FAMILY APPRENTICESHIP FOR THE ORANGE ECONOMY
PlayWorx: The Manifesto
Championing Parents of T(w)eens to Nurture Them as Imagineers
The best way to predict the future is to imagineer it.
~ Emeka Chukwureh (adapted from Abe Lincoln)
In the ‘60s, NASA was casting around for a new test. The test was to enable it predict creativity in its astronaut candidates. NASA already knew how to find intelligent people. But finding intelligent people who could think adaptively was a different mission category.
Space travel involves pushing past frontiers into unknown territory. Attempting achievements for which no manual books exist. Going, as Buzz Lightyear eloquently elucidated, “to infinity and beyond”.
Humans’ push into space called for a quality beyond mere ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. It called for the ability to adapt to unforeseen situations. The capacity to recombine things into new, useful configurations with ease. It called for the creative capacity, for practical imagination.
NASA needed people who possessed that sort of ingenuity. Individuals who could tackle the sorts of unanticipated challenges that perennially arose within space missions. To help with this problem NASA turned to George Land.
At the time, George Land was building a research and consulting practice into the enhancement of creative performance. Working with his wife and partner, Beth Jarman, he developed a test to measure creative potential. The test involved divergent thinking — the ability to look at a particular problem and propose many solutions. Land’s Creativity Test turned out to be a huge success for NASA.
But the really interesting thing was what happened next. Because the test was so simple it could be administered to any age group, George and Beth decided to give the same test to a group of young children. So in 1968, they administered it to a sample of 1,600 children between the ages of 4 and 5. The results absolutely stunned them…
98% of the children scored at a level described by the NASA test as “Creative Genius”!
Excited by those incredible results, the duo turned the experiment into a longitudinal study. They gave the same test to the same group of children 5 years later. As it turned out, their findings were again quite stunning. But this time for diametrically different reasons.
Because these same children, by now 10-year olds, had deteriorated to 30% “creative geniuses”. And 5 years later, the same group of children — now 15-year olds — had dropped all the way down to just 12% rated as “creative geniuses”!
Disturbed, but still intrigued by this fascinating study, George decided to conduct this same test on adults aged 25 and up (with an average age of 31). After many studies, what he invariably found, was that less than 2% of all adults scored at the “creative genius” level. Dishearteningly, the inevitable conclusion of George Land’s landmark study was that…
…somehow, somewhere along the journey of life, the innate creative capacity in most of us deteriorates…
Yet tellingly, a minority manages to retain this crucial human quality…
In a later book reflecting on this study, the couple wrote, “what we have concluded is that non-creative behavior is learned”.
The Great Discontent
Curiously, the creativity deterioration observed by the Lands mirrors almost exactly the student-school engagement cliff…
In 2012 Gallup “surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states”. It “found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students who participated in the poll are engaged with school. By middle school that falls to about six in 10 students. And by high school, only four in 10 students qualify as engaged”.
According to Gallup, “several things that might help to explain why this is happening — ranging from our overzealous focus on standardized testing and curricula to our lack of experiential and project-based learning pathways for students — not to mention the lack of pathways for students who will not and do not want to go on to college.”
And as it turns out, “students whose engagement wane [most] during their time in the educational system are those who have high entrepreneurial talent”.
Back in 2006, creativity expert and school reformer Sir Ken Robinson gave a TED talk titled, “Do schools kill creativity?” Almost 15 years on, such was the universal raw nerve that talk touched that it still ranks as the most-watched TED talk of all time.
In that talk Sir Ken, who challenges the way we educate our children and champions a radical rethink of our school systems, argued that “We are educating people out of their creativity”. We fail to get the best out of ourselves because “ we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers”.
It is hard to listen to that TED talk and not have a visceral reaction. It leaves you with an almost incontrovertible feeling about the inadequacy of school as we presently practice it. Listening to that talk, possibly back in 2008, set me on a personal path to reimagine how we educate our children.
The Great Disconnect
In a previous Medium article, I wrote about what I term The Great Disconnect — the utter lack of real-world application for the work kids do in school. I quoted Anastasia Basil who put it eloquently in her article titled Dear School, Eff Your ‘F’,
“Your curriculum is bloated with minutiae — it’s designed for test-taking, not life beyond the classroom.”
We feed our kids into the K-16 school pipeline and turn on the autopilot. We implicitly trust the process — that they would come out at the other end and land jobs that would enable them to build stable lives.
But that logic has been broken for a long time, a position made abundantly stark since the Great Recession of 2008. Post the Great Recession, being overqualified & underemployed has become a ‘thing’. And humongous college student debt may have resulted in the stymieing of social mobility.
But more insidious is the growing suspicion that public schools may be the primary cause of the increase in teenage suicide, rising lifelong substance abuse and the mental illness epidemic.
