when my son Sam was four he had a pet
Minnillo now I know what you’re
armadillos aren’t indigenous to the
Pacific Northwest and for that matter I
actually never saw Sam’s armadillo for
starters it lived in the hall closet and
it was invisible so it had that going
for it as well I may have never seen
Sam’s armadillo but it inspired me to
write and illustrate a children’s story
called Sam the lion about a boy and his
imaginary friends among which was an
armadillo now unfortunately this work
never saw the light of day I had a lot
of fears that held me back from
finishing it I’ve heard failure if your
judgment I’ve heard feedback I wanted it
to be perfect and so it literally sits
on the Shelf today unfinished now for a
living I work in software product
development at Intuit we make tax
accounting financial services and
time-tracking software among other
things important to the way we define
design and build these products is a
system called design for delight
designed for delight is a design
thinking methodology particularly
important in design thinking is deep
customer empathy we work with customers
very closely and then we generate a
number of ideas we say we go broad to go
narrow to come up with potential
solutions that we can then experiment
with and figure out to see if we can
find solutions for those customers more
importantly design for delight is a
mindset that values feedback failing
fast and lots of iteration given my
experience with Sam the lion and the
fears that held me back from finishing
it I became fascinated by the idea of
applying this software product
development methodology to the creation
of a story an entirely new story and so
my first step well I decided to conduct
an experiment my own and my first step
was to pull together my team this team
had to be highly literate creative and
market experts and here they are
Aloise age six highly opinionated and
great at naming things bale in sugar and
spice creator of worlds Sam you’ve met
him he’s the armadillo aficionado but
he’s also great at developing characters
and Liam cynical skeptical teenager did
I say cynical I meant delightful always
fun to be around and super psyched to be
part of this TEDx talk I knew that I
wanted to adapt a creative system that I
was familiar with and apply it to the
creation of a story in reality would end
up happening as I was taken on a journey
into the childhood imagination and in
what into what some believe is an
imminent creativity crisis that
threatens our children’s future but I’m
getting ahead of myself let’s talk about
the experiment first in design think
it’s particularly important that you
first frame the problem we knew we
wanted to create a story but we didn’t
know what made a story good so we set up
interviews with our target audience
which was kids in third to fifth grade
to establish empathy and understand the
emotional connection that they had with
their stories from there we were able to
identify seven attributes that would
define our story
for example the genre would be fantasy
fiction the characters would be animals
we used ideation to go a level deeper so
in the case of the setting we identified
the moon as a key location but our
characters needed to be able to get to
and from the moon so we shared and
generated a lot of ideas and we ended up
storyboarding and here’s an idea for
example space well to get to and from
the moon that’s convenient
as we shared our ideas we continued a
storyboard and then we developed a
prototype
here’s baylin’s prototype called stuck
on the moon which she eventually shared
with her third-grade classroom and she
collected feedback and she continues to
iterate on it and improve it so what did
we learn in this process well as I went
through the the process of running the
experiment I realized that one of these
things was not like the other mainly
when it came to tasks of ideation was
oftentimes met with physical distress
mental taxation and sometimes
embarrassment I wanted to understand why
we’re all familiar with the changes of
adolescence but he hadn’t always been
like this in terms of his thinking his
thinking had changed and that question
takes us into the next chapter of our
story as I went about investigating this
I researched broadly I scoured the
Internet I talked to parents and
teachers and children I read scholarly
journals and here’s what I learned first
the definition of creativity is the
process of having original ideas that
have value this is a commonly accepted
definition within the field of creative
research one view of creativity is that
it requires divergent thinking
generating a lot of unique ideas and
then convergent thinking combining those
ideas to come up with a potential
solution I also learned that there’s a
line of thinking that the schools are
killing our kids creativity this is no
more evident than in the most viewed
talk in the history of Ted given by Sir
Kenneth Robinson in 2006 this line of
