Creative Leaders at RISD from John Maeda on Vimeo.
RISD Website
I came across this video that looks at how some design students from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) simply define leadership as "people that bring people together"...
RISD Website
RISD Website
I took the Belbin Team Roles assessment the other week. For those who are not familiar with the assessment Belbin suggests that, by understanding your team role within a particular team, you can develop your strengths and manage your weaknesses as a team member, and so improve how you contribute to the team.
The Pla
nt is the creative innovator who comes up with new ideas and approaches. The plant is a specialist idea maker characterised by high IQ and introversion while also being dominant and original. The plant tends to take radical approaches to team functioning and problems. Plants are more concerned with major issues than with details.
I am not sure what I am going to do with this information at the moment. My boss used a great analogy about really enjoying reading horoscopes but taking it with a pinch of salt and using it as a talking point rather than a something to rule your life by.
Team leaders and team development practitioners often use the Belbin model to help create more balanced teams. Teams can become unbalanced if all team members have similar styles of behavior or team roles.
If team members have similar weakness, the team as a whole may tend to have that weakness. If team members have similar team-work strengths, they may tend to compete (rather than co-operate) for the team tasks and responsibilities that best suit their natural styles. So you can use the model with your team to help ensure that necessary team roles are covered, and that potential behavioral tensions or weaknesses among the team member are addressed.
So I went through the assessment and I came out as a Plant! So to give you an idea of my what my 'default' behaviour is I have described it below...
The Pla
nt is the creative innovator who comes up with new ideas and approaches. The plant is a specialist idea maker characterised by high IQ and introversion while also being dominant and original. The plant tends to take radical approaches to team functioning and problems. Plants are more concerned with major issues than with details.I am not sure what I am going to do with this information at the moment. My boss used a great analogy about really enjoying reading horoscopes but taking it with a pinch of salt and using it as a talking point rather than a something to rule your life by.
"Do you want a collection of brilliant minds or a brilliant collection of minds?"
Further Reading:
Official Belbin Website
Official Belbin Website
This quote resonates with me at the moment...
"Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better."
King Whitney Jr
"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
Pablo Picasso
A teacher is holding court at the front of her class of students. She gives the children arts materials and paper and asks them to draw whatever they like. After 20 minutes of walking around and looking at pictures of cars and flowers she comes to a girl at the back of the room. The teacher asks the girl what she is drawing; she replies with enthusiasm "I am drawing a picture of God..." "Well that is interesting, but how can you draw God when no one knows what God looks like?" replied the teacher. The girl looked up with a determined glance and said "Well, everyone will know now because I have drawn Him!"
This story has been told to me many times through various guises but its message still rings with poignancy; young people's education is becoming less and less creative.
I was recently in discussion with some emerging leaders from across the UK and we were discussing just this. Our experience of the education system is too fragmented and is focused too much on literacy and maths; creativity has a bad name.
My personal experience of working in schools is that teachers are over worked, not encouraged to think outside of the box and are made to focus on exam results. There is far too much going on for teachers and and students to lift their heads from the education trough to even start to think about learning. I also have seen some amazing creative work that has young people engaging in education that stimulates and gets to the core of what great education is all about.
Sir Ken Robinson sums this thinking up very articulately at a TED conference in 2006. I would highly advise watching the video:
Ken Robinson - Do Schools Kill Creativity?
This post is the first of many about my belief that the formal education structure within the UK needs to change, where creativity is encouraged and embedded within young peoples learning.
Read More:
A teacher is holding court at the front of her class of students. She gives the children arts materials and paper and asks them to draw whatever they like. After 20 minutes of walking around and looking at pictures of cars and flowers she comes to a girl at the back of the room. The teacher asks the girl what she is drawing; she replies with enthusiasm "I am drawing a picture of God..." "Well that is interesting, but how can you draw God when no one knows what God looks like?" replied the teacher. The girl looked up with a determined glance and said "Well, everyone will know now because I have drawn Him!"
This story has been told to me many times through various guises but its message still rings with poignancy; young people's education is becoming less and less creative.
I was recently in discussion with some emerging leaders from across the UK and we were discussing just this. Our experience of the education system is too fragmented and is focused too much on literacy and maths; creativity has a bad name.
My personal experience of working in schools is that teachers are over worked, not encouraged to think outside of the box and are made to focus on exam results. There is far too much going on for teachers and and students to lift their heads from the education trough to even start to think about learning. I also have seen some amazing creative work that has young people engaging in education that stimulates and gets to the core of what great education is all about.
Sir Ken Robinson sums this thinking up very articulately at a TED conference in 2006. I would highly advise watching the video:
Ken Robinson - Do Schools Kill Creativity?
This post is the first of many about my belief that the formal education structure within the UK needs to change, where creativity is encouraged and embedded within young peoples learning.
Read More:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)