Learning On Purpose
What problem do you want to solve?
Last week, I visited Bellesini Academy, a small, independent parochial school in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It’s open to students of all faiths and backgrounds and geared toward families living in Lawrence with limited financial means. The academy is tuition-free and named after Stephen Bellesini, who was an Augustian priest whose school was known as La Scola por gnent, or “The School for Nothing,” because it was free for the poor children of Trent, Italy.
In a room of approximately 60 to 70 middle-school boys and girls in uniform, nine other adults and I took to the front of the room to share more about what it is that we do for work. There was a JetBlue pilot, a dentist, a physical therapist, an HR benefits manager, a venture capitalist, an engineer, a marketing specialist, an operations executive, and then there was me, the lady who “consults” and wrote a book about preparing for jobs that don’t even exist yet.
I already have a difficult time explaining to people my own age what I do. So, how do I describe succinctly to a bunch of wide-eyed children what consulting is or what a chief innovation officer does?
In our little breakout sessions, I had seven children at a table with me switching every 15 minutes, asking me questions like: “So, I don’t get it. Do you just make up jobs that don’t exist?”
Touché, my friend, touché.
I quickly decided to take a different tack with my students, and instead asked each of them, “What problem in the world do you think you want to solve? If you could go to a school of hunger, poverty, Alzheimer’s disease, mental health … what kind of school would you want to attend?” This is when they started nodding vigorously.
I started talking about my own family members who have died of Alzheimer’s and how I wish I understood the disease better. Others talked about wanting to build affordable housing. Another talked about curing cancer. They each started to chime in with a problem they were excited to learn more about.
What each of them identified was a grand challenge, or what Stanford d.school Executive Director Sarah Stein Greenberg has called: purpose learning. In a great talk for Wired, Greenberg asks,
What if students declared missions not majors? Or even better, what if they applied to the School of Hunger or the School of Renewable Energy? These are real problems that society doesn’t have answers to yet. Wouldn’t that fuel their studies with some degree of urgency and meaning and real purpose that they don’t yet have today?
Starting with a mission definitely changes our orientation as problem solvers. Just the idea of starting with a purpose got the kids to shift their posture and lean into our discussion.
With that starting point of a grand challenge, I shared that even though they were getting to learn about nine or ten different jobs that day, those were only a small fraction of the jobs that actually exist.
When you start with a problem like cancer, however, a young person can begin to understand that there isn’t just one way to work on cancer. You can certainly become a doctor or a research scientist, but those aren’t the only viable routes. You can also work in a lab as a project manager and keep those scientists on track. You can manage their budget. You can hire great people for teams that need to work together productively. You can be the person who connects the business side to the scientific side of an organization. You can write grants to raise funds for research projects. Under that larger umbrella problem of cancer, there are hundreds of ways to engage and participate.
One of the students shared that she found she was pretty good at sketching and wanted to explore that more. I leaned over and picked up a pink acupressure ball that the physical therapist had given the children to take home. I showed them the small ball and asked, “Do you know how many steps went into making this little ball? Look at the writing on this ball. Someone had to make a decision about what kind of font to use — how big and heavy and smooth to make it. Everything we interact with in the world is a design problem, and your ability to sketch and draw well can be used in so many different ways.”
Each of us has access to these small moments. We can take a beat and look at what’s around us to consider the various kinds of jobs that must exist for our reality to be what it is. And the great news is: we don’t even have to have the answers to these questions. Just posing them can be enough.
I recently interviewed financial aid advisor Kevin Fudge for CGN about college and career pathways for first-generation learners. Kevin shared a great example from his personal life to illuminate the daily conversations each of us can have with our kids to open their eyes to the world of work around us. Here it is:
Just a few questions while looking at the credits of an animated movie, and look at where they can take you….
Those beautiful middle schoolers still have no idea what I do for work, and that’s fine by me. They just have to run with their own kernel of excitement and follow their curiosity about that larger problem they want to solve.
Dr. Michelle R. Weise is the author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet and leads Rise and Design, a strategic consulting and advisory service for businesses and higher education institutions.