In wandering around the thinking on serendipity, I keep falling over references to Arthur Koestler´s book The Act of Creation, published in 1964. In it (I am cowed by the 600+ pages, so have just taken a little dip into it), he devises a theory on creativity. Creativity is increasingly prized by industry and regarded as one of the aspects of humanity that will stil be done by a person rather than a machine in future. As such, it is one of the ways I think we will be able to differentiate ourselves as talent. How, then, to become more creative becomes both the question and the challenge.
In Mr Koestler´s book, the author of the foreword, Sir Cecil Burt asks “…what are the social and scholastic barriers which hide or hinder the emergence of creative talent? Educational psychologists have of late woken up to the fact that the kind of examinations and intelligence tests which they still habitually employ tend to select the efficient learner and the verbal reasoner rather than the intuitive observer or constructive and critical thinkers. (…) The problem has at last been recognized but the remedy is still to seek.”
Compare and contrast the statements by Erik Brynjolffson in an interview in Wired magazine in 2015, over half a century later. He says “There’s a real extra value to creativity that wasn’t there before.” He then goes on to lament that schools and the education system aren´t equipping their students with creative and interpersonal skills: “There’s a huge mismatch between the kind of education that was important and successful in the 20th century and the kind that’s going to be needed in the 21st century. In Henry Ford’s era, industry needed people who could follow instructions and work on big assembly lines. Today, routine information processing is something that machines do extremely well. Our schools need to move beyond simply teaching people how to follow instruction and do routine information work, toward creativity and interpersonal skills, toward entrepreneurship and teamwork. We need a revolution in education that’s every bit as big as the revolution in technology.”
With this talk of revolution, The Beatles naturally come to my mind. Their advice in their song Revolution “You tell me it´s the institution/Well you know/You´d better free your mind instead” seems particularly relevant: If you are expecting institutions to prepare you for the future of your work, I think you may be waiting a long time for the remedy.