how you feeling this is a great event isn't it I really think so I arrived here last night from Canada and I've been traveling now for about three weeks and I was in Ottawa monta Toronto and Saskatchewan and I got here last night quite late now this is not relevant to the conference I just want you to know the trouble I have gone to to be here and you're normally supposed to say what a great pleasure it is to be somewhere I'm not at all sure frankly I mean it may be a pleasure or not I don't know yet but it's a great pleasure to at least open the conversation and I do want to say a couple of words about education could we have the lights up a little bit on the on the audience I can see us here how many of you've got young children graven you know of elementary school age okay um how about our teenage children how are you okay I know now keep keep the lights up please I thought that was me then I thought I had gone out but think about this children starting school this year will be probably retiring if you can imagine such a thing roundabout 2070 nobody I know has any idea what the world would look like in two years time or five years time or Ted slightly not ten years time I mean look at the turmoil it's happened on Wall Street in the past two weeks the very few people actually predicted although a lot of people feared it now I'm saying this because the theme of this conference business as usual seems to me to be absolutely appropriate to the challenges that we face and I think it's even more appropriate that we have people from so many countries here and from so many different backgrounds and disciplines because I believe in a way the conference exemplifies the sorts of issues we have to be confronting I want to put three ideas too pretty quickly one of them is that we are caught up in a revolution and I believe this is a full-on literal no-nonsense not metaphorical revolution a revolution in which many of the things that we think are obvious and that we take for granted are not true and will no longer be true even if they're true right now so I hope part of your conversation in the conference will be to discuss what's really going on and I believe that part of the changes that we're facing now have no historical precedent you really can't look back to any time in history and say well it's like that all over again I don't think it is I think the reform out for which nobody really is properly prepared that's fessing the second thing is that if we're to meet this revolution we have to think differently about our own abilities about our human abilities about human resources and creativity to me is the major theme that we need to address it amazes me how many adults think they're not creative and since this conference is about innovation understanding the nature of creativity seems to me to be fundamental I wanted to congratulate Stavanger on being the European Capital of Culture the other European Capital of Culture is Liverpool and you are I think you have a memorandum own understanding don't you between Stavanger and Liverpool I am from Liverpool in fact I thought I was coming to Liverpool frankly hence this vague feeling of being disoriented um I've been searching this theatre all day for members of my family but they are nowhere to be seen but Liverpool is the other city of Culture this year in fact I'm going to Liverpool shortly um I grew up in Liverpool which is also a major port in economic hard times I think has been for a long time I went to school there and across the street across the city centre was an was another school which is now the school for the Performing Arts the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts one of the pupils there a bit older than me when I was at school was Paul McCartney you know who I mean Paul McCartney of the Beatles the popular music group and I helped to set up the Liberal issued for for the Performing Arts to a degree I helped with their examination systems early on and I because of that I was given an honorary degree at a couple of years ago so I went back to Liverpool to get this degree from Paul McCartney so I was hanging out chilling so to speak for a couple hours with Paul McCartney that's it okay thank you very much any questions about million and the beatles generally really you know no Paul McCartney or Paul as I call him was telling me as with as we're chilling I asked him how he got on at music at school did he enjoy music at school he said he hated it he hated music at school he said nobody at school thought he had any musical talent at all Paul McCartney his music teacher never spotted anything unusual about Paul McCartney's musical abilities one of the other students in the same music class with him was George Harrison of the Beatles and the music teacher didn't spot that either so this one music teacher had half the beetles in his class and he missed it Elvis Presley born in Tupelo in America was not allowed in the school choir no I'm sorry in the glee club at school they said he would ruin their sound Elvis but we all know what great hikes the glee club went on to once once they'd managed to keep Elvis out John Cleese from Monty Python do you know who I mean he's got a very funny piece on YouTube at the moment about Sarah Palin possibly our next president um I live in America I'm worried no I think it's going to be okay but I'll tell you about this and own it but anyway John Cleese said that he went from kindergarten to Cambridge and nobody ever thought he had a sense of humor he does doesn't it now I could multiply these examples but the really time the ridic the only point I want to make here at this point is that some of the most creative people in the world didn't realize they were during the course of being educated but it's not just a my creativity I think that many many people never truly discover their talents especially during the course of education but sometimes never I know all kinds of people who have no real sense of what they're truly capable of achieving what their real talents are all kinds of people who go through their lives not really feeling they're good at anything just getting on doing stuff that's necessary but not really feeling deeply fulfilled by anything and I think this is a major problem that education contributes to the title I was given for this talk was there we go what do you think and was to talk about education and creativity not in the sense that education destroys creativity but the fact it doesn't help very often and I believe we have to make it a systematic process now of developing creative capacity because I believe that there is a crisis of human resources let me just flesh this out a little bit I spoke at a conference a couple of years ago with Al Gore who or Al I shall keep dropping names of that psoriasis I live in Los Angeles you know and I've been there seven years like when I arrived there a few years ago seven as my friend let's be specific I was speaking at a conference the Getty Center and one of the other speakers was Arnold short aren't lost enough and Oso nails with a similar name Arnold Schwarzenegger before he became the governor and I was giving the keynote address at this conference and so I was walking around the platform to begin with to saying hello to people and I went over to him and I said hello I'm Ken and he said hi I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger which seemed to me to be completely redundant I mean who else was he going to be you know Danny DeVito no anyway I acted surprised for social purposes