CRUSH SCHOOL

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I blog on Brain-Based Learning, Metacognition, EdTech, and Social-Emotional Learning. I am the author of the Crush School Series of Books, which help students understand how their brains process information and learn. I also wrote The Power of Three: How to Simplify Your Life to Amplify Your Personal and Professional Success, but be warned that it's meant for adults who want to thrive and are comfortable with four letter words.

Want Smarter People and Organizations? Teach Lateral Thinking.

June 19, 2018  /  Oskar Cymerman

Teach Lateral Thinking
“Formal education, in many cases, is so slow or out-of-date that venture capitalists pay bright people to skip school and start Internet companies.”
— Shane Snow, author of Smartcuts

What Lateral Thinking Is

You're driving in the rain. Someone must have turned on a giant hose up in the heavens because it is coming down! Suddenly, you notice 3 hitchhikers on the side of the road - a drenched and shaking old woman, a woman of your dreams, and a friend who's helped you out in the past. You stop and realize you have only one seat available. Whom do you help? 

This is the story Shane Snow, a journalist, a successful entrepreneur, and the author of Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking uses to introduce his readers to the concept of lateral thinking. Snow gives the lateral thinking answer to the question of whom to help, which we will talk about later, but for now let's define lateral thinking as a creative, often counterintuitive approach to problem-solving that helps individuals and organizations achieve success using alternative, often faster or simpler ways.

This article describes how you can apply lateral thinking in teaching, learning, and creating more successful teams and organizations. While you read, you will discover how to apply the key concepts from the book Smartcuts to your life and line.

What Lateral Thinking Isn't

While learning how to leverage lateral thinking will shorten your path to success, it will not eliminate hard work. It will however help you simplify - to use what works and eliminate what doesn't. Rather than keeping your nose down and waiting your turn, the lateral approach shortens your path to the top by shunning the traditional "climb the ladder" method and creating an alternate, uncommon, and unexpected path to individual or industry success.

Win Small, Gain Momentum, and Pivot

Big goals overwhelm. Seeing a long path ahead with little progress is demoralizing. In Smartcuts, the author brings up "psychology of small wins," which explains that focusing on small but significant tasks and succeeding at them "attracts allies" and "lowers resistance." This builds momentum toward accomplishing the big goal, because it motivates to keep going.

Whether you're a teacher, a coach, or a CEO, create conditions to help your proteges achieve frequent small but meaningful wins by first breaking down a big goal into many smaller more manageable tasks. Allow them to get good at it fast.

But don't stop there. Take advantage of the gained momentum and pivot to something bigger or better. Once you get rolling create a new challenge. Find a way to use the new skills and learning in something else. This will spur creativity and engender new approaches to old and new problems.

Mentorship (It's Not What You Think)

Getting an industry titan to mentor you can be a huge advantage if the process occurs organically and you know the mentor before he or she mentors you. This is not the case in most situations.

For example, it's unlikely that Barack Obama handlers will encourage the former president to become your mentor even if you're an aspiring, idealistic future politician with big dreams. It is however easy - and smart if you want to channel Obama - to read Obama's own publications, biography books that describe his methods, and watch YouTube videos paying attention to how he carried himself in public and in challenging situations.

Shane Snow cites research in Smartcuts that formal mentoring is often ineffective. He suggests it's often better to track individuals successful in your domain and analyze how they achieved their success to speed up yours. Finding the right book or TedTalk or a Masterclass by the right individual can supercharge your progress. 

Rapid Negative Feedback

Negative feedback does not have to be negative. On the contrary, if given the right way rapid negative feedback is more effective than "atta boy" or "atta girl." For negative feedback to work, it is important to make sure that it is situational and specific but not personal. 

For example, you can approach an employee and say: "Your client presentations are wrong," or you can say "I see you give a lot of eye contact to the right side of the room and not enough to the people on the left. Did you notice some might be more engaged than others?" The second way of approaching the problem takes longer, but is depersonalized and specific.

A teacher might say to a student: "You are not helping your team be successful because you're on your phone all the time" and she might comply but will feel "called out" and judged as worthless. Alternatively, if you say: " I noticed you're staring at your phone a lot and I'm concerned you're not contributing to your team enough," you state your observation based on the situation while allowing the student to save face and correct the behavior without unnecessary angst.

And as for the rapid part, the idea is to give and receive feedback quickly to iterate your approach and keep pushing existing boundaries. Interestingly, admitting failure as opposed to blaming external factors leads to better results. According to Smartcuts, owning your failure will lead to deeper personal reflection and learning as a result. Blaming someone or something else prevents introspection.

Platforms: Teach Skills & How to Think/Learn

It often seems that formal education is a world of wheel reinvention. We claim our students must learn how certain theories and facts came to be before they can use shortcut tools that allow them to skip steps and be successful faster. In his book, Snow uses the phrase "effort for the sake of effort" to describe the "foolish tradition of paying dues" we have in education. Our students call this "busy work" and they're onto something.

You might have heard about Finland outscoring every other nation on tests, but did you know that Finland has more researchers per capita than any other nation and is ranked at the top in technology innovation by several studies? The book gives three main reasons for Finland's educational system prominence: (1) Highly qualified teachers (Master's degree or higher), (2) Teaching skills and existing platforms, and (3) Focus on depth not amount of knowledge. Let's discuss the last two. 

