One thing we know from the field of neuroscience is that, unlike computers, the brain is very slow at individual processing. In one second, a computer circuit can handle millions of instructions, but a neuron can fire only about two hundred times. That's why computers are so much faster than human beings at serial, computational tasks.

But why can a child understand someone speaking with a lisp, or a foreign accent, better than the best voice recognition software? Why can a baby recognize facial expressions better than a supercomputer?

The answer is that the brain is a massive parallel processor, with 100 billion neurons operating simultaneously, making it extraordinarily powerful at pattern recognition. Much of what our brains do is to pre-process information—we store up experience—and then, in real time, determine which patterns to apply to which circumstances.

That's why business and law schools teach via case studies. It's why entrepreneurs are so fond of biographies. It's why religions teach morality through allegories. In each case, we load up our brains with examples that enhance our ability to spot patterns. Those patterns can later be summoned to help us manage unforeseeable situations.

What are the implications? To boost your pattern-recognition abilities, give yourself exposures to a variety of experience bases. Don't limit yourself to one model of reality. Different fields -- the law, physics or religion, for example -- offer complimentary ways of understanding the world. Steve Jobs traced his invention of the Mac to a calligraphy course that gave him an aesthetic appreciation which he later fused with his technical know-how. Today, we see advances coming at the intersection of fields like biology and computer science, economics and psychology, finance and social entrepreneurship. If you want to be an effective problem-solver, gather experiences from different fields, sectors and cultures—and keep thinking about the patterns.

Back to Part 2

Photo: Mrs McArthur's Blog

I've spent the past 20 years interviewing social entrepreneurs in different countries and fields—and if there's one quality they all have in common, it's creativity. Not a specific talent like a flair for painting or writing poetry, but a generalizable kind of creativity that can be applied to many types of problems.

This creativity has less to do with knowledge (although it requires knowledge) than with a willingness to ask unconventional questions, absorb new information, and try ideas out. It's both playful and bold.

A society that does not nurture this kind of creativity is in trouble.

The irony is that it is so easy to encourage. If you look at young children, they are continually experimenting. Most of their experiments are failures—in the sense that their efforts to control their environment usually backfire. A toddler quickly discovers that he can't stand on a ball. Or he pulls a glass of milk off the table and SMASH! Big mess. But the wonderful thing is that there are no penalties for those failures.

There’s a robust and incredibly accelerated learning process in the first five years of life. And it can be a joy to witness. A first grader (who hasn't been suckered to think that he's really supposed to build the Star Wars ship featured on the Lego box) will concoct the most marvelous paracosm out of a bunch of Lego pieces, Pokemon cards, and plastic reptiles.

Then you get to school and you discover that if you put up your hand and give a wrong answer, it doesn’t feel good. Maybe the other kids laugh at you or the teacher frowns. The impulse to experiment gets abruptly curtailed. How many students come to avoid failure more than they embrace learning? It depends on how much we value 'right' answers over self-directed learning. In this regard, testing can be a huge impediment.

Schools can do much better to nurture the kind of creativity that helps children grow into powerful changemakers. In our new book, Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, Susan Davis and I devote a chapter to this subject. Here's a brief excerpt:

In their book The Scientist in the Crib, authors Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl observe that babies and toddlers from their earliest years “think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations, and even do experiments.” Children know far more about the world than adults imagine, and they seek to understand everything they touch and taste. During their first two years, they make extraordinary intellectual leaps.

For most children, intellectual development slows dramatically within a few years. By the time they are in grade school, children have lost much of the curiosity and resourcefulness that a few years earlier made them incomparable explorers. As the educator Eleanor Duckworth explains in her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas, once children enroll in school, their natural enthusiasm and inquisitiveness becomes subordinated to the needs of adults enlisted to teach them. A young child who breaks something to see what it looks like inside, or asks a question that is socially embarrassing, or wants to discover how it feels to wear shoes on the wrong feet, will often be met with a discouraging glance or tone from an adult.

Duckworth argues that educators should encourage and structure moments when children can have their own ideas and feel good for having them. Only if children honestly believe their ideas are valuable will they develop the interest, ability, and self-confidence to be lifelong learners and doers. “Having confidence in one’s ideas does not mean ‘I know my ideas are right,’" notes Duckworth. "[I]t means ‘I am willing to try out my ideas.’”

Photo: ScienceWorldCA

If you're interested in children, education, social innovation, or, for that matter, the future of America, Newsweek's recent cover story on the "creativity crisis" by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman is a must read. It makes a powerful argument that our system of education, and perhaps our way of life, are diminishing children's imaginative capacities.

