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Spotlight on Adrian Woods

By Adrian Woods (August 2004 Issue)
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If Adrian Woods seems like a man in a hurry, it is no wonder. This former chief economist for Boots has glimpsed the future and does not like what he sees. ‘We are about to face global competition about ten times bigger than anything we have experienced since 1945,’ he says. ‘About 4 billion people – many highly educated – are coming on stream from Asia and the former Soviet Union. We have two choices: compete on price (which is not a good idea as some are paid a dollar a day), or stay ahead on ideas and brainpower.’ Woods’s approach is to teach people how to use their brains and develop their creative potential.

Giving up security and a healthy pension, Woods studied under Tony Buzan and others, left the corporate life and set up his Eurekazone business in 2001. ‘There is a bright future, but to get there our children have to have new thinking skills,’ he says, reminding us that Singapore has branded itself ‘The thinking island’. He is worried by the steady exodus of good trainers going out to the Far East to effectively help ‘destroy’ our economy, and is a little pessimistic about existing business in the UK. ‘So many British businesses have closed minds; fear of the future seems almost endemic,’ he warns.

The future, he says, lies with our children: ‘I want to get new thinking and creativity skills into our schools so that young people can develop a flexibility of thought, build up lots of self-esteem and brim over with lots of great ideas. It’s the change I want in schools and eventually in the whole of society. Humans have dominated the world because we have new ideas and can advance ourselves.’ Woods is rather critical of our current education system. ‘It is very effective at discouraging new and original thinking,’ he says. ‘It aims to encourage uniformity.’

Like a latter-day Jesuit, Woods believes in working with the young. ‘We must start at junior school level,’ he says. ‘There, children can really learn to “run their own brains”. That means much more about learning how their brains function.’ To this end, Woods’s recipe involves Mind Mapping®, memory development, creativity games and deeper reading. ‘Schools could give kids so many opportunities to hone and develop these new skills and help to make them feel good about learning because they would be making so much progress. Teachers could then spend more time on helping individuals rather than dispensing content.’ Woods, a well-practised Neuro Linguistic Programming exponent, places emphasis on getting youngsters in the right state in order to learn.

Woods is currently working with a school in Mansfield. ‘We have installed a programme of TLC – thinking, learning and creativity – into the curriculum,’ he explains. Six teachers spent a week with his company to work with his TLC material and apply it to their own curriculum subjects. A large part of the focus is on building self-esteem. ‘Fun is also a key,’ Woods adds. ‘The purpose of these fun exercises is to change the belief system of the children.’

One session designed to raise creativity encourages children to think about all the different things one could do with a paper clip. If they come up with, say, 20 uses, the teacher then explores ways of getting another 50 ideas. If one idea is, for example, to use the paper clip to pick finger nails, they focus on the object as a picking tool and look at all the other things it could pick. ‘The children soon fill the page with ideas and once they realise how many they can generate, it becomes a skill they can build on.’ The key for Woods is that every child comes to believe in his or her prowess in generating ideas. ‘Then you start to push that positive belief system into all their curriculum subjects.’

But, of course, this will only happen if the whole school culture changes and every member of staff works in this way. There is the rub. Woods acknowledges that change is threatening and our education system moves slowly. He also knows that teachers are bombarded with new government initiatives and that any new ideas, even great ones, may be treated with suspicion. ‘Lots of schools try little bits of these skills, but it must be applied in all subjects. It takes more than a few training sessions.’

Shouldn’t he be starting with the teacher training courses? ‘Thinking and creativity skills are not on the agenda. It is a very difficult area to penetrate and I don’t know anyone who has succeeded. Perhaps Training Journal readers could share their experiences of trying to work with teacher trainers?’ This is indeed an interesting challenge and one that Adrian Woods is anxious to see faced quickly. As he says, time is not on our side.

 

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