“If we are not prepared to be wrong, to make mistakes, we will never ever come up with something original.” Sir Ken Robinson
“I am not creative”, said Paul* , a 20 year old student, with total conviction, “I leave that to others in the team”. He shared this at a leadership development training of a group of behavioural science students from the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
A startling reminder of a TedTalk by Sir Ken Robinson in which he raised the question if schools kill creativity. Robinson makes the point that we teach children that making mistakes and being wrong is something to be feared. That they are failing, when they make a mistake. Instead of embracing making mistakes as a learning opportunity. And by the time children become adults, most of them will have lost the capacity to be wrong. Not being able to be wrong blocks learning, which ideally would continue until the end of our life (and perhaps beyond).
Most education systems around the globe only saw the light of day in the advent of the industrial age and that the system’s emphasis is on preparing young people for (the industrial) society.
Now, if society is embarking upon a substantive transformation to rebalance with our planet, conserving and regenerating it for future generations, does the ‘equipment’ from the past serve the younger generation for the future?
Our thinking is that if we are committed to a more sustainable, regenerative future this should be reflected in the way we raise and educate our children. And it seems that the current education system needs all the help it can get.
Let’s face it, future generations are the catalysts for transformative change and need to bring free thinking, imagination and creativity for new solutions. More than ever do they need relationship and social skills to collaborate with others in ever complex ecosystems as well as openness, adaptiveness, and a hunger for continuous learning. Not to mention technology. If they are hampered down by the fear of “failure”, how much will they be able to adapt and learn?
Increasingly our lives and work are characterised by accelerating change, complexity, and the need for a fundamental rethink how we go about our lives to rebalance with the planet to avert environmental and social shocks and crises.
We’ve seen this coming for a long time but the inertia and lacking capacity to change is not unique to the education sector; we see that in all sectors, in all walks of life. We don’t like change, we struggle with ‘not knowing’ and are intolerant of making mistakes. We rather cling to the devil we know and fear the devil we don’t know.
Transformation of mainstream education is needed to better equip the younger generations. For a better balanced world, should we not make the development of our children a societal priority and resource it properly?
As always, change starts with yourself. Do you allow yourself to make mistakes and “fail”? Can you own up to your “mistakes”? And what stories are you telling about yourself that might not be true? Like Paul* who claimed he was not creative. Discover what stories you are telling yourself in our mini-version of the Inner Knowing Journey.
*name has been changed to protect the privacy