Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Last week, I hosted a group of high school students from Kanagawa Prefecture for the first on-campus YCISL program since 2019. And it was the first “Popcorn with Colin” session at Stanford; previously, PwC had only been online through Zoom in response to the pivot to remote education.

In this PwC, the focus was on Creativity, Uncertainty, & Real-World Problem-Solving. When I was ideating in preparation, I thought about two aspects of creativity application that sets Stanford-style education apart. The first is the concept of uncertainty – which I learned most when teaching environmental toxicology (ETox is full of uncertainty…and risk). Uncertainty was also a talking point early in YCISL taking Geert Hofstede cultural dimension examples from the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell (it was one of the books in the Stanford freshman orientation Three Books program in 2009). So, this PwC started on the topic of uncertainty – in everyday as well as academic terms.

The second concept introduced in the PwC was Real-World Problem-Solving. I recalled examples from various Stanford environmental courses where problem assignments are designed with intentional incompleteness – just like in the real-world where there are numerous gaps or questionable information. The idea was for students to learn to make guesses or estimates to come up with justified and plausible solutions. This approach to academic coursework aligns with high-level research where knowledge extensions and connections are made and tested.

With the above concepts set in a Stanford context, the students were then pulled into the YCISL-style of playful creativity. We started with the fast thinking exercises (“What do cows drink?”) then moved into the 30 circles exercise to demonstrate imaginative agility as well as transfer from mind to paper. We ended our creativity fun-fest with the Human Knot exercise to immersively showcase group problem-solving.

To complete the circle, I introduced a variation of the Design Sprint exercise just completed in the Sustainability Design Thinking course; partly to share what happened in an actual Stanford course, and partly to get the students to apply creativity, uncertainty, & real-world problem solving to a forward-thinking problem that may affect even their own future. In my view, this turned out to be very resonating as it brought in some of my latest thinking & experiences, & tasked the students with brainstorming along a timeline. The temporal flow was sweet.

This was a great way to get back to on-campus YCISL activity.

I am preparing for an upcoming Popcorn with Colin where students at an IB school have been invited to discuss their ideas for an extended essay. The IB Extended Essay “…is an independent, self-directed piece of research, finishing with a 4,000-word paper” and a mandatory part of the IB Diploma program. I have an interest in this activity because I was an IB Diploma student when I was in high school, and still have vivid memories of my extended essay project work.

The plan for the Popcorn session is to open with a discussion about “what is research?” for the purpose of shared viewpoints and expectations.

Then we would move into a reveal-type segment where we explore the ideas that the students have for their extended essays. We would tease these ideas for creativity, connectedness & design thinking. Our discussion about creativity could look into personal curiosity, originality & innovation where concepts such as comfort zone, out-of-the-box thinking, and uncertainty. Connectedness would deal with awareness of published scholarly literature as well as personal experience, and how to support/justify a research project. And design thinking would be about sketching a human-centered problem statement and vision using the YCISL Innovators Toolkit method.

The third component of our session would be on the suggestion of the need for a research plan & the design elements; this is intended to encourage good documentation habits as well as methodical forward-thinking skills.

That’s probably plenty for our 90-minute session where I hope to have plenty of reciprocal learning.

In Part 2 of this teaching reflection, I had mentioned individual and team as groupings for assignments. There is also the possibility of pairings – in terms of fixed pairs, or speed dating-type pairs where changes in the pairing are made quickly. Pairings could be even more interesting if there was not just equity and parity in the pairings, but we could have intentional mentor-mentee setups.

But the grouping I wanted to really add for consideration in this course is a “committee” comprising students and instructors would serve as mentors. We could form committees of students where they would be responsible for organization and execution. This experience would involved design thinking at a very different level and allow for leadership as well as interpersonal group dynamics lessons.

In YCISL, we formed a committee for the Sustainability in Education Roundtable (oooh, could we have a student-organized roundtable please? Pretty please?). We have also included in our YCISL program proposals, the idea of an editorial committee to publish mini-conference proceedings. This would help us as well to deliver a reference from which we could design accurate and precise resume statements about a student’s experience in this course (use asking-questions design thinking).

I have written before how EQ should be used in preparing for and opening a course. Here are more thoughts as I design think what I would like to contribute to the Sustainability Design Thinking course this summer.

We could start with a pre-arrival survey like we have used in past YCISL workshops. This is mainly to raise potential talking points, but can also be used to set expectations using Adora Svitak’s reciprocal learning model.

Along with a topical overview, the instructors should communicate to students the work characteristics (form and load) and performance expectations. We could use the DezignBläst RFP from past YCISL workshops. For most students, this scenario should put them in an unfamiliar position and will reflect their EQ.

