A Look Back About 10 Years on the YCISL Program

Today, I came across the group photo from the first YCISL workshop in 2011. It reminded me to reflect on the past 10 or so years of YCISL programming.

I checked the original posts in my YCISL wiki and noticed that I started this wiki in 2010, a year before that first workshop. Spurred by Sir Ken Robinson’s TEDTalk, I had started collecting thoughts on creativity. I had drawn the graphic on Approximation of Leadership Objectives by Age Stage in March 2010 and added it to this wiki as my second entry. That graphic is still central to my program’s thesis.

Good fortune (which I have often been lucky to have) came my way when Singapore Polytechnic wanted to send students on a visit to Stanford University for a leadership program. Off-shooting from earlier good fortunes of having Jim Leckie as my “boss”, the Singapore-Stanford Partnership experience, and the formation of the Center for Sustainable Development & Global Competitiveness, I couldn’t have wished for a better school and group of students to start the YCISL with. Really.

The relationship with SP ended after three annual workshops. A prospective new path, this time with students from China, turned out to be a very bumpy ride. The China part of the YCISL program started small with a workshop organized by a Stanford MBA/MEd alum (2013) then continued with Raising Culture organized by another Stanford alum (2014) and finally a sustained series of workshops sponsored by Goldmine for university-level students (2017-2019).

There were two very good workshops with City University of Hong Kong (2016 & 2018). In contrast, there was the workshop for students from SNU (2017) which revealed how playful creativity is not accepted in some academic cultures.

Gathering momentum was tough for any particular school or group of students, especially from China. Even more difficult though was getting new programs launched. I received a lot of interest from prospective organizers and had a lot of planning meetings. The first plan was to create a program for children of executives attending a CSDGC executive workshop co-organized with an educational exchange company (2011).  That didn’t get far. A program for South Korean students through a Silicon Valley incubator fell flat after intensive discussions (2012). A program planned with an investment company based in Hong Kong and an educational consultancy couldn’t get pulled together either (2013). Two other educational exchange companies (2012 and 2017) found that finding students in China would need special authorization that eventually shredded our plans. The failure rate was frustratingly high, yet still energizing to know there were prospects. Persistence.

This leads me to two of the best and most successful collaborations in the history of YCISL. The first was the relationship with GPI US which launched connections with several schools and one juku in Japan. The Wasedajuku workshops (2014 & 2015) were great…until there was a sale of the business. Ritsumeikan (2013-2015) impressed me because I met the head of school during the first workshop and showed awareness of design thinking. Hiroo Gakuen (2013-2019) was a broader-than-most program with its after-session research presentation evening. Asano Gakuen (2014-2019) added learning with its all boys groups; I had an interest in group dynamics and this group always gave a useful comparison.

The second important relationship for the YCISL program was with E-Squared Learn with Leaders. This came about because of the Covid panic and lockdown. This allowed for YCISL to pivot to an online platform and meet a distant student audience through a virtual setting that had not been so appealing a few years before. The pivot enabled shorter programs (for concern over Zoom fatigue) that required a new sense of creativity for program design. From this circumstance, we invented Popcorn with Colin, the Innovators Toolkit Workshop (ITW), and NIFTI (New Ideas from the Inside). Why this is so amazing is that the same pivot was offered to GPI US and they couldn’t get it to grow. Not an easy ask because a couple of other prospective partners in Indonesia and China also could not get traction.

Looking ahead, I am going to focus on YCISL e-books and perhaps other media to document the lessons and learnings of the YCISL program. The collaboration with E-Squared Learn with Leaders is now in the rear window and I am looking for something new and newly exciting with a fresh and refreshing partner. As I have showing on my presentation introductions, I am in the “What’s next?” stage – actually, I am always at that stage.

“Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone.” – Richard M. Nixon

BOOK: Keep Going by Austin Kleon

It’s been a while since I finished reading a book all the way to the end – without skipping anything. “Keep Going” by Austin Kleon (2019) follows “Steal Like An Artist” and “Show Your Work” which I have reviewed previously in this wiki. His idea of separate analog and digital workspaces has been a concept that I bring up in YCISL workshops frequently to help students understand that there are two (or more) modes to make creative thinking work – such as in our divergent-convergent thinking exercise. The analog connects to the divergent thinking creative side whereas the digital connects to the convergent thinking focus side. This incidentally connected well when I read (actually I listened to the audiobook) of “Thinking, Fast & Slow” by Daniel Kahneman where he describes two systems that operate together to enable our thinking.

“Keep Going” continues the series in his concise and practical, personal and reflective style. The overall theme relates to a sort of biorhythm where his creativity vibrance rises and ebbs, and the resonance he has found in the personal stories of other creative artists to help him “keep going.”

“Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb.” Sad, but true. In the various frameworks we display in the YCISL, we have nodes with labels (the nouns) connected by actions (the verbs). This is especially embodied in the emotional intelligence framework where our awareness is connected by management. We also present design thinking as an exercise focused on both form (noun) and function (verb) in order to be compelling and complete. In terms of practice, think of the noun and verb as a pair and be creatively quick in coupling them. This would make an interesting YCISL exercise. For example, I could show a noun then have students come up with three verbs for that noun. The reverse of giving a verb or two, and asking students for a noun to match may also be good for thinking agility.

“One of my art heroes was a nun.” To me, this may be my most fascinating discovery in this book. After reading about her in the book, I Googled Corita Kent and found a treasure trove of things I could use in the YCISL program: (1) Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules, (2) “You are who we love.” A collaborative poem for Corita Day posted online at corita.org website, (3) the Corita Kent Art Collection, (4) the Finder, a simple tool used in “experimentation” to frame views, and (5) the term “Plork” combining the words “work” and “play”  and describing the resulting emotional uplift [reminds me of Richard St John’s TEDTalk where he says “It’s all hard work. Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun.”]

“In an age obsessed with speed, slowing down requires special training.” In the basketball training paradigm that we use in YCISL, this means being able to switch modes – between ball handler and supporter, or between offense and defense. Speed (and focus) can be critical in some situations, whereas slowing down (assessment) is needed in others. In a reverse way, the YCISL also emphasizes a need to be able to engage in fast creative thinking in problem solving because education generally teaches us to store and recall.

“To slow down and pay attention to your world, pick up a pencil and a piece of paper and start drawing what you see.” The YCISL ITW workshops have been using drawing as a means to express the design thinking form and function. Perhaps more in line with Kleon’s “what you see” motive, we can use the drawing method in a problem statement finding exercise which would promote the attention to the world (or worldview) that we need. Does this have the same meaning as “Stop and smell the roses”?

“What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and work will be made of.” The idea of listening filters and fidelity is something learned from “Understanding Other People” by Beverly D. Flaxington, and is the premise behind our workshop exercise in learning to turn off listening filters and fully listen to the information being transmitted. Paying attention to certain things and not paying attention to others is our way of filtering and prioritizing. How the rules of those filters are written and ordered affect our perception and consequently influences our mindsets and behavior. More importantly, our mannerisms and behaviors reflect these filters and shape our identity.

“Of course, to change your mind is to do some real thinking.” How do I know if I am doing some real thinking? I’m not sure, but I hope that I am able to do it at least some of the time. Personally, I am open to changing my mind as well as others changing their minds – so long as it isn’t in a vacillating manner or with ill intent. So long as the change is based appropriately in intelligent and intellectual navigation, it should be expected and welcomed. This connects with our YCISL interest in the growth mindset where we are open to new ideas and experiences that may turn out to be good or may turn out to be bad or non-events. But recognizing that real thinking is “hard work”, it might not be available all the time – although we should train ourselves to build stamina for it. In YCISL, I think our prototyping exercises and the concept of iteration strengthen us in mindset, skills and abilities so that changing our mind is practically normal and necessary with no dings on our self-confidence and sense of direction.

