Published in the Independence Daily Reporter April 2018

In many disciplines and industries, we often hear and see the term “Best Practices.” We are invited to a conference or to read a book to learn about the best practices. The implication is that we should learn about the best practices so we can emulate them in our situation. I’ve been in meetings during discussions about ways to solve a certain problem or deal with a certain situation and heard someone say “How do others handle this?” While emulating someone else’s best practices can help prevent a lot of mistakes made by others, best practices should be a starting point for figuring out how to do things in a better way.

Make Best Practices Better

Apple did not become the leader in that industry by going to conferences and emulating the best practices of the industry. They dissected the best practices to see how they worked and then went about the business of coming up with better solutions; in some cases, new solutions that had not existed. This is where the idea of continuous innovation comes from. We should all have a best practice of making the best practices of our disciplines and industries better. Sometimes innovation can be disruptive as when Apple made personal computing affordable when some in the industry said no one would ever want or need a personal computer at home. Or when, a little over 100 years ago, Henry Ford brought affordable automobiles to the population when most people would have said they wanted faster horses.

Improve What We Do While Lowering Costs

The missions of our businesses and institutions should be based on providing solutions of some kind to the problems that abound in our society. Once the mission is established, everything we do should be to improve the products and services we offer in fulfilling the mission or becoming more efficient (i.e. lowering costs) in the use of the resources required to provide the solutions. We should be engaging everyone in the business or organization, not just those at the top, to work on better solutions for customers or stake holders while lowering the costs. We live in a world where many of the people in our businesses and organizations are not engaged in making improvements and thus we struggle to maintain relevancy and stay competitive in our markets. If our mission is compelling and our people believe in the “why” we exist, they can be challenged to actively participate in the efforts of continuous innovation.

Analyze Don’t Emulate Best Practices

Best practices should be looked at not to emulate, but to analyze, always to look for ways we can change those practices to make them even better. Sometimes the ideas for improvements can seem crazy. That’s where small experiments and testing can minimize risk while providing a safe way to test radical new ideas before implementing them system-wide.

When we go to the meetings and conferences to hear about “best practices,” before we even return home, we should be thinking about how we can take those best practices and improve them in our own situation.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter April 2018

We first heard the term “productive struggle” at a Fab Lab symposium a few years ago. The term represents the idea that some tasks are not easy to accomplish in a few simple steps. Some tasks force us to venture into unknown territory, learning as we go, making mistakes large and small along the way. People with a growth mindset understand that struggling with mistakes and setbacks are productive in accomplishing these tasks. People with a fixed mindset give up when things become difficult and often are not willing to try anything new for fear of failure.

Experimentation and Learning from Mistakes

The magic of working in a Fab Lab is that the work is nearly all based on experimentation and learning from mistakes, developing a growth mindset as we go. The growth mindset is like a muscle, the more we use it the more it grows and over time we become willing to take on more daunting tasks. If we don’t use a growth mindset, our mindset atrophies, reverting back to fixed and we can get to the point of not wanting to try anything new.

Operating Fab Lab ICC as a Business

As we strive to operate Fab Lab ICC as a business, we foster an environment in which experimentation and learning from mistakes, i.e. productive struggle, is celebrated as one of the best methods of learning. In a sense, the whole operation of Fab Lab ICC has been an experiment since our opening on October 1, 2014. Nobody has a textbook titled “Fab Lab Operation 101” and it wouldn’t be effective anyway since community and academic needs vary and Fab Lab operation is just simply not a one-size-fits-all situation.

A Need for Consistency

Like other businesses, our members and constituents want a certain consistency in the Fab Lab experience. They want a stable schedule, knowing when they can come in to do their work. They want consistent instruction and “how-to” knowledge from whoever happens to be working, whether it’s the paid staff members, student work-studies or one of our great volunteers. They want the machines to work properly and the Lab to be well stocked with the supplies they need. They want all this to be organized in a space that’s easy to maneuver with the tools they need close by. They want consistency. Therein lays our challenge and our own productive struggle, figuring out how to provide all of these things while experiencing accelerated growth in the number of people that use the Lab on a daily basis.

Consistency Amid Experimentation

Even as we continue to provide the environment of experimentation that makes a Fab Lab such a good learning tool, we’re embarking on a renewed campaign to add consistency to the operation of the lab. Manager Tim Haynes has taken on the task of organizing an operations manual, “Here’s how we do things here.” This will include “How To” documents and videos to help members in learning to use our wider variety of equipment. We’ll develop an organization chart, defining who has what roles. There are only three of us full-time staff members so our names will be repeated several times through the chart. Such is the nature of a Fab Lab, short of staff in order to keep membership fees low and affordable to many.

