Walking around our school, one thing that always grabs my attention is the capacity of our learners to engage independently in the process of creative innovation to generate something quite unique and original. Unfortunately this often happens outside of the classroom setting, or in an elective classes, after school activity as the structure and expectations tend to be more open ended. Granted this is not always the case. This capacity for autonomous innovation often conflicts with the more regimented curriculum and learning that students engage with in the context of their classes. This is also the case for adults in our own work environments. There is no doubt that the rigid structures of school and work have served their purpose well, but today I am not convinced these are as helpful as in the past.

Today with the acceleration of change in technology and our lives I believe there is a growing need for autonomous creative innovation to become an integral part of the day to day fabric of our schools and work places. In a world where the acceleration of change only increases there is evidence that this is impacting our day to day capacity to work and live effectively. Our to do list becomes bigger, we are multitasking to manage an ever increasing information flow and somehow things do not seem to slow down.

We are dealing with a situation that is relatively new, change at an ever increasing pace, desperately trying to manage this with tools and structures that simply do not seem to work for us.

Schools and work places need to engage actively to create environments where the unstructured opportunities to innovate, create, explore and try out new ideas autonomously are part of the day to day schedule, structure and learning. So often you hear the term let us think “out of the box” but as long as we start from a box and then go out of it to think, we still are tied to certain structures and habits connected to the initial box. There is no doubt that a set of standard skills, a clear scope and sequence, and learning capacity needs to be formally introduced and nurtured for each learner to develop a strong skill set to be then able to effectively innovate and problem solve.

There are company’s that have developed a structure into their work flows  “creative time” (Google calls it 20%). This is being done by many other companies and even some schools currently. The results of this dedicated time to explore autonomously has generated extremely innovative products or learning which have been integrated into the companies markets or schools learning.

For our respective community of learners who are exposed to continual accelerated change, we will need new solutions to be able to deal with this effectively. Creating in our learning environments (schools and workplace) time, capacity, structures and a cultural expectation were innovation becomes part of the day to day fabric will generate in my opinion a greater capacity for us to deal with this accelerated change.

Do not think out of the box, simpley get rid of the box, and let us think without a box.

John @ https://beyonddigital.org