Design Thinking and Failed Events

What is the practical value of adopting a fail-friendly attitude? Leaders in innovation and design advocate for learning from failure as a necessary element of a design-conducive ecosystem, along with empowerment, refection, collaboration, trust, experimentation, and honesty, according to Julian Jenkins in "Design Thinking." A organization that adopts these attributes will be more agile and creative, ultimately more successful in a changing world. These are the values that encourage people to take on difficult and long-term challenges on the way to creating improvements in the world. As an example, one of Pixar's core principles is to fail early, enabling staff to move on quickly to promising approaches. Instead of viewing failing as a risk, such organizations view failing as a prerequisite to meaningful learning and innovation. This attitude is fostered through valuing creativity, insight, complexity, synthesis, invention and awareness. What steps can we take to practice these habits of mind and nurturing them in others?

There are many worthwhile models, which could be suggested to create or modify an effective learning ecosystem. For a progressive institution, emphasizing the connections between math/science and society, one approach to consider is Design Thinking (DT)(http://www.ideo.com/work/toolkit-for- educators, 2011). Neumaier (2009) defines DT as the “process of working through problems while operating in the space between knowing and doing, prototyping new solutions that arise from the use of four key strengths: empathy, intuition, imagination and idealism. Stanford University has developed a "VIRTUAL CRASH COURSE IN DESIGN THINKING (https://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/) and since 2005 requires engineering students to take DT class. DT is often used when addressing "wicked problems", situations where neither the problem or solution is known. Wicked problems correlate well with current beliefs on educational systems, where perhaps we are attempting to educate learners for problems and careers that do not currently exist (cloud-server specialist, big-data architect, data scientist, waste data managers, 3D Food Print Engineers, and Smart Dust programmers).