Composting and Dancing for a Stronger Community
Baby Steps to Sustainability
We met Paulette one Saturday morning during our weekly village clean ups. When we asked if she’d consider separating her sweeps, - leaves and natural waste to one side and plastics to another, a translated answer came across. “She says she doesn’t care.”
I’m going to take a wild guess and imagine that people in a fishing village in one of the poorest countries in the world do not know much about the chemical mix of plastic waste. There is no garbage collection, no information about waste.
I asked students how long they’ve been throwing trash on the ground. “Depuis toujours,” since forever. No doubt, they are young and have only experienced all waste as equal, to be swept away for burning.
Never Waste a Teachable Moment
“Maybe this lady could use some help,” I say. From English to French to Magasy and back again, a dialoge begins. What are plastics, how are they a problem?
Make Things Better Now
Vegetal waste can be used for gardening. It’s quite incredible that villagers buy tomatoes by the dozens and stack them up for sale along the village streets. Everyone is seemingly unaware tomatoes could be grown at no cost.
What if we grew our own tomatoes?
That creative question is how the new compositing program was born at Wings of Change. Right here on campus we have a vision for a garden and growing our own vegetables. Thanks to a power outage, students were able to break away from class and get the brown team set (branches and leaves). The green team, vegetable peelings followed in preparation for a compost program.
Update on composting to follow.
Tsara Nosy Be
As grace would have it, Paulette is a singer and somewhat of a rombo teacher, a traditional form clapping music in Madagascar. Paulette’s visit to campus was a great success and inspiration to keep going.
Nothing like collaborative learning and a bit of real world problem solving. Movement in the direction of intention is how visions become realities. With our own garden, we will be able to teach others.
Misotra
Thank you Paulette, for staying open to what we had to say about separating garbage. And thank you for the rombo and dancing.
Tanya is a facilitator for creative processes in problem solving and educator. This blog captures Tanya’s experience as a visiting instructor in Nosy Be.
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Ambatozavavy resident Paulette
Composting initiative at Wings of Change
Wings of Change is a vocational hospitality school and hotel social enterprise with a dual mission of transformation through education and impacting the community.
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Class Notes on Creative Thinking Skills
What’s in an idea? Too soon to tell.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
And that’s the point.
Ideation, and particularly brainstorming is well known for generating a lot of ideas. We often think of ideas as lightbulbs, right?! Why is that? Not sure. It has something to do with a sense becoming suddenly alive with something, a thought, a fleeting, random, incomplete concept that flies across consciousness.
So here’s a question: how many different kinds of lights are there? Really, think about it for a second.
There’s quite a few different lights out there, actually!
Ideation is simply about drumming up lots and lots (and we do mean lots) of ideas.
Often this is an out-loud activity, but it doesn’t have to be. Ideas can be written too!
WoC students practice brain writing to generate ideas.
Ideas are so useful. And they are incomplete. Random thoughts, in all their glorious wild and crazy forms at this point are welcome. That’s what generating ideas is all about.
It’s important during ideation not to judge. Oh no - don’t do that. That would be like saying you don’t like liquorish before you’ve tried it. Another (creative) question, in that situation would be more like, “What might be all the other flavors that could be made that might delight the palate?!”
Class Notes of Creative Thinking Skills
Formulating Challenges
How to get from here to there?
A map is an obvious answer.
What if there is no map? No Google Maps? No Wifi?
What if there is no obvious answer? Ugh.
How to achieve a goal, wish or challenge is a challenge in and of itself. This is why spending time on discovering what is in-between the current state and the desired future state is important.
There is a gap between now and the future desired state. What might be all the things in the way, as obstacles or as unforeseen challenges?
What must be overcome to achieve the goal?
A strategic gap analysis identifies critical issues that must be addressed in order to achieve the goal. This is what formulating challenges is all about and the real problems start to emerge.
One way to become fluent in English is to listen to music. Seems like a great idea. It’s fun. And free. Music is readily available online. And yet, as full time students, there is not much time to listen to music, let alone study it in detail as a process for building fluency.
In fact, time is a barrier to learning English through music. Spending time on learning English through music is a roadblock to learning hospitality skills.
The creative process is fluid. Stopping, restarting and iteration is all a part of the creative process.
Back to the proverbial drawing board…
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How to get from here to there? What’s standing in the way?
What’s in the way of the vision?
Hospitality Skills at Wings of Change
Class Notes on Creative Thinking Skills
Exploring the Vision
Identifying Goals, Wishes and Challenges
If we are to start at the beginning of the creative process, this is the time to vision, to imagine and to dream about hopes and desires for a future ideal state.
Imagining what is desirable activates a mindset focused on possibility. Many, if not all of the things we have now began as an imagined thought. Imagine that!!