thinking extends to a number of
researchers like George land who
believed that the schools are affecting
our kids ability to think broadly and
think divergently in 2011 a researcher
named Kim Yi hung from the College of
William and Mary published a paper
called the creativity crisis this paper
sounded alarm with respect to the
falling creativity scores of our
children in the United States
Kim analyzed the scores from something
called the Torrance test of creative
thinking now the Torrance test is a
90-minute series of tasks that measure
different levels of creativity like
divergent thinking the test was invented
in the 1960s by dr. Ellis Paul Torrance
it’s been given widely and taken
internationally millions of people have
taken it it’s the most widely given
created tivity test in the world one
task for example to measure divergent
thinking would be to ask someone to come
up
with as many different uses as they can
for a Monday an object like a brick or a
paperclip or tin can
most people come up with like 10 to 15
people were really good at this
can come up with a hundred to 200 Kym
analyzed the scores from nearly 300
thousand students adults kids in the
United States dating all the way back to
the 1960s so she was able to look at the
linear trend from the 1960s to the
present one thing sticks out that’s
remarkable as a Constance from the 1960s
to the present when kids hit sixth grade
their scores for divergent thinking drop
off dramatically the fact that it’s a
cliff suggests a dramatic change so if
it is indeed the schools that are
killing our kids creativity is there
something radically different happening
at sixth grade classrooms than any other
previous grades or could it be something
else something like puberty as I
conducted the experiment there’s a key
distinction in terms of the way the
three younger kids engage versus Liam
and that was play the younger kids play
pretend they play with dolls and this
seemed to me like an important gateway
into the imagination Liam used to play
with dolls he used action figures I’ll
give him the benefit of doubt but he
stopped and I wanted to know why so
being the dad that I am I asked him I
also asked his friends by the way if you
want to clear a room of teenage boys
just start asking them if they play with
dolls I also asked my coworkers I asked
strangers at cocktail parties believe me
if you don’t like small talk this is a
fantastic conversation starter I wanted
to know what was lost in that process of
growing up
typically we stop playing with dolls at
about age 11 and we typically don’t
remember when or why we stopped kids who
are in closer proximity to this this
change they say one of three reasons
that it’s lonely that is boring or it’s
what little kids do now the last one
speaks to some level of peer pressure
and conformity
but the first to speak to a
developmental change an activity that’s
no longer mentally or emotionally
satisfying effectively when you ask
people if they play with dolls
you’re dabbling in developmental
psychology that’s how I’m spinning it at
least so that led me to this man Jean
Piaget Jean Piaget is a Swiss
psychologist and a pioneer in
developmental psychology in his theory
of cognitive development Piaget defined
four phases of childhood in the
pre-operational phase which is ages two
to seven kids play pretend and they
engage their imagination by playing
symbolic value to objects for example in
this pet school PE class that container
lid is a yoga mat the foam brick is a
pommel horse for the horse the foam
roller is a juice bar that serves hay
and wheatgrass smoothies for the horse
clientele as kids transition into the
formal operational phase which is ages
11 and up complex logic takes over kids
can use hypotheses those what-ifs
now that object has to be something very
specific it has to be a very under under
very certain circumstances can it be
something else the six-year-old doesn’t
think in those terms so they’re
uninhibited from making that brick a
spaceship or a boat or whatever that
eleven-year-old the sixth grader he
doesn’t think as broadly doesn’t think
as divergently because it’s not logical
so is it really the schools that are
killing our kids creativity and their
ability to think divergently or is it
just the natural development of complex
logic ultimately the point I’m trying to
make is that this is a complicated issue
saying that schools kill creativity
it also perpetuates sentiment that the
schools are robbing our kids of their
innate creative genius this plays out in
the thousands of comments on Sir Kenneth
Robinson’s TED talk people by moaning
their unrealized potential they’re lost
creativity because a teacher or the
school squashed it and crushed it this
is a victims mindset creativity doesn’t
succumb to victimization listen our
education system needs to be improved
but as parents we need to realize when
it comes to our kids education when it
comes to their creativity we control the
