In today’s fast-paced digital world, the ability to harness the power of technology is no longer a luxury, it’s an essential skill to meet the demands of our economy and society. The progression of artificial intelligence is giving us an opportunity to reimagine who we want to be and design a new path forward. We’ve identified three key insights to reimagine how we live, learn, and earn.
First, to educate for the future, we must have the courage to reconsider our past. When we look back at the past two decades, we see a story about rapid technological transformation. Today’s college students, born in the year 2000, have never known a world without a computer and are graduating into a workplace driven by AI. Throughout their formative years, they witnessed the birth and boom of social media platforms like Facebook, transforming how we connect. High schoolers have only known a world with the iPhone, and social media shaped their early years and has changed how they engage with one another and the world. Our youngest learners, those entering kindergarten this year, were born in a world where they can command technology with their voice. However, just as our generation doesn’t consider electricity to be magic, the next generation won’t consider artificial intelligence tools like chatGPT to be magic. It’s their normal. These students spend a third of their waking hours in school, yet we’ve struggled to design schools that are relevant for them today and that prepare them for their workplace. The challenge we face is a reflection of the choices we’ve made in the past. Without a forward-thinking mindset, the status quo we stubbornly maintain and our tendency to resist change, even when it’s clear a new direction is needed.
Our second insight is that we must embrace the unique qualities that make us human. According to professors Frank Levy from MIT and Richard Murnane from Harvard, there are two qualities that separate people from machines. The first is solving unstructured problems or problems to which there are no obvious answers. These are things like climate change, social justice issues, and designing schools and workplaces. These are the challenges today’s generation will have to solve. The second quality is engaging in complex communication or making sense of contextualizing information, using emotional intelligence, collaborating, and turning ideas into reality. No matter how advanced technology gets, our human advantage will always persist.
Third, to adapt quickly, we must emphasize research-based strategies, not superficial tools. We help organizations adapt, build trust, encourage creativity, and inspire a shared vision to be future-ready. Today, we do this using an evidence-based approach called design thinking. It’s a creative problem-solving method used by the world’s top companies like Apple, Google, and IBM to turn their obstacles into opportunities and their ideas into impact.
I’m Dr. Saba Kidwai, and I believe that cultures of innovation begin with a culture of empathy. From classrooms to the corporate world, we’re living in a time of unprecedented change, accelerated now by AI. As a former educator and administrator in K-12 and higher education, and an education executive at Apple, I’ve experienced these complexities up close and have also seen the opportunities. The one question that comes up again and again is: How can we spark more creativity? How can we fuel more innovation? My research from the past decade tells us the answer lies in design thinking. Why? Because it gives us the frameworks that become a roadmap to adapt and innovate alongside emerging technologies.
I’ve had the privilege of working with organizations to become human-centered and technology-driven. What is the result? When we cultivate trust and inspire a shared vision for the future, people become more engaged in work that resonates with their purpose, paving the way through remarkable growth, skyrocketing revenue, and increased engagement and retention. We’ve identified how we can accelerate organizations by identifying what the machine does best and what the human does best. All of our experiences, from our signature SPARK framework and AI toolkits to our in-person workshops and online courses, to our immersive environments for human connectivity, we offer steps to structure and scaffold the change you want to see in your organization. We’re excited to work with you to help you realize your vision for your organization.
