If Not Now, When?

Posted on April 26, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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Megan-The-Brilliant sent me a text this morning. She is attending a state teachers conference. Her text said: I’m in a conference where the keynote lecture is on the importance of creativity. Novel, huh? How many times will we say this before we do something about it?

It’s a great question: How many times will we say this before we do something about it? It’s a question that generations of educators have been asking. Literally. Generations. How many times will we say this before we do something about it? Later in a phone conversations she said, “If I hear another person state the obvious I’m going to puke.” She also said, “I’ve had it.”

I’ve heard that a lot lately. The amazing educators, the fire starters, are taking their fire elsewhere. When survival is the best a teacher can do, when thriving is out of reach and dowsing fire is the aim of the system, the choice is to be dowsed or to go make creative fire where fire is welcomed. Think of this: teachers can leave in disgust but students have no choice but to be dowsed. And make no mistake, their fire is being dowsed. And, as levels of absurdity stack upon levels of absurdity, listen to the overriding complaint of businesses about new hires: where’s the self-direction? Where’s the critical thinking and capacity to innovate? Why aren’t we preparing our students for the world of work? Answer: Because we are dowsing their fire with buckets of wet tests to feed metrics that tell us nothing usable. We are patterning them to complacency.

Fire is dangerous to test makers. Educational fire is anathema when answer regurgitation is the goal.

The disjoint between what we know and what we do is vast. It is a farce. If you doubt what I’m asserting, think how ludicrous (sad) it is for a keynote speaker in the 21st century to address educators on the importance of creativity. The speech is only necessary in an arena that has stripped creativity from the system.

After the call with Megan I remembered my recent conversation with Robert. His son is just starting school and he was appalled by what his son’s teachers are being forced to do. He said, “There’s no room for creativity. I’m not talking about art or music – I’m talking about any form of creativity. It’s a wasteland.”

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Tap Into It

Posted on April 23, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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What is the original “why?” What is your reason for doing what you do? During a break in the Design for Demand class I eavesdropped on a conversation between Skip and one of his students. The student asked, “Isn’t making money the reason “why.” It can be a reason. It’s not the reason.

Before the break the students were doing business pitches followed by a discussion about their reasons for creating the business. Skip showed them Simon Sinek’s terrific TED talk explaining what distinguishes a great business from a mediocre business. In the talk Simon explains his golden target with the reason “why” occupying the center. A great business operates from why. How and what occupy the middle and outer rings of the target. Mediocre businesses confuse their what and how with why. This might seem obvious but it’s not.

In another class, I recognized that the MBA students think the single reason they are getting a degree is to get a better job. They’ve confused their why with the what. Getting a better job can be a reason. It’s not the reason. K-12 education believes that the purpose of education is to raise test scores. They’ve confused why with how – and it is debatable whether raising test scores is a viable how. In our lives we have an abundance of “how and “what” reinforcement. It is no wonder we sometimes misplace our why.

In the modern age, people without a clear understanding of their “why” will generally buy something to fill the void. It is a temporary hit but delays the recognition that there is nothing substantial driving their life. Or, they’ll numb themselves, distract themselves or sabotage themselves. Either way, the “why” gets lost in the “what.”

Everyone has a why. Sometimes you have to wipe off a layer of dust or muster enough courage to look beyond the purchases. It is there. It’s waiting to be sourced. If your current answer to the question, “What’s the point?” is to raise your test score or to get a better job, stop and ask yourself, “What else is true?” Look beneath the superficial and you will find a spring that will rejuvenate you and keep you nourished for the arc of your life. Tap into it.

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Occupy Your Center

Posted on April 21, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

773. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Robert is a gifted actor, director and teacher. We had a long conversation yesterday about actors and acting. He said that the art of acting is unusual because young actors in training don’t always recognize the necessity of technique. So, for instance, an opera singer would never expect to advance in his or her career unless they had rooted their voice in solid technique. A pianist would not expect to become a concert level musician without a solid technique. As Robert said, “Many young actors believe that if they feel it, if they connect the dots from feeling to feeling then they are acting. “Anyone can emote and call him or her self an actor,” he said, “but acting requires just as solid a technique as any other art form. It’s just not as expected or understood.” Robert recently told a young actor, “It does the audience no good if you feel it but they aren’t invited to participate.” Technique facilitates participation because it frees the artist to be present. The point of any art form is to share, to include, to transport. Artistry is never about the artist. It is always about the relationship.