other side of the equation and this is
the key takeaway from ki young-hee Kim’s
research on the Torrens test scores
since the 1990s our kids creativity
scores have been on the decline
significantly but most significantly for
kindergarteners through 3rd graders
Kim’s hypothesis as to why well these
kids haven’t had enough time to be in
school their downward to trendin in
creativity is due to what’s happening in
society and what’s happening in at home
and that’s the root cause of our
creativity crisis so what can we as
parents do about it I frame some ideas
that I’d like to share with you i frame
them as how might we now how might we as
a design think technique for sharing an
idea with open-ended possibility so I
posed these questions to you how might
we foster a culture of creativity at
home for our kids let’s start with time
creativity needs time
kids need time we live in an over
scheduled society with hurried
lifestyles it’s hard to pursue a
creative project let alone a creative
impulse when you have trapped practice
and lacrosse practice back-to-back
overlapping seasons you then go to your
vo lesson and then you have homework for
your AP classes so how might we provide
our kids more time to be creative
boredom when I ask kids if they play
with dolls I also ask them when they use
their imaginations at school three
themes emerged
they use their imaginations when they
play at recess these inner imaginations
in art and music class and they use it
when they’re bored in other classes this
is this is what boredom looks like it’s
painful it’s painful for the kids but
it’s really painful for the parents and
so what do we do we hand our kids a
device we don’t give them the
opportunity to self-soothe we don’t give
them a chance to use their imagination
we’ve become an entertainment first
culture if you think even about
something as simple as a car ride we
have entertainment systems built into
our vehicles now and kids no longer
stare out the window and use their
imagination so how might we provide our
kids the opportunity to be bored boredom
is not enough though kids need what I
like to call boredom with proximity they
need the materials the space or the
tools in order to take that creative
next step now this isn’t the most seemly
from an interior decoration perspective
but sometimes it’s just as simple as a
pen and a paper so how might we provide
our kids the proximity to the materials
and the tools that they need for that
creative next step psychological safety
a couple years ago Google conducted a
research study called project Aristotle
they asked the question what makes teams
great the most important attribute that
they came up with was psychological
safety this is the safe space to propose
the crazy idea to ask a judgment-free
question or just to be vulnerable
oftentimes as parents we violate this
and we don’t even realize it recently
Sam made scrambled eggs I applauded him
for taking the initiative to cook his
own meal finally and then he added honey
to the scramble I was that’s disgusting
I saw the look of disappointment on his
face I had gotten caught up in what I
call the conformity of the eggs I let my
idea of what scrambled eggs should be
interfere with his risk his creativity
so how might we provide our kids an
environment of psychological safety at
home to be creative creativity needs an
environment to thrive and parents need
what I like to call mindfulness of the
invisible armadillo kids are oftentimes
most annoying when they’re pursuing a
creative impulse
they’re loud they make messes they can’t
sit still they ambush the dog the
artists of this work like to call it
post-it notes of shame a commentary on
canine creativity when I ran the
experiment Liam was in proximity to
materials that led him to make paper
airplanes I was annoyed I’m his dad I’m
teaching him valuable stuff hey he
should listen to me right well in
reality he was teaching me about his
creativity through his rebellion as much
as I love writing stories as much as I
love creating stories Liam’s designed
for delight was flight he didn’t finish
the experiment in the way I intended it
to be finished he went and created his
own experiment and for that I’m grateful
so I’d like to leave you with a metaphor
it’s a bit strange but memorable and it
takes us back to the beginning of this
story where we started with Sam’s
armadillo well we may grow up and we may
not get to choose our teachers or our
schools in the very hallways of our home
right there in the hall closet is an
invisible armadillo
it’s the idea or the creative impulse
that’s unrecognized and maybe that idea
or creative impulse is cute but have you
seen an armadillo lately they’re kind of
weird or maybe that idea or creative
impulse is so common it’s invisible or
maybe it’s messy and annoying so we shut
the door on it so my question to you is
how will you take care of it will you
feed it will you play our children want
to know thank you
you [Applause]