Why is the ETP relatively low? I didn’t mark as many parts of the book as compared to Kleon’s other two books. And what I did mark was isolated between pages 65 and 136, a total of 71 pages out of a 201 page book. Then again, the mark for Corita Kent would get a 10x impact factor (if I had such a factor) which makes me super grateful for this book. I recall my thinking being sidetracked in the latter part of the book a couple of times in a way that I started feeling disagreeable. The language used in the treatment of Marie Kondo’s tidying method pinged of singularity (eg, the use of the negativity words “propaganda”, “mania” and “fetishize” in a single sentence) and blocked my search for practical extensibility. It was good and interesting storytelling in the latter part of the book…the fresh air and the walks etc…but I was no longer on the same journey. I became a spectator. Oh well.

Kano Model & Sustainability-Smart Design Thinking

The Kano Model is an analysis method to categorize the features of a product and evaluate them in terms of customer impression and satisfaction in relation to the effort to insert those features. I heard about it originally from Rory Sutherland.

The basic idea is that there are critical features that you must get right and there are other features you need help deciding on including otherwise you might never deliver the product. The category buckets (according to Wikipedia) include:

Must-be Quality -> un-noticed when present, noticed when absent!
One-dimensional Quality -> if it’s there and I notice it, it could make me really happy or it could make me really mad (if poorly implemented).
Attractive Quality -> if it’s there and I notice it, it could make me really happy but it probably would not make me un-happy if it was poorly implemented.
Indifferent Quality -> things that usually go un-noticed by most people.
Reverse Quality -> things that, if overdone, could cause dissatisfaction.

It’s interesting to ponder on the application of the Kano Model to Sustainability-Smart Design Thinking. I use the term “Smart” here to push the oblique method of including sustainability features. Depending on the Kano Model category that a sustainable product feature falls into, the angle of obliqueness can vary.

For YCISL, we could develop an exercise where we design think a sustainable product with its feature list then tune the presentation of each feature in various oblique ways that optimize user satisfaction – especially the OOBE/first impression of the early adopter. In a way, if un-desirable but necessary features are present, a viable strategy may be to make it oblique such that it becomes an “Indifferent Quality” whereas it might be a “Reverse Quality” when fully frontal.

I don’t enough experience applying the Kano Model so the application to sustainability design thinking is pretty thin here. But it is another tool that could help a product designer tune their feature list and exercise creativity in doing so.

WSJ: The Elizabeth Holmes Trial: Founder Recounts ‘Big Idea’ That Led to Creation of Theranos

Jury duty can sometimes be interesting. Out-the-corner-of-an-eye, I have been watching some news reports about the Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos trial. I have previously commented on the leadership and innovation characteristics of Theranos leaders. Today, I watched a news report about how a hedge fund investor claimed to have been deceived by the Theranos story.  I also found a WSJ article published today titled “The Elizabeth Holmes Trial: Founder Recounts ‘Big Idea’ That Led to Creation of Theranos” which has the very interesting by-line “Holmes says early feedback from scientists fueled her optimism about startup’s blood-testing technology.” At least, it’s interesting to me.

So I am thinking and wondering:

1. Miniaturization can be a very compelling direction in technology innovation. We generally love personal products that are compact and sometimes even almost invisible. Thinking “nano” as a favored buzz word. The result isn’t always a success and can be the cause of new problems. But anyone who has studied analytical chemistry should be able to tell you that miniaturizing sampling lowers accuracy. The margin of error in the blood draw, contamination issues, preservation requirements and eventual sample handling all detrimentally affect sample integrity and analyte detectability. This is understood of even simple samples and as being even more difficult in a blood media matrix. The basic knowledge one needs is that scaling down pushes uncertainty up…and in chemical analysis, unbridled uncertainty leads to useless data. It’s reality, not skepticism. Lesson for YCISL: Manage uncertainty with divergent-convergent thinking with a fail early, fail fast attitude.