The Great Disruption
In his seminal 1970 book, Future Shock, renowned futurist Alvin Toffler cogently argued that “society is undergoing an enormous structural change”. He described the acceleration of change across practically all dimensions of human living as “an elemental force”.
Since Toffler wrote those words, this ‘elemental’ force has only been compounding and accelerating even more.
As a geology student I studied discontinuities — line-breaks which separate layers of one type of material from another within the same rock mass. These discontinuities preserve geologic records of massive changes in rock formation.
In similar fashion, human society is going through an extended discontinuity — moving from an industrial society to a new societal configuration. I term this ongoing reconfiguration of human society The Great Disruption.
There are many prisms through which to examine The Great Disruption. For my purposes here I briefly apply this to the most enduring consumer product that marks our industrial civilization — the automobile.
- In the first wave of disruption, the combustion engine beat out other competing technologies to replace the horse-and-buggy. That disruption was iconized by the Ford Model T, created in 1908, and available in any color so long as it was black!
- The second wave took place in 1980 when the Japanese Big 3 (Toyota, Honda, and Datsun) crossed the quarter volume mark of all cars sold in the US, sending a shockwave through the auto industry.
- In the current wave electric vehicles and self-driving cars, most emblematically represented by Tesla, are upstaging the Big automakers, leading to unthinkable outcomes such as the recent announcement by VW to stop supporting motorsports featuring combustion-engines.
This is but one slice of The Great Disruption. Across all parts of society — housing, health, work, education — significant, rapid and accelerating changes are happening all at once. Interacting across multiple dimensions, these compounding forces are intensifying and complexifying life as we know it.
The “Good Ol’ Days”, if they ever existed, are well and truly gone forever.
The Orange Economy
“All of the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.”
~ Winston Churchill
The reconfiguration of human society resulting from The Great Disruption poses significant challenges of adapting to rapid and massive change. But it is also a harbinger of infinite opportunities.
The Great Disruption is unleashing a creative economy where the generation and application of unique ideas and combination of ideas are increasingly the most sought after human quality.
Technological advances such as mobile internet, Internet of Things, cloud technology, energy storage, 3D printing and new materials, are enabling new spaces — physical, virtual and augmented — for creatives of all types to flourish and thrive.
These technological advances are ushering in the Orange Economy — a brave new world where ideas are the new oil.
The Orange Economy, a term specifically used to describe Colombia’s Creative Economy, captures the vibrant potency of the democratization of production and distribution of creative goods and services, powered by digital technologies.
The Orange Economy is based on talent, culture, intellectual property and connectivity. It implies economics that is much more accessible to people today than the factors of production in the industrial age — capital, land, labor.
“Being creative is part of growing up and a sign of being normal. But then for years, when children went to school to be taught facts and how to behave, their creativity was relegated to the art class. Teenagers emerged more-or-less educated but their creativity was muted.”
~ John Howkins, preface to his acclaimed 2001 book, “The Creative Economy”
PlayWorx: Apprenticeship for the Orange Economy
For the past few years, I have been developing my parenting method for the teenage years for our 3 children. I have branded this home-brew PlayWorx, as it emphasizes learning through play, nurturing of bold imagination and building of sustained creative capital in the t(w)een years.
I outline the shape of this method in 2 previous Medium articles:
- Raising !magineers, where I describe the imperative of discovering passions and cultivating creative capital from early in life; and
- The Curiously Fruity Flavors of Sweet-Tasting Lemonade Stand Education, where I outline teenpreneurship as a crucial mind/skill-set needed by our t(w)eens to thrive in a fast, ever-changing and complex world.
Over the past 6 months I have been refining that method to enable me easier share its principles and practices with other parents of t(w)eens. I will be sharing those primarily through my Medium articles, so you can follow me here on Medium if you wish to read more about those practices.
However each week I also distill insights from my lived experience of raising 3 t(w)eens to masterfully navigate and thrive in this Age of Massive Disruption. I will draw deeper reflections on how I am enabling them engineer their bold imaginative and creative ideas into productive and practical forms.
Update (25 Sep 2021): PlayWorx is currently on sabbatical.
At present, I am blogging exclusively at The Global Careerist.
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If you are a parent of a t(w)een, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly PlayWorx Insights email and join other perceptive parents who are already benefiting from this ‘front-side seat’ into another way to grow t(w)eens!
I champion parents of t(w)eens to become intentional in nurturing them as Imagineers, enabling them engineer their imaginative and creative ideas into productive and practical forms, thus empowering them to masterfully navigate and thrive in an Age of Massive Disruption.
I do this by writing a Medium publication, speaking at events and cooking up ingenious ways to spread the PlayWorx Method message of emphasizing nurturing of bold imagination and building of sustained creative capital during the t(w)eens years.