Minnillo now I know what you’re
armadillos aren’t indigenous to the
Pacific Northwest and for that matter I
actually never saw Sam’s armadillo for
starters it lived in the hall closet and
it was invisible so it had that going
for it as well I may have never seen
Sam’s armadillo but it inspired me to
write and illustrate a children’s story
called Sam the lion about a boy and his
imaginary friends among which was an
armadillo now unfortunately this work
never saw the light of day I had a lot
of fears that held me back from
finishing it I’ve heard failure if your
judgment I’ve heard feedback I wanted it
to be perfect and so it literally sits
on the Shelf today unfinished now for a
living I work in software product
development at Intuit we make tax
accounting financial services and
time-tracking software among other
things important to the way we define
design and build these products is a
system called design for delight
designed for delight is a design
thinking methodology particularly
important in design thinking is deep
customer empathy we work with customers
very closely and then we generate a
number of ideas we say we go broad to go
narrow to come up with potential
solutions that we can then experiment
with and figure out to see if we can
find solutions for those customers more
importantly design for delight is a
mindset that values feedback failing
fast and lots of iteration given my
experience with Sam the lion and the
fears that held me back from finishing
it I became fascinated by the idea of
applying this software product
development methodology to the creation
of a story an entirely new story and so
my first step well I decided to conduct
an experiment my own and my first step
was to pull together my team this team
had to be highly literate creative and
market experts and here they are
Aloise age six highly opinionated and
great at naming things bale in sugar and
spice creator of worlds Sam you’ve met
him he’s the armadillo aficionado but
he’s also great at developing characters
and Liam cynical skeptical teenager did
I say cynical I meant delightful always
fun to be around and super psyched to be
part of this TEDx talk I knew that I
wanted to adapt a creative system that I
was familiar with and apply it to the
creation of a story in reality would end
up happening as I was taken on a journey
into the childhood imagination and in
what into what some believe is an
imminent creativity crisis that
threatens our children’s future but I’m
getting ahead of myself let’s talk about
the experiment first in design think
it’s particularly important that you
first frame the problem we knew we
wanted to create a story but we didn’t
know what made a story good so we set up
interviews with our target audience
which was kids in third to fifth grade
to establish empathy and understand the
emotional connection that they had with
their stories from there we were able to
identify seven attributes that would
define our story
for example the genre would be fantasy
fiction the characters would be animals
we used ideation to go a level deeper so
in the case of the setting we identified
the moon as a key location but our
characters needed to be able to get to
and from the moon so we shared and
generated a lot of ideas and we ended up
storyboarding and here’s an idea for
example space well to get to and from
the moon that’s convenient
as we shared our ideas we continued a
storyboard and then we developed a
prototype
here’s baylin’s prototype called stuck
on the moon which she eventually shared
with her third-grade classroom and she
collected feedback and she continues to
iterate on it and improve it so what did
we learn in this process well as I went
through the the process of running the
experiment I realized that one of these
things was not like the other mainly
when it came to tasks of ideation was
oftentimes met with physical distress
mental taxation and sometimes
embarrassment I wanted to understand why
we’re all familiar with the changes of
adolescence but he hadn’t always been
like this in terms of his thinking his
thinking had changed and that question
takes us into the next chapter of our
story as I went about investigating this
I researched broadly I scoured the
Internet I talked to parents and
teachers and children I read scholarly
journals and here’s what I learned first
the definition of creativity is the
process of having original ideas that
have value this is a commonly accepted
definition within the field of creative
research one view of creativity is that
it requires divergent thinking
generating a lot of unique ideas and
then convergent thinking combining those
ideas to come up with a potential
solution I also learned that there’s a
line of thinking that the schools are
killing our kids creativity this is no
more evident than in the most viewed
talk in the history of Ted given by Sir
Kenneth Robinson in 2006 this line of
thinking extends to a number of
researchers like George land who