Today in tai chi Saul-The-Chi-Lantern paired the beginners (me) with the more advanced students. We were doing a simple push hands exercise that I recognized as the technique beneath the practice. I had a revelation that shocked me to the core and inspired me to teach it to every artist that I know. In push hands, the idea is to empty of all resistance, to drop deeply into your center and use your partners force to knock them off center. As the advanced students told me, “The point of the exercise is to fail. Failing is the only way to find your center and empty yourself of opposition.” My revelation was this: opposition (resistance) is the act of giving another person responsibility for your balance. Literally, you invest your balance in their center. It is visceral. My partners easily tossed me off balance because I easily gave away my center every time I resisted them. When I (occasionally) found my center and emptied myself of resistance, I entered a balanced fluid center that shocked me in its potency.

I left tai chi today and went to see a student production of a Shakespeare play. The rivers of my conversation with Robert and my tai chi revelation met as I watched the young actors push and force and resist and reach for feelings. They did not know to include me. Their play was about them, not the story or the opportunity for relationship with me, the audience. Yet, the paradox, the moment of truth came after the play when I listened to their investment in what the audience thought of their work. They gave me their center because they shut me out of their play. Had I cared I could have easily tossed them off balance. As I left the theatre I thought, “Someone needs to teach them how to fail.” In that direction technique is found. In that direction is learning.

I wished the young actors had access to Robert or the advanced students in my tai chi class. If I keep at it in fifteen years or so I might have the capacity to keep my center. The young actors need to pretend that they can do it all now. They are oriented to the test (performing the words with feeling) and not the mastery.

Even though I know the 37 moves that constitute the tai chi form, I am only now capable of beginning. At this age, I am finally capable of understanding the relevance and necessity for solid technique.

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Bring It

Posted on April 16, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

768. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

This afternoon I taught a Business of Theatre class at Cornish College for the Arts. The students were seniors in the final weeks of their degree programs. Their assignment was to make project pitches as if we, the class, were granters or investors. My job was to support them to get better at doing project pitches. Through the several pitches, two themes emerged that became the focus of our conversation.

The first theme: rather than pitch their ideas as great, almost all the students justified or somehow diminished their idea. They defended it prior to an attack.They were unconsciously seeking reinforcement or approval of their idea. Or, to be clear, they sought approval as if I was the keeper of worth for their idea. Had I said, “What a stupid idea,” they might have agreed with me. The need for my approval trumped their personal point of view. My approval was more important than their idea.

Theme number two is related to theme number one: they entered the relationship assuming that the granter (me) had all of the power. As pitch makers they cast themselves in an unbalanced, powerless position. They came as supplicants. They assumed that the grant maker held the golden key to open the door to their project/dream. In this play (a pitch is a play) they cast themselves as impotent.

Both themes were unconscious. Both were based on assumptions of lack.

Every artist, if they are to thrive, must reorient at some point in the arc of their career. They must leave behind orientating according to what they might get from the world and reorient according to what they bring to the world.

Grant makers, foundations, investors and auditors have no power over an artist – unless, of course, the artist is oriented in the relationship according to what they might get from the relationship. At best, a granter can support a route. They might open a pathway to fulfilling an idea. There are hundreds of routes. There is one dreamer. The responsibility for manifesting the dream is the dreamers not the granters.

No one need apologize for his or her dream. No one need justify why it is important. It is a dream. It is an idea. It is a desire. No one else need approve; the approval belongs to the dreamer.

The students and I discussed the power of bringing the dream to the world. We played with the perspective shift that happens when artists own the responsibility for their dreams and refuse to define their role as impotent. Bring the dream. Stop seeking your worth in the responses of others. Bring it. The granter will fund it or not and that should have no impact on whether the dream is pursued or not. Bring your best game. Bring it everyday. If you have a dream, create it. There are many routes. Explore them all and in each case pitch your best game.