you know I said I said oh you're Arnold Schwarzenegger so he thought your Dustin Hoffman idea fight it he sat on the front row while I was giving this talk and it's a bit spooky you know I mean I know he's not the Terminator you know but he looks an awful lot like him you know and if you you do want the talk to go well you know when you've got when you've got the end of days sitting right in front of you anyway um anyway he became governor and now presides over among other things the education system of California now when I say there's a crisis in human resources let me illustrate it this way um Al Gore gave the talk at the conference I attended the talk that became the movie Inconvenient Truth you know the movie you know he's arguing that there is a major crisis in the way we use the world's natural resources there is I think it's beyond question you know it infuriates me when people say oh we don't know we know I was in Salt Lake City recently and I was talking to a number of people and some of them you know strongly Republican I remember this isn't party political at all I really don't think it is but I remember talking somebody who was a prominent member of the Republican Party there and he said you know that I said what you thing like climate change he said no no we're not interested he said it's a democratic issue I said it's a far now it's an issue for the Democrats I said so what happens you know when the earth dies what are you gonna do is I'm sorry I'm a Republican leave me alone you know you know nothing to do with me nothing to me no the floods are going to go round my house am a Republican I'll have a thing up saying I'm a Republican stop you know a minute ridiculous but people do still they still question it I don't know how much more evidence they need but they question it but the thing is our gore didn't think of this Rachel Carson was writing about this in the early 1960s but she didn't think of it Benjamin Franklin was writing about this stuff in the 18th century you know that there may be long-term effects of industrialization well there are and we're feeling them a group of geologists have recently said that they believe the world is in a new geological age they call it the Anthropocene what they mean is that the period up until 10,000 years ago the last and till 1800 that 10,000 year period they refer to as the Holocene period that period since the last ice age they say there is evidence now that the Earth's crust and its atmosphere and its oceans have been altered in a geological sense by the activities of human beings that if the future generation of geologists would come to earth they would see the evidence in the carbon record in the acidification of oceans the evidence of extinction of species that it's undeniable that the world how the planet has changed because the activities of people they call it the Anthropocene I believe in and we're dealing with it now and thankfully people are waking up to some of the long-term implications but I think that there is another climate crisis which is just as important as that one and it's related now you may say really I'm fine you know one climate crisis is enough you know I'm good really leave me with this one but I believe this one is as profound it's a crisis of human resources I believe that we have systematically wasted some of the best talents of our children and of ourselves and we still do in our communities and we spend enormous sums of money dealing with the damage in just the same as we do in the world of natural resources I believe the analogy is exact now I don't see education it's the whole of it but it doesn't help and it doesn't help because it's locked into an old model the very model of social organization and economic activity that's given rise to the crisis in natural resources I mean industrialism that we have modeled our education systems on the principles and processes and mindsets of industrialism we see education as an industrial process and it's focused on producing certain types of people and some of those people do very well but most people don't and the byproducts the social waste that results from this method this method of educating people is causing massive problems in many of our communities I'll give you an example Arnold Schwarzenegger I don't mean that he is a massive problem in our communities but but Arnold Schwarzenegger presides over government in California is now the the governor last year on the published figures California the state of California spent three and a half billion dollars were told on the state university system in the same year they spent nearly nine billion dollars on the state prison system now does that make any kind of sense that anion I mentioned it not just because I live in California but because you see similar sorts of figures in other places the problems of social exclusion of dropout rates of disaffection of the use of chemicals to keep people set balanced I don't to bring you down here you know but the rate of suicides among young people has increased throughout this generation at you since the 1960's know some people are turning off some people are just checking out because I believe in part because they don't find a sense of purpose and meaning they find their communities often to be estranging and they don't in many cases find education the liberation it is intended to be now I'm just saying this because I think this crisis of human resources is actual real and in every sense of the word too expensive to tolerate and I think we have to not change education would do something different so that's my second proposition that there is a crisis of human result and the third is that if we're to meet it we have to think we have to do things differently and in particular I believe we have to put creativity at the center of our enterprise now it's important here because what were concerned about in this conference is the whole field of business innovation but that depends upon people coming through and finding lives without purpose in meaning - I have two kids so far as I know and my son is 24 he's about to leave college he's going into a totally different world - the one I graduated in - I was born in Liverpool in 1950 now let me say immediately I know you don't believe that I feel it you know like I am feeling the incredulity you say how can this be you are saying he is so boyish you think I understand I understand you know but I live in Los Angeles you know I've had work done you know what can I tell you that when when I left college in 1972 I had a story in my head that was true and the story was this if you worked hard and did well and got a college degree you are absolutely guaranteed a job isn't that correct the idea until relatively recently that you would have a college degree but not be able to find a job was ridiculous it's not ridiculous now a lot of people are graduating from college and going home again to play computer games because the jobs for which they have been training may not be available or there's too much competition but mainly because the world economies are moving in a totally different direction to the ones that those of us who have them how many of you here would think of yourself as baby boomers by the way the baby boomers gone as more than Turville surely okay all right definitely how many of you here over the age of 40 go on I'm going to let you in on this clap how many of you are under 30 great ok that's it I'm not going to push you any further that's a no year for a couple of days and you have