Readers of this blog will know that one of my interests/research areas is how to effectively bring together left-brain (i.e. logical) and right-brain (i.e. creative) thinkers in order to drive creativity and generate new and innovative ideas to solve some of the worlds wicked problems. One of the books that have most influenced me in this respect is Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Together with a colleague I am developing the concept of the versatilist (first coined by Gartner) as a role that effectively brings together both right- and left-brain thinkers to solve some of the knotty business problems there are out there. As part of this we are developing a series of brain exercises that can be given to students on creative, problem solving courses to open up their minds and start them thinking outside the proverbial box. One of these exercises is called What Would Google Do? The idea being to try and get them to take the non-conventional, Google, view of how to solve a problem. By way of an example Douglas Edwards, in his book I’m Feeling Lucky – The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, relates the following story about how Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, proposed an innovative approach to marketing.“Why don’t we take the marketing budget and use it to inoculate Chechen refugees against cholera. It will help our brand awareness and we’ll get more new people to use Google.”

Just how serious Brin was being here we’ll never know but you get the general idea; no idea is too outrageous for folk in the Googleplex.

To further backup how serious Google are about creativity their chairman Eric Schmidt, delivered a “devastating critique of the UK’s education system and said the country had failed to capitalise on its record of innovation in science and engineering” at this year’s MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh.  Amongst other criticisms Schmidt aimed at the UK education system he said that the country that invented the computer was “throwing away your great computer heritage by failing to teach programming in schools ” and was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in UK schools. Instead the IT curriculum “focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made.” For those of us bought up in the UK at the time of the BBC Microcomputer hopefully this guy will be the saviour of the current generation of programmers.

US readers of this blog should not feel too smug, check out this YouTube video from Dr. Michio Kaku who gives an equally devastating critique of the US education system.

So, all in all, I think the world definitely needs more of a versatilist approach, not only in our education systems but also in the ways we approach problem solving in the workplace. Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, who revealed last week that he was stepping down once told the New York Times: “The Macintosh turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians – who also happened to be excellent computer scientists”. Once again Apple got this right several years ago and are now reaping the benefits of that far reaching, versatilist approach.