The students should be able to communicate to instructors early their learning preferences as well as strengths and weaknesses (academic knowledge as well as skillsets).

The type of work we require for the course should be different from their past experience to provide the opportunity to grow and learn. As in the Richard Nixon quote I have used of late in YCISL workshops, “Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone.” This short idea is full of EQ with timing, awareness and action. Students should be coached for success on their sense of timing and timeliness, a divergent-convergent thinking ability to assess awareness, and a 5-second rule propensity for EQ-rich action.

I imagine there will be a variety of assignments:

1. in-class quick challenges such as the 30 circles test or water bottle feature list exercise.
2. overnight individual or team observational and inspirational efforts to exercise Corita Kent’s “Look & See” and practice converging or merging ideas for innovative solutions.
3. 1 week or longer development efforts that involve iteration and feedback loops.
4. One or more term-long deliverables such as a video or portfolio package to give a memorialized close to the gamestorming framework of the course.
5. In a way, we could also ask the students to reflect on their personal story or brand identity. We could perform mindfulness exercises to train the mind to navigate and explore their imagination. Very non-academic. Potently life-changing.

I hope these ideas will make it daylight. Right now, I am just imagining what we could do to make the course very forward looking.

While at the Mock Interviews at Foothill College last week, I noticed a flyer about “How to Get an Internship.” I snapped a photo of the flyer. I have some thoughts to share about what factors were involved in selecting mentor interns for the YCISL program. But first, I will disclose that I got my first internship as a junior undergraduate in college…and it wasn’t as simple as sending an email with a resume attachment. It took a lot of legwork and communication. It worked out great in the end because this was the start of my path to a PhD.

Then there was the hard work (and luck) to get a postdoctoral research position (an internship by form and function) at Stanford University where I was fortunate to build my career of about 30 years. For this opportunity, I mainly credit (a) timing & timeliness which is mostly in the form of luck, and (b) a personality matching click which is difficult to predict. If I had to highlight three specific factors, I would list preparation (resume and past work), good listening and response skills, and authentic interest. But I am just guessing.

I will now reflect on 5 things that I favor when I search for mentor interns for the YCISL program. This list is in the order that the factor runs through my brain…

1. Resume. Stanford students applying for a YCISL internship would upload their resume (and cover letter) onto Stanford’s Career Center Jobs database (currently Handshake). Non-Stanford students (usually high school students) would be asked to email me a resume. I would usually take two quick scans of the resume: first for an overall style to reflect on attentiveness to detail, and second for…
2. Experience, Interests & Activities. I specifically look for hooks with the activities that I have planned for the YCISL program or would make for talking points in an interview. I would especially note engagement in group activities as well as vivid detail.
3. Cover Letter. I look upon the cover letter as an indicator of the ability to collect and communicate thoughts lucidly and to-the-point. Word choice and persuasive language are key. Humility is also appreciated. Usually about one or two applications per season get rejected because of an un-compelling cover letter.
4. Personality. The resume and cover letter can hint at the personality, but it really comes down to the interview. First impression is really important, and this might include dress, eye contact and the first spoken words. Beyond the first impression which usually takes about 1 minute, I try to drive a conversation using the talking points and observe responsiveness and soft skills.
5. Connection. A connection to Stanford University was usually required. That was an easy one for Stanford student applicants, but high school student applicants were often family of colleagues through my Stanford work, or had attended Stanford programs in the past. I used this as a means to make sure Stanford culture was an inherent ingredient of our YCISL mentor staff.

To summarize, there are two parts: the remote pitch with the resume and cover letter, and the in-person pitch with the interview. For me, I was looking for trustworthy and dependable interns with initiative and motivation  so that I could focus on the students in the program. It worked out well.

I have an idea for a YCISL Divergent-Convergent Thinking Exercise. Along with DCT, this exercise also involves brainstorming, rapid prototyping, fast thinking, design thinking, creativity and eq. We could also add an elevator pitch component with storytelling and your personal story elements.

Overview: In Canva, create a desktop wallpaper. We could assign various scenarios based on purpose and context.

Instructions: Divergent Phase: In Canva, set up a blank desktop wallpaper template. Add your text. Play with the font styles coming up with various prototypes. With the font prototypes, play with various color schemes for the text and monochrome background. As a last step, create versions with background images. Convergent Phase: Identify up to three prototypes that you think resonate the most. The criteria are up to you. Pitch Phase (optional): Design a 90-second elevator pitch around these selected prototypes providing a feature list, a story and an explanation of how it connects to your personal story. Assess the level of creativity, growth and mindfulness involved in this exercise.

