Day 561
Being authentic partners for the next generation.
So much has happened in the last 561 days since we got told to work from home in March of 2020 here in Aotearoa. We now have a vaccine, our investment valuations aren’t free falling (as much 😜) and most of us have accepted it’s only a matter of time before we will be able to just live with COVID and move on with our lives. A contrast to what I felt writing about Day 1 last year below.
I now believe more than ever that the use of technology will only become more prevalent and the speed of adaptation will accelerate even faster as the new generation become more and more reliant and trusting of these new disruptive technologies I research and use within the Datacom Foundry, this increase in rates of adoption will in turn further drive more investment which will further accelerate innovation the pandemic has all but ensured.
The speed of innovation has skyrocketed, there are exciting new breakthroughs that are taking place in the near term future with regards to AI and automation and I’m sure that living standards will measurably increase similar to what happened during past industrial revolutions. The first, second and third industrial revolutions have increased people’s living standards dramatically each time but it also imposed great hardships on certain population groups, this is effectively created new second class citizens each time. For example the industrial revolution increased the demand and profitability for cotton and this in turn led to the increased demand for slave labor, this led to an increase in slave trade by the British Empire.
There is so much wealth generated in the industrial revolution but there is also so much inequality that arose as a result. A simple Google search yielded an abundance of literature that attests to the inequality the industrial revolution created, so much inequality that it ultimately gave rise to economic and political movements like socialism and communism as well as imperialism before that.
Many are now referring to the upcoming AI and automation changes as the fourth industrial revolution and as a society we must ensure that people don’t get left behind like what happened with the first, second and third. I don’t believe that slowing down adaptation through legislation is a solution because all that’s going to do is artificially reduce our own GDP compared to other countries this would be akin to say voluntarily reducing our own standard of living relative to countries where they don’t impose the same legislative restrictions.
I’m not going to pretend I have an answer to this problem but I do believe that the first step in solving any problem is properly identifying it.
How do we ensure people who are employed in certain job markets don’t get left behind as their jobs get replaced by machines and technology?
Recently I have had the privilege of working with groups of high school students all around the country, who have embarked on a 10-week digital start up accelerator using hackathon and value hacking methodologies, focusing on digital-tech solutions to solve wicked problems. Below is a video of some of the creative individuals the team at Datacom were privileged to work with and a snippet of the atmosphere post our wānanga in Christchurch, New Zealand.
As I mentioned in the video one of my favourite parts that I absolutely believe in personally was:
Seeing how curious the rangatahi were, that curiosity we should take onto the rest of our lives. If you are that curious you will go along way.
This ethos and mindset helps us learn and acquire new knowledge. Being in the digital age, many of us are only now realising how easy it is for us to find information and everything is at our fingertips. One curious thought can lead to another and before you know it you could go down another rabbit hole.
This leads me to creativity, The oxford dictionary states.
Creativity — having the skill and ability to produce something new
To be creative one needs a combination of originality and appropriateness, you have to be capable of two things divergent thinking which is basically about exploring possibilities, coming up with ideas and convergent thinking which is about deciding what to do. You take a look at all of those possibilities you’ve come up with and you decide on the best one given your situation.
Divergent thinking includes things like exploration, originality, idea generation, risk taking and flexibility. Convergent thinking includes things like evaluation, logic, inhibitory control, persistence and focus but the key is that you need both of these things divergent thinking and convergent thinking to get to those two main ingredients for creativity - originality and appropriateness.
But now let’s think about the balance of skills that you typically associate with children and adults, so when you’re thinking about exploration, idea generation, risk taking who are you thinking more of? Children or Adults?…Children, right?
When you think about evaluation, logic, inhibitory control, Are you thinking of children or adults? Most likely adults and which of these two do you think of most often when you think about creativity? well many of us have a very strong bias to think almost exclusively about divergent thinking and it’s really easy to do and in fact researchers even share this bias.
Many of the studies on creativity that exist right now actually look at divergent thinking and the problem is even greater when you look at the research on childhood creativity. There’s a review that looked at all of the studies on children and creativity and it found that 82% of those studies looked at divergent thinking. So, we’re not alone in this but keeping all of that in mind we need to separate fact from myth so let’s take a look at the following statement.
Children learn more flexibly than adults.
I believe this to be true and it can be seen pretty clearly in some work by a researcher named Alison Gopnik, she’s been looking at what happens when you give information to children and adults, that does not support an existing bias that they have. In other words how willing are they to change their minds when they’re given new information and this is an ability called cognitive flexibility.
I think another important point to talk about is inhibitory control. This comes into play when we think about risk, it can help you to suppress that traditional inside the box thinking and see other possibilities there, so you can think of it this way creativity requires balance. If the focus becomes too heavy on divergent thinking we can get stuck in idea generation and never bring ideas into reality, if the focus becomes too heavy on convergent thinking we can become so stuck in our knowledge of constraints that we fail to recognise great ideas when they come along.
So how do we find that sweet spot, that balance between the two how do we maintain cognitive flexibility while balancing that with inhibitory control? how do we maintain a fresh outlook on the rule world, while also balancing that with expertise? we have to find some way to be both spontaneous and reflective and that is a tough balance to strike, so how do we get there?
This is where I think programmes like Programming Maori Potential and Microsoft Student Accelerator (MSA) nail it. Adults need to be authentic partners in the whare (house, workplace, school), for example by inviting suggestions and then guiding the child (rangatahi) with the experience adults (mentors/kaiarahi) have. This is where we find a really good balance and get the outcomes I have been privileged to see in my lifetime thus far.
I’m excited to see what the future of tech innovations will bring forth and I’m also looking forward to increasing our living standard for the general population as a whole. Being in this tech space has been really rewarding and and I hope that we can come together to preemptively tackle these issues to ensure that we don’t inadvertently create a new generation of second class citizens as we embark on this journey towards making the world a better place then when we arrived.