2. So where were the scientists? The WSJ news report mentions scientists inside and outside Theranos, and uses the words “dismissed” and “unimpressed” which reflects negative views, but that still does not reflect a clear and thorough scientific understanding of analytical detection limits. Was there any robust & rigorous scholarly communication and discussion? Where are the science publications, reviews and commentaries?  And where were the hedge fund manager’s scientists and science advisors? How did the science of this get so distorted and mis-aligned? Lesson for YCISL: Make sure your team communicates really well.

3. Most of the news reports mention what was said and what people thought was said. What were the questions asked and what was the path of enquiry that these questions developed? For leadership, the questions are as important as the answers. Did anyone perform a check-for-understanding? What were the body language and other hints that accompanied the Q&A? Lesson for YCISL: Practice active listening and make sure you support your critical thinking with questions.

Thoughts: Sustainability has a PR Problem

One of the messages shown to students at the start of the current YCISL NIFTI program is that “Sustainability has a PR Problem.” The idea behind this statement is that sustainability messaging has probably peaked. I believe there are two main reasons. Firstly, most people are tired of negative news from the media and news about sustainability gets filtered or drowned out quickly. Secondly, sustainability is usually presented in a significant loss-frame which fractionates attention. People are not motivated to live sustainably under these conditions.

The sustainability issue I have been thinking about to analyze this lack of motivation and poor messaging is the push to EV transportation. Do we need EVs? The answer isn’t clear and obvious. In a mass market, EVs could be a huge sustainability problem with uncertain resilience and reliability leading to un-even benefit. EVs can be inefficient and that has already been demonstrated by poor distance performance when driven at highway speeds – below EPA estimates. And if you have personally had poor experiences with electronics and battery-operated devices, your trust in EVs could be very low. It’s understandable. Cash incentives don’t help because that shows EVs are not a strong compelling choice.

For tens of years, I have watched vehicles on the 280 freeway going at 70 to 85 mph. I learned from college thermodynamics class that the car engine combusts most efficiently in the 45 to 55 mph range. That is why the EPA expresses its mileage estimates at that speed. What people do not seem to realize is that the drop in fuel efficiency is precipitous above 55 mph. It’s figuratively like walking off a cliff. And what about fuel efficiency in stop-and-go traffic or slow traffic or just idling waiting for something or someone? One last behavior that is really inefficient is accelerating the car really quickly which injects fuel into the engine that does not combust and just gets dispersed. All this puts more wear and tear on the vehicle which in itself is non-sustainability.

Is the problem fossil fuel? Only partly. Human behavior is mostly the issue. Some of it is determined by economics where people live quite a distance from work. Or the shift to online shopping is pushing up the number of delivery trucks. Growing consumerism requires more transportation of goods (notice all the Amazon rigs on Highway 5?) and globalized access to goods means longer distances for shipping. In California, public transportation is poorly maintained and relatively inconvenient. Focus on profitability in government and private corporations ensures that human actions are dictated by monetary tides.

California’s messaging on water conservation is also failing. Water resources sustainability is in a loss-frame with new levies and higher cost structures. Affordable innovations for water use reduction are absent. Instead, the conservation message is ignoring reality and the residential needs elevated by shelter-in-place are miscalculated. The reduction baseline is from 2019 which is pre-Covid and at a point in time when many people had already converted to drought-tolerant landscaping, drip irrigation and reduced watering schedules. Instead, we have electronic water meters whose cost is passed to homeowners…so that fees can be collected more quickly.

Sustainability really has a PR problem. We need sustainability design thinking and creativity to improve on this.

Thoughts: Building NIFTI 2.0

NIFTI 2.0

Last weekend, we kicked off the second year of the NIFTI program. I am calling it NIFTI 2.0 – The Sustainable Futures Initiative. Our primary focus will be on sustainability design thinking. There are many situations where sustainability design thinking is absent. The California water crisis is one.

The YCISL program sees sustainability design thinking as comprising smart programming, debugging and release to early adopters as prototypes. We will coach students to get divergent-convergent thinking to be instinctual and an essential ingredient of their emotional intelligence practice.

