#40 - SMART DUMBO'S: FLEXIBLE THINKING IS KEY - Part 1

Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to is. - Alyssa Edwards

FUNDAMENTAL FLAW

The multi-billion dollar poverty industry won’t tell you that you cannot eradicate generational poverty (GenPoverty) without making the people concerned smarter. They won’t tell you that to eradicate GenPoverty you need self-propelling systems. And self-propelling systems need smarter people. They won’t tell you because building perpetual loops does not fit within their operational framework - building self-propelling systems requires radical empowerment of the people living in the barrios.

They theoretically embrace the concept but they are not willing to accept the high risks of failure. They don’t want to bet the house on it. Can you blame them? Maybe not but the tragedy is that playing it safe does not achieve fundamental solutions; it only softens the sharp edges of poverty. According to me, that is the fundamental flaw of the current establishment in the poverty industry.

Is empowering inexperienced, low-skilled people in the barrio a high-risk business? Absolutely 100%. But if you don’t do it, you will never come close to some sort of final solution. The underlying reason why radically empowering people is still not the mainstream approach perhaps is that many middle-class+ decision-makers believe that poor people are Dumbo's – not capable of creating social progress. Of course, they are smart enough not to say it out loud but these hidden thoughts might penetrate their decision-making. I won’t rule it out.

SMART DUMBOS

Any smart person understands that s[he] is a Dumbo knowing nothing about most things while knowing a bit about a few things. Your deep understanding of buy-side economics is worth shit when you get lost in the heart of the jungle of the Amazone. You can have Smartz in one situation while being Dumbo The Jumbo in another. Personally, I know jack shit about mathematics, cars, first aid, cricket, the universe, rap, coding, birds, Yugoslavia, electricity, and the list goes on and on. I am Dumbo #1 in these areas.

I think that many poor people are smart in surviving stressful environments. They are able problem-solvers on their own territory. Sure, when catapulted into the corner office of a huge marketing company, they would not know what to do. There are no corner offices in the ghetto; just street corners where the hustlers rule. But don’t take my word for it because I know jack shit about the barrio either.

The key point I try to make is that each environment ( the jungle, the street, the office) requires a different Smartz to survive and flourish. Each environment harbors potentially smart people. Each environment requires a different application of skills and mindsets. But what holds true in all environments is that Smart people could be more effective in problem-solving with more resources. What also holds true universally is that people could be more effective if they could free their thinking from all sorts of limitations.

In IkoCiti, we radically empower people on the inside of the barrio with resources. They can be Dumbo's in many fields but they are experts on the Barrio. Our challenge is to make our Maveriqs smarter in areas needed to rebuild the barrio effectively. This requires also knowledge that they and I don’t have. Nobody knows everything and that is why collaboration was invented. Smart people collaborate. The challenge is to collaborate smarter and to achieve this objective, we need to free our thinking from all those mental biases that reduce our effectiveness to solve problems.

Problem-solving skills involve the ability to generate new ideas and new methods to consider the problem at hand. Problem-solving may require individuals to think flexibly to expand their thinking beyond what they previously understood.

IkoCiti’s primary educational challenge is not to ‘pump knowledge in memory cells' but to free up the Maveriqs' brains by encouraging their curiosity and flexible thinking. If successful, we can build talent pools with better problem-solving abilities.

SOCIO-COGNITIVE POLARIZATION

The study, “Not getting vaccinated? It Is a matter of problem‐solving abilities and socio‐cognitive polarization“, [here] by Alice Cancer, Carola Salvi, Alessandro Antonietti, and Paola Iannello, published in Environmental Research and Public Health gives us some interesting general handles. Their findings are useful for IkoCiti because it underlines the show-stopping importance of the psychological dimension in fighting poverty and social progress. Hence, a huge risk factor for our success is those people who want to participate but demonstrate high levels of socio-cognitive polarization (not my term).

Socio-cognitive polarization includes measures of conservative political ideology, absolutist thinking, intolerance of ambiguity, and xenophobia.

I believe (strongly) that individuals demonstrating absolutist thinking, political conservatism, religious dogmatism, and xenophobia are less likely to be successful in IkoCiti as barrio changemakers. An able changemaker needs to develop problem-solving skills, be able to improvise in situations and know how to approach different kinds of people to achieve practical results.

BARRIO SMARTZ

As we all know solving problems starts with a deep understanding of the problem itself. Life in the barrio is a society on its own. If you don’t know the people, the hierarchy, the secret codes, the hypocrisy, the psychology (pathology), and so on, you cannot rebuild the barrio to something better. Outsiders are Dumbo's; only insiders (collectively) have the keys to a final solution. They might not have all the answers but they are the field experts. Any type of real solution starts with them. They have the Barrio Smartz. The challenge now is how can we make them more effective. What is needed is to develop a special type of learn-by-doing education (skills training).

IkoCiti trains Maveriqs and offers them the tools to be successful. We facilitate; they execute. The better they execute outcomes, the more money they make. Maveriqs must see themselves as micro-start-ups always evaluating their SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/ Opportunities/Threats). Evaluation should not be feared but embraced. Working on your weaknesses pays off. But what if your growth is blocked by unconscious factors like a tendency to absolute, rigid thinking?

Are you doomed for failure or is there a way out?

Part II coming soon

THE END