Through Visionary Thinking
Imagine a magazine or newspaper front cover a year from now with your vision. What would it say?
Let’s say becoming fluent in English is the headline. Seems pretty reasonable, if not a stretch for an ESL cohort. For now anyway.
And this is why visions matter.
Act Toward the Direction of Intention
With a vision in mind, a destination is set. It may be far out in the distance. It may seem lofty or even far-fetched. That’s fine. That is what visions are: big hairy audacious goals or BHAGs.
Unconstrained free thinking in order to expand horizons beyond what might be normally considered…yep, that’s where visions have the headspace to emerge.
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Exploring the Vision
Visionary BHAG
Statement starters for visionary thinking:
“It would be great if…”
“Wouldn’t it be great if…”
To explore negative images of the future:
“It would be awful if…”
Notes on Creativity Through English
Defer Judgment
How we think matters.
The piece is silly, weird, ambiguous
and yet somehow recognizable.
The piece is also correct.
This drawing is an experience in what it is like to defer judgment.
Thinking matters
A new season brings a new cohort to Wings of Change. New faces, new opportunities and new perspectives to see things differently, are always available to us.
Knowing how to see things differently is exactly the right approach in sharing with students how they might approach their own learning. In becoming more creative, students develop a capacity for original thought and can become better problem solvers.
for Problem Solving.
A lot of problem solving is sequential. That is to say, a lot of problems follow a pattern, a structure, a sequence of tasks in order to achieve the final goal. Cooking, addition and running a hotel are examples of challenges that require a capacity for sequential thinking and doing.
Sequencial problem solving is important!
A lot of problem solving is also resolving something complex and unclear. Unclear, because a lot of solutions are possible and ucovering what solution is best is the real problem. A sudden (think COVID) or particularly complex (think COVID again) situation can throw us for a loop and then thinking clearly for any solution can be a challenge. Pausing and having a toolkit for processing information is key in crafting a desired outcome. This is where creative capacity matters.
Complex problems are everywhere!
The Creative Process
More optimistically, exploring what possiblities are out there before possibly considering what decision could or should be made is central to what the creative process is all about.
How to cook is different from deciding what to put on the menu. How to cook is creative certainly, and is also highly sequential. What might all the dishes to put on the menu… well, now that just opens the door to infinite possiblity right there. Of course contraints and requirements such as budget and resources play a significant part in that decision making, but I digress…
Defers Judgment
We kick off each new cohort at Wings of Change in deferring judgment. That’s what the drawing is about. Deferring judgment means to delay any decision making, to put off deciding just about anything, until a decision would need to be made.
Take towels for example. Room towels can be folded in any number of ways.
There’s the standard square towel fold. And then there’s crazy fun towel folds such as flowers, lizards, elephants and the like. Like napkin folding, there seems to be endless possiblites of towel folding.
Exploring what might be possible is a great way, perhaps the best way to then determine what idea stands out and could be developed into a solution.
Allowing Something Novel and Useful to Emerge.
When shown some options, the lizard towel fold always gets the most laughs among students. I wonder how towel folding might serve as a good example in creative thinking and problem solving. I can imagine there will be some practice needed, failures for sure and eventually, something novel and useful will emerge as a cool towel fold…who knows, we may end up something even more interesting than a towel lizard.
Of course, to get to the right towel fold decor, deferring jugdment will have to happen. Some folds may be too complicated, too time consuming, too crazy etc… Let’s explore and see what happens!
Building a Virtuous Cycle Through Creativity in English
“Today, you are going to make a bicycle.”
This was the only direction the 53 students received on their tropical island out in the Indian Ocean.
I like kicking off classes with a challenge. Infact, starting with a problem has become a thing in Creativity Through English, a leadership course that teaches English alongside problem solving.
To be clear, the students were not tasked with making a bike as we know it. Instead, students go out into their school courtyard and have to figure out how they could collaborate to make a bike in human form.
Tableaux vivants, living pictures, are silent and motionless groups of people arranged to represent a scene or an incident. They were popular in the 1800’s and are often a component of improv classes today. The making of human scenes that replicate famous paintings, movie scenes or events freeze a physical depiction of a moment in time.
Throw creative license into a creativity class and this group of students decided their living picture should move. Makes sense. After all, one of main features of a bicycle is that it moves. Open the video link to see it.
So, what might be all the ways to make a bicycle in human form? That is what the students had to figure out. The purpose of the question is to develop problem solving and leadership skills.
First, making a human bike is a very ambiguous challenge. Tolerance for ambiguity is key in becoming a creative thinker. There are two kinds of problems, linear and open-ended. Certainly there are many sequential processes in life and in work. In developing leadership skills, processes for resolving challenges that are both unclear and have many possible solutions is a key 21st century skill.
