The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, identifies key behaviors to find innovative solutions to impact organizations, products, and services. Christensen and Gregersen (2011) share five skills that leaders need to innovate their way out of problems and into opportunities:
- Question – ask challenging questions that take on common wisdom to create new directions
- Observe – watch the behavior of customers, suppliers and competitors the way an anthropologist would identify new ways of doing things
- Network – talk to people with different life experiences and perspectives to spark new ideas
- Experiment – construct interactive experiences and build prototypes to provide unorthodox responses and gain new insights
- Associate – draw unexpected connections between questions, problems or ideas from unrelated fields
In education, both K-12 and higher ed, we need to spend a more time mastering these disruptive skills and improving our productivity. By adding these tools, educators will be able to consider different possibilities to support our learners and find new solutions to educational issues. This new approach to education requires innovation, organizational collaboration, and teamwork on the fly. It’s great to see that there are innovative ideas brewing, such as #change11, BigIdeas and #EmergentEDU.
How are YOU using these 5 disruptive skills for education?
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