an image to give up but what I'm saying is the central story of Education was if you go right through the system and qualify with a college degree you're set for life it's not true it's one of the things that we take for granted that is no longer true and it's because of the shifts in the world economies so what I believe is this that we have to do something radical with education if we're to cope with the challenges that we now face and innovation and creativity should be central themes of the process every education system on earth current is being reformed everyone and it's happening for two reasons the first of them is economic everybody's trying to figure out how do we educate our kids to get jobs in these economies that we can't predict and I think we all believe that I mean we all want that I mean anybody thinks education is not about the economy I think isn't really listening I mean we do don't we we all want our children if they become educated to become economically independent don't we I do I can't tell you how much I want my children to be economically independent and as soon as possible but how just having a degree is no guarantee and that's as far as most people have again my son start at USC which is a private university in California and are very struck when we went along to get to sign him up about four years ago cost a lot of money you know to get through a private university in America it's like $60,000 a year I think I know trust me I know it's $30,000 roughly for tuition fees it's about $10,000 for accommodation about ten thousand dollars for food and drink and about ten thousand dollars for drugs you know for us I mean you know to keep us balanced and get keepers with the program but when we got there one of the tutors we spoke to said I mean our kids were let off you know to have the academic orientation and the parents were led off for financial counseling and we spent an hour tearing up checks you know til it didn't hurt anymore really but he said them what this guy said - he said take some advice from me he said now your kids have got to college leave them alone I said how do you mean we all said he said let them make their own decisions now don't tell them what courses to take let them follow their instincts I said I thought this was really good advice he said his son had start at USC about 20 years before something like that and he was going to take a degree in classics and they said my wife and I were really depressed you know because we thought what kind of a job will he ever get in classics with a classics degree he said so we were thrilled when a couple of years later you know the end of the second year he came home he said you know dad I'm an dad I don't think I'm going to do classics he said okay he said why he said I don't think it's very practical it's okay he said we're really excited he said I think I'm going to do something more useful he said what's that he said philosophy he said he said so we tried to explain to him that none of the big philosophy companies were hiring at the moment you know international philosophy Inc and he said he did it for a year but he finally he majored in art history and he said the result of this was here is now these years later he's the senior partner in an international auction house he makes great money he travels extensively has a wonderful network of friends and professional friends and colleagues and he's blissfully happy and he's doing so well because of his knowledge of classical cultures the intellectual trainee he got from philosophy and his passion for art history it said is ideally suited for this job but he would never have found the job if he hadn't done those things he said if we'd started out saying listen my boy you know that in this first year do philosophy classics in art history and maybe an opening will turn up in the field of auction international auction houses you know now the reason saying this is that one of the ways our education system is out of date is its premise on a linear assumption of social planning one that was never true by the way it's a factory model you go through the system you qualify at the end you go into this job that you are planning for all the time I don't think that's true of most people I don't know it's true of many of you that you're doing the thing that you thought you'd be doing the age of 15 if you thought of anything at the age of 15 but it was never a linear process but that's the premise of the system one of the other premises of the current system is that it's all about conformity all the kids doing the same thing with in many countries supported by a system of standardized testing and a third way in which it's like a factory model is it's all done according to ages it still amazes me that we educate people by age group why you know all the eight year olds together all the nine year olds other all the ten year olds silat why yeah it's like the most important things kids have in common is their date of manufacture you know when we all know if you've got kids they're all different and they're all different at different ages so in other words the system is based on conformity and based on linearity and based on standards in most of our countries that that continues to be the case and the reason is it's locked into the industrial mindset now one reason education is being reformed is economic the second reason is cultural everybody's trying to figure out how do we educate our kids so they have some sense of cultural identity and yet can be citizens of a globalized cultural world most countries trying to do this it's true all over America it's true in Europe you know the French and I'm sure there's some French people here are in no rush to stop being French you know the Norwegians do not want to not being Norwegian any time soon but we do all want our kids to learn our values to understand them where they come from but also to have sympathy with global cultural values that's a hard challenge for education but is an essential one now I believe that the challenge for education is not to reform it which is what most countries are doing they're changing bits and pieces here and there it's to transform it into something else we have to have in hand a transformational process one which has a different relationship with business with the cultural sector and with our communities but it has to begin with a different conception of human ability so I just want to flesh this out for a couple minutes and then we're going to open this up for some conversation my impression of this is this that most adults think they're not creative and yet all children think they are don't they up to a certain age let me define creativity for you as time is short I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value the process of having original ideas that have value and I say most adults in my experience think they're not very creative so let me ask you this how creative do you think you are personally and this is a rather important positive interest in innovation the reason I want to explain in a minute being creative is essential so how creative do you think you are okay on a scale on a scale of one to ten now which I would you put yourself on a scale of one to ten while you're thinking about that think about this question how intelligent are you on a scale of one to ten okay can we put the lights up a bit more please no attending nonsense here just a bit more if you can now I'm gonna ask you to put your hands up you don't have to you can say well I'm