believed that the schools are affecting
our kids ability to think broadly and
think divergently in 2011 a researcher
named Kim Yi hung from the College of
William and Mary published a paper
called the creativity crisis this paper
sounded alarm with respect to the
falling creativity scores of our
children in the United States
Kim analyzed the scores from something
called the Torrance test of creative
thinking now the Torrance test is a
90-minute series of tasks that measure
different levels of creativity like
divergent thinking the test was invented
in the 1960s by dr. Ellis Paul Torrance
it’s been given widely and taken
internationally millions of people have
taken it it’s the most widely given
created tivity test in the world one
task for example to measure divergent
thinking would be to ask someone to come
up
with as many different uses as they can
for a Monday an object like a brick or a
paperclip or tin can
most people come up with like 10 to 15
people were really good at this
can come up with a hundred to 200 Kym
analyzed the scores from nearly 300
thousand students adults kids in the
United States dating all the way back to
the 1960s so she was able to look at the
linear trend from the 1960s to the
present one thing sticks out that’s
remarkable as a Constance from the 1960s
to the present when kids hit sixth grade
their scores for divergent thinking drop
off dramatically the fact that it’s a
cliff suggests a dramatic change so if
it is indeed the schools that are
killing our kids creativity is there
something radically different happening
at sixth grade classrooms than any other
previous grades or could it be something
else something like puberty as I
conducted the experiment there’s a key
distinction in terms of the way the
three younger kids engage versus Liam
and that was play the younger kids play
pretend they play with dolls and this
seemed to me like an important gateway
into the imagination Liam used to play
with dolls he used action figures I’ll
give him the benefit of doubt but he
stopped and I wanted to know why so
being the dad that I am I asked him I
also asked his friends by the way if you
want to clear a room of teenage boys
just start asking them if they play with
dolls I also asked my coworkers I asked
strangers at cocktail parties believe me
if you don’t like small talk this is a
fantastic conversation starter I wanted
to know what was lost in that process of
growing up
typically we stop playing with dolls at
about age 11 and we typically don’t
remember when or why we stopped kids who
are in closer proximity to this this
change they say one of three reasons
that it’s lonely that is boring or it’s
what little kids do now the last one
speaks to some level of peer pressure
and conformity
but the first to speak to a
developmental change an activity that’s
no longer mentally or emotionally
satisfying effectively when you ask
people if they play with dolls
you’re dabbling in developmental
psychology that’s how I’m spinning it at
least so that led me to this man Jean
Piaget Jean Piaget is a Swiss
psychologist and a pioneer in
developmental psychology in his theory
of cognitive development Piaget defined
four phases of childhood in the
pre-operational phase which is ages two
to seven kids play pretend and they
engage their imagination by playing
symbolic value to objects for example in
this pet school PE class that container
lid is a yoga mat the foam brick is a
pommel horse for the horse the foam
roller is a juice bar that serves hay
and wheatgrass smoothies for the horse
clientele as kids transition into the
formal operational phase which is ages
11 and up complex logic takes over kids
can use hypotheses those what-ifs
now that object has to be something very
specific it has to be a very under under
very certain circumstances can it be
something else the six-year-old doesn’t
think in those terms so they’re
uninhibited from making that brick a
spaceship or a boat or whatever that
eleven-year-old the sixth grader he
doesn’t think as broadly doesn’t think
as divergently because it’s not logical
so is it really the schools that are
killing our kids creativity and their
ability to think divergently or is it
just the natural development of complex
logic ultimately the point I’m trying to
make is that this is a complicated issue
saying that schools kill creativity
it also perpetuates sentiment that the
schools are robbing our kids of their
innate creative genius this plays out in
the thousands of comments on Sir Kenneth
Robinson’s TED talk people by moaning
their unrealized potential they’re lost
creativity because a teacher or the
school squashed it and crushed it this
is a victims mindset creativity doesn’t
succumb to victimization listen our
education system needs to be improved
but as parents we need to realize when
it comes to our kids education when it
comes to their creativity we control the
other side of the equation and this is