In a world of chaos and uncertainty, people want a level of consistency and quality in the companies and organizations with which they interact. Companies and Fab Labs that survive will be those that strive to provide consistency and quality while celebrating the successes and mistakes along the way; productive struggle.

Join Us for Our Groundbreaking on April 18

We know that adding more space will help us organize our tools, educational and work areas to better serve. To that end, the groundbreaking ceremony for our new 6,400 square foot expansion building will be on April 18, at 11:30. We’ll combine the ceremony with a lunch-time open house from 12:00 to 1:00. If you can break away from your daily activity for a few minutes, we’d love to have you join us for this milestone occasion in our growth. We’ll provide snacks and refreshments.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter March 2018

I get a little nervous when I hear politicians, policymakers, and educators talking about making college free for everyone.  Free college is a bad idea and here are some reasons why.  By the way, these principles apply to many parents who are killing themselves trying to provide a totally free ride so Junior can attend college with no “skin in the game” of his or her own.

People Don’t Value Free

People don’t value things they receive for free.  Many times it’s because the free things are really of little value.  This gives people the impression that free things don’t have much value so that even things of value are not appreciated.  Giving things away does little to build the recipients’ ability to be self-reliant, building their self-efficacy, a form of self-confidence that leads to better life-long decisions.  “Habitat for Humanity” is a program that helps people have affordable housing, not free.  The reason the program is successful is that everyone has to contribute to the house being built for them in some way.  This “sweat equity” is what makes people value the program and the homes they receive from the volunteers who help make them possible.  A college education should be affordable, but not free.

Not Everyone Needs College

Another reason free college is a bad idea is that not everyone needs college.  Don’t misunderstand, everyone needs to be educated, and everyone needs to be committed to life-long learning, but there are lots of ways to become educated besides going to college.  After decades of a societal message that everyone should go to college, many of us now realize this is not the case.  There are plenty of examples of people that have made huge differences in the lives of others, indeed, the world without a formal college education.

Higher Education Needs Change

Finally, with more than fifty percent of college graduates unemployed or underemployed, we need to re-engineer higher education before we make it free and infuse even more unemployable graduates into the market place. The college degree needs to include training and knowledge about how to be agile and adaptive to a changing world.   As the world changes and career paths come and go, we need our educated people to be able to change course and thrive rather than hit the unemployment line while waiting for the next job in a career that is no longer of value to the market place.

College Should Be Attainable, But Not Free

Scholarships and financial aid should be available for those willing to work in exchange.  There’s nothing wrong with the idea of students working their way through college.  Students having their own “skin in the game” will take their education more seriously and will tend to make sure how and what they learn will serve them well in a future world of continual change and disruption.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter March 2018

Making Progress

We’re making some progress. In many ways we are starting to change the message to our youth regarding how they will become productive, self-supporting members of society. From “go get a job working for a large company and retire with a pension” to “you can be anything you want to be” to “follow your passion and do something you love,” we’re moving in the right direction, but we’re yet quite finished changing that message.

It’s All About Problem-Solving

All of this has to be within a framework of providing some kind of useful service to others, whether bosses, coworkers, customers or society. To be useful, the service has to solve problems for others. Hence the emphasis at Fab Lab ICC and in our classes on problem-solving in all our activities, projects and classes. Indeed, as related to career building and making a living, all of the educational institutions should be emphasizing problem-solving as the primary objective, not how much salary can be drawn from an employer or how much profit can be extracted from customers. Don’t misunderstand, salaries have to be right for the work performed and profits have to be sufficient to provide for the sustainability of the company and the satisfaction of the investors and/or stock holders, but money and profits should be secondary to an objective of solving problems in the best, most innovative and efficient ways possible.

Challenge Youth to Change the World

At every opportunity, we challenge youth to start figuring out how to change the world and “you don’t have to wait until you get out of school to start.” We are not challenging them to make large salaries or become rich. We are challenging them to figure out ways to change the world by making it better. The challenge will be met by solving problems of one kind or another. This kind of challenge will tend to lead these young students to a life of work solving problems by doing something about which they are passionate. There’s nothing wrong with making a lot of money and/or becoming rich but that’s not the primary goal. If you’ve built a life around helping others, chances are that you’ll use whatever money you make and wealth you build to help others throughout your life.

The Best Life Is One of Serving Others

You can follow your passion as long as it solves problems in ways better than any other solutions available. You only get to follow your passion if people individually or in our society are willing to pay for your solutions. You can’t make a living following your passion if no one else cares about or benefits from the fruit of your passion.

If we can continue to change the message to our youth in this way, eventually we’ll have a society of people concerned with making the world around them better, many of them following their passion. The best way to have a happy and fulfilled life is to figure out how to serve others by solving problems while doing work about which you are passionate.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.