Almost 50 million people have viewed the talk online and millions more have probably seen it screened at conferences and other events.
In the talk, Robinson said we are all born with natural capacities for creativity but that education systems tend to suppress them. Equally, if not more importantly, he made the point it was becoming increasingly urgent to cultivate these capacities – for personal, economic and cultural reasons.
Those reasons vary from the societal need to have happier and healthier populations to the requirements of companies for creative people who can develop the next wave of innovative new products and services on which their continued success depends.
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Robinson’s record in this space goes back decades and in 1997 he was asked by the incoming Labour government in the UK to establish a commission to look at creativity in education. “They had already had commissions on literacy and numeracy, so I argued it made sense to have one on creativity,” Robinson recalls.
With the government’s support, he gathered together people from across business, academia, sciences, the arts and other walks of life, to produce a report which defined creativity, explained its importance, and laid out a strategy for how to encourage and nurture it in the education system.
“The report was widely welcomed by almost everyone apart from the government,” he says. “I have no doubt but that the government wanted to kick it into the long grass. Tony Blair campaigned saying that he had three priorities: education, education, and education, and that he wanted to promote creativity and innovation in schools. Then when Labour got into power they just continued the policies of previous governments and remained focused on targets in literacy and maths.”
He notes the current case of a school in Bradford as an example of the pointlessness of these narrow targets-based strategies. The school had been under considerable pressure from the UK education regulator Ofsted to make ground on targets which it was missing by quite some margin. The school boasted a highly multicultural environment, with fewer than five per cent of the students on entry speaking English as a first language.
We need to educate people differently if we want to make the most of them
The principal didn’t believe that obsessing over targets would help improve the students’ performance and so ignored Ofsted’s instructions. Instead, the school introduced extra music classes every day, and results improved across the board. “There is now a queue to get into that school because it is tapping into the creative energy of its students,” says Robinson.
Robinson had a more positive experience in Northern Ireland, where he was asked to chair a commission on education back in the early years of the power-sharing executive. In that instance, the report was adopted by a willing government. He has since done similar work in the US and Singapore.
The world has changed, and so must schools and workplaces, he continues. “For our generation, if you went to school and then on to university you were guaranteed a job. The education system was designed for an industrial economy when the majority of people did blue-collar work. There was a small number of higher-paid white-collar jobs and this was what made a degree worth so much. But the world has shifted on its axis since then. We are now sitting on the next wave of change, with technologies like artificial intelligence coming in and we need to educate people differently for that.”
The problem, he believes, is that our schools are not encouraged to develop the wide range of people’s talents. “Talents include much more than academic ability. Passion and love are important as well. Just because you’re good at something is no reason to spend the rest of your life doing it. We need to educate people differently if we want to make the most of them.”
We need to have the right skills if we are to tap into our imagination and creativity
This applies equally to businesses who are not sufficiently attuned to the talents and creativity of their people. He points to Eastman Kodak as an example of this. “That company was synonymous with photography and innovation, but it went out of business at a time when people were taking more photographs than ever before. They believed in chemistry and refused to invest in digital.”
This is despite the fact a young Kodak engineer had actually developed the world’s first digital camera for the company in 1975.
In that case, the company ignored and, some claim, suppressed the creativity of its employees. In others, the problem is a failure to engage or stimulate that creativity. “Companies are not machines, they are organisms,” Robinson claims. “Research in the US has found that 70 per cent of people there are so disengaged with their workplaces that they have no interest in their work or in the fortunes of the companies who employ them. That is staggering.”
Successful companies need to move with the times and foster a culture of innovation
He believes this is in part the product of a failure to understand what has been happening in the world of work. He recalls a television debate he took part in during the 1980s when a Conservative party education minister talked of a “leisure society” developing as a result of the increased automation of manual labour.
He uses a choice word to describe his feelings about the leisure society before saying more politely that it is a “bogus idea”. Less work can mean increased leisure while no work can more starkly mean that an individual is unemployed.
“Just the same way as email creating the paperless office was a bogus idea, this is too. Work is tied up with our self-respect and self-worth. It is so baked into our culture. The idea that you can just discount its importance in our lives is nonsensical.”
That makes it all the more urgent to rethink our views on education and work. “Automation is likely to lead to the destruction of vast swathes of service-sector jobs,” he says. “Education was seen as a linear process which led directly on to a career. But when I ask people in audiences how many of them are doing what they thought they would be 15 years ago, almost no one puts up their hand.”
Part of the reason for this is that so many people don’t really know what they are good at or where their talents lie when they leave school. “Non-conformity gets squeezed out of us. Too many schools don’t acknowledge the variety of people’s talents and don’t accommodate those who don’t fit the mould.”
There is a lesson there for organisations. “If you are just looking for efficiency and want people to do as they are told, that may work for a command-and-control economy. But successful companies need to move with the times and foster a culture of innovation. Most companies are good at innovation. They are all based on a good idea after all.
“The largest organisations started out from small beginnings and became more complex over time,” he continues. “There is a very high mortality rate for companies and even some of the largest don’t last for more than 30 years. It is exceptional to find a company that has been around for longer than 100 years. The ones that succeed are those that changed and grew in other directions over time. Companies like GE, BP and IBM did this. And culture is important in this. If they don’t have a culture of innovation where people are encouraged to come up with ideas, they won’t succeed. Companies like Apple have shown this.”
The Apple model, where ideas from all levels and areas of the company – not just the design or marketing departments – has proven to be enormously successful. But schools and organisations have to be mindful of the need to give people the right skills to be creative, Robinson concludes.
“You can’t be a good musician or composer if you don’t know how to hold an instrument, you can’t be a good writer if you are illiterate, the same goes for engineering and so on. We need to have the right skills if we are to tap into our imagination and creativity.”