Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The Newsletter shares the source code, through quick snapshots, for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done.
About Divergent Thinking
Listening to Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on Changing Education Paradigms led on an exploration to learn more about the importance and value of Divergent Thinking. JP Guilford, a well-known American Psychologist, is said to be the father of Convergent and Divergent thinking Studies on Human Intelligence. The importance of Divergent Thinking concepts in our day-to-day work and life seems highly relevant and essential. Divergent thinking is about finding more solutions to a problem and involves much more creativity. As people enter the workplace, they are not trained well enough in the craft of divergent thinking as have only developed the ability to do convergent thinking. One of the best books to read on this topic and start diving deeper on this is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
The Catalyst - How to Change Anyone’s Mind
by Jonah Berger
Professor Jonah Berger is an internationally bestselling author and a world-renowned expert on change, influence, word of mouth, natural language processing, consumer behaviour, and how products, ideas, and behaviours catch on.
Prof. Jonah Berger talks about how our behaviours and decisions are shaped by social influences, the environment and the people around us. Here, in the podcast presented above, he talks about the mistakes we make when it comes to changing ourselves or the people around us. He identifies and explains the underlying contradictions between what you want to do- like desiring to get more fit and reduce time spent on social media but how we end up doing the exact opposite! It takes a conscious and consistent effort to enable that change, and he shares some of his thoughts on how to do it.
How to Change Education
by Sir Ken Robinson
In this talk, Sir Ken Robinson traces back the evolution of education since the 18th Century. He says that the education needed for the current era is not aligned with those designed and built in the 18th or 19th Century. The education system of the earlier era was built for the industrialised society, which is no more the case now. He talks about education following a production process methodology. In this old-world approach, students are taught in batches by age and have standardised templates of testing and evaluation, which are completely broken. He outlines the need for divergent thinking, working in groups, and by collaborating, among many others, which are critical aspects of today's workplace requirements. He calls for a systemic change in the way children are taught today and the need to transform education to fit in with the current needs of society.
Earning a Degree vs. Degree of Difficulty in Solving Problems
Thinking back, one thing that kept coming back was the mismatch between what we study at school or college vs what we are asked or given to do at work. Today's work is very different from the industrialised world of the early 1900s. We find that there are a lot of engineers around who have earned fancy degrees and grades in college, but not many of them have the ability to solve problems when it is thrown at them. It is only a handful of them who can do it. The problem is not the person, but the system of education one has been through. When you look at the meaning of the word engineer - it is “a person whose job is to design, build or repair engines, machines, etc.”. Or when you take the meaning of an Accountant, it is about ‘Examining the financial accounts of a business.’ Inherent in this definition is the ability to design and repair or examine, which requires the ability to build hypotheses, ask questions, look at the problem from different angles, explore the unknown, and have a curious mind to deconstruct the problem and systematically solve it with different solutions through a method of trial and error. But, that is not how we learn in school or college today. We are discouraged from making mistakes, and there is no space given to explore and discover concepts, find solutions and apply them, which leads to people seeking a ‘syllabus’ even when they come to work. They start with the question, “Tell me what to do”. If we tell them, “ Go figure out, here is the problem”, they get very uncomfortable as they have not done so in their entire school or college life. But the work requirements of today and in the future, you are expected to look at new problems, and they need to be solved every day. Also, the lifespan of companies is shrinking rapidly from 90 years (S&P 500 in 1935) to 18 years. So, if you are out there working, expect to work in a different company or a new industry solving new problems. What is your way in getting ready for it is the question you have to ask yourself.
Earning a degree is no more an insurance for a stable future. Mastering the degree of difficulty in solving problems is a better indicator!
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Divergent thinking is key to looking at a problem from different angles and points of view. This will help us find many solutions to the same problem.
Enabling a behaviour change requires consistent and conscious effort, and the environment you surround yourself with makes a big difference in making that change.
Education requires a new source code and enabling applications. Just relying on the existing methods and delivery models will make us redundant quickly. We must find ways to prepare ourselves and our kids for this change.
Degrees increasingly have no meaning in a post-industrialised world. If the life span of companies is shrinking so rapidly, then we need to build our moats to keep ourselves ready for this shift. We need to find new ways to think and solve for problems never seen before.