A highlight of my week was spending a day with Stephen Hurley for great conversation, insights, question asking, music making and of course great food!

One of our conversation stops was taking time to explore the question: “Have we lost the long game?” With our respective backgrounds, an easy place to start was the K-12 educational arena, but this question easily applies to many aspects of society. This particular week, we looked at education and health care.

On the health care front, we wondered about two particular elements: finding a better optimization of health care through remixing best strategies rather than polarizing traditional against alternative. Why is this so often viewed in a polarized one vs the other viewpoint? Why can’t it be easier to blend both approaches? Our other focus was on the idea of achieving greater personalization of services at a faster rate. What are the barriers for faster more impactful change? What are the best questions to ask re change?

In terms of education, we explored what we observe – such as the continued focus on “now”. While improving math scores, literacies etc. are important elements of learning and achievement themselves, we wondered what is being neglected while this narrow focus occupies our collective head space? In 20 years, will it matter if a jurisdictions math scores are up one or two percent? Where are we at with teaching other important disciplines? Say creativity for example. Everything in the world around us is changing so quickly, how do we align a long term path of learning for each student that will addresses finding passion, creativity …

By coincidence, I happened to hear TEDx speaker Lucas Foster of WatchMojo, present a session on the Creative Business Cup at the new Idea Exchange in Cambridge on the weekend. In his presentation he made the case for recognizing the crossroads for change at the go forward/no going back stage. He emphasized the need for creativity as part of the process. He pointed out the importance of how we teach, practice, promote creativity as a core element of moving society forward. In my view, this reinforced elements of the “Have we lost the long game?” discussion.

I am looking forward to more exploration of this idea of the long game, and of course, I am looking forward to my next day with Stephen to explore the long game with deeper thinking and questioning.

~Mark