sorry I'm not going to frankly you know this is in O town I didn't come here to put my hand up I was I'm an adult person yeah I'm I came in here to hang out and hide you know so no I don't know it's up to you you don't have to you can sit and sulk if you wish I don't mind it's I probably won't see you again either man but let me assure you that if you do put your hands up there are no social consequences at least not from my point of view you know it may be social death for you but not to me I mean I'm what I mean is I'm not going to pull somebody out here and ask you to prove it okay Oh 10 you think so well do this you know you're safe in your seats okay it's just for purpose of conversation so with that in mind with that encouragement would you put your hands up if you'd give yourselves ten for creativity and if you woulda made a groom like room like this out hope so thank you great thank you nine eight seven six five come on four three two is that the two of them you're scratching you had like two old one I'm not sure yet okay okay one all right where was the top of that curve you say I think so yeah right how about intelligence now I know a certain social modesty comes into play here but try and overcome that with you for the purposes of conversation be as honest as you can how about 10 for intelligence wonderful thank you very much anybody has any other tens fantastic thank you very as intelligent as it's possible to be that is fantastic you cannot be more intelligent than this lady here so thank you very much thank you that's great actually you can go now if you want ready malice for you were we're just wasting your time frankly but behind some thank you very much that's great all right nine any nine eight seven six five come haha four three it's getting tense in it too okay I never do one honestly you got one you're not following this anyway are you I mean really you have no idea what we're talking about here arnold schwarzenegger okay where was the top of that curve seven okay here's the question i find really interesting put your hands up if you gave yourself different marks different marks or both questions okay what percentage of this is that roughly just do it again the answer in what percentage a bit more I think maybe fifty forty fifty now you may have get yourself the same marks but for different reasons so think about that it's worth asking though why you give yourself different marks those who do and often the majority will do by the way the reason I ask is that if you interest in innovation challenging business as usual innovation depends upon the capacity for creative thinking the capacity for having original ideas that have value and the problem is that many people think they're not very creative one of the reasons I think is that creativity and intelligence have become detached as ideas I know people who think they're very creative but not very intelligent very intelligent but not very creative and it's because these ideas have become separate I believe in our culture the idea that you can be one or the other now my interest is in making creativity an operational systemic idea that can be used reliably in schools companies and organizations I mean everybody has the occasional good idea that's not the point the challenge is to have ideas reliably and systematically to really develop this capacity and I think of it as it compares with literacy you know if if you asked a room full of people who was literate and only half the room put their hands up you'd be concerned about it and you wouldn't leave it a chance you wouldn't say well that's too bad you know but we'll we can get by with the ones who are um also if somebody said they weren't literate you wouldn't believe them to be saying they were incapable of it you'd realize what they were saying was they'd never learned how now I believe the beginning of learning how to be creative is to connect creativity back to intelligence there are three misconceptions back creativity one is it's about special people it is not in my experience everybody has profound creative capacities everybody it's in the nature of being a human being the second misconception is about special things it's not I mean people think it's about the arts for example or design or architecture well all those things can be very creative not always but they can be but so too can anything some of those brilliantly creative people I know work in the sciences or they work in mathematics I used to teach it you know in the university in Britain in Warwick University now remember speaking to a senior professor of mathematics there I was never very good at mathematics at school it didn't appeal to me actually the teacher didn't appeal to me to be honest but and my daughter for a while suffered the same problem there's a point in her life when she thought I knew everything she should bring home maths homework and give it to me and when she was in elementary school this was great you know because I could do it ethically like four times four you know I was like a math God you know I would say Kate i'd say sixteen come on you know she would write it down she thought how's the font of all wisdom and then when she was about six dead back twelve she brought home a page full of quadratic equations and I remember the old familiar panic you know hit this stuff so at this point I introduced learning by discovery methods they said Kate there's no point me telling you the answer this is not how we learn you have to find this out for yourself I'll be outside having a margarita and and even when you've got the answer there's no point showing it to me this is what teachers are for anyway a few weeks later she brought me home this cartoon strip is great it had on it for three frames as a father helping a child with homework a daughter and the first frame he says what have you got to do and she says I've got to find the lowest common denominator and he said are they still looking for that he said he said they were trying to find that when I was at the school it's exactly how I felt anyway I asked this math teacher Matt's professor how do you judge a PhD in pure maths and he said there are two criteria which I got really interested is because I mean I didn't like math so I said well her first question was how long is a PhD in pure math I didn't know and he said it seemed one that was 24 pages of math you know page after page after page of math with equals at the end you know I imagine I don't know you know but we're talking about hard maths obviously you know like remainders and there are things on that it ought to do it anyway I said well how do you assess one in a PhD in pure math I mean presumably it's right you know I mean you'd be annoyed here then five years doing a PhD in pure maths comes back wrong see me in at the bottom he said no they're normally right normally I said how to judge them he said with two criteria the first is originality how creative it is it has to break new ground conceptually but the second fascinated me more in a way he said its aesthetic I said why does that matter he said well it's the beauty of the proof he said the reason is that among mathematicians there's a very strong belief or intuition of mathematics is the purest way we have of understanding the natural world and since nature is inherently beautiful there's a powerful feeling that the more elegant the proof is the more likely it is to be true it's an informal test of truth that's beautiful isn't it he could have been talk about a sonata or a piece of poetry