Entries Tagged 'design' ↓

The biggest problem facing American cities is a lack of imagination, and it is rooted in a clinical diagnosis.

The human brain is well suited to two basic tasks: raw survival and creative problem solving.

Raw survival is mediated by the amygdala, a small almond-shaped segment of the early human brain. The amygdala well suited at playing zero-sum games (ones where there can be only one winner and one loser).

Our frontal cortex, by contrast, is relatively new, and is the center of imaginative and creative thinking.

It turns out that prolonged stress diminishes the function of the frontal cortex and shifts more brain function to the amygdala.

Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen coined the phrase “allostatic load” to characterize the condition of being under continual stress – particularly stress for survival. Being in this state of hyperarousal floods the body with adrenalin and cortisol, and it can be quite energizing.

Unfortunately it has the effect of diminishing the function of our frontal cortex, and enhancing the fight-or-flight impulses mediated by the amygdala.

Many city leaders in the United States have been raised and trained under conditions of allostatic load. This kind of prolonged stress causes people to make defensive, pragmatic choices rather than perform the kind of long-term, imaginative thinking required for good leadership.

“Failure of Imagination”

The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that the reason that the September 11, 2001 attacks were not prevented was because of a “failure of imagination.”

Is it surprising that the government of the United States, embroiled as it was in name-calling and a plethora of stop-the-other-guy tactics, failed to imagine the possibility of a motivated terrorist organization next?

How imaginative can the country be when our primary concern is beating out the other party? Our amygdalas have been in charge when our frontal cortexes should be front-and-center.

Baltimore

When I hear government officials, including our current Mayor, talk about how schools, services, and safety are all that people want, I hear allostatic load talking. It favors expedient answers, not the best answers. The best answers would be those that used creative problem solving to realize a new future that few dare envision.

Competent services efficiently delivered are not enough. We need imagination. We need creativity and the power of a dream state. We need politicians and press that have the ability to look beyond the day-to-day bickering of politics and into what it means to be an effective city on planet Earth in the year 2020.

To do otherwise is to sell our city short. I don’t know about you, but I want my leaders to use their whole brains, not just their flight-or-flight reflexes.

You can read more about allostatic load in this article, “Is the life you’re living worth the price you’re paying to live it?” in Harvard Business Review, as recommended to me by my friend Shuchi Rana.

Thinking about what works for entrepreneurs and what doesn’t, it occurred to me that it’s not always enough to do the right things. You have to do the right things in the right order.

That sounds hard. It is tough enough to know what the right things are, without also knowing what order to do them in.

But the order matters. Adding a particular investor first helps you get the interest of others. There is a right order to seek investors.

There is a right order in which to seek press and PR for your products, and possibly a different order that’s best for your company as a whole.

You could call it “strategic,” but that implies that it might be hard to figure out, or that a wrong move might cost you dearly. That’s probably not quite right; but there is usually one story that’s better than the others.

I think in the end we are all just telling stories: about ourselves, our companies, and our products. We tell a story to prospective employees, and all sales is really storytelling.

So here’s the trick: tell a good story. If you tell a story that has good characters doing interesting things in a compelling order, you’ll win.

And the inverse is also true. Tell a sad story, or a boring one, or one where the elements don’t build towards a climax, and odds are, you won’t get very far.

So the next time you’re worrying over strategy, or wondering how to get investors interested in what you’re doing, start thinking about your story: the characters, their beliefs, the heroes, and the villains.

Write a story that motivates you, and odds are, others will want to play a part too.

Public education in America has long been the subject of hand-wringing and now, after over 100 years of the same model, it’s time we finally recognize what has worked and what has failed. Education is, in a sense, a kind of technology, and it’s time to ready its next version.

I’ve recently been asked to participate in some discussions about innovation in education; my mother co-founded a primary school in 1980 and I’ve had a chance to consider these topics as a student and a thinker. Here’s precisely where I believe we have failed and what we might do to invent the next generation of education.

Failure to recognize the importance of networks

What makes a successful student? Being around other successful students. We are the average of those around us. This simple fact is what has animated desegregation as well as programs like KIPP, Head Start, charter schools, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, and private schools. If we really want to create social mobility and social justice, we need to change people’s position within the social graph to expose them to self-actualized learners and educated people. This suggests one imperative only and it has nothing to do with schools, per se: If we want children to learn, we must ensure that they are surrounded by people who value learning.

