I’m reading, ‘Chutzpah: Why Israel Is A Hub Of Innovation & Entrepreneurship’ by Inbal Arieli, and loving some of the novel education strategies helping to make Israel one the top places on the planet for creating entrepreneurs. Look at the statistics for maths and science education and Israel barely makes the Top Fifty. But for the creation of successful start-ups it is Top Three. And, if I interpret what’s happening in terms of creating Red World and Green World people, I’d say the country also creates the highest proportion of people comfortable in Green World.

The book describes a number of traits of Israeli life that help create this outlier-level entrepreneurial performance, but my favourite describes the emergence of a system of ‘informal’ education institutions designed to help students develop and enrich their practical skills. Not just the fact that they exist but that they, have recognised the importance of ‘stuckness’ in the learning process. Hand kids answers on a plate and not much learning takes place. Force them into situations where they are made to be stuck, on the other hand, and we really head into outlier territory. The bigger picture rationale sounds something like this:

“We are not really interested in teaching children to take a skill that they acquired and apply it to another field. Instead, we are focused on increasing the ability to create new skills in realms we are not really aware of today. That is a hard task, and our practice shows that the way to do that is by bringing the children to a place where they are truly stuck, do not know the answer, and no-one will give it to them… therefore true growth, true teaching, comes from that place of not knowing the solution, trying to figure out an answer regardless of whether you find it or not.”

I instinctively love the idea, but I’m also conscious of the importance of creating a sense of progress if kids (or anyone for that matter) are to develop their persistence skills. Which turns out to also have been thought through:

“Assessment methods in these programs are also radical. Rather than measuring the students’ successes, the instructors measure their failures as a better indicator of their learning. “If you manage to solve twenty exercises, I, as an educator, have wasted your time. Since you already knew how to solve [the exercises], you made no progress, you’ve learned nothing.””

Now, I think, we’re in wow territory. The sort of territory that says, ‘damn, I need to go out and set up a school like that’.

Before I do that, though, I thought it might be interesting to look at the problem through the contradiction-solving lens: The Israeli system is trying to increase the entrepreneurial skills of students and what stops them is the likely absence of a sense of progress. Here’s what the 3.0 Business Matrix has to say about how others have resolved this conflict:

And hey, presto, there’s good-old Principle 13, The Other Way Around. Don’t measure success, measure failure. Green World measures for a world that needs more Green World thinking.