Since 1990, measures of creativity among children from kindergarten through sixth grade have steadily declined—and the decrease is significant. This doesn't just mean we'll be producing fewer painters and pianists; it means we'll be producing fewer problem solvers and changemakers of all kinds. Creativity is defined as the ability to produce something "original and useful." And one way it's measured is by asking children questions about specific problems—how to improve a toy truck, for example—and seeing how many unique ideas they come up with and how they combine them. Children who come up with a lot of ideas are more likely to become entrepreneurs, inventors, authors, software developers, and so forth.

In fact, Bronson and Merryman write that the "correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment" has been found to be "more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ." [My emphasis]

Have American educators overlooked creativity? We now evaluate student success almost exclusively by performance on standardized tests that focus primarily on reading and math. In this context, the challenge of nurturing students' imaginations is a luxury many teachers and principals feel they can't afford. But educators in other countries see it differently.

In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test [a leading creativity index] to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

What should we be doing? Essentially, we've got to reconstitute childhood. We've got to stop terrifying educators into teaching to the test. Instead, we've got to make sure they give children ample opportunities to engage in imaginative play and practice solving problems that are meaningful. There are effective ways this can be handled in a classroom, as the Newsweek article shows. (And guess what? Test scores soar.)

Parents can also do this at home by giving their children real-world challenges to work through. Quite a number of initiatives like Youth Venture, Do Something and the Girl Scout's Challenge and Change program specialize in helping young people generate and build their own solutions to social problems. Groups like Playworks, Peace First and Roots of Empathy bring child-led problem solving and conflict resolution into elementary school classrooms. These kinds of educational offerings are still seen as supplemental in many districts. But, in fact, they teach children the core skills they need—empathy, leadership, teamwork and the ability to shift perspective—to be creative agents in a world of change.

Tomorrow: More on what schools and parents can do to nurture changemakers.

Continue to Part 2

Photo: Nederlands Watermuseum

What do you do when hundreds of attendees at social entrepreneurship's flagship event - the Skoll World Forum - find themselves stranded in England due to a volcanic eruption? Social entrepreneurship blogger Nathaniel Whittemore got the idea to throw a conference. He contacted TED and, with help from TEDxLondon, The Hub, the Sandbox Network, and many others, TEDxVolcano was happening 36 hours later (yesterday). See some of the headliners here.

If you only have time to watch one speaker, jump to 31:55 and listen to Larry Brilliant, president of Skoll Global Threats Fund and 2006 TED Prize Winner, who reflects on the interplay between science and policy that we are witnessing over the current flight ban.

Are we overreacting? Or underreacting? Quite simply, we don't know. Brilliant says that the current air travel crisis highlights 1) how little we still understand about many threats including pandemics, climate change, and the effects of volcanic ash on jet engines, 2) how vital it is to counter the current attack by a "new generation of Luddites" who seek to de-legitimize scientific research when science is more important than ever, and 3) how abundantly obvious it is that we are all in this - the world! - together.

Photo: Telegraph

PROBLEM:

RESPONSE:
Hollender and Seventh Generation realized that despite their socially conscious approach to business, at the end of the day, most folks did not want the person who sold them toilet paper to tell them how to cast their vote. Hollender saw his passion for this political cause was out of step with the relationship his company had created with its customer base. In response to the consumer outcry and in accordance with its pledge to maintain radical transparency, Seventh Generation issued an apology to its customers for inappropriately merging consumerism with partisanship. “One of the critical principles Seventh Generation promotes is whenever you make a mistake, be the first to admit and the most vocal to talk about it,” Hollender said. “We were very public in saying we made a mistake and that we did something we shouldn't have done.”

RESULTS:
Hollender discovered that Seventh Generation reached more Republican consumers than he had assumed—and that passion for the environment often crossed partisan lines. He also learned the importance of letting a relationship with consumers grow organically, rather than imposing one. He kept this lesson in mind as he grew Seventh Generation from a small-scale company doing business through a mail-order catalog, as it was in 1992, to the largest eco-friendly household product brand in U.S. history.

Though the incident made Hollender more cautious about getting Seventh Generation entangled in partisan politics, it did not dampen his personal enthusiasm for activism. He speaks his mind regularly in lectures, blogs, books and even his own TV show, and last year he was arrested at a global warming protest. “I want to be out on the frontlines,” Hollender said, “fighting the fight through policy and politics to help make a transition from the economy we have today to a more sustainable economy.”

Photo: Seventh Generation