So I have been trying to read more, and focus less on technical technology reading more books on a variety of topics. So one that I wanted to check out was the innovator’s mindset.

Right now my family has been going through a lot of changes, and at the forefront of that is the fact that my kids are a school age, we are moving, and I’ve been looking at my approach to tackling innovation and education as the mission of our family is to secure the future of our kids.

Because of that I was really keen to hear options for people use to help guide new innovative learning methods for not just myself but my children as well.

The book interesting mirrors the work of Angela Duckworth, and her book Grit. And Carol Dwreck’s book, Mindset. Both of which I am very familiar with, and enjoyed and have seen value in my life.

The interesting part he points to here is honestly that the education system. Is ripe for disruption. Many schools and institutions cling to the old ways of doing things and are afraid to take risks with how they teach.

The focus of the book is around how we as a society teach problem solving but not problem fighting, the idea of how you look at the world and see that something is wrong. That requires intelligence but more than that requires empathy. The ability to understand how people feel and to gain understanding into their situation and problem.

The intention is then that we should focus on using learning to drive outcomes, because knowledge that is not practical is wasted effort. There needs to be a way for the student or person to absorb that knowledge into the fiber of their being, into their structure of knowledge for application.

The idea of the innovators mindset is that we need to seek alternative viewpoints take risks and recognize that their is a cost to not changing, and know that failure and iterations are a part of that solution.

I enjoyed the focus on how to embrace the idea of taking risks and the kid of challenges you may run into, and overall found this book to be great. I think he focused a little too much of examples that involved social media. This is not a magic silver bullet for education.

But one point I do agree with is his focus on honest and public reflection. The idea of declaring you will do something is a great way of encouraging accountability, but to the authors point, it also encourages us to be more thoughtful of our ideas if we know that others will be reviewing and challenging these ideas. This can lead to a better more thoughtful effort and a crowd sourced solution to problems.

The biggest thing that really landed in our family is that right now the education system is very focused on consumption, and pushing kids to consume what is thrown at them. While this type of learning can work and has its place, there is such a thing as focusing on empowerment. The idea is to take an objective, and help our kids to have the resources to learn everything they need to obtain that objective. It’s an interesting piece of learning but it works.

So how did this help, my daughter, has been struggling with learning her letters in kindergarten, worksheets are like pulling teeth, flash cards are boring. She’s been having a rough time. While listening to this book, I noticed my daughter loves putting on plays and shows at home. So I asked her “let’s make a letter video.” Not only did she get excited but she pushed passed what was required. After practicing her letters making videos and her wanting to practice “for the video.” She took her test and went from struggling to pass 1 list of letters, to passing 2, and almost a third.

It occurs to me this goes beyond kids, in my own profession. Anyone can learn a technology but it becomes a lot easier when you focus on solving a specific problem and direct your learning as such.

There is no better place to learn than the foxhole. Ultimately it leads to much better drivers to success at the end of the day.

The interesting part also was the second half of the book which talked about how to as a leader foster a culture of innovation within your organization. And the key points I would acknowledge here are that the giving peole the freedom to fail, and fail fast. And encouraging your people to take risks. This is something that I’ve been working on in my family and with my kids, and celebrating the fact that they “tried something new”.

Overall I recommend the book, it gave some good ideas with regard to approaching innovation that I found enlightening, provided you can get past the “education system” focus.