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Choose Your Experience

Posted on April 15, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

767. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It’s after 7:00pm and I just realized that it was Sunday. One of the privileges of wandering is that days of the week blend and become one. There are relatively few patterns so markers like workday and non-workday do not exist. This has been somewhat true most of my life. The line between work and play is indistinct. My play and my work have mostly been the same thing.

This afternoon Skip and I did a test run of experiences for our new start-up business. The audience is entrepreneurs. Some members of our team are young entrepreneurs so we gathered and talked through the content with them and then threw them into some experiences. Having been a data-basher most of my life it’s an interesting flip to do things to gather data and adjust my work based on audience responses. I learned a lot today!

What came clear to me was something that I’ve known for a while but did not fully grasp the magnitude until today. Human beings come into the world oriented to the unknown and strive to pretend that we are oriented to the known. We make meaning of chaos. And, what is chaos really? It’s a made up concept. It means, “I don’t know!” It has no use outside of the human need to make story and project order onto the world. It’s like the word, “wild.” Wild is only useful when there is an expectation of tame. Chaos is only meaningful relative to an expectation of order. Both are categories. One is generally comfortable because it provides the illusion of control and the other is uncomfortable because the illusion is of no control. Tame and wild follow the same general principle. I was in the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles and as the earth threw my house off of it’s foundation and hurtled me through the air, I learned that control was not mine to assign. I learned that wild is tame and tame is wild and chaos drives order and order collapses into chaos. It’s a dance.

It’s not the nouns that matter. It’s the verbs. It is the movement. Nothing is static. Nothing is fixed. The answers are not important. The questions matter, it is the conversation and the relationship that hold the real stuff of life. Questions and relationships are fluid. They move. Orient to the unknown and you orient to the questions. The questions will open you to discovery. Orient to the known and you orient to the answers. The answers will close you to rules and righteousness. This would seem obvious but it is not. The most potent revelation of all: how you orient is a choice. Choose to open or choose to close. Orient to the unknown or orient to the known. Orient to the infinite game or to the finite. Choose your experience.

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Map or Map

Posted on April 7, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

759. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Beth came to visit after working with teachers on a curriculum map. She was understandably frustrated. If you want to understand how far awry we’ve gone in education you need look no further than the curriculum map. The idea behind the map is to ensure that all teachers in each grade level are relatively on the same lesson all the time. The map determines the path of content delivery. The map is at the center. The actual needs of the students are nowhere on the map. In fact the actual student (as opposed to the abstraction of a student) is nowhere to be found. The student is actively not considered. It is a recipe for dulling minds not opening them.

Consider that it has been decades since we understood that grouping children according to age creates an educational disaster. In other words, age is one of the least effective ways of identifying and working with stages of development. Kids develop at different rates and according to a myriad of circumstantial factors so to squeeze them into an age-box called “grade” and pre-map their curriculum path before they walk in the door is obscene.

Mapping the curriculum to make sure every child is on the same lesson on the same page on the same day is yet another extension of the national standardization madness. Gather some actual data and take a small road trip. Visit some schools. You will find that the schools are not standardized. The schools in rural North Dakota don’t resemble the schools in urban Chicago and bear no resemblance to the schools in Beverly Hills, CA. They are not funded in a standardized manner. In fact, the inequity in funding is apparent within single school districts; you need not travel far to gather your data. It will not surprise you to find that the students attending the schools are not standardized. Take a moment and reflect on our national identity. We are the most individualistic nation on the planet, celebrating our cowboy spirit and diversity and yet somehow have been anesthetized into embracing an abstraction like standardization in our public schools. Learning and standardization are antithetical.

A map can be a noun or a verb. We’ve chosen the noun to our own peril. I can give you a map to Boston and you will be able to find your way around. It is useful in locating landmarks but not in learning. If I give you a map and load you on a tour bus and give you the standard tour, you might say you visited Boston but you learned relatively little. The learning was eliminated when you got on the bus. Exposure is not learning. When teachers map a curriculum with no regard to the relationship with their students, the students become incidental. The exercise of mapping the curriculum for the sake of consistency of delivery has everything to do with control and nothing to do with educating. It is exposure. We are kidding ourselves if we think it has anything to do with learning.