the key takeaway from ki young-hee Kim’s
research on the Torrens test scores
since the 1990s our kids creativity
scores have been on the decline
significantly but most significantly for
kindergarteners through 3rd graders
Kim’s hypothesis as to why well these
kids haven’t had enough time to be in
school their downward to trendin in
creativity is due to what’s happening in
society and what’s happening in at home
and that’s the root cause of our
creativity crisis so what can we as
parents do about it I frame some ideas
that I’d like to share with you i frame
them as how might we now how might we as
a design think technique for sharing an
idea with open-ended possibility so I
posed these questions to you how might
we foster a culture of creativity at
home for our kids let’s start with time
creativity needs time
kids need time we live in an over
scheduled society with hurried
lifestyles it’s hard to pursue a
creative project let alone a creative
impulse when you have trapped practice
and lacrosse practice back-to-back
overlapping seasons you then go to your
vo lesson and then you have homework for
your AP classes so how might we provide
our kids more time to be creative
boredom when I ask kids if they play
with dolls I also ask them when they use
their imaginations at school three
themes emerged
they use their imaginations when they
play at recess these inner imaginations
in art and music class and they use it
when they’re bored in other classes this
is this is what boredom looks like it’s
painful it’s painful for the kids but
it’s really painful for the parents and
so what do we do we hand our kids a
device we don’t give them the
opportunity to self-soothe we don’t give
them a chance to use their imagination
we’ve become an entertainment first
culture if you think even about
something as simple as a car ride we
have entertainment systems built into
our vehicles now and kids no longer
stare out the window and use their
imagination so how might we provide our
kids the opportunity to be bored boredom
is not enough though kids need what I
like to call boredom with proximity they
need the materials the space or the
tools in order to take that creative
next step now this isn’t the most seemly
from an interior decoration perspective
but sometimes it’s just as simple as a
pen and a paper so how might we provide
our kids the proximity to the materials
and the tools that they need for that
creative next step psychological safety
a couple years ago Google conducted a
research study called project Aristotle
they asked the question what makes teams
great the most important attribute that
they came up with was psychological
safety this is the safe space to propose
the crazy idea to ask a judgment-free
question or just to be vulnerable
oftentimes as parents we violate this
and we don’t even realize it recently
Sam made scrambled eggs I applauded him
for taking the initiative to cook his
own meal finally and then he added honey
to the scramble I was that’s disgusting
I saw the look of disappointment on his
face I had gotten caught up in what I
call the conformity of the eggs I let my
idea of what scrambled eggs should be
interfere with his risk his creativity
so how might we provide our kids an
environment of psychological safety at
home to be creative creativity needs an
environment to thrive and parents need
what I like to call mindfulness of the
invisible armadillo kids are oftentimes
most annoying when they’re pursuing a
creative impulse
they’re loud they make messes they can’t
sit still they ambush the dog the
artists of this work like to call it
post-it notes of shame a commentary on
canine creativity when I ran the
experiment Liam was in proximity to
materials that led him to make paper
airplanes I was annoyed I’m his dad I’m
teaching him valuable stuff hey he
should listen to me right well in
reality he was teaching me about his
creativity through his rebellion as much
as I love writing stories as much as I
love creating stories Liam’s designed
for delight was flight he didn’t finish
the experiment in the way I intended it
to be finished he went and created his
own experiment and for that I’m grateful
so I’d like to leave you with a metaphor
it’s a bit strange but memorable and it
takes us back to the beginning of this
story where we started with Sam’s
armadillo well we may grow up and we may
not get to choose our teachers or our
schools in the very hallways of our home
right there in the hall closet is an
invisible armadillo
it’s the idea or the creative impulse
that’s unrecognized and maybe that idea
or creative impulse is cute but have you
seen an armadillo lately they’re kind of
weird or maybe that idea or creative
impulse is so common it’s invisible or
maybe it’s messy and annoying so we shut
the door on it so my question to you is
how will you take care of it will you
feed it will you play our children want
to know thank you
you [Applause]
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