Creativity in the Age of Automation - The Power of Relationships

The old idea that people were 'individually creative' and that it was individual ideas that were most impactful is making way for a new form of creativity. Now, it's the ideas that emerge from networks that are the most innovative. We as creative people need to understand how to participate in networks and how to create them.

At its core, LinkedIn is a platform designed for professionals to leverage online networks and create their own value from them.

The above quote by IDEO CEO Tim Brown speaks to the relational aspect of such networks and how we, as humans, can use them to foster the type of critical and creative thinking that we will need in the 'age of automation', 

TechCrunch recently published an article on the automation revolution and the seismic shift that it could create across the professional services. As the article points out: "Automated functions are quickly becoming as qualified as humans when it comes to logic-based tasks, and as machines become smarter and more capable, they will continue to assume these types of roles in virtually every field". This includes professional services such as accounting and law. 

The article also points out that education models will need to fundamentally change in order to adapt to the changing nature of work: "In the future, tests will be less about rote memorization and more about critical creative thinking that machines can’t yet replicate."

As a mother wondering about what my daughter's world will look like in 20 years time, education for the future is something that I think about a lot.  

Why can't machines replicate critical and creative thinking? It is because creative thinking is most usually about empathy, and empathy is about relationships - how we relate to and respond to others is the human part of humanity.

The design thinking promoted by Tim Brown, which is becoming so central to product and service design, is underpinned by what others see, feel and experience. While machines are outstripping humans in the implementation of ideas, it is the generation and design of original ideas that draw on human experience where those of us made from soft tissue have the advantage. 

So, I am in wholehearted agreement with the author of the TechCrunch article - our education systems need to be incubators of critical thinking and creativity. There needs to be as much focus on the why as there is on the how and the what. 

Why wait until college or university to start exploring perspective and comparison and theories of being (which is what we do in NZ)? Why focus on educational silos when the best ideas are to be found when different worlds collide?

Let's get our kids and young adults learning how to problem solve together - how to collaborate on generating ideas, testing them and refining them. Let's get them confident about sending those ideas out in the world. Let's teach them that it's OK for some of those ideas to fail and strategies for resilience when they do.  

As this article by UC Berkeley shows, when we emphasize the process over the product and encourage 'divergent thought' (read disagreement) during our interactions with children, we are embedding a culture of creative and critical thinking in the next generation.

It therefore follows that education experiences focused on this culture will be developing the people who can create and leverage innovative networks, both online and offline, in order to collaborate for effective change.

Image credit: Gensler