or a dance and in a way was because the truth it is we have different ways of understanding what turn out often to be the same things but we use different modes of understanding to understand things differently and sometimes to understand different things I mean if you want to understand quantum mechanics you need mathematics you can't approach the complexities of quantum mechanics with poetry you need mathematics it's the only way to really engage properly with that field but if you want to tell somebody how much you love them don't give them an equation you know it's just a tip rather you know how much do you love me here you work it out you know and get my calculator because we use different ways of understanding the world to understand different sorts of thing so it's about everything and the third missing session our creativity is you either are creative or you're not and the truth is we can become much more creative by doing certain things as I say if somebody said they weren't literate you wouldn't leave it there what you'd understand them to be saying is they don't know how to do it and I think that's true with creativity and innovation the reason people say they're not is because they haven't understood how to do it now I said to you that most adults think they're not and I think kind of borne out by you know our show of hands here and most children think they are those of you who've got young children know that young kids are tremendously confident in their own imaginations so I want to show you something I came across a study that I find really interesting oh by the way some of these things I'm saying are in this book which I wrote myself this book by the way is terrific okay you could not do better than buy this book unless you buy this book which is coming out in January which I'm really pleased with it and you know the expression to be in your element I got very interested this because when I say most people I know don't know the things they're really good at some people do and I spend a lot of time talking with people who do the thing they love to do and I realize that this expression of being in your element it means two things one of them is that you have a natural aptitude for something that you know what this thing is and you can do it I mean I for example was given a guitar at about the same time that Eric Clapton was given a guitar you know it worked out better for him I feel yeah he got the hang of it you know he understood what he was doing I was still trying to blow into mine about the time he got his first record amp so having a natural aptitude is important one of the people in the book is a guy called Terence Tao who won the field medal for mathematics he was doing advanced mathematics the age of five and six compared to the rest of us he just knew what this was there's a guy in the book called Bart Conner Bart Conner who's lives in Oklahoma now found when he was six that he could walk on his hands as easily as he could walk on his feet he just tripped over one day and started walking on his hands he said it was easy as easy as walking on his feet no use to anybody but he could just do it and the result was he became very popular you know because you know at social gatherings he said you know kids love that and this parents used to encourage him you know when conversation failed there's a Bart do the hand thing with you sir and then he found that he could walk up and down stairs doing it just as easily as standing on his feet he said that I didn't see any point in it it was just stealing a little entertainment but his mother thought more about it and when he was 9 she took him to the local gymnasium and he said I still remember the feeling I had when the door opened into this gymnasium I'd never been in one before like this he said it was a mixture to me of Disneyland and Santa's grotto there were trampolines trapeze ropes wall bars I mean when I walk into a gymnasium I need a drink you know but but puff bart has a totally different feeling he walketh Oh leave me here anyway he was started going regularly went every day for nine years and nine years later when he was 18 he walked onto the mat of the Montreal Olympics representing America in the male gymnastics team and he became and remains the most decorated male gymnasts in American history he now lives in Oklahoma City he's married to nati common edge they run this extraordinary School in Norman in Oklahoma for gymnastics and they're both leading figures in the Special Olympic movement they are wonderful people now this happened mainly because his mother had the insight in the sense to see this as something special here and it should be encouraged he said she couldn't have foreseen what I what my life would become but she did have the insight to see what was unique about him so the book is full of stories of people who found their talent and how they found it and what it really means if we're interested in helping other people find theirs Paul McCartney is in the book and he talked about the impact it had on on him of meeting John Lennon you know what would have become of both them if that hadn't happened anyway I think you'll find it interesting and I'm very excited about this this study I mentioned um was a study of divergent thinking divergent thinking is not the same as creativity or innovation but it's a fundamental aspect of every creative process divergent thinking is the ability to see lots of possible solutions to a problem to see many possible answers not just one and it often involves thinking in metaphors or thinking visually or thinking in analogies analogically not just logically not just linear from A to B it often involves reinterpreting the question there are some standardized tests for this stuff and um I'll give you in a one kind of basic example you might be a something like how many uses can you think of for a paper clip you know people might think of 10 or 15 you know all involving paper probably people who good at this might come up with 200 you know because they might say well what if this what if it was 200 foot tall and made of rubber you know you didn't say it couldn't be so in other words they don't accept the question of face value and a lot of really innovative thinking comes from not accepting the question at face value it comes from reinterpreting the question and not taking anything for granted that's really the key to innovation not taking anything for granted not even the question so they gave these tests to 1,500 people and on the protocol of the test if you scored over a certain level you'd be considered to be a genius at divergent thinking okay so my question to you is what percentage do you think of the 1,500 people scored at genius level for divergent thinking what thing oh you need to know one more thing about them they were kindergarten children all right ages three to five what do you think what percentage hundred now great 98 percent a genius level that I've read you're thinking I love this because what it illustrates is what I'm trying to say we're all born with this capacity to think broadly imaginary and to make lots of connections what was interesting at this particular study was that it was long to to dnal so they retested the same children five years later these were all on the eastern coast of America by the way heading down towards the south I spoke to the author's study a few years ago and got some more details but this essentially same kids five years later what you think what percentage genius level 60 17 same children they