Here’s the creativity ground rules for generating lots of possibilities when problem solving.
First, defer judgment. The task could be crazy, unclear and questionable. Unless it’s two plus two and clearly sequential, a lot of life both professionally and personally is ambiguous. Deferring judgment enables a growth mindset and an openness to what might be. Make decisions only well after a lot of options have been uncovered.
Second, strive for quantity. In quantity, there is quality. Coming up with great ideas is formulaic and called the rule of thirds. The first third ideas are obvious. The second third are a bit of a stretch, but still pretty familiar. It is in the last third that something novel emerges. In quantity there is quality. Lots of trial and error happened to get that human bike into a living picture.
Third, seek wild and unusual ideas. The task may be crazy; the solution may be unclear. For creative thinking to work its magic, it's important to go for it when brainstorming or ideating. Osborn, who coined the term Brainstorming, said it’s easier to tame a wild idea than to invigorate a weak one. Stretch thinking for wild ideas when looking for something new. The answer is likely in that last third.
Fourth and last, build on others’ ideas. It is in combining, improving and building up possible options that a rich pool of thoughts become a critical resource from which crafting the end goal becomes easier.
And they did it! The students completed the task with not only one, but five versions of a human bike. A virtuous cycle for good is happening in real time at Wings of Change.
A+ students for tolerating ambiguity, for going for it, and for completing the task with novel solutions that add value to your ability in becoming leaders through Creative Problem Solving.
Wings of Change is a social enterprise with a virtuous vision to impact impoverished communities through education and empowerment with employment opportunities in responsible tourism that align with all 17 of the UN Sustainability Goals. Nosy Be, the Wings of Change flagship property, is a vocational hospitality school and boutique hotel. www.wingsofchange.co
Tanya Knudsen is a Creativity Consultant and PhD Student for Creative Leadership. She teaches problem solving at Wings of Change and the International Friends School in Bellevue, WA.
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Tolerance for Ambiguity, Works Every Time
Tolerance for ambiguity is one of the basic rules for a creative mindset. It’s right up there with deferring judgment and being open to novelty.
I’ve got to shout out my addendum to the mantra because it’s true. Tolerance for ambiguity truly does work each and every time.
Take this zoom chat box, for example. Tech issues on my end interfered with the audio during a recent class. After trouble shooting, comes tolerating. Fortunately, I know this now. A former me would not have taking such a glitch so well during a live class.
Flipping the classroom is an opportunity for the students to take over and did they ever in spite of tech problems. A beautiful series of storytelling emerged, (hello raising student talk time) and corrections were delivered in the chat box. Guess what? Teaching via chat box works! The ability to speak at will is what fluency is all about. What may have been a setback turned out to be a new insight into teaching remotely.
High student talk time. Check plus. Facilitator teacher. Check yeah!
5/25/21
Purpose for doing good combined with imaginative processes brings novel solutions into real game changing reality. That’s what I am about. Its called a new Ph balance.
Purpose plus how for new solution finding.
Purpose and processes could be perfect partners for social innovation. A compelling ‘why,’ is leads to purposeful work. Purposeful work, any work, is a minefield, however. Process in work is decisive in shaping outcome. A new Ph balance combines purpose with imaginative processes for novel solution finding. Useful and novel solutions edge old patterns instigating action in the direction of intention and resolution.
To have purpose is to have a compelling ‘why.’ Compelling is key, because a burning desire to do anything is the absolute guarantor for getting anything done. Purpose has value, meaning. Intrinsic motivation the the driving force to get a job done.
Finding a path toward purposeful work takes a two-pronged creative approach.
First, how does the problem solver think? What is their energy wave when tackling a challenge? It is at the beginning, do they want to complete the task and just get it done, or is it something else? Know anyone who asks a million annoying questions? That’s a different and important kind of energy to solve problems.
Knowing what part of the challenge energizes us for problem solving helps in two ways. First, knowing what we are good at is always great. We feel good doing what comes naturally to us. Second, knowing where we have gaps is awesome for building a well-rounded team.
Second, what might be all the ways to solve a problem? How do we know what exactly the problem is? Creative, or imaginative thinking for problem has been around for decades. The real beauty of imaginative thinking is the opportunity to shape outcome. Creative thinking is the new lingua franca to discover and craft a novel solution that is both unique and practical.
The Ph balance is the key to growing plants aeroponically. Get this right and the system mostly will take care of itself.
How might a new Ph Balance, where social innovation or doing good can emerge through the unlimited potential of applied imagination? That is the question for our times.
The world is a mess. Our creativity got us here. It can get us out. Let’s get some creativity on for novel solutions. Our quality of life depends on how we respond to the creations we have made.