I may have a chance to try this exercise out this summer in Sustainability Design Thinking. In the meantime, I will describe my experience reflected by the 9 designs in the gallery above in this wiki entry.

• I started off with a black background to have lower computer screen glare. I also think a black background has a sophisticated vibe.
• I chose three words related to the YCISL and intentionally selected words that rhymed so that they bounce around in the head together. I also feel the expression has a connected 3-step progression so there is an element of active listening (hearing, listening & understanding) involved.
• I actually created 16 prototypes based on font type. The three font types shown in the gallery at the top are Courier Prime, Garamond and Agrandir Thin representing the more common type styles.
• I then made a copy of the set of 16 prototypes and changed the background to white. As I started working on this WordPress entry, I found that I preferred having some contrast between the wiki image and the wiki background, and made another set with an off-white background (#f5f5f5). I feel both the white and off-white background sets work well. Putting a little red, blue or green tint would have been an interesting expansion, but I didn’t do it. That’s because I like to design exercises with sets of 3, and the 3rd step in this exercise is to…
•  Use images for the background. Again, I did actually create 16 prototypes with various backgrounds, and the three shown in the gallery above are just by chance the ones for the three basic font typefaces. Still, I like the variability represented here where the water has a cool and dynamic feel, the orange slices image touches most of our senses, and the scenery background denotes place and time.

Another important note is that even with 16 font typefaces and three variations on the background, there is learning happening in this exercise. Preferences, new ideas and intrinsic motivation are being exposed. So if there is enough time in this exercise to conduct a second DCT cycle, that would be consistent with the way we do the Spaghetti Tower Marshmallow exercise (“Fail Early, Fail Fast”) as part of rapid prototyping.

On my way to play some tennis this morning, I came up with an idea for the next YCISL e-book. It’s about Hard Work. The idea springs from Alison Ledgerwood’s 2013 TEDxUCDavis Talk “Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck)” which was somewhere along the way re-titled to “A simple trick to improve positive thinking.” In that talk, she says “We literally have to work harder to see the upside of things.” That statement links to another which I do find more resonating which is “It’s all hard work. Nothing comes easily” – spoken by Richard St. John in his 2005 TED Talk “8 Secrets of Success,” but credited to Rupert Murdoch through an interview.

So I think I will work on an e-book with maybe eight examples of creativity and hard work.

1. “We literally have to work harder to see the upside of things.” Alison Ledgerwood. TEDxUCDavis. 2013.
2. “It’s all hard work. Nothing comes easily.” Richard St. John. TED. 2005.
3. “It’s very, very simple to get what you want. But it’s not easy.” Mel Robbins. TEDxSF. 2011.
4. Work = Force x Distance. An equation to describe the Growth Mindset. The YCISL Personal Story & Roadmap.
5. Push. Pull. Center. Mindfulness. Sweat Equity. Stress & Strain. About YCISL EQ.
6. Active Listening. Filters. A YCISL conversational topic.
7. “Must try harder.” Sir Ken Robinson. TED. 2006.
8. Creativity. Fast Thinking. Divergent-Convergent Thinking. Self-Edit. Self-Doubt. The YCISL Creativity Model.

That’s probably enough for the kind of short e-book I have been publishing. Hopefully, I can make it interesting for readers. The structure goes from ideas to concepts to a model.

Looking forward to getting started.

A moment ago, I received an email from Coursera with the Subject line “How to get a job with no experience.” There are 8 steps listed in the email. Let’s see if we can create a similar (and better, more EQ-enabled) list using YCISL ideas.

HOW TO PREPARE TO GET YOUR FIRST JOB – THE YCISL WAY

1. Active Listening. Showing that you can hear, listen and understand may be the most important factor in an interview as well as mentoring for a new hire. Your sense of timing, word choice and expression (facial, hands & body language) reflects on your emotional intelligence and is your chance to earn initial trust.
2. Shared Problem. Sharing a problem closes the distance between you and the person you are talking to in an elevator pitch. Ask about the problem related to the job and discuss how the new hire is expected to solve the problem. How do your interests and skills connect to the problem and solution?
3. Business Card, Mind & Heart. Show an understanding for the job functions (perhaps written in a job description), intelligence requirements, and the intangibles that may make the work fulfilling and meaningful.
4. Opportunity. From personal experience, timing is everything. Demonstrate flexibility and adaptability. Be aware of the timeliness as well as “currents” and “cross-currents.”
5. Team. You must show that you can work with others and contribute as an individual. Do you have group, social and empathy skills? Demonstrate composure and leadership potential.
6. Growth Story. In YCISL, we like to think about Your Personal Story. How would you grow in the job? How does it connect to your past and future? Make sure you are the main character in your story. Do describe the chapter scene at the prospective workplace. Make it interesting for the “reader” using success and happiness, two fundamental positivity features.
7. Intrinsic Motivation. Highlight the many ways you are motivated and self-motivated. What aspects of the job has the potential to make you feel rewarded emotionally and perform well sustainably? Helping people? Learning from others? A balanced work-social life? Flexible work hours? Practice divergent-convergent thinking here.
8. Promise. Show that you can make and keep promises. Be clear on what you are sincerely promising if you are granted the job role. You can echo and resonate the promise in your follow-up (thank you) note as well as when you start your first job.

