Leadership requires 21st Century Literacy, Self-discovery & Innovation
By Aditya Dev Sood
During my recent travel around the country visiting different campuses, I asked the young people in the audience if they’re on Facebook. Everyone raises their hands. Twitter? May be a quarter or fewer. Despite the popularity of Facebook, young people in India are not using many of the other social platforms out there: GooglePlus, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare, IFTTT, or even Google Drive.
Social Media can be diverting for sharing content, socialising and flirting, but it can also be an essential tool for organising one’s portfolio of work and sharing it with the wider world. Proficiency with social media, today, means not only being on a network, but actually knowing how to use it to achieve social effects: being able to build a following quickly, being able to run a promotional campaign, being able to create content that goes viral. 21st Century literacy also means light coding, of the kind that can serve to update a Wikipedia article, for example.
To lead in these dynamic times, it is simply not permissible for young people to be ignorant or illiterate of the powers of networked media — they must rather be capable not only of navigating social media, but also bending its logics towards new and creative ends.
Self-Discovery: The Basis of Leadership
What are the elements of leadership which young people in India lack or fail to understand? I’ve spent some time now, working with young people in different ways over the past decade, and I can see three broad areas where they could use help: discover, communicate, interact.
Discover what? Discover themselves. Young people are naturally curious about the world, about ideas that get traffic on the internet, about places they have yet to visit, about experiences they have yet to have. Amidst the lively, sparkling, distracting world around them, they must have the opportunity to discover themselves. What are they good at? What is hard for them? What life-skills do they need to improve to achieve their goals? What are their goals, their passions? What kind of impact do they seek to make in this life?
One important way to sort this out is through writing. Organising one’s thoughts in a linear structure that one can look back upon, share with others, improve upon. Without writing there cannot be sophisticated, reflective, interior thinking. Young people should maintain a blog, share that blog with the world, and so discover their voice.
They should also think about the world and its problems, to search for where new possibilities may remain hidden to improve it. To look within is eventually to discover the world anew, but to now be able to act upon it with vision and purpose.
Innovation: To Design and Develop
At the heart of innovation is a creative process. This is obvious to most young people I’ve talked with, even if they have had no experience actually doing it. But in many cases I’ve been talking to management and engineering students who are now connected to creativity only on account of their youth and their proximity to the unstructured play and joyful interaction that still organises their social interactions. As they move forward in life they will move further and further away from such creativity. At one further point, creativity will become for them a hidden and mystical world, one which they are sometimes forced to engage with, or even worse, be responsible for.
In most emerging economies, the word design is used exclusively to describe the quality of articles of visual consumption: jewelry, apparel, accessories, luxury goods, home fashions, architectural statements. The wider sense of the word as a creative mode of problem solving, systems thinking or data visualization is not really known, nor is its role in product development widely understood.
Let’s understand the role of creativity in the conceptualization of product, service or systems with another word: develop.
If you have an idea, it can be described in a sentence, you write that sentence down on a post-it note. Then you add a little diagram explaining your sentence. Then you think on it some more and you describe it on an A4 sheet of paper with a bunch of sentences and a couple of drawings. Then you make a three-slide powerpoint presentation on it. You show that around and get feedback and develop it further into a ten-slide presentation. Then you write a 30 page paper describing your concept using multiple images, which you submit to get some funding or permissions to build the thing out. Next, you make a virtual model of your solution maybe using a 3-D modeling software. Next, you make a non-working or dummy prototype of your solution. Next, you make a working prototype. Now your description is at 1:1 resolution with your concept. This arc of ‘develop’ has come to its natural resting point.
The challenge for most people is that the arc of develop works counter-intuitively for them. They are most often habituated to using their rational side to ask whether a particular solution will work and how well, not to making a solution using their innate creativity and problem solving genius. At the beginning of the arc there is nothing, only a set of problems. Towards the end there are options with density, the rigor of description, some sense of partial reality. How can something come out of nothing? It remains a mystery for those who have not acknowledged, cultivated and nurtured their creative capabilities.
About the author:
Aditya Dev Sood is chairman of Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation
