Engaging learners

Creative abrasion

/ Susan Hendrich / 1 Comment

Opposites Attract

This decade-old article by Fast Company’s Katharine Mieszkowski crackles with creative intensity and wisdom…

Sometimes the right person for the job is two people. So argues auto designer Jerry Hirshberg, whose world-renowned studio hires people in pairs to spark “creative abrasion.” 

 

When Tom Semple starts to design a new car, he clears away all traces of earlier projects. He relishes the freedom of a blank sheet of paper. He might glance at some engineering specs or a marketing report. But what he’s searching for is artistic intuition: design means inventing entirely new forms. When Allan Flowers starts to design a new car, he worries about nuts and bolts – literally. He conducts a methodical assessment of potential components and materials, of schedules and priorities. For Flowers, form follows function: design means understanding how things work.

Don’t let the differences fool you. Semple, 53, and Flowers, 56, work in the same organization. In fact, they’ve worked on the same projects for 18 years. They were hired as a pair – not in spite of their differences but because of them. They are one of two-dozen odd couples creating vehicles of the future at Nissan Design International (NDI), the influential studio based in La Jolla, California.

Jerry Hirshberg, NDI’s founder and president, calls this practice “hiring in divergent pairs.” When it comes to creativity, he argues, the best person for the job is often two people – people who see the world in utterly different ways. “I believe in creative abrasion,” says Hirshberg, 58, who began his career nearly 35 years ago as a “paid renegade” for General Motors. “And I mean abrasion. We have titans in their fields going at each other: ‘I’m sorry, I see the project this way. The way you’re approaching it is just absurd.’ That friction can produce wonderful creative sparks.”

Those sparks have been flying at NDI http://www.nissan-design.com for nearly 20 years. Hirshberg left GM in 1979 to create Nissan’s first design studio in the United States. Since then his organization has produced a stream of trend-setting innovations, including the Pathfinder sport utility vehicle, the Infiniti series, and the Mercury Villager minivan. More than 4 million cars designed by NDI are on the road today. The shop has won countless awards. Hirshberg is recognized as a design visionary. And he’s about to publish a book, The Creative Priority: Driving Innovation in the Real World (Harper- Business, February 1998), about his approach to creativity.

That approach begins with his creative ideas about hiring. And like most new ideas, “hiring in divergent pairs” began by accident. After Nissan recruited him from GM, Hirshberg had to find great designers to join him. Semple and Flowers, both of whom had worked for Hirshberg in Detroit, agreed to join the new venture — which was about the only thing they did agree on. “They were spectacularly gifted but utterly different,” Hirshberg says. “They were from different solar systems.”

That creative tension quickly began paying dividends. The pair’s first big project in the early ’80s was to design a killer-looking light truck that would not only wow Nissan’s leadership in Tokyo but also win over the mass market in the United States. Semple dreamed up a truck with a muscular body reminiscent of the sports cars of that era. Flowers created a more rational prototype. The Nissan brass chose Semple’s design. But the truck that rolled o/ the assembly line incorporated a key component of Flowers’s design in its truck bed.

“Bringing these two together created an immediate vitality, a crackling intensity,” Hirshberg says. “Each approached a project with utterly different priorities and workstyles. The pairing was so successful that we said, ‘Let’s keep doing this.'”

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/12/rftf.html

Would You Stop to Listen?

/ Susan Hendrich / 5 Comments

Would You Stop to Listen?

A man sat at a metro station in Washington, DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousand of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. Three minutes went by and a middle-aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.
The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.
Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of an social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?
One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

– From The Effective Club

Writing effective scenario questions

/ Susan Hendrich / 3 Comments

Want to increase the quality of your assessment questions? Think stories!

Scenario-based evaluation questions help the learner to really think about the content, not just regurgitate facts or data. Check out this easy plan for constructing good scenario questions:

Hendrich’s ABCD Model for Constructing Effective Scenario Questions

·        Actor/Audience – Who is in the situation? Who is involved?

·        Behavior – What situation are they in? What are they trying to or unable to do?

·        Condition – Under what circumstances or context is the actor behaving or hoping to behave?

·        Dilemma/Decision – What decision must the actor make? What dilemma is s/he facing?

Examples of ABCD Question Stems

Below are some example questions which include Actor(s)/Audience (A), Behavior (B), Condition (C), and Dilemma/Decision(D). Note that the order of presentation of each component is not important.

  • “Dr. Chang is considering prescribing a blood pressure medication for Jim, who has a comorbid liver disorder. What class of medications is Dr. Chang likely to choose?“
  • “Meryl stopped taking her antidepressant, because she did not like the sexual side effects. What class of medications was Meryl likely taking?“
  • “Ernesto has not found any success with two different SSRIs and is worried that he’ll never find relief.  What might Dr. Cerilski tell him?“

Now it’s your turn…try writing an ABCD scenario question today!