This is why the YCISL tagline is “Life Lessons in EQ.”

Good luck!

I just watched a YouTube video titled “New US Vit D research” by Dr. John Campbell, and wondered about a possible connection between Vitamin D and the thinking skills in the YCISL program. Could creativity, EQ, growth mindset, mindfulness, positivity & fast thinking be enhanced by Vitamin D (also called “sunshine vitamin” by some)? A Google search led me to the Scientific American article “Does Vitamin D Improve Brain Function?” written by Diane Welland and published November 1, 2009?

The article mentions information-processing speed, cognitive impairment, and cognitive losses – all of which affect our creativity. It does mention one study of “3,100 men aged 40 to 79 in eight different countries across Europe” which sets up a huge knowledge gap open to a YCISL Innovators Toolbox Filling & Crossing Gaps analysis.

This is one of those “Hmmmmmm?” moments. A pause to reason (or imagine) this out. An opportunity to ask “What if…?”

Should we discuss a possible YCISL-Vitamin D link in a Popcorn with Colin? We could explore a youth perspective about Vitamin D as well as a need to improve brain function. Do students notice any brain function performance difference between seasons, between night and day, between indoors vs outdoors, or anything else related to light exposure?

Should we create YCISL projects around Vitamin D healthcare? Besides a physician telling a patient to take Vitamin D supplements, is there anything else that can be done to improve Vitamin D healthcare? Could a person’s Vitamin D be measured without a blood test making it more convenient? Is there any program that could be designed so that people would take Vitamin D supplements consistently? Is there a software app that could change human behavior to improve Vitamin D levels? I imagine there are many possible innovations.

Should we ask YCISL participants about their Vitamin D levels? As part of an EQ-framework, should we assess self-awareness about Vitamin D levels as well as boosting and supplementation? Should we also complete the EQ-framework with a design thinking discussion about resources and how to connect with those resources?

While writing this, I took a Vitamin D3+Vitamin K2 supplement. Let’s see if it worked.

One of my LinkedIn connections had liked a post that came across my feed. That article referred to an article titled “Dear daughter, sorry we were a bit negative about poly next year”  dated March 20, 2023 and written by Jill Lim. Fortunately, an image of the article was included in the LinkedIn article so I could read a slightly blurred version of the article.

Anyway, I wanted to share some perspective on this article because it deals with one of the transitions in education, plus I originally started the YCISL program with students from Singapore Polytechnic.

My 1-sentence summary of the article: This story is about an emotionally-driven change in perspective on the part of parents concerning an educational choice expressed by a daughter in a highly status-conscious society & culture.

Remark #1: There was EQ growth. One of the most common places we can learn and practice EQ is as a family, and such was the case in this instance where the connections in an EQ framework changed. There was the changed awareness about institutional as well as academic field of study options. There were management changes in how the parents perceived their daughter as well as adapted connection to the changed academic landscape in Singapore. A great family unit undergoes EQ growth.

Remark #2: Improve with Divergent-Convergent Thinking. Great parents are leaders who are adept at divergent-convergent thinking to go along with an EQ-based sense of timing and wording. There was an initial fixed mindset that took a little time to flip to a growth mindset. Hopefully, the growth mindset which uses the divergent-convergent method skillfully will become more engrained and a matter of preferred habit. As I like to say, there is a personal story and each is about a journey that can have all kinds of directions. Tie this together using the YCISL Your Personal Story approach, and it would make a lot more sense and be filled with positive hope and dreams instead of regret.

Remark #3: Think Transition. In YCISL terms, the “stage” is mid-Proof. There is no mention of a Proof element in the journey. A Proof element would help support the basis of this story. In GameStorming terms, we are in the Explore phase of the Proof Element where exploration allows for enlightenment in all directions. Eventually, she will reach the Close phase of this Proof element, and transition to the Open phase of the next element, Integration. As parents, making sure this transition goes well is of utmost importance to the “fulfilling education” mentioned in the article’s tagline.

I’ll wrap it up here by re-iterating that this is about a personal story and that the main character person is on a design thinking journey. The parents each have their own personal story. Their daughter has her own personal story too.