I recently returned from a two day technology conference in New York thinking about how to action the ‘Big Idea” I was lucky enough to stand up and present to the audience.
The conference was the usual mix of technology vendors, consultants, experts and users brought together under one roof to show off their latest products and innovation. Spread throughout the two day ‘educational’ part of the conference program were a series of vendor sponsored, independent expert and discussion panel sessions.
I was asked to participate in three different panels, two of which were of the usual sort but the third and final panel which happened to be the ‘grand finale’ of the conference was designed to be a little different. Unusually there were thirteen panelists; far too many to orchestrate a focused discussion around. Instead the conference organizers had asked each of panelists to think ‘out-of-the-box’ and give a two minute pitch on the next big earth shattering idea that was going to take us forward.
The line up of fellow panelists was pretty daunting! CTO’s, CEO’s, tech experts, many of the ‘who’s who’ of our industry. However I was honored and excited to be involved so I got to work trying to think about the next big idea that would take not just technology but the human race forward in a leap and a bound rather than a small incremental step.
I came up with all sorts of ideas but I knew every single one of them were not original thoughts for me and indeed many I’d used before at conferences when asked what I thought the future held for the tech industry. Almost all were specific to IT and Data Centers because that’s the industry within which I work so my mind is filled with the day-to-day challenges that this industry faces and thoughts around how we might solve those challenges.
I knew I wasn’t therefore thinking outside the box.
I realized my thoughts were being bounded by the world I was living in and an industry I’ve worked in for almost 20 years. It’s not surprising I was having trouble thinking beyond my own self-imposed boundaries. I thought about this more and realized that my whole career and in fact my education too had charted me course directly to where I find myself today.
I thought back to when I was a child and how my imagination used to run wild with seemingly crazy and impossible ideas. I thought about how my own 9-year-old son is exactly like that today. He’s young enough to not really know the boundaries of our world today. Then I was struck by a profound thought that every parent watching his or her children growing up must have at some point. That was that as he grows up and gets educated, the education system he’s in is teaching him from a huge learned knowledge base built up from thousands of years of historic learning.
The system he’s in teaches him very little about the future. Why? Because we don’t really know what the future holds. While we can, and many do, speculate, it’s very hard to get it right as we all know, predicting the future is not a science!
I thought back to my school days and how the world was back then. Compared to the world we live in today, the changes driven mostly by technology is spectacular, much of the technology we take for granted today, we considered impossible just a decade or two ago.
I decided to turn to my son for inspiration as his world was not constrained by the years of education that is shortly to be programmed into him. It made me realise that we are educating our kids the wrong way, with too much focus on ‘learned’ knowledge and not enough focus on skills to learn new things. That’s another story and perhaps a blog for another time though.
Getting back to my big idea for my panel I decided to ask my son for his help. I didn’t ask him for his ideas on solving a specific issue or problem; instead we talked about his views on technology in the future and how that might impact his life.
Of course a lot of his thinking is shaped by the world he lives in, which today is roughly 25% the actual physical world he lives in, 25% the futuristic world shaped by the virtual world he watches on YouTube and Netflix – he’s a fan of watching (and playing Minecraft), the New Avengers, Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Wars -the Clone Wars, etc. – the remaining 50% is his pure and almost unbounded imagination.
I love watching the 50% imagination in action because it brings back memories from my own childhood. Watching his make Lego into almost anything he can imagine and then play with that Lego in a completely imaginary world is amazing! Its also slightly sad to think that as he gets older and more ‘educated’ that 50% is highly likely to get reduced and eventually squeezed down to maybe 5-10% if he’s lucky.
My son spends a lot of time ‘playing’ Minecraft like many kids his age. I often hear parents and other adults saying they don’t understand the game at all or the point of it. I’ve taken the time to understand what it is about Minecraft that captivates them so much. I’ve join