The Benefits of Fuzzy Goals

Fuzzy goals

I’m home again on what is now our 12^th or 13^th snow day this year.  At this rate, we will be making up snow days well into the end of June. I’m ok with it as I have plenty to keep me busy, including preparing for some upcoming presentations on the creativity curriculum I am documenting through this blog.

I stumbled upon a great book in my monthly Amazon book browsing (aka binge purchasing) called “Gamestorming: A playbook for Innovators,Rulebreakers, and Changemakers” by Dave Grey Sunni Brown and James Mancanufo.  It is a book written for business people looking to create change and inspire innovation in their organizations. In the introduction, the authors write about something called “fuzzy goals” that I would like to share and offer the suggestion to think about how it relates to education and in particular in teaching creative and critical thinking.

“Like Columbus, in order to move forward toward an uncertain future, you need to set a course. But how do you set a course when the destination is unknown? This is where it becomes necessary to imagine a world; a future world that is different from our own. Somehow we need to imagine a world that we can’t really fully conceive yet-a world that we can only see dimly through a fog.

In knowledge work we need our goals to be fuzzy. “ p. 5

I think what is happening with this creativity curriculum that is different from what a traditional art teacher might teach, is that the goals are not as precise, the way I ask my students to approach the challenges cannot be designed fully in advance, nor can they be fully predicted.

In education, we have this expectation of a “secure chain of cause and effect”, We use SMART goals. We lay out very detailed plans of how learning objectives will be achieved and map every detail out to the nth degree. However,  real true creative growth and innovation happens when a chain is not followed, but rather there is a framework for exploration, experimentation, and trial and error.  The same is true for retention of information. When I think about the bits of knowledge that have been exposed to over the course of my own school experience, those opportunities to connect the learning in a meaningful way through exploration, experimentation, and trial and error are the only ones that really stuck. 

Our purpose of education is not for kids to memorize and cram in information only to forget later after the project is complete or a test has been taken. We should provide spaces for them to create their own path and make connections that will last. (This thought came to me after participating in a conversation with some other teachers about how happy we should be about our standardized testing coming in the spring next year, rather than the fall, so that they information will be fresh and thus kids will score better.  And I wondered to myself, “Why are we even bothering to teach at all if we know and expect our kids to forget the information later?”)

 

In the real world and in life, the path to the goal is not clear, and the goal may in fact change.

In business, this is sometimes referred to as “sideways management”. 

A fuzzy goal is one that motivates the general direction of the work, without blinding the creator(s) to opportunities along the journey.

So, how does this happen?

According to Gamestorming:

“What’s the optimum level of fuzziness? To define a fuzzy goal you need a certain amount of ESP: fuzzy goals are Emotional, Sensory, and Progressive.

Emotional:  Fuzzy goals must be aligned with (students) passions and energy for their project. It’s this passion and energy that gives creative projects their momentum; therefore, fuzzy goals must have a compelling emotional component.

Sensory:  The more tangible you can make a goal, the easier it is to share with others. Sketches and crude physical models help to bring form to ideas that might otherwise be too vague to grasp. You may be able to visualize an effect of the goal, such as (the viewers experience).

Progressive:  Fuzzy goals are not static; they change over time. This is because, when you begin to move toward a fuzzy goal, you don’t know what you don’t know. The process of moving toward the goal is also a learning process, sometimes called successive approximation. As the (student) learns, the goals may change, so it’s important to stop every once in awhile and look around. Fuzzy goals may be adjusted and sometimes completely changed based on what you learn as you go.

(Students) need to navigate ambigious, uncertain, and often complex information spaces. What is unknown usually far outweighs what is known. In many ways it’s a journey in the fog, where case studies haven’t been written yet, and there are no examples of where it’s been done successfully before. Voyages of discovery involve greater risks and more failures along the way than other endeavors. But the rewards are worth it.” p.8