Do organizations kill creativity? [Robinson]

Thanks to the beauty of the internet we come across various inspirational people that have a great impact on our thinking and approach. We share some of those presentations in our section: “true gurus”. We have also included citations from the videos. We will always finish with a reflection on the connection for knowledge management and research.

This talk is from Sir Ken Robinson. It’s mainly about how almost all education systems in the world have an adverse effect on the creative capacity of their students. Sir Robinson also makes a striking remark on the way we run our companies.

We apologize if you don’t have sufficient bandwidth to view the video, unfortunately there is not much we can do about that. You can try to download this one on www.ted.com. We’ve listed the most important quotes according to us here below.

“There have been three themes, haven’t there, running through the conference (red: Sir Ken Robinson held his talk at the prestigious TED conference) , which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we’ve had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it’s put us in a place where we have no idea what’s going to happen, in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.”

“I have an interest in education — actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. (…) We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue — despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days — what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. And the third part of this is that we’ve all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have – (…) So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity.”

“My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”

(…) kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. (…) And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

“And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes.”

“We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. The result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this: he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. So why is this?”

“If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude — if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everyone that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter) And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement.”

“If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.”

“In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about — technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true?  But now (…) you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of educatio is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.”

“What I think it comes to is this: (…) I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”

“There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.” And he’s right.”

“What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.”

Why do we consider Sir Ken Robinson a true guru?

First things first: WOW! What an amazing presentation. It really made us think long and hard, starting with our own educational histories. And he is funny too! His presentation was not primarily about knowledge management or organizational learning, but it does contain crucial ideas and thinking on how to foster creativity, and the fundamental flaws in our education systems.

His comment on how we run our companies intrigued us the most. This topic will be one of our focal points in the coming months. When our knowledge market opens, we will start a discussion on this, inviting you all to participate.

Until then, if you already have some ideas, we would like to ask you to react on this video through a comment.

• How do you see the relation between stigmatizing mistakes and the hinderance of the staff’s creativity?
• And how do we make sure that the people in our organizations use their creative potential to the fullest in order to reach the best outcomes?

We are very interested in your ideas on this topic, and we are working on our own answers based on experience and scientific research.