Designing and Thinking for the real world

There is this story is about mosquito nets distribution in Africa, by Tim Brown of IDEO, that demonstrates that the best placed intentions can have the most mismatched and ill results.

“The nets are well designed and when used are effective at reducing the incidence of malaria. The World Health Organization praised the nets,
crediting them with significant drops in malaria deaths in children under age 5: a 51 percent decline in Ethiopia, 34 percent decline in Ghana, and 66 percent decline in Rwanda.6 The way that the mosquito nets have been distributed, however, has had unintended consequences.

In northern Ghana, for instance, nets are provided free to pregnant women and mothers with children under age 5. These women can readily pick up free nets from local public hospitals. For everyone else, however, the nets are difficult to obtain.

When we asked a well-educated Ghanaian named Albert, who had recently contracted malaria, whether he slept under a mosquito net, he told us no—there was no place in the city of Tamale to purchase one. Because so many people can obtain free nets, it is not profitable for shop owners to sell them. But hospitals are not equipped to sell additional nets, either.

As Albert’s experience shows, it’s critical that the people designing a program consider not only form and function, but distribution channels as well. One could say that the free nets were never intended for people like Albert—that he was simply out of the scope of the project. But that would be missing a huge opportunity. Without considering the whole system, the nets cannot be widely distributed, which makes the eradication of malaria impossible.”

These missed opportunities, although an obvious omission in hindsight, is all too common. Time and again, initiatives falter because they are not based on the client’s or customer’s needs and have never been prototyped to solicit feedback. Even when people do go into the field, they may enter with preconceived notions of what the needs and solutions are. This flawed approach remains the norm in both the business and social sectors.

Dan Ariely, an American economist, did a study of some MIT students.

He gave these MIT students a bunch of games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. They then offered them, depending on performance, three levels of rewards - small, medium and large reward. If you do really well you get the large reward.

What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skills, bonuses worked as they would be expected to: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what governments and education systems do. And what is worrying, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that educationists are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. If we really want to get out of this mess, and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things - to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.

Scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach, built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they're interesting and because they are part of something important. That proposed new operating system for our education system orbits three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Autonomy - the urge to direct our own lives.

Purpose – directing our mastery into a drive to achieve in the service of something larger than ourselves because we believe in a cause that is greater than our own.

Mastery - the desire to get better and better at something that matters derived from our own autonomous urges.

Education Systems are not trees. They are computers. Somebody invented them. It doesn't mean they are going to work forever. Traditional Education systems are great if you want compliance and people who do not know how to think. If you want engagement, and autonomy, purpose and mastery- self-direction works better.

Dan Pink has something to say about this too.

“Google has 20 Percent Time, where engineers can spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique - radical amounts of autonomy. At Google, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20 Percent Time. Things like Gmail, Orkut and Google News.

Another system is the Results Only Work Environment - The ROWE. It was created by two American consultants, in place at about a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional.

What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, and turnover goes down. Autonomy, purpose and mastery- these are the building blocks of a new way of doing things and a new way of learning. Now some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice. But it's Utopian."

There is proof.

In the mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives.  They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later another encyclopedia got started. Different model and do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a Euro or a Ringgit. They did it because they enjoyed doing it.

Now if you had, just 10 years ago, gone to a human being, anywhere, and said, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober person anywhere on planet Earth, who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.”

There is another very important and hugely interesting experiment that was conducted in India a few years ago, called, “Hole in the wall”. Simply put, Dr. Sugata Mitra of NIIT India, placed computers and touch pads into walls all over India, stood back, and watched, recorded what happened. After replicating this experiment all over India, Dr. Mitra proposed a learning idea called Minimally Invasive Education.

“Minimally Invasive Education™ (MIE) is a solution that uses the power of collaboration and the natural curiosity of children to catalyze learning. It is defined as a pedagogic method that uses the learning environment to generate an adequate level of motivation to induce learning in groups of children, with minimal, or no, intervention by a teacher.”

The core idea behind MIE is that groups of children are able to learn on their own without any direct intervention from teachers. Dr. Mitra found that children using a Hole-in-the-wall Learning Station required little or no inputs from teachers and learnt on their own by the process of exploration, discovery and peer coaching. The idea of MIE has been fine-tuned over a period of time based on observations and educational experiments conducted at NIIT.

MIE uses the intrinsic motivations in children and provides an enabling, autonomous environment where they can learn on their own, thereby providing purpose leading to mastery. While experimenting with the Learning Station, children pick up critical problem solving skills. Most importantly, the learning occurs in a collaborative setting where children can share their knowledge and in the process, inherent group dynamics, and a process of self-selection, culminates in a highly organized educational environment.

Conventional pedagogy focuses on many teachers’ abilities to disseminate information in a classroom setting, where NO autonomy and purpose leading to mastery might be achieved. MIE though, complements a formal schooling environment by providing a much needed balance for a child to learn on his own and self-selecting to move on to higher levels of wisdom and achievements..

Dan Pink concludes by saying this.

This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. There is intrinsic (bottom-up) versus extrinsic (top-down) motivators. There is autonomy, purpose and mastery versus carrot and sticks.

Who wins? 

Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, purpose and mastery– every single time!

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what education and management systems in all its forms do. And here is what science knows, and research has proven.

One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of education; do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive - the drive to do things for their own sake and the drive to do things because they matter.

Here's the best part. We already know this. 

The science confirms what we know in our minds. So, if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what education does instead, if we bring our motivation into the 21st century, if we can get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can radically transform and strengthen our education systems. The candle problem and its findings confirm this.

We can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world. Design Thinking, using the candle problem and a whole host of case studies that any one of us could pick almost at random, clearly demonstrates that we are able to think and design what learners need. Political will and motivations are lacking though, and this stands in the way to users changing the world versus letting it continue to slide into personal ambitions and greed.