XplanaZine

Transcript

Everybody knows that addiction is an ugly thing. They also know that it can often provide a strange motivation for invention or creativity.

Take last week, for example. I was in Phoenix on business and for the entire duration of my visit there was a water quality alert. The long and short of it is that I wasn’t able to buy a cup of coffee the whole time I was there. Now that may not seem like much of a problem to you, but that’s probably because you don’t have a severe addiction to the first cup of morning coffee.

The first morning my partner and I went into a local Starbucks, only to be told that there was no coffee to be had. Pastries and bottled water they would gladly sell us, however. On the second day, we were sure the ban was still in place but we stopped by Starbucks again, just in case. Again, the woman at the counter broke the bad news about no coffee for sale, but then she added an unexpected serendipity. "One of our customers made a large pot of coffee using bottled water," she said. "You’re welcome to a complimentary cup if you like."

Okay, so the the cups ended up being awfully small and I helped myself to more than one complimentary serving. Like I said, I have an slight addiction to morning coffee. But the thing that really got my attention was that some guy, a guy who very likely has at least as much of a problem with coffee as I do, took this mini-crisis and made it into a nice opportunity. You see, he was more than a good customer. Every time the people at that Starbucks told a customer about the complimentary coffee, they also mentioned the name of the man who made it along with the name of his company. Pretty smart, eh?

Sure, I know. You’re thinking that I’m a pretty big cynic. I mean, the dude really brought coffee because he was a standup guy and wanted to support the community. But I’m not a cynic, actually. I think that’s exactly why he did it. I believe he was motivated by scarcity and a desire to help out. But I also believe he ended up benefiting from his actions in some unanticipated ways. And that’s the nature of allowing scarcity to influence our actions — unexpected blessings occurs.

In a broad sense, I watched the power of scarcity in the lives of my father and others like him who were children of the depression. An intense feeling of scarcity drove them to attempt things and create solutions that were way beyond their education or actual know-how. They were forced to make up solutions on their own, without the benefit of families and an education system that made it easy. That had to write their own texts for success, in a manner of speaking.

In my opinion, this same sense of scarcity should have a formal place in our educational process. We should put it up there right alongside all of the abundance we currently administer in our classes. I mean, we provide students with every shred of information they could possibly need to succeed. We give learners all of the answers to the exams and, if that weren’t enough, we even coach them to make sure they score well. And if all of that fails, they always have the Web to fall back on.

Well, perhaps it’s time we realized that an alternative path to success might be to give learners less rather than more. Maybe it’s time we do at least some of our teaching through scarcity.

Why don’t we stop trying to complete the paintings for our learners and, instead, just give them some broad outlines and a free choice of colors. I say it’s time to make at least part of the education process about real participation, about scarcity that requires the learners in our system to find their own creative solutions.

A little need and a little absence can go along way to making people think creatively.

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