tested them again five years later what you think you can see a trend candy I'm now oh by the way they tested two hundred thousand adults once just as a control what you think to here yeah I often say to companies no these the people you're hiring at the bottom end and it does add up to 100 if you'd add it to the three to five roles now a lot of things have happened to these children during the course of this study a lot of things have happened to them you know they've gotten older they've got hormones kicking in and so on but one of the most important things that's happened to my I'm convinced is that by now they've become educated you know they're spent ten years at school being told there's one answer and it's at the back and don't look because that's cheating and don't talk to anybody else while you're doing the test because that's cheating to outside schools that's called collaboration but inside schools is thought to be cheating now let me say immediately I have spent my life working in education and I don't believe this is deliberate I know wonderful teachers wonderful school principals wonderful college lectures professors I don't think it's deliberate people don't set out to kill creativity it's not deliberate but it is systematic nonetheless it's routine and systematic and it happens in several ways one of them is the curricular of our school schools in all of our countries the most part are built on a hierarchy of subjects where some subjects are thought to be much more important than other ones and the effect of that is to rule out a whole swathe of children who are attracted to those ways of working you know what the hierarchy is at the top are math sciences and languages then the humanities and then the arts and that's true even here in Norway you know the arts are important but not so much theatre and dance because there's another hierarchy in the arts art and music are normally taught more commonly than theatre and dance I don't know many school systems anywhere we're dance is stored everyday routinely to every child in the way we teach them mathematics why you know why we all love to dance don't we why why isn't it part of the education system one reason that means this is because the system is founded on the interests of the industrial economy so there's an idea of utility built right in you know it is like people say to don't do art you won't be an artist don't do music you won't be a musician so deep in the system there's this idea that some subjects are useful and some are useless and the fact of that is to deny children I think access to some of their best talents whether they're interested in science or art this is an argument for everybody the second way in which this happened is we divide these disciplines up and we think that the arts are totally different from the sciences they're really not one of the people I had on my commission in the UK I led a whole strategy though that you heard about earlier was a guy who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry he also runs a design studio and asked him one day what the difference is between the creative process in science and in art in the studio and the laboratory and he said there's no difference whatever it's exactly the same process the outcome is different but the process is the same the closer you get to the Arts and Sciences the more alike they are in many respects but we build system variation which divided them and then set them up into a hierarchy and the third way it happens is through this process of standardized testing of only focus on certain sorts of accomplishment for assessment purposes mainly through letter grades and things of that sort I remember talking to kid years ago who done a five-year programming in contemporary dance and I said what did you get out of it and she said I got a B because that was the message of the system and you know from talking out here these things are built in systematically that's why I say we have to transform it because we then get people come into the system on whom we depend for innovation but have lost their confidence in it and part of the job is to restoring how many of you here again are baby boomers mr. Meighan bands up are over 40 how many of you have had your tonsils removed I don't suppose you've been asked that recently have you doesn't come up socially visit very much really you must be married do you have your tonsils you know it doesn't I've I've asked people all over the world this recently people over the age of 40 and especially people over the age of 50 many of them many of us have had our tonsils taken out is this not the case millions and millions of people in the in the 50s and 60s the 1950s and 1960s had their tonsils removed surgically when I was a kid you couldn't afford to clear your throat in public for fear that somebody would take your tonsils out if you so much as coughed you'd be hospitalized I know people who had their tonsils taken out not because they had a sore throat but because they're one of their siblings did parents would say it would take is out at the same time to save coming back millions of tonsils were removed in the 50s and 60s what happened to them you know we don't know it's a scandal it's not area 51 like one those Rockwell things you know but my point is not that nobody needed to have their tonsils removed but that it was routine for a while these days some kids will have their tonsils taken out because some people need them taken out because it's very critically infected and it's necessary mainly it doesn't happen it used to be routine doctors have thought better of it and what seemed to be an epidemic is now recognized to be an occasional necessity this generation of kids our generation of kids these days do not suffer from the plague of tonsillectomies they suffer them this one this is a map of America as you can see I don't know what the equivalent is at the moment in Europe and certainly don't know about Norway but it'd be interesting to find out this I believe represents the latest fictional demmick that's affecting our children that they suffer from that we didn't but they don't suffer tonsillectomies that they suffer from this one this is the alleged instance in America of attention deficit disorder of ADHD now I don't mean to say that nobody has ADHD doctors believe there is such a thing there are learning papers written about it I'm sure there is such a thing and that some people have it and they probably need help and support what I can't believe is that it's an epidemic that all our kids have got this I don't know what the situation is here now honestly another not the European figures are but in America in the mid-1980s it was estimated that half a million children suffered from ADHD attention deficit disorder the current estimate is eight million it's a three billion dollar bonanza for the drug companies drugs like adderall and Ritalin being handed out to our kids now you can tell right away that this is nonsense because it onto this map the pale areas of weather isn't much and the darker is our weather is more so according to this map there isn't much ADHD in California I live in Los Angeles trust me you know people can't listen for more than a minute in Los Angeles before losing interest recording us there isn't much according to this map people start losing interest roundabouts Oklahoma they completely lose it by the time they get to pass the deep south and when they get to Washington they can't listen at all which may well of course actually be true what