The Wisdom of the Pack Rat

Image by Diego Cupolo*

Our culture prizes neatness. We try our best to avoid clutter—in our homes, in our workplaces, and, most importantly, in our minds. We coin pejorative names for people who don’t toe the party line, labeling them “pack rats.” Many of us can’t even begin to work on a project until we feel that our office is sufficiently organized and free of excess stuff. These tendencies are perfectly legitimate—mental and physical tidiness do have their place—but would it be radical of me to suggest that clutter might, in fact, be a cornerstone of creativity and imagination?

Redesigning the American Classroom

Image by John R. Hawk*

In a recent blog entry on graduate business schools, I mentioned “design thinking,” a term that may be unfamiliar to many readers. In a fascinating January 20 interview with Public School Insights, a blog of the Learning First Alliance, professor and business innovator David Kelley provides satisfying answers to anyone in the dark about what exactly “design thinking” is. In addition to founding the world-class design company IDEO, Kelley has been a professor at Stanford’s unique Institute of Design (nicknamed “d.school”) for over 30 years. Like LCI’s Imagination Conversations initiative, much of Kelley’s current work is dedicated to reshaping American public education—but how does he want to change it, and why?

Stop Making Sense

Image by Dan Nevill*

Adult human beings are chronic sense-makers. Surrounded by dizzying ideas and sensations, we work to make them manageable: we classify things so that when we encounter something new, we can drop it conveniently into a folder in our mental file cabinet. When we’re working on a project, we focus on that exclusively and block out all “distractions.” This narrowing and organizing is necessary, of course; without it, we’d too be confused to ever get anything done. But might such confusion also be an asset?

For years I was an avid spelunker—that is, I liked to explore caves. My experiences visiting them have taught me a valuable lesson about imagination. Let me explain. When you enter a cave, you turn off your everyday sensory expectations; you step into a dark, mysterious world different from the one to which you’re accustomed. But as you spend six, eight, ten hours underground, you adapt to your environment and acquire an alternate way of seeing. When you finally emerge, however, the real shock comes: after hours of blackness, the colorful aboveground world is more vivid than ever. It stimulates your visual receptors. But in that moment you’re too overwhelmed for your usual organizational mechanisms to kick in. Instead of defined objects, you see floating blurs of color and texture. This may be disorienting, but it’s also liberating and, literally, eye-opening!

The Pope’s Telescope

Image by Sarah G*

The discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be the greatest turning point in the history of humankind. Fire, the wheel, religion, organized government, the printing press, the computer—all of these breakthroughs, which have enabled us to advance in so many ways—would pale in comparison. Of course, the scenarios I’m imagining wouldn’t necessarily have to involve intelligence: mere microbes from other planets could help us cure diseases. But what does the Vatican, of all institutions, have to do with this?

In November, the Associated Press reported that “the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.” The Reverend José Gabriel Funes, director of the 120 year-old Vatican Observatory, held a weeklong conference that brought together thirty scientists—astronomers, physicists, biologists, and other experts—to discuss these issues. Obviously, the possibility of sentient beings existing beyond Earth raises many questions for adherents of all religions, but the conference centered on science rather than theology. This interests me most, however, as an illustration of imagination at work.

Imagination Means Business

Image by Mark Kobayashi-Hillary*

One aim of Lincoln Center Institute’s Imagination Conversations is to demonstrate to audiences that imagination is not only the province of artists but, rather, is central to the fields of education, science, government, and business. A recent New York Times article by Lane Wallace, “Multicultural Critical Theory. At B-School?”, reveals that some thought leaders in the business world share our perspective. The piece focuses mainly on Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, whose guiding principle is that business students need to learn more than number-crunching if they are to succeed in the 21^st century—they must also be able to think critically and creatively.

Martin’s idea, Wallace explains, is to weave skills traditionally associated with the liberal arts—for instance, the ability “to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives”—into the business school curriculum. Other institutions besides Toronto that have expanded the scope of their M.B.A. programs in the last few years include Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and the Yale School of Management. Many of these programs are now offering “design thinking” classes that send students into the field to find problems, to which they then propose solutions. Martin and his like-minded peers are wisely responding to one of the lessons of the current financial crisis: businesspeople with basic knowhow aren’t enough to keep our economy thriving. The new era demands workers who can “think … nimbly across multiple frameworks, cultures and disciplines.”

Developing the minds of M.B.A. students holistically is an exciting step in the right—that is, the imaginative—direction.

*There is a Creative Commons license attached to this image.

Imagination Takes a Hike

Image by Craig Cloutier**

To say that I am an avid walker is an understatement. It is perhaps one of the things I love the most about living in New York City. For me walking is about much more than exercise or fresh air—it’s about exploration, experience, and reflection. But it wasn’t until I came across Alexei Sayle’s* article from this past Sunday’s Observer of London that I became cognizant of how wonderfully this activity also fuels my imagination.

It was really a single line from Sayle’s article that has started me thinking about this: “The act of walking itself can be, if you tread with your eyes and brain open, fantastic for the imagination,” he writes. This seems deceptively obvious, perhaps, and it is certainly something I readily recognize as I reflect, now, on my own experience. Stepping out for a lunchtime turn around the block during a busy work day isn’t just about releasing tension, it’s about re-starting my brain, revving up those gears, generating sparks. Yet I had not previously conceived of walking as a part of my own imagination practice.