Finns don't care about their kids becoming Jacks of All Trades as much as the U.S. Education, Inc. does. They gut curricula and allow students to learn to think and problem solve in the areas they care about. Instead of teaching everybody everything about math, Finnish schools teach students platforms such as knowing how to learn effectively, gain skills efficiently, and use problem solving tools creatively to work on solving problems in their passion domains. Rather than being hung up on teaching long division, students are encouraged (and mentored by highly qualified teachers) to dive deep and leverage the existing platforms such as computers, calculators, algorithms etc. and learned platforms such as critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity to discover meaning and create with it.

The lesson for the U.S. (and maybe other) CEOs is this: The bigger your company, the more of your employees learned how to memorize facts and follow rules. So if you want original thought and creativity, teach them to use the platforms you have, and give them freedom to try and fail. Or hire only Finns.

And if you want smarter proteges and organization gift them a copy of Smartcuts. 

The Lesson for Everybody

To achieve success faster, find small wins, gain momentum, and pivot to bigger or better.

Learn from live mentors if you can but learn from those who came before you and knew their trade - it's all well-documented in books, videos, and other media. 

Try often, fail often, own your failures, collect and reflect on feedback, learn from it, and iterate.

Don't reinvent the wheel - use platforms others have build for you and add on top of them.

Master the platforms you need - everything else is a waste of time.

You turn your hazards on as you see all three running toward your car. Who do you choose? It's a humane thing to do to help the old woman but you don't meet the woman of your dreams every day. And, you owe your friend... 

I highly recommend you read the book Smartcuts to find out what the best lateral thinking answer is or Sign Up for my Free Newsletter here and I will tell you. Whichever you choose, I promise it will be worth your time. Thanks for reading and let's talk soon!

Oskar

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Hi! I'm Oskar.          

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

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categories / Learning
tags / focus, teaching teens, deeper learning, learning, teaching, smarter people, smart teams, lateral thinking

Don't Read Educational Books This Summer. Read These Instead.

June 14, 2018  /  Oskar Cymerman

Don't Read Educational Books. Read Game-Changing Books
“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.”
— Edward de Bono

You don't become an innovator by reading books on innovation.

You can learn what the process of innovation looks like by reading a book on innovation. It might even give you a starting point to innovate.

But you only become an innovator when you innovate.

Dean Kamen, the inventor of Segway and co-founder of FIRST Robotics, explains that "every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation." But how? What is the process for creating something new or turning something old into an innovation?

Perhaps the author of the Harry Potter series can answer this best. J.K. Rowling believes imagination is what drives all invention and innovation. According to the author, imagination is the "transformative and revelatory capacity to envision that which is not," because it "enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared." 

But how do we see what doesn't exist? How do we find the "that which is not" trail; the Diagon Alley? How do we grow our imagination?

The answer, cheeky as it may sound, is you have to practice imagination; do imaginative things.

One way is to differentiate. Do uncommon things or common things in uncommon ways. The education example I want to use here involves reading.

I'm about to hop on your summer reading list so beware.

if you're a teacher, chances are you've put together a list of books to read this summer or have one or two books you plan to read. You want to learn - and that's great - but what are these books? How many are directly related to education? How many are fiction? How many are non-fiction and seemingly unrelated to something school?

There are many great written-by-educators books on Amazon. I've read a few this year and would recommend them. But here's the thing: If you want to grow your imagination faster, produce more unique and more ideas, and innovate more effectively, read something else.

“Don’t read education-related books this summer”

This may sound crazy to some of you so let's take a closer look at how ideas form in the human brain.

When studying how the human brain forms original and creative ideas, University of Haifa researchers found that such idea formation requires the simultaneous firing of different neural networks. They observed that the brains of individuals who gave the most creative ideas had "associative" and "conservative" brain regions fire together. You may know "associative" as "diffuse" or "unconscious" thinking and "conservative" as "focused," "conscious," or "analytical" thinking.

Succinctly, the more you can tap into your unconscious while ideating, the better and more original your ideas will be. 

Since drugs can help with that but are the less acceptable way, the question becomes: What gets stored in your unconscious and how do you make it more diverse?

And, if you've been paying attention you know where I'm going here. And I could but I'll just say this: If you read mostly or only education-related books you're severely undercutting your brain's capacity for original thought and... innovation. This is similar to always staying home - not experiencing the outside and fearing change - but you get to know your home really well.

But that's not fair, because most of us want to learn and get better! That's why we focus on getting better at our craft. We've only been encouraged by friends and admins and never told that this approach might limit us! And it's a good one if you want to become an expert!

But if you want to innovate... you know...

So, read what you want and do read an educational book if it's of benefit to you. But throw in a bunch of game-changing books and take notes when your brain unexpectedly fires off an idea related to your classroom, subject, ideology, or education at large. Then, create something new - a lesson, PD session, classroom procedure, technology use, or a new school - anything just a little bit different. You know... innovate. 

Oskar

In my future posts, I will describe why the educator in me wants to read the books below and how I plan to apply what I learn in my classroom and give you ideas you can apply in yours. Up next: Smartcuts. I'm almost done with it. Sign up here and I'll be back in your inbox with it Tuesday.

Here's the rest of my summer reading list:

  1. Smartcuts by Shane Snow

  2. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

  3. Brain Rules by John Medina

  4. Contagious by Jonah Berger

  5. Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg

  6. Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday

  7. Unshakeable by Tony Robbins

oc pro.png

Hi! I'm Oskar.          

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

BOOKS & TOOLS

CONTACT ME

BLOG ARCHIVE:

Comment
categories / Learning
tags / focus, teaching teens, deeper learning, learning, teaching

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