplinary silos: if you are given a physics problem, don’t even think of solving it with social science.

Don’t take me wrong here. Conforming mode is necessary, mostly in earlier stages of education. Conforming mode helps us to apprehend the gifts of our culture, and to acquire a lot of cognitive tools that will make us way more powerful, even as transformers.

But don’t you think education systems should:

• Devote at least a small fraction of the curriculum to get people into transforming mode, right from infant and primary education.
• Increase this fraction of the curriculum as you get into latter stages of the education system.
• Teach people to switch between these two modes, and use their best judgement to get into the right mode for the task at hand?

In the last few decades (in Spain as in other countries), some policy makers have introduced progressive education reforms that have attempted to make education a little less conforming and a little more transforming. But they have been repeatedly choked and made to fail by teachers as well as parents (and by the lack of the funds needed to really transform the system bottom-up). Somehow, as education consumers, we all seem to feel safer with the “old-school school”. And the education offer has been, well, shaped by demand.

I think if we want to commit ourselves to innovation as a long-term goal, we should all change this. What do you think about it?