The new NIFTI will be less about career guidance, and more about upgraded and upgradable thinking skills. We will pollinate NIFTI with exercises from the ITW program so that students can envision what the next-generation of leadership needs to do – and how to do it.

If we were to give the current NIFTI group of students the challenge of solving the California water crisis, how would the divergent-convergent thinking process go? I think first we will have a long list of people who would be accountable. We will then have a comprehensive list of reasons for the water crisis perception. On the convergent side, we would design innovative solutions – perhaps a trio that get all stakeholders to realize we have a glass half full and the challenge is to get it more full, and not prevent it from getting emptier.

One of the premises I presented in the introduction to NIFTI 2.0 is “Sustainability has a PR problem” and that this explains why sustainability is stuck (stuck in the negatives as Alison Ledgerwood puts it) – and why it is so hard to move ahead. I am hoping that the NIFTI students will learn design thinking strategies to make sustainability behavior popular (like phenomenally popular) and practically naturally. And this leads to our NIFTI Roundtable 2021 topic of “Sustainability in Education.”

Google Data Studio: YCISL Skills Survey

I have been wondering how to create web dashboards and came across Google Data Studio. While learning how to use Google Data Studio, I played with visualizing the results from the YCISL Skills Survey. I aggregated the results from several YCISL workshops including two NIFTI programs, one ITW workshop and one YCISL Focus Group; there were responses from 107 students.

I will be starting the another NIFTI program next week and will update this dashboard when the survey results are in.

First, a few things I learned about using Google Data Studio:

1. Collect GEO information. Google Data Studio includes a Google Maps chart which looks cool and would show the worldwide reach of the YCISL program.
2. Try to eliminate chances for duplicate entries. I use Google Forms to do the survey and that is collected into Google Sheets. I manually moved data from each event’s survey to an aggregate Google Sheet from which Google Data Studio accesses data. I did this because I needed to clean out duplicates manually in Google Sheets.
3. Include time stamp information. This allows Google Data Studio to display data from different time frames.

And now some observations about what I found through Google Data Studio:

1. Students rated their Positivity skills very high at 4 or 5. This is a great indication of growth mindset.
2. Students rated their Design Skills as average with most choosing 3. This suggests that we could discuss the meaning of “design” in the same way we discuss the broadness of “creativity” and “leadership” so every one feels that it is accessible. It was also interesting to see that design was the skill most students wanted to improve. Fits well with our programming on design thinking and design-build.
3. There are also several students who rate various skills at 1 or 2. This could be an indication of no prior exposure or poor past experiences. Pushes our YCISL program to try to turn this around by creating memorable great experiences.

Looking forward to collecting more survey feedback and updating this dashboard.

CNA: The PSLE Math problem that got everyone calculating – and asking

In my CNA app today (Sunday October 3, 2021), I read an article about a math test problem that reportedly caused immense distress among test-takers and their parents…plus caused a wave of reactions on social media. The story “The PSLE Math problem that got everyone calculating – and asking Why do Helen and Ivan have so much change when everyone’s gone cashless?” was written by Khoo Bee Khim.

The test question as reported in the article was…

Helen and Ivan had the same number of coins. Helen had a number of 50-cent coins, and 64 20-cent coins. These coins had a mass of 1.134kg. Ivan had a number of 50-cent coins and 104 20-cent coins.

1) Who has more money in coins and by how much?

2) Given that each 50-cent coin is 2.7g more heavier than a 20-cent coin, what is the mass of Ivan’s coins in kilograms?

I gave a go at solving the problem. I initially started on a spreadsheet then moved to a pen and paper (and calculator). I scribbled an equality expression and after 10 minutes reached an answer for part 1 when I realized it wasn’t an equality problem. Then I contemplated an approach to part 2 and set up an equality expression for that and reached an answer. My answer for part 1 was correct, but I had done an addition when a subtraction was called for in part 2 and had the wrong answer initially. Switching the addition to a subtraction got the correct answer. I am an average C-student after all.