this is really showing is a map of prescriptions and what we're finding is that that many schools teachers and parents are administering these drugs because it keeps kids focused on the program but artificially I have a big interest in the arts and I've also mentioned the extent to which in science and mathematics aesthetic experience is central to creative achievement an aesthetic experience is one in which you are fully alert and living in the moment where your senses are alive and you're resonating with the present where you're kind of tingling with the excitement of the moment that you're experiencing the opposite of an aesthetic experience the opposite of aesthetic is an aesthetic an anesthetic is where you close your senses down so you don't feel the discomfort and I think that's what we're doing with our kids where illicit izing far too many kids to keep them with a program and the reason are not paying attention is because the program too often is boring and their minds are working faster than the program and this is an important generational shift how many of you here today are wearing a wristwatch one of these we handle ask a roomful of teenagers the same question kids don't wear watches not the same degree when I said that innovation is not challenging what you take for granted it's hard to know what you take for granted because you take it for granted you know you don't know what you take for granted because you do one things we take for granted is wearing these things I mean did you think it think about did you think about that this morning without a decision putting the watch on were you like I don't know what a dilemma you know shall I add a do I feel it this morning do I feel the time thing happening you know I'll put it on in case somebody asks me you know you don't do it you just put it on kids don't and they don't because for them the time is everywhere everywhere it's on their iPhones it's on their iPods it's on their laptops it's everywhere my daughter's 19 never wears a watch she can't see the point of it she says why would you wear some separate device on your wrist just to tell the time you know like a one function device I mean like how lame is that you know I said no no no it tells the date you know you know it's um it points to a distinction that a chap called Marc Prensky made between digital natives and digital immigrants what he means is if you're over 25 you were born before the digital revolution began and we have learned most of us this digital culture secondhand and we have a kind of passing relationship with it we're okay but our children speak digital they live in a digital culture their mind works at a digital speed they multitask they are using these technologies not just for information but to build our social networks and the latest generation of the Internet isn't just about passive reception but active co-production this is a new world that they're creating with the assistance of those who are driving technology forward and it isn't over this is just what I want to quickly show you when I said there's a revolution there are two big drivers this is one this is a brain cell stylized and this is a brain cell growing on a silicon chip I was speaking to somebody recently from one of the main computer companies who said that the most powerful computer on earth at the moment has the processing power of the brain of a grasshopper now I don't know if that's true but it sounds great doesn't it you should trot this out to your next dinner party and then look confident that's the case oh no no no no no no no no I heard it at a conference in O town in Stavanger oh yeah no the guy was an expert no I don't know if it's true you've got people talking here know more about these things than I do he will confirm it one way or the other but the point he was making is that even the most powerful computers on earth at the moment are impressive because the speed at which they do things not because they think they just do something very quickly and impressively but apparently within a relatively short time the most powerful computers on earth will have the same processing power as the brain of a six-month-old baby he was telling me people differ on how long that will take but in the not-too-distant future and he said and that will be a big shift I said what's the shift he said it'll mean that computers will be capable of learning and what does that mean he said it means they'll be able to rewrite their own operating systems in the light of their experience well that's Skynet isn't it that is Terminator 3 at this point apparently the not-too-distant future according to people like reycarts find others for $1000 we should be able to buy a laptop computer if that's what they are with the same processing power as an adult human brain so how is that going to feel you know I mean you're feeling pretty good at the moment with your iPhone you know but in the not-too-distant future maybe in your working lives you may find yourself sitting in front of a computer a laptop that's as intelligent as you are not as attractive you know but not as in-demand socially yeah but as smart as you are you know you give this thing an instruction and it hesitates yes that's what I don't know you know have you thought this through I'm not sure you have honestly the technological innovations are moving faster than ever and becoming more encompassing that's the other thing that's going on the world's population has doubled in the past thirty years it went from a billion at the begin of the Industrial Revolution to three billion in 1970 then left up to six billion between 1917 2000 and is heading to 9 billion we're at about six and a half billion now the dark bit at the bottom is the growth rate in the industrialized economies so we are losing population while the rest of the world is growing faster than ever so by the middle of the century we may have nine billion people on earth but predominantly in the emergent economies and predominantly digital natives the other thing that's happening is the world is becoming more and more urbanized massive conglomerations of humanity in sprawling mega cities more than at any time in history but they're not going to be groovy cities like Stavanger you know with no Starbucks and information goods they'd be more like this this is Caracas in Venezuela part of Caracas anyway the name of the architect is not known here by the way but greater Tokyo at the moment which does not look like this has a population of 34 million people which is greater than the entire population of Canada in one place so when I say there's a revolution there is it's huge it's gathering force it's driven by technology it's driven by population growth extraordinary demands on the earth's resources unprecedent in the whole course of human history and I believe to meet it we have to think definitely about every capacity of every person that we educate and that we work with this will be a demand on human creativity innovation like never before and at the moment we're systematically stifling the very thing that we're going to depend upon so let me say a quick word about it I think if you're interesting promoting it in education or in your business it's a three part thing it's about developing personal creativity it's about understanding how creative groups work and it's a knowing the cultural circumstance under which people are most likely to give their of their creative capacity and I've done altar work on education systems to show how this might be let me just