Overconfidence in Curriculum, Testing, and the Educational Machine

If a child’s success is determined primarily by their position within the social fabric, it cannot also follow that the machinery of education has very much impact. Consider that a single child surrounded by a diverse, thoughtful, inquisitive support network of adults and other children will undoubtedly flourish (assuming a base level of socioeconomic security). It is therefore incorrect to assume that the modern educational machine is necessary to produce a successful adult. We should recognize that successful learning can happen in many different ways, and not just through schools.

Confusion about what “school” actually is

The popular conception of “school” is that it is a place where we send our children to learn and be systematically exposed to an orderly program of ideas, culminating in a baseline level of performance that will prepare them for employment. In fact, school provides only a) a basic social safety-net within which children can be placed into a social fabric, b) state-sponsored childcare, c) minimal insurance of the breadth of instruction (via a curriculum), d) minimal insurance of the length of instruction (usually at least 13 years of 180 days each).  School enables some parents to participate in the workforce while insuring a basic safety net for students who would otherwise lack a supporting social fabric.

Confusion and guilt about the role of teachers

Many people intuitively understand the value of a good teacher. But look back on your own school experience and ask honestly how many truly excellent teachers you can recall. Most people will name three or four. Some might name five or six. This suggests that the best experiences in our educational system happen by accident. We all want to value teachers and the work that they do, but when performance varies so widely, it’s difficult to develop metrics that reward those who are making the most difference. Additionally, when others have demonstrated that self-directed learning is possible when children are working within a supportive social fabric, it’s not clear that the model of “teacher as the driver of learning” is sane. The child is the driver of learning, and the teacher is only an informed and enthusiastic member of the child’s social network. Children, not teachers, are the true drivers of learning; teachers are just one part of the child’s social support fabric.

Politicization of education

We have damaged both public education and social justice by conflating the two. Well-intentioned activists on the left identified public education as a civil rights issue. And certainly education is a matter of social justice. But education is a matter of one’s position within the social fabric, and we have been forced to try to use our public school system as the only available tool to manipulate peoples’ placement within it. Well-meaning bureaucrats and school boards make countless decisions that affect people’s placement within social networks – everything from what schools they can attend to what set of classes they can access. People on the right have mistaken left-wing proponents of public education as the enemy, when in fact the enemy is only the many layers of ineffectiveness that plague our system. We can only improve education when we understand the importance of social fabrics and stop fighting each other.

Historic co-opting of education alternatives by both the right and the left

Many on both the far right and left have historically chosen to opt out of public education in favor of religious education, private schools, home-schooling, or unschooling. Because they have been associated with extreme political affiliations, or with the moneyed (and oft-maligned) “elite,” many Americans have found them distasteful. Many intuitively believe that if they pull their child out of public education, they affect the social fabric of the schools they leave behind. However, many also fear that this alone is not a sufficient reason to participate in an underperforming school environment. You hear people say, “I believe in public education; that’s why I’ve got my kid in this school. I hope I’m doing the right thing.” People should put their children in schools only if they provide functional social networks for learning.

Over-reliance on causal thinking

We largely believe the myth that if you graduate as valedictorian and go to the best college that you’ll have a rich and successful life. That may appear true on the surface, but it’s arguable that more opportunities come from the social fabric that results from those experiences than from the credentials themselves. And even optimizing for “rich and successful” doesn’t necessarily translate to “happy and fulfilling.” We all know the old saw that “your degree doesn’t matter; what matters is that you have a degree.” That’s more true today than ever (at least outside of academia itself). The reason for this has more to do with our position within the social fabric than anything else. We need to start giving kids the skills they need to become life-long learners and stop trying to win some imagined game of education.

Vestigial artifacts

We educate children in an industrial model to prepare them to work in industrial environments, as if they were so many machine parts. We take off three months per year so kids can help with farm tasks. These are both obviously ridiculous notions today. So much of the system is the way it is because it has always been that way, and the system begets the system. We must break free. Learning should happen continuously and year-round, individually and in groups, and should be coupled with plenty of play and breaks.

How we might move forward

Buckminster Fuller famously said, “You never change things by fighting the existing model. Instead, make a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” This is happening right now.

First, new instructional tools are emerging. The phenomenal and free Khan Academy website provides deep instruction on hundreds of topics that kids can ingest at their own pace – and as supported by their network of peers and mentors.

Second, social tools like Facebook and Twitter enable people to self-organize face-to-face peer-driven instruction for their children. This will evolve into an effective, mainstream and apolitical home-schooling movement, and it will be a juggernaut.

