Today I was mentoring someone and we talked about what we can do for our children to support them in our fast-changing world where we are so focussed on being busy.
I reflected on the fact that my three boys have all been very focussed on sports as they grew up, and I believe this has served them superbly in teaching them many values, such as grit (passion and perseverance), resilience, team-work and more. This has also brought them rich experiences and they’ve met amazing people from around the world.
A few days ago my friend Patrycja Skurzak (a brilliant coach who specialises in confidence coaching) pointed me towards another element of the speech by Jack Ma at the WEF recently (I wrote about another theme her had in that speech in #TheFutureIsFemale), and he brilliantly targets what fresh ideas and leadership are needed in education, including teaching children sports, music, arts.
First his speech excerpt, then two more thoughts.
Now, Jack Ma’s main theme is what we need to do to change education to stay ahead of machines and AI. I wrote on this in “Why humans will always stay ahead of AI”
My thoughts from that piece :
“Is the world as we know it over? Will we be taken over by machines? Are we already living in the Matrix?
I cannot be sure, but I am hugely positive about the innate magic of the human race, and I feel we have a massive untapped resource available to us that is one that AI may perhaps never replicate.
What is that secret, you say? Energy, emotion, and so Empathy. The ability to feel our own feelings and to feel those of others.
Stay with me on this one. Leadership is all about reading and managing energy. Without boring you on the science, humans make ALL decisions based on our feelings, and NONE based on our rationality and intellect.”
Finally, back to Jack Ma. Many of the ideas he then spoke of have been the focus of Sir Ken Robinson for several years. For me, I’ve often dropped in learnings from Sir Ken around education into business and leadership workshops around the world, as I believe his thinking is massively relevant for leaders in all fields.
A wonderful animation of his talk on Changing Education Paradigms, one of the most watched TED talks of all time.