After this experience, I feel this was a fair question and showed which students had high organizational thinking skills. There are other factors in play as well though. These include:

(1) the ability to interpret story-based questions. We know that girls tend to do better in this area.

(2) the comfort with unknowns. Most students are conditioned to be able to manage two unknowns in a problem: x and y. This two-part question had three unknowns in part 2, but one of them was already expressed in part 1. There was sequential dependency. So the issue here was the perceived high uncertainty because the problem had two parts. In coding, we might call this nested logic.

(3) tracking units. Some students may have got the wrong answer in part 2 because weight information was given in kg and g. This is a classic “trick” in STEM problem solving.

(4) test context. If this question was considered part of the “hardest” part of the test, then perhaps we could assume most of the rest was…less hard? There is also strategy in where this and other “hardest” questions were placed in the test…beginning…middle…or end. This would be the stamina and change of pace factors. In the real world, if this problem was the only one that needed to be solved in day, how many people would be successful?

(5) test balance. Was this question building on a previous problem that tested a similar math skill but in a simpler context? Ever had a test where every single question was “hardest” and filled with booby-traps? I have…once.

In relation to what we discuss in YCISL, I wonder whether students will ever need this particular math solving skill? And after answering that, will the educational system ever help students to become masters at solving this type of problem?

Furthermore, this question is outright positioned on the reasoning side of thinking skills. The storyline set-up is a distraction and perhaps a creativity decoy. There are many ways to make this a creativity-testing question or even a real world type question. Maybe one day, our tests will advance to that more emotionally intelligent level.

Love the Instagrams really though…!

YCISL Skills Survey: Which skill group do you want to improve the most?

In 2019, we presented the idea of EQ-fying Schools, Classrooms & Learning in order to optimize the level of engagement. We postulated that current teaching paradigms exclude evaluation and optimization of emotional intelligence of students and the instructor, and that leads to fuzzy learning. We envisioned a smart dashboard for instructors that would help in course preparation. Data would include student academic records (mainly to identify gaps), learning strengths and weaknesses, and conditional preferences. For example, does the student typically need to be taught a math concept one or five times before it is mastered?

A creativity skills survey was designed and prototyped for a Stanford Sustainability Design Thinking course in 2020. A similar survey was then applied to various ITW workshops in 2020 and 2021. One of the questions (multiple choice) in the survey is “Which skill group do you want to improve the most?” In the YCISL context, this question is aimed at informing the instructor on student motivation and self-awareness. The survey is still in the prototype phase because we have had short programs and long programs, small groups and larger groups, and so on. So we are learning how the survey works in various settings.

However, I came across a YouTube video today on a cool way of displaying data in infographics so I thought I would try it out. The following infographic show the response to the above-mentioned question by a group of students from a university in Japan attending a YCISL Focus Group.

Almost half the students were interested in improving their creativity skills which is great because the YCISL program focuses on creativity (or more specifically creative energy). Many students were interested in improving their communication skills which is helpful to know since we have our elevator pitch exercise. Having this kind of information could help us balance our workshop agenda with accurate eq awareness & management.

Thoughts: Framing Your Design Thinking Story

In the YCISL program, particularly with the project work, we have been taking our asking questions design thinking method and placing it in a storytelling frame. When ideating concepts, teams have to ask Who? What? Where? When? Why? & How? questions regarding the story frame they wish to open presentation of their concept. The aim is to engage the viewer to share or empathize with the problem or need. In a Thinking Out Loud session I recently presented in, I had students “doodle” a scene where their product and user were together. I asked them to try to answer as many of the design thinking questions as they could through their doodle sketch. Working on such a sketch helps teams learn their concept’s positioning and application circumstance as well as opportunities for adding details and filling gaps.

The doodle sketch above reflects an exercise I have used where we look at sustainability in bathroom lighting.

Want to try this method? Here is a 3-step method to try:

1. Form and answer the design thinking questions.
2. Make a preliminary sketch using the answers.
3. Add details to the sketch to focus on one concept message (eg, your problem statement or your concept statement).

Bonus: give your sketch a title (could be your concept title).