People will opt out of public education because they will have found something that works better.

If we want to save the mission of public education, we urgently need to get smart about the nature of school, what it is and is not, and figure out a way to offer an effective social safety net for everyone that recognizes this new reality.

The old model simply doesn’t know it’s obsolete.

Newly-elected Maryland State Senator Bill Ferguson was recently named to the Baltimore Business Journal‘s Power 20. This week they asked me, as a friend of Bill’s and member of a previous Power 20 cohort, to comment on Bill’s relationship with and use of power.

“Bill is a curious, humble, and earnest young man, and he represents a true shift in how power is conferred in this town,” I said. “He didn’t work his way up through the ranks and spend a few years as a city council person, or wait his turn. Bill was able to win because of a shift in political power that’s taking place right now. He derives his power from the people, not from the system.”

Political power is now being conferred through the accumulation of weak and strong ties with citizens, and no longer by top-down power structures, power-brokers, and kingmakers. Don’t get me wrong; those folks still have an impact (they did in Bill Ferguson’s race – they got behind him when it was clear he was onto something), but that impact is waning. And things that were previously unthinkable are now possible.

It may seem like hyperbole to compare the situation in Baltimore to what took place over the last three weeks in Egypt. But it’s an apt comparison.

For decades in both places, people have felt marginalized by a top-down, tone-deaf government that was more interested in its own well-being than that of its citizens. In both places, decades of neglect and mismanagement have led to a serious crisis of confidence.

People are fed up. They’re tired of feeling marginalized, the failed programs, the broken promises, the lack of accountability and the inability to implement imaginative solutions. For 60 years, Baltimore’s population has been in decline, and places in decline have not had the benefit of oversight, dollars, or creative leaders. Instead, corruption (explicit or implicit) festers.

The Perfect Storm

Several factors are emerging all at once:

• Young people want to live near their work and are tired of commuting (and they’ll accept a pay cut to do it)
• Our roads are full and can no longer be meaningfully expanded due to lack of space and funds
• Fuel costs are projected to rise as China’s demand grows exponentially
• Online networks are having a meaningful impact on real-world relationships and politics

These factors, combined, have made Baltimore the most important jurisdiction in Maryland – practically overnight. Yet our leadership has not caught up with this reality.

Baltimore’s recent rise to relevance combined with the power of communications networks will create stark shifts in the power structure.

Two Kinds of Leaders

Today we have a choice between two kinds of leaders. We can choose between the leaders that the system hands us, or we can choose to put our faith in new, emerging leaders with whom citizens have a legitimate connection and a voice.

It is sadly telling that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s much-promoted (Orwellian, broadcast-oriented) Safer City social media campaign follows just one person on Twitter: the Mayor herself. And it has just 78 followers. Why? Because it’s all for show, and no one legitimately cares about a program to mitigate a problem – people actually want to solve it at the root. To hell with a Safer City: give me a city where everyone can earn a living, and I can bet you it’ll be safer.

But our politicians don’t know that, because they have not taken the time to benchmark ourselves against other cities or learn from best practices elsewhere. Baltimore has more cops per capita than any other city. Why is that?

Because we need them. Why do we need them? Because we have a lot of crime. Why do we have a lot of crime? Because we have no middle class. Why do we have no middle class? Because we have not seriously focused on enabling small business formation, which is the number one driver of jobs. Instead we have given tax handouts to fatcat developers so they can build big projects and enrich their cronies.

Yes, clearly the cure is more cops. As the Mayor told the Baltimore Sun’s Justin Fenton, “Maybe we could do without as many officers, but that’s not what the public wants. They want more patrolmen on the street. They want more police in the neighborhood.”

No, Madam Mayor. What the public really wants is for these root cause issues to be addressed. It takes true leadership and understanding to go beyond just treating the symptoms.

Accelerating Change

Some have called the recent events in Egypt “the Twitter and Facebook revolution.” A few have scoffed at the idea that these tools could spark a revolution and cite eons of revolutionary precedent as proof. But it’s a mistake to dismiss their role.

Online networks are accelerants. They create connections passively where none might otherwise exist. Critical mass for change comes when the density of connections between people reaches a threshold level. Ideas spread between networks instantly. What might have taken 10 years before now takes 1 year.

The Soviet regime could never have survived in the age of networks. Iraq would have collapsed under its own weight if given time and these tools.

And the same repressive structures will fall in Baltimore, for the same reasons.

To quote Gandhi: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”