As A New Generation Steps Forth
- 5 Suggested Things YOU Should Consider -
Blink . . . and ten years pass by. It’s now 2023. A brand new generation is taking the reins. The world has continued to shrink and is much, much smaller. Technology has continued an unabated, unchecked progression; what is now futuristic has become commonplace. Complexity is the daily norm, and change the only constant. Opportunities, problems and grand challenges abound.
Will this be a new generation of innovators? Will they be strong, resilient problem solvers, or servants of the status quo?
The answer has everything to do with their concept of learning . . . or how learning is adapted to the realities and wonderful opportunities of the not-too-distant future.
What do educators, mentors, and life coaches need to provide for the next generation of positive, innovative leaders?
If core competencies are assumed what will be the key elements of an education that might help students become life-long learners, successful in multiple, varied career paths?
Henry Doss is a venture capitalist, student, musician and volunteer in higher education. Suggest's five critical elements that every student should be looking for in an educational journey . . . and educators should be looking to deliver.
(Short Bio: Henry Doss - His firm, T2VC, builds startups and the ecosystems that grow them. His university, UNC Charlotte, is a leading research institution.)
1: Language: We live in language and we create with language. Innovation and creativity, solving big problems, leveraging opportunities – all of these demand highly developed language skills. It is language that brings ideas to life, that inspires, and that creates narrative continuity in organizations. Without powerful language skills, leaders struggle to gather resources, to bring clarity to action and to lead the kinds of conversations that cause innovative action. Language, eloquence even, is something that goes well beyond “writing intensive” classes and the odd English class or two. The resilient, creative leader is one who has immersed herself in words, who is comfortable with complex language and who has an abiding sense of the power of narrative.
The business leader causes action with words not threats; the engineer communicates ideas and concepts and invention with words; the nano-biologist must write something, sooner or later. It is not enough to be competent in a core discipline, if you aspire to innovation and leadership. Eloquence of language, clarity, erudition . . . all of these matter to those who aspire to lead.
2: Leadership: As a discipline, a thing to be practiced and learned, leadership is a woefully low priority in education. Innovation, problem-solving and invention are much more about failure than they are about the occasional success. The concept of “successful failure” is critical to developing leaders and something educators should teach at every possible point in the course of a student’s education. Students should be given multiple opportunities to experience the thrill — and certain failure — of leading. Of being accountable. Of taking charge. Our educational culture tends to be success-focused, and rewards “high achievement.” But leadership requires putting yourself on the line, consistently taking risks, and without exception, sooner or later . . . failing. Without this element of leadership learning and personal growth, the educational experience is flat, unrealistic and uninspiring.
3: Authenticity: Learning about yourself is perhaps the single most important outcome of a powerful educational experience. Self-awareness can lead to an ever-increasing authenticity, which in turn leads to powerful leadership abilities. Authenticity is not about “accept me for what I am”; authentic leaders are self aware, willing to adapt and change and “be who they are in service to others.” Education should be a powerful process of increasing self awareness, of coming to know yourself and of learning the intrinsic value of who you are as a human being. . . and then understanding the need for constant change, personal growth and learning for the rest of your life.
4: Breadth: There is an old saying: “specialization is for insects.” In our zeal to certify, to create “experts” and to organize learning around “disciplines” (rather than around, say, learning) our system of education forces students to “major” in something. Although this works reasonably well in service to core professional competencies, this arbitrary structure does little to encourage breadth of education. We often speak in awe of the “Renaissance” person, as if this were an ideal. But we do little to encourage a “Renaissance education.”
Leonardo da Vinci A Renaissance Thinker
Future leaders and innovators should seek out, and schools should encourage and support, a broad — a very broad — educational experience. Acquiring a “Renaissance education” is nearly impossible in a system that encourages – actually, requires – students to say “I am this, but not that” at a very young age, and at a very early stage in their education. Innovators, leaders, change-agents – the folks in the world who cause things to be different – are rarely this or that; they are more often this and that. One of the great challenges for students and our schools is to evolve beyond the narrow confines of “disciplines” and embrace the chaos and uncertainty of a rapidly changing world, bearing in mind that the “discipline” of today is the forgotten history of the future.
5: Resilience: It is a cliché nowadays, but true nevertheless (and has likely been true for as long as human beings have aspired to anything): Everyone will have multiple jobs, careers and life experiences and rarely will any one way of thinking or one path to career preparation have a very long shelf life.
Circumstances change and change rapidly, and the career students think they are preparing for today will simply disappear in ten years. Students need an education that will leave them resilient and prepared to turn on a dime. To the extent we teach as if things were permanent, and curricula are created as if there are predictable paths to careers, we are basically teaching students to bestatus-quo oriented. And they will find little supply of status quo in the future. Academic dogma is anathema to creativity, flexibility and resilience, and students should be encouraged to challenge, to inquire, to develop powerful points of view of their own.
Educating students to become innovative leaders is not yet a science, and is inherently a messy enterprise. It is not likely to occur in the safe, predictable, ordered and linear world we tend to put students in. In a sense all of this can be summarized as the need to teach students to dare, to experiment and to fail with joy. Perhaps John Stuart Mill said everything that needed to be said about innovation and leadership in this short sentence: “That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time.”
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