quickly show this I think this is a great quote it's from Bertrand Russell British philosopher I pick it not because he's British I just happen to like the quote but it seems to me to be the essential question of Western philosophy are we this or over them you know is life meaningless and accidental and random or is it for the purpose and importance I got interest in this first bit the small and unimportant planet bit and we know we know we're a small planet but how small are we do know it's hard to get an idea probably because you get things like this in the Hubble telescope this is an area called the mega lenok cloud now we know that light travels that distance in space and measured in light is this and select light travels in the air this is an area of the sky which is hundreds of thousands of light-years across I think it's seven hundred thousand light-years from one scientist that's big isn't it I mean what can you do with that information except go really honestly what is the cosmos like you know look at that look at the size of it huge this is far you know this is far but how big are we in the middle Wallace well it's very hard to know because of the distances involved so I came across this great set of images on the internet which I want to show you very quickly which I've had rear-ended for your pleasure entertainment which are an attempt to give a sense of the scale of the earth by taking distance out of the equation so what something out the brilliant idea of doing was essentially taking the earth out of the sky and putting on the floor with some other planets like a team photograph you know of the solar system to start with so here it is isn't that fantastic there is the earth looking groovy having bigger than Venus undercover things to mention it right away I mean one of them is I think that we are less worried now than we were about being invaded by Martians armies don't you feel I mean bring it on I think you know try if you dare is what we're feeling Pluto by the way is no longer a planet and frankly we can see why now it's a boulder but pull back a bit more and bring children it's a bit less encouraging I feel don't you hey did you realize that Sandburg Jupiter was um but how big is the Sun compared to the earth I mean is it twice the size of Jupiter three times do you know I didn't know but bring the Sun into the picture and it's all together less encouraging one thing I just want to say immediately by the way I remember Thomas Edison said this why can't we derive all the power we need for this dinky little thing from that enormous thing why are we burning up the ground beneath our feet to keep the planet moving you know it's a thought but keep your eye on the Sun that you pull back a bit more Arcturus is visible in that sky Jupiter's one pixel the earth is gone and what back one more to bring and Antares the Sun is about 1 pixel and Jupiter's invisible and the earth has gone so when you go back here we are in conceivably extraordinarily tiny that's how America sees the cosmos I know because I live and enjoy living there but it's raid there's an awful truth in that now the first thing today now we're going to stop in just minute because then we need to move on but I just want to say a couple quick things the first is this when you reflect on those images of the state the size of the earth whatever you woke up worrying about this morning get over it you know make the call apologize and move on frankly it was it was probably your fault okay but the second thing is this we are nonetheless the species that produced Hamlet and the music of Mozart and quantum mechanics and the internet and 6,000 languages currently spoken on earth and telecommunications and all the extraordinary convoluted achievements of human culture I can put it this way we are able to conceive uniquely of our own insignificance other species are not bothered by these images we are because at the heart of this is this extraordinary human power of imagination and the process that derives from it of creative thinking I think of creativity is putting your imagination to work and innovation is putting good ideas into practice we all have this it's a natural human power and it's what's taking us from caves to conference halls from eating carrion to cuisine and what's produced all the extraordinary efflorescence of human thought and it's the one thing that will take us safely into this future that we can't predict and cultivating it systematically in schools in our businesses and in our communities and understanding that we are no longer dealing with business as usual is absolutely a fundamental challenge it's the challenge of our generations that we should do this and understanding the processes and what will make creatively flourish and what will diminish it is I believe a matter of now high strategic priority I believe from the work I've done that this is a perfectly feasible proposition it's about changing institutions it's about changing our social systems out of the old model of industrial education and organization to a new model actually it's a more ancient model of agriculture human organizations are not like machines though they're often represented that way they are more like organisms they thrive on feelings and sentience and aspirations and motivation and like all organisms they flourish under certain conditions and they wilt under other ones great leaders I believe are not like industrialists they're like farmers farmers know that you cannot make a plan to grow the plant grows itself what you do is create the conditions under which you will do that and it's the same way in every human system as it is in nature I live near Death Valley in California and in 1919 2004 summit remarkable happened it doesn't normally rain in Death Valley so nothing much lives there it rained 7 inches for the first time in 100 years in the spring of 2005 the whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted with it spring flowers people came from all over the world to photograph this extraordinary phenomenon what it proved was the Death Valley wasn't dead it's dormant if you create the conditions for growth the growth will come because it's sitting there beneath the surface the whole time and I believe it's true with human systems too every one of us has this extraordinary power for imaginative development and for creative contemplation and if the conditions are right we'll give it and that they're wrong we'll hold it back and protect ourselves which is what many people do in schools and many people do in our organizations and I believe the challenge the future is to understand these conditions and to make them available to all of us as humanity and I believe it's no less a challenge in that so I really want to applaud Stavanger for hosting the conference for inner town for putting together this extraordinary dialogue to encourage you above all to speak with each other freely about the experiences you've had but to realize at the heart this is a hopeful message that the crisis that we face in the human and natural world have been brought about to a degree by our overreaching our own needs if we reconsider them and bathe them in the creative possibilities that as human beings we can create thing fresh will come of it Michelangelo I think it once was who said the problem for human beings is not that we aim too high and fail it's that we aim too low and succeed and I believe in all of our lives and collectively the time now is to aim high and be sure a success thank you very much
