My youngest son approached me earlier to help him with his homework and, being the supportive father I am, told him no.
I helped him of course, but not in the way he wanted. He had some Design work to do on safety signs and wanted ideas. So I showed him how to research it, how to collate and compare resources and how to translate it into satisfactory output. I could, quite easily, have been more specific with the guidance but it does me (or him) no favours to create the outcomes for him. It was summed up quite nicely by Robin Ince on his blog a short while ago:
We need to tell children and remind adults why we have the society we live in. the television you watch, the hot water you enjoy, the painkillers, vaccines and seaside railways, are all the result of others inquisitiveness. How unthinking and unthankful should we be to enjoy the results of others imagination and questioning, while switching off our own.
This lack of innovative thought is frustrating me. I wrote a while ago about training as Mexican food and this ongoing fascination across L&D with creation of solutioneered product is beginning to get to me a bit.
It looks like it’s beginning to get to others too; David Kelly’s excellent backchannel for Learning Live infers there may be a change coming. The follow up #chat2lrn twitter chat says the same.
My concern is that when L&D is faced with challenges to our way of working it will do what it always does; create a ‘new’ way of delivering what we’ve always done. It’ll be wrapped in another style of pancake and labelled a new pseudoscience.
As always, what do you think? Please comment below.
Lost and Desperate 