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We can and should do more to make school more reflective of home values and more representative of a greater society in which identity and personal agency matter.

defines design thinking as “a process for creative problem solving” with a “human-centered approach to innovation.”

The central challenge of our time, Drayton says, is to make everyone a changemaker.

Once a kid has had an idea, built a team and changed her world, she’s a changemaker. She has the power. She’ll go on to organize more teams. She will always be needed.

Today, schools have to develop the curriculums and assessments to make the changemaking mentality universal.

Creative leadership is rich with paradoxes. Creative leaders are driven by their internal passion and purpose, yet they also have an externally oriented, explorative mindset. Creative leaders lead from the front by envisioning a better future, pointing the way and setting an aspiration, yet they achieve this by orchestrating a creative team, often leading from behind to bring out the best in others. In this article, we describe the competencies of a creative leader in detail, and invite you to look in the mirror and see how you score on those key competencies. We explore the topic of paradoxes found in creative leadership and leave you with some practical suggestions on how to grow as a creative leader.

We discovered that self-awareness is the cornerstone of leadership: great leaders are aware of what we call their ‘leadership gifts’ as well as their ‘learning edges’. And we found out that self-awareness helps leaders to build authenticity, as great leaders think and act from a place of truth within themselves.

At THNK, we distinguish between a management team and a creative team. A management team typically comprises seven or more members and is charged with running an existing business. By contrast, a creative team has ideally three members and is focused on seeking new solutions.

Dewey wrote about knowledge as a verb, an action upon one’s environment.

creating Makers that view the world as malleable, not just through products and goods, but in social-political-economic systems

...make sure there is space for students to find problems

we’re also seeing a renaissance of something decidedly traditional: the corporate R&D department.

We all need mechanisms and a culture that encourage the embrace of new technologies, kindle the passion for knowledge, and ease barriers to creativity and serendipitous advances

Conventional wisdom holds that organizations die of starvation from a shortage of good ideas and projects. In reality, they are much more likely to die of indigestion. A surfeit of projects with inadequate staffing makes delivering on anything less likely.

The learning classroom is active, collaborative, and full of real, thoughtful, academic-discipline-informed discussion with students working together to solve challenging problems

But when the teachers see it, really get it, there is no going back. It is what they are after for their students and classes: problem-based, project-based, inquiry-based, discussion-based-all student-centered deep learning.

And to pursue learning for their students, teachers must be pedagogical scientists. Every day, in every class, teachers must conduct research and experiments into the most compelling learning experiences for their students. In these experiments is unavoidably innovation.

Simply put, design thinking is not enough. True success comes from building a complete design system, and no organization can build such a system on design thinking alone

design thinking only has value when combined with design doing and supported by a strong design culture

successful design thinking must also include an element of making – early experience prototypes are important to validate thinking and align teams.