The verb, to map, is actually a great metaphor for true learning. Lewis and Clarks Corp of Discovery explored the western territory of the United States. It was unmapped and therefore considered unknown. They stepped into this unknown land with inadequate supplies and engaged with what they encountered. They made big mistakes. They challenged their assumptions. They chanced upon new ways of seeing and would not have survived without alternative perspectives. They made their map as they went. To map is to have a relationship. This is learning.

If learning is the goal then it is impossible to map a curriculum without the students in the room. The true curriculum map can only be created as students explore and discover. The map is created after the fact, not months before the experiences.

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What Circle Are You On?

Posted on April 3, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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There are lots of Venn diagrams showing up in my life. Today, Beth offered another that applies to education. The three circles of her diagram are Pattern, Metaphor, and Questions. Master these circles and you are a critical thinker. She brought to mind those other circles from my past, The Vicious and Virtuous Circles (I am now thinking of them as a Venn diagram – more on that in another post). I dug around and found these notes that I wrote almost seven years ago. Think about the notes as they might relate to education reform (or life change):

A Vicious Cycle has the following characteristics:
• There are winners and losers (a finite game)
• The direction of movement is “away from” something (a negative action)
• The actions are reactions.
• It is reductionary in every way (“tames” or over simplifies problems, reduces others, reduces self)
• Circumstance/Fear driven

The Virtuous Cycle has the following characteristics:
• The game is played for mastery (an infinite game)
• The direction of movement is “toward” something (a positive action)
• The actions are generative or creative.
• It is expansive in every way (allows for complex problems and identities)
• Values/Love driven

Both the Vicious and the Virtuous cycles are patterns. Just as water always follows the structure of the land, behavior always follows the underlying structural pattern. In other words, the pattern represents a way of being. The Vicious Cycle is a default pattern, an unconscious way of being. The Virtuous is an intentional pattern, a conscious and therefore, a creative way of being. The goal is to replace the default pattern with the intentional pattern.

To move from the Vicious to the Virtuous cycle, you first have to Identify & Clarify:
Identify your Vicious Cycle. Name it.

After you identify your Vicious Cycle, answer these questions:
Why move off the circle? What do you gain by staying in your default mode? In other words, what does the Vicious circle buy you (you only stay in dysfunction if you are getting something from it)?

Identify/Clarify your Intention
What do you want?
Identify/Clarify your Circumstance
What’s in the way? Name your obstacles.
Identify/Clarify your Values
What drives you? Name your yearning.

The required Movement/Action is to build a new pattern. Since the Vicious and Virtuous Cycles are patterns (structure of the land). Talk about the competencies in terms of building a new pattern. These are:

Pattern to catch your 1st thought, and then work on your second.
How: witness your thoughts; challenge your assumptions.
Pattern to suspend judgments
How: put down your need to be right, assume that you “don’t know”
Pattern to grant specificity.
How: Look beyond the superficial, own your fear,
Pattern to slow down
How: Breath, Be seen
Pattern to say yes and….
How: open your fist; entertain other perspectives
Pattern to step toward….
How: own your edges; make them horizons

Initially, the competencies may look too simplistic, however changing the behavioral structure of a human being begins with changing the patterning; also, systems never change through complexities, rather, they change through leveraging the local simplicity. It’s the pattern that reveals the local simplicity….

Thank you, Beth. Pattern. Metaphor. Question. What we do is really a matter of the direction of intention.

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Create A New Circle Of Thought

Posted on March 25, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

746. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I am cleaning out old files and rediscovering some small gems. This one is useful for educators and the national non-conversation we continue to have about education. This gem is from the Circle Project years when Patti and I used Vicious and Virtuous circles with our clients as a way of clarifying their challenges. We also used them to clarify our challenges or to prepare for a training/teaching session. This Vicious circle came from our preparation to lead a train-the-trainer session. Imagine the phrases move clockwise around a circle so that the final phrase returns to the first. The challenge, of course, it to discover and change the premise of the vicious circle, transforming it into a virtuous circle:

I Am The Expert, requiring that I have all the answers

And when I must have all the answers, I can never say, “I don’t know.”

