Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Innovation gagged ?

Here you can read the entire article which I consider to be a brilliant piece. Thanks to Alexandru Popescu for twitting it (I've made a habit thanking him for sharing so I'd better set up a daily cron job to do that for me :-D ). What hit me very hard and almost made me feel bad (heaving a 6 years old daughter) was the following bit which I find to be astonishing:
If you look at 4 year olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work. But by the time they are 6 ½ years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions. High school students rarely show inquisitiveness. And by the time they're grown up and are in corporate settings, they have already had the curiosity drummed out of them. 80% of executives spend less than 20% of their time on discovering new ideas.

I always though that lack of innovation is deeply linked to the social factors as poverty in under-developed countries where 80% of the time you must actually think of how to survive. Instead I learn it's very deep in our "organization" as a species. SCARY !

What do you value ? The right answers or the atypical / provocative questions ?

3 comments:

Mihai Campean said...

Interesting realization and I must agree, however, we can't all be innovators, imo - think of who will get to implement the innovations in this case :). Also, if you think a bit about inquisitiveness, in the wrong hands it wont lead to innovation, but to annoying the others around.
In other words it is extremely valuable to be inquisitive and curios, but if you are inquisitive just for the sake of being against everything everybody states, then that's a pain in the ass (I know such people :)). Jeff Dyer expresses this idea in a very elegant manner: "We've found that questioning turbo-charges observing, experimenting, and networking, but questioning on its own doesn't have a direct effect without the others. Overall, associating is the key skill because new ideas aren't created without connecting problems or ideas in ways that they haven't been connected before. The other behaviors are inputs that trigger associating — so they are a means of getting to a creative end."
Finally, I must agree with you that inquisitiveness is not very well encouraged in our society, but I believe that it would be quite interesting if inquisitiveness would be encouraged in the right individuals, namely in those that the other key skills are present - that would and is what most probably forms the great innovators.

The Rabbit said...

Mwuahaha ! Somebody actually READS my blog ! Thanks Mihai, all valid points. But you get to pay the first beer anyways ! :-D

Mihai Campean said...

Sure, first time we get the chance :)!