Production Mindsets Vs Design Mindsets in Education
Edition #054
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The Newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
If Your Favourite App Disappeared, How Would You Spend That Time?
In this fascinating article from Kellogg Insight, Prof. Guy Aridor writes about the research on how customers would behave if their favourite apps disappeared! This is important as companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube do not charge for access to their platforms but instead sell audience attention to advertisers within the so-called attention market. So, it is vital to understand how app substitution works.
Here are some interesting points to think about and learn from this study:
People readily switched to other categories of apps, partly because many apps span multiple categories.
Does Digital addiction alter the choice of app substitutes?
Does inertia minimise how often users seek out new, less prominent digital apps as substitutes?
One interesting question to think about is - “If I am an executive at Twitter or Meta, are we competing just with TikTok or YouTube?”
Read the full article here.
The State of Indian Education – Outdated Systems, Flawed Teaching Methods and Myopic Parenting
In this enlightening episode with Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, a pioneering IVF Specialist, Angel Investor and Social Impact Entrepreneur, he draws our attention to some critical challenges with the present education system with some arresting arguments and recommending some alternate education models.
These are some of the points worth thinking about from this conversation:
Why do we need to break the mould of one-size-fits-all education
Schooling teaches us a lot of bad habits, which we are unlearning as adults
How parents are burdening their kids with their unfulfilled ambitions
It’s not the kids who are failing. It’s the schools that are failing the kids!
Why should kids put up with terrible teachers in schools?
You can listen to the entire episode to think about and reimagine everything about your long-held beliefs on education and learning.
How Every-Day Interactions Shape Our Future
In this TED Talk, Social psychologist Prof. Mesmin Destin talks about how words can shrink, expand and transform the person we are talking to.
It is essential to show possibilities to people every time you interact with them and lead them up that path which helps them aspire, dream and drive them towards their passion and interests. Your words should be something other than a speed breaker to their dreams or interests!
Just click and watch the above video.
Production Mindsets Vs Design Mindsets in Education
We often follow templates to standardise what needs to be done and ‘Idiot-Proof’ many processes so that anybody can do it quickly and without errors. However, production-type methods of designing, building and scaling people do not always give you similar incredible results, as humans are more complicated than machines!
The thinking of standardisation and templates seems to have emerged from the industrialised era, where every work was seen as ‘components’ and needed a standard way of getting it done. However, as we moved to the information era, many practices of the industrialised age continued to be done without giving adequate thought to their impact and value.
One such thing is education. Society is following a standard template for educating kids right from early schooling to their college education. What standard templates do is, it disregards the innate creative and imaginative capability of the individual. First, it assumes that everybody’s learning capacity is the same. Second, it assumes everyone is a ‘product of an assembly line’. Third, it assumes ‘education and skills can be mass produced’. Hence, this thinking has led to a scenario like a stockyard with millions of cars or products waiting to be shipped. The current education system fills the ‘People Stockyard’ with millions of professionals and graduates like engineers, doctors, lawyers, economists, accountants, management professionals, statisticians, nurses, psychologists, designers etc.
Unfortunately, the education system is creating a relatively more significant majority of stockpiles of poor-quality ‘People Products’ who are not first convinced about what they are doing or have been asked to do or forced to do, hence unprepared, less adequately motivated and interested in what they are supposed to do or excel at. They may still have all the ingredients and possess great potential, but they are like ‘Square Pegs in a Round hole’.
What’s more, parents believe that standard templates of school and college education, learning methods, curriculum, assessments and degrees are a surefire way to succeed or reduce any potential chance of career failure. However, they realise after some time that this is not the reality they have to deal with. The individuals, too, come to terms with this misalignment after many years.
We must realise grooming kids and individuals vastly differ from creating products through machines. They must be inspired, carefully nurtured, and sufficiently customised, but they must be flexible and adaptable in developing, mentoring and directing them.
Any standard templates and blueprints don’t work with humans or will fail when we apply them with a ‘Production Mindset’. We need to adopt a ‘Design Mindset’ when it comes to developing humans, where there is a lot of play, a feeling of unsureness of what can be expected as an output before we get one, try and explore a lot of options, see what fits best for the problem at hand, develop and junk many possibilities but the final piece that comes out is done with a lot of conviction and belief. In the designer’s mind, the final work is one of a kind and cannot be applied to anybody else.
Education and realising the true potential of humans need a design mindset rather than a production mindset.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Studying digital adoption, usage, retention, and switch journeys can provide interesting insights and perspectives on customer lock-in and relationships.
Education methods and systems require a reboot and rethink.
Don’t forget the power of your words and their impact on the person. Your words must create possibilities rather than bottlenecks in their minds.