And when I can’t say, “I don’t know,” learners and questions become dangerous,

And when questions become dangerous, controlling the learner is my primary intention.
And when I need to control the learner, I train against surprise,

And when I train against surprise, my training becomes transactional,

And when my training becomes Transactional, I relegate the learner to a “passive receiver,”

And when the learner is relegated to being a passive receiver,

I am The Expert, requiring that I have all the answers…

Everything we need to know to revolutionize education: interrupt the loop OR do the opposite. Begin with this phrase and see what new loop you might create:

I refuse to be The Expert, requiring me to help my students find their own answers,

And because they must find their own answers, we begin by saying, “I don’t know.”

And when we can say, “I don’t know,” learners become questioners so there’s a reason to learn,

[the rest is for you to create – or go back and alter my start. Have fun revolutionizing a system badly in need of your new circle of thought!].

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Get Almost Naked

Posted on March 24, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

745. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Saul-The-Chi-Lantern shared two bits of wisdom this morning. The first was his secret for remaining free of the chaos of domestic life. When he returns home and finds the vacuum is running, all three televisions are blaring and there is an implied list of things for him to do, in his words, “I get almost naked. I take off most of my clothes because it will appear as if I am about to take a bath.” He suggested running a little bit of bath water just to support the illusion. He said, “In this way, you remain aloof of the confusion. People will leave you alone.”

Once, while exiting the freeway on my way to the Polyclinic, I saw a fully naked man walking leisurely down the sidewalk and, as proof of Saul’s theory, no one bothered this man. Most, if not all pedestrians and motorists alike steered clear of the fully-naked-man. Though a true scientist would argue that my assertion is false. Had the sidewalk man been nearly naked instead of fully naked he would prove a better sample case.

The second bit concerned intentional party behavior wisdom. Saul told us that as a young man he had the reputation for never sitting down at parties. People assumed that his capacity to stand for hours at a time came from stamina developed from his tai chi practice. Saul said, “This was not the case. I was dedicated to continued sampling of the appetizers on the table but had to mask my repeated visits to the table. Too many visits to the food table is not polite. My stamina had nothing to do with tai chi and everything to do with my dedication to food.”

There you have it. Pearls of wisdom for living a good life: 1) Get almost naked to remain free of the chaos. 2) Make several trips to the appetizers but do so in a subtle if not polite manner.

In case it slipped by unnoticed, be aware that both pearls are essentially studies in the fine art of creating illusion. 1) Pretend you are taking a bath. 2) Weave an illusion of stamina so you might graze the snacks without calling attention to your real intention.

Saying, “There you go! 70 years of wisdom reduced to two essential pearls,” Saul spun around and led us into a silent practice of the form.

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Learn To Fly

Posted on March 3, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

724. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“I have a song in my heart and I’m not flying!” He was waving his arms up and down like a bird like all of the other children, his eyebrows knit, with a pout on his face. The other children were flying. Their eyes were closed, faces to the sky, arms riding the imaginary thermals. By the look on their faces they were flying high above the trees and soaring to the clouds.

We were having a storytelling. In our story a little girl (she’s a princess but doesn’t know it) must move from the country to the city with the kind old man and old woman she believes to be her parents. She is terribly sad because in the country she spends her days singing with the birds. In the city, she no longer sings. In the city she pines for the birds. She sits in her bedroom looking out of the window. Concerned for her, the old man and woman buy the girl a yellow bird.

The girl soon realizes that, just like her, the yellow bird never sings. She asks the bird, “Why don’t you sing?” and to her surprise, the bird answers her, “I’m not supposed to be in a cage. Why don’t you sing?” Together the little girl and the bird help each other learn to sing again. The bird finds her song when the little girl sets her free. The girl finds her song when the bird teaches her to fly with a song in her heart.

All the children in the classroom, save one, were flying like the little girl and the bird. “I have a song in my heart,” he insisted, “and I’m not flying!”

“Close your eyes!” someone suggested. “Then you’ll hear your song better. Then you’ll be flying!”

He closed his eyes, arms flapping, and a smile replaced his pout. “I can fly!” he exclaimed and swooped above the treetops and soared into the clouds. A little girl soared over to where I was sitting, perched and whispered to me, “Flying is easy with a song in your heart.”

Yes. Yes, it is.

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