Acts of leadership, and creativity

Despite, or perhaps because of, my commerce background (both theoretical and practical) I am very wary of taking business practice and trying to apply it to educational leadership, organisation, or practice. I do not believe that the competitive market model has served schools and our young people well.

With that mind-set I read this recent article from McKinsey and Co on creativity and business. I continue to believe that we need more creativity in schools, that we need our young people to be more creative. My specific interest still lies in those leadership practices that give us more creative schools i.e. what specific, deliberate, and intentional, acts do we need to see from Tumuaki, senior leaders, HoDs.. in fact all teachers and school staff, that will make schools more creative places for our rangatahi, places that nurture creativity amongst rangatahi and kaiako alike?

The acknowledgement from McKinsey and Co about the importance of creativity to business awas, I thought, a god start.

As obvious as it may sound, creativity and innovation need to be business priorities. Even more important, a company needs to execute on those priorities in its daily practices. This can be difficult, given the relentless pressures on business leaders to hit quarterly financial targets.

It is however the few lines in the article that look at specific leadership practices that caught my eye:

In companies within the top ACS quartile, senior executives serve as role models for creativity and innovation. They don’t simply encourage their people to pursue those objectives—they see themselves as personally on the hook to deliver creativity and innovation. 

In addition, almost 60 percent of companies in the top ACS quartile self-identify as industry shapers or innovation leaders versus slightly more than one-third of their peers. In the most creative firms, a strong narrative has permeated the enterprise: people inside the organization believe in what the company is trying to do and that they can help to achieve it.

And this next statement I think supports the view that this focus spans all levels of the organisation, from front facing customer service right through to governance:

This commitment is reflected in a mind-set that prioritizes creativity and innovation. Thirty percent of the firms in the ACS top quartile discuss creativity and innovation at more than half of their board meetings versus only 20 percent of peer firms.

I don't think there is in fact anything here that is rocket science. There are generalisable lessons that apply whether in business or education (that makes a change, eh) .

• More creative schools will come about when leadership and governance value creativity
• We will have more creative schools when leaders and Board members both 'talk the talk' and 'walk the talk' i.e. when they keep talking up the value of creativity, challenging colleagues to imagine what this all looks like, and when they act in ways that show that they believe this
• You get what you focus on

A simple Google search on leadership and creativity immediately yielded this result. The post led with this quote: 

“The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they’re valued. So it’s much more about creating climates. I think it’s a big shift for a lot of people.”

– Sir Ken Robinson

This diagram took my eye:

There is far more in this one article alone that deserves unpacking, but that's enough for now.

Better schools won't come about when we test learners more relentlessly. Better schools will come about when we focus on what really matters, not the measuring but the thinking, the acting, the doing. It would be hard to disagree with the views Bali Haque expressed in this recent article.

So my challenge to all school leaders is this: what will you do each week, each day, each hour, that makes it clear to all that you value creativity? What will you do to "create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they’re valued." ?

And if you don't accept the belief that creativity is important, what will it take to convince you?

Creativity by stealth

A piece of life wisdom: surround yourself with people brighter than yourself. And I have. One such group is the trustees of the Ako Ōtautahi - Learning City Christchurch trust.

Source: https://learningcitychristchurch.nz/ 

This week I attended a meeting at which the Trust brought together some of the contributors to the 2023 'Learning Days' in something of a look back and look forward exercise: 'what worked, and what do we want to be doing in 2024?'.

The 2023 Learning Days were held under the 'umbrella concept' of 'Kōtuituia Weaving Curiosity'. I love that idea of a city in which we value, feed, and nurture, curiosity (using the word curiosity in preference to the word 'learning' which comes with a veritable truckload of baggage for many). I've written on this previously.

The talk this week centred around taking a new central idea, 'gamification', and weaving its threads into a 2024 Learning Days event.

If you are not sure what gamification is, I have placed the Wikipedia definition at the end of this post for reference.

Gamification is a powerful educational strategy, and perhaps more importantly a powerful developmental strategy for business and organisations generally. I suspect (opinion alert!!) that it has however proved damnably difficult to 'realise', to actually implement, particularly in a business context, but in almost any context.

Source: https://www.harbingergroup.com/blogs/how-to-build-a-gamification-strategy-an-expert-view/

I see the potential of gamification in a different way (and an entirely predictable one if you have read any of my other thinking on this blog). In the same way that there was talk in our long lost war on drugs about 'gateway drugs', so too could gamification be a 'gateway to creativity'.

I am a huge fan of the concept of creative cities, although as always I mean creative in ways that go well beyond the creative arts. To me, creative cities are places where creative problem solving is 'how we do things around. here'. So I am imagining:

• a festival in which gamification is used to enthuse, to inspire, and to engage, a wide range of people in a wide range of new things. 
• a massive game design contest that engages young people in particular in game design and creation. 
• the creative potential of our most vulnerable unleashed
• gamification in all of its guises, both digital and analogue

... and perhaps most importantly: 

• gamification as a tool to build creativity and creative problem solving at a community wide level. 

Perhaps this is creativity by stealth. I am drawn to a story I heard many decades ago a t ban Art galleries and Museums' Association conference when I was heavily involved in the world of museums and art galleries. James Mack (then Director of the Dowse Art Gallery in the Hutt, related a story of his time at the Suter Gallery in Nelson. He was running a showing of a film of "The Lord of the lies', hosted in the galleries amongst the art works on show. This was in those days when you played movies from reels of celluloid, using a projector (no Youtube back then).  group he described as 'punk rockers' came to see the movie. At the half time break, when it was time to change reels, the punk rockers got up (as you did) and began walking around the gallery. They began talking about the art hanging on the walls. James laid down a defiant challenge: 'how many of you can claim to have had a group of punk rockers in your gallery critically analysing art?" I loved that story. James' message was 'it doesn't matter how you get 'em in, just get 'em in'. Education by stealth, creativity by stealth.

I also come back to some of my earlier thinking.. where I said:

An even bigger question in my head is, what happens if we are deliberate and intentional about nurturing the 11 dimensions of the Creative Schools Index across a city?

The CAST team research indicates that nurturing and growing creativity in schools supports wellbeing and academic outcomes. Could it do the equivalent across a city?

• How do you identify 'points of curiosity' in a city context?
• Is a better focus for that the idea that we deliberately and intentionally create 'points of curiosity' across a city?
• Is this a way of addressing inequity in the ways in which we create those points of curiosity in different parts of a city that target those most likely to suffer from. those inequities?
• What could that look like?
• Who does it?
• How do they do that?

Creativity needs to be nurtured, front and centre, in our schools. So too it needs to be nurtured, front and centre, in our businesses, amongst our civic leaders, our NGOs .. everywhere. It needs to be 'how we do things around here', it needs to be embedded in our city culture.  If gamification is one way to do that, I say let's start playing.. NOW!!

Gamification:

Gamification is the strategic attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by creating similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users.[1] This is generally accomplished through the application of game-design elements and game principles (dynamics and mechanics) in non-game contexts.[2][3]

Gamification is part of persuasive system design, and it commonly employs game design elements[4][2][5][6][3] to improve user engagement,[7][8][9] organizational productivity,[10] flow,[11][12][13] learning,[14][15] crowdsourcing,[16] knowledge retention,[17] employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems,[13][18][19] physical exercise,[20] traffic violations,[21] voter apathy,[22][23] public attitudes about alternative energy,[24] and more. A collection of research on gamification shows that a majority of studies on gamification find it has positive effects on individuals.[5] However, individual and contextual differences exist.[25]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification