From Luke Armstrong of Coburg Consultants
Here they were, strewn about, lying out on their backs on the lawn in front of the iconic Henry Hicks building. The second-year Dalhousie CRMBA students were watching clouds, and it was weird.
There is a tectonic shift in society taking place that many are painfully unaware of. Of course, we see symptoms of the shift, mostly in the form of neo-luddist battle cries, “the machines are taking our jobs!”
Indeed they are, agrees bestselling-author Dan Pink in A Whole New Mind, but not all the jobs. They’re just taking the jobs that don’t require the uniquely human capacities of design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Even some writing, something most consider to be a human task, is now moving to the portfolio of machines. This year, Yahoo Fantasy Football and Automated Insights rolled out a feature that automatically generates accurate and entertaining written recaps of the week’s gameplay from the data. The writing isn’t just good – it’s perfect.
Where MBAs in the 20th century were trained to conduct advanced numerical analyses and assess returns, the task of 21st-century business leaders will be to tackle complexity in an increasingly interconnected world. The curriculum-makers of the Dalhousie CRMBA program have identified this eventuality and addressed it in a number of ways. Reframing problems as opportunities, capturing creative insights from a team, making the space for creative practices under deadlines and pressures and exploring the diverse nature of creativity within and outside the business are some topics covered in PPE II.
Keith Westcott, a mechanical engineer and second-year CRMBA student, sees value in creativity. “Math and logic are essential to evaluating ideas and plans, but it’s creative thought that conceptualizes the ideas in the first place.”
In the most watched TED Talk of all time, Sir Ken Robinson explains how the traditional education system may be killing creativity and the dangerous consequences that could bring. He says, “our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip mine the Earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t service.” He suggests that the education system has over-selected for outdated metrics of intelligence such as memory and simple logic while ignoring or even stigmatizing creative processes.
Which brings us back to our CRMBA students on the lawn. That sunny afternoon, the students began to break down some of the barriers to creativity and engage the modes of thought proposed by Dan Pink. Uninhibited by classroom walls and rules, the second years played and watched clouds before strolling campus to identify design flaws and the opportunities therein. Original and valuable ideas for campus gardens, rainwater collection, walkways, and student services abounded.
Tomorrow’s business leaders will wrestle with seismic shifts of global power, demographics, and technology. The Dalhousie CRMBA program prepares graduates to enter a world where the rulebook is rewritten daily and the future is cloudier than ever.
Sometimes this preparation looks like a group of suit-clad students huddled around a whiteboard. But sometimes it looks like cloud watching, and the value is no daydream.
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