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Love for the outdoors comes from learning through play, exploration, guidance, fun, and wondering.

Learn the natural and human history of the place you are working in order to be open and aware of teachable moments—and to gain your own sense of being. A sense of wonder is the greatest gift you can give children.

There are two parts to having a well-developed sense of wonder. One part is the ability to see the wonder in the world (the “wow,” the “amazing,” the “how is that possible?”). It also is the ability to wonder, to ask questions, to know there is more to know.

Put differently, purpose is a thing you build, not a thing you find. Almost any work can possess remarkable purpose.

For almost everyone, there’s no one thing we can find. It’s not purpose but purposes we are looking for — the multiple sources of meaning that help us find value in our work and lives

Acknowledging these multiple sources of purpose takes the pressure off of finding a single thing to give our lives meaning.

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.

demonstrate that groups that use Osborn’s rules of brainstorming come up with fewer ideas (and fewer good ideas) than the individuals would have developed alone.

There are several reasons for this productivity loss, as academics call it. For one, when people work together, their ideas tend to converge. As soon as one person throws out an idea, it affects the memory of everyone in the group and makes them think a bit more similarly about the problem than they did before. In contrast, when people work alone, they tend to diverge in their thinking, because everyone takes a slightly different path to thinking about the problem.

Early in creative acts it’s important to diverge, that is, to think about what you are doing in as many ways as possible. Later, you want to converge on a small number of paths to follow in more detail.

There are no topics in mathematics; only artificial barriers that we have erected to help organise the curriculum. At school, we study topics in discrete chunks and come to understand them as separate islands of knowledge. Yet the most powerful and interesting mathematics arises when we cut through these barriers.

Knowledge has its place; you cannot connect or create what you don’t know. Tokio Myers is a trained pianist; his thousands of hours of deliberate practice are the foundation of his creativity. But he is more than a pianist (he’s a BGT winner!), and that is because he dared to defy the the conventional norms of music. Wiles is similarly the world class mathematician that he is because his field of vision is not restricted to any one topic.

If only students were encouraged to transcend their study of individual topics.

What good is gained in assigning a grade to a child’s work? The concept of 90–100% = A, 80–89% = B etc. is so entirely subjective and fraught with fallacy. Because a child can do every question on your arbitrarily chosen and constructed exam, and do so by anticipating what it is you are looking for with 100% accuracy does not mean they understand or can explain what the mathematics is about.

Why should our children be assigned something we also use for factory produced vegetables? Grading is an anachronistic hold-over from the Scientific Management era inserted into schooling during the 19th century.

Finnish kids have NO homework, but call me a believer in the idea that the Finns place less importance upon grading their children against each other. Formative assessment replacing heaps of summative assessments.