It’s been almost two months and I am still angry at feeling restricted in a five minute task that required quick thinking and even quicker drawing. It was the second day of the Google Certified Innovator Academy in Sydney when the facilitator - the brilliant Leslie McBeth from the Future Design School - got us doing ‘Crazy Eights’ to iterate an idea. Quite simply you have 40 seconds to come up with a possible solution to an identified problem. I know, 40 seconds. Then you are thrust into coming up with a new solution for, you guessed it, a whole 40 seconds. So naturally, being someone who often stops working on a document to ensure that everything is using the same point before proceeding, I was frustrated because ‘I could have done so much better if I had more time!’. You get me right? It’s not OCD, it’s just wanting to do your best, utilise your resources, and prove your ability.
It is only now, after an engaging conversation with my Master’s supervisor, that I finally get it. Iteration is not about trying your best to perfect that step before moving on to the next; about having an informed and stable platform to launch from. It is about just putting your foot on the step just long enough to reach to the next one. I have been focussing on the ‘step’ and not the ‘moving’ part of the previous sentence and to be frank it’s been slowing me down. In discussing the next step of developing a research proposal his exact words to me were “don’t spend too long on this” to which my brain replied “but how can I possibly do it justice with that approach? This is serious!” It only took me a moment however, to trawl up from memory all of those things that I have done in the previous month that I had crafted and honed with precision only to bin and move past. I wanted of course, to ensure that I was giving myself the best possible chance of progressing forward but all of those cognitive resources I spent on that meant that there was little left to envision how it could look if I went in a completely different direction. Was any of that work a waste of time? Absolutely not. Because, like any task that we make our students do, it is not really about the outcome but about the thinking that goes into producing that outcome. But what made this conversation unique was that I have such a clear picture of my end goal only as a result of so much iteration. My previous work up to this point was not representative of a simple case of ‘drafting’ because the entire outcome changed significantly. Yet I could have reached the point a lot faster had I been creative and divergent in my visualising of what it would lead to.
When I was growing up I was all about that Lego, and perhaps if it wasn’t 10 times harder to get hired by Google than to get into Harvard then I would give it a shot just so I could use their Lego room in my coffee breaks, but where is the real fun in Lego? For as much as you strive to have completed that model in your head or on that page, that’s not what it’s about. It’s of course about the construction process and that’s where it is fun and by association, that is where learning happens. I constantly catch myself implicitly pushing the message to the students that it is all about the outcome; the thing they produce or create to demonstrate their ability or understanding, until I remind myself that if I am able to develop their appreciation for the learning and construction process then they are set for life. For whilst it is good to be focussed on production and motivated by completion, it can come at the expense of recognising the intrinsic value of process; of looking for steps to launch forward and upward from rather than just making the current step nice and homely.
So it took me two months to learn the lesson from a 5 minute task, which equates to about 17,500 minutes of processing for every minute of activity. That may make me a pretty slow learner but hey, at least I learned.