Not only is New York an eminently walkable city, but I am certainly not alone in my passion for exploring this fascinating place on foot. The population encountered striding through Central Park, Riverside Park, or along the sidewalks of the Upper West Side (or in myriad other corners of the five boroughs, I presume), is gratifyingly diverse and often unexpectedly fascinating. What and who you encounter during a particular foray makes the experience valuable, but I wonder whether simply being “outside” or “abroad” in both a conceptual and physical sense doesn’t also exercise the imagination in a certain way?

Thinking about stepping out to reignite? Caleb Smith documented his two-year project to walk every street in Manhattan. Shore Walkers is a year-round walking club based in NYC and lower New York State, perhaps best known for The Great Saunter, an annual 32-mile hike around the perimeter of Manhattan. (A bit crazy on the face of it, I know, but I have actually completed this walk more than once!) I don’t mean to seem completely NYC-centric, though! Check out www.startwalkingnow.org from the American Heart Association. And consider browsing the Internet for information about walking your own community.

*Sayle is not terribly well-known in the U.S. Readers might most likely remember this British author, actor, and comedian for his recurring role as the landlord Jerzy Balowski on the 1980s import, The Young Ones.

**There is a Creative Commons license attached to this image.

The Spaces Between

Image by Ladonite / Brendan*

As a dancer and someone who frequently experiences works of art in many disciplines, I’ve come to see over the years that constraints are often more conducive to artists’ imaginations than so-called “freedom.” Let’s say you’re a choreographer working on a commission. If you know that the area of the stage is only so many square feet, the piece must last no longer than twenty minutes, and the budget will allow for just four dancers, then you are able to focus on one thing alone: how can you make the most complex and beautiful dance possible within these limitations? But does this suggest that embracing boundaries is also a valuable strategy for business, government, and other institutions?

Fail to Succeed

Image by CCK Mom*

Sometime between childhood and adulthood, we become afraid of failure. As kids, whether we’re wrestling with watercolors to create a coherent painting or struggling to ride a bicycle or getting the hang of rope climbing in phys ed, we understand intuitively that failure is inevitable and acceptable and that we can learn from it. But as we grow up, all too often we become conditioned to see only “right” and “wrong” answers where we once saw infinite possibilities. Disapproving glares and snickers—wherever they come from—drive us to fear failure, to cover it up, to toe the line. Fortunately for me, an early mentor offered a much different philosophy.

Standardize Me

In her bold article for Education Week, “Schools Need a Culture Shift,” Betty J. Sternberg identifies “the skills and competencies needed to thrive in today’s world—teamwork, collaboration, creativity, and innovation,” and refers to “the culture of thriving, cutting-edge business environments.” So here’s the question: is the United States currently preparing its students to take on roles in the 21^st-century workforce, positions that rely on what Eric Liu and I call the ICI Continuum (Imagination-Creativity-Innovation)? Sternberg, a former commissioner of education and superintendent of schools in Connecticut, doesn’t think so. In her view, the No Child Left Behind Act has focused the attention of too many American administrators and teachers on tests and the “progress” they measure, to the exclusion of other, richer aspects of learning.

At Lincoln Center Institute, we believe that holding teachers and school leaders accountable for their students’ learning—and measuring this growth—requires multiple measurement tools. We believe in clear and focused standards, but reject standardization. We embrace accountability, but reject teaching to the test as the sole means toward that end. The goal is to make connections between methods, based on the needs of students. Let’s be bold enough to do this.

The core of Sternberg’s argument is her belief that drilling kids to perform well on state tests is a shortsighted practice because it fails to foster the qualities that really make them successful students, workers, and citizens: love of learning, the ability to work with others, the desire to solve difficult problems, and so on. “They all deserve to grow into extraordinary individuals,” she writes, “not just a record of test scores.” As a commissioner, Sternberg did help develop methods of K-12 assessment, so she knows that measurement of knowledge is necessary and can be implemented “in authentic and meaningful ways.” But, according to her, we’re moving farther away from this ideal each day.

We at LCI have our own idea of what imaginative learning looks like; for more information, visit our Web site at www.lcinstitute.org. What is your vision of imaginative learning? And how do you think we can spread it throughout our schools in order to produce both happier, more engaged students and a stronger, more competitive America?

Art: The Great Connector

When we think about the skills that will help our students keep the United States economically competitive, the fields of math and science usually come to mind first. Mastery in these subjects leads to new technologies and means of production, certainly, but do they give us everything we need for success? In an insightful opinion piece for the Christian Science Monitor, David Arzouman says no. Arzouman points to the paradox of specialization in education: on the one hand, it prepares students to play specific roles in the workforce, but on the other hand, it narrows their vision in troubling ways. The arts are a remedy for this. Art is all about how “elements must balance and synergize”; it reveals to young people “the surprising and far-reaching connections that put the world back together, that elicit the ‘aha’ response,” and thereby compensates for schools’ compartmentalized curricula. Art teaches us how to weave disparate threads into a harmonious whole.

Here at LCI, one of our ten “Capacities for Imaginative Learning”—which students develop through encounters with works of art and “original source” exemplars from other, non arts, disciplines—is “Making Connections.” Arzouman is right in step with this idea. He sees that the arts give people the conceptual tools to look across disciplines and see how things fit together in “the big picture”—a valuable skill set when one is trying to solve problems and innovate in the working world. So if economic competitiveness is our goal, math and science in schools gets us partway there, and when we add the arts, “[t]heir mix, although paradoxical, moves us closer to completeness.”