Mai Chen: Olympic effort for a better future

Ukrainian world and Olympic champion pole vaulter Sergey Bubka's pearl of wisdom was: 'Your heart must clear the bar first.' Photo / Allsport

The Olympic Games is the reason my family emigrated to New Zealand. My father had trained the Taiwan gymnastics team for both the Tokyo and the Mexico games and in 1971 he was headhunted to train the New Zealand gymnastics team.

As a result I grew up in a household where the wisdom of top athletes was seen as the key to success in all areas of life. I was reminded of this last year when, in the midst of my own marathon effort to write a book while running a law firm, Dad began coaching me with Olympic insights once again.

"The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful - will win," said Roger Bannister. "Your heart must clear the bar first," said world champion pole vaulter Sergey Bubka. "The subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between reality and imagination," he reminded me, quoting Billy Mills, a rank outsider who blitzed the field to win the 10,000m in Tokyo.

The coaching helped me not to quit when working seven days a week for two years really got to me.

So while I am glued to the screen for these two weeks, I am not just interested in stories about relentless training schedules, but also the back stories of the Olympic athletes, about mental toughness, and creativity and innovation.

Just think about Oscar Pastorius, South African sprinter and a double amputee, who runs on artificial legs.

We need an Olympic mindset to propel our export industries into a position of strength on world markets. And we need it to solve tough policy and law reform issues we face, like keeping superannuation affordable, addressing Maori claims to water, or structuring our domestic broadband market to enable Kiwis to compete abroad from here. The easy problems are behind us. There are only going to be more toughies.

As Sir Ken Robinson says in his recent book, Out of our Minds; Learning to be creative: "The rate of technological innovation in the past 50 years has been breathtaking. But the indications are that the revolution may only just be getting under way. ... In the 21st century humanity faces some of its most daunting challenges. Our best resource is to cultivate our singular abilities of imagination, creativity and innovation. Our greatest peril would be to face the future without investing fully in those abilities ... The impossible yesterday is routine today. Wait until tomorrow."

Robinson cites Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat: "Those who have the ability to imagine new services and new opportunities and new ways to recruit work ... are the new Untouchables. Those with the imagination to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies will thrive."

To which Robinson responds that schools have a doubly hard task not just to improve reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

The takeout for me is that policy and law reform are creative solutions to tough government problems so the purpose of the public law "toolbox" is to help create solutions; we need to apply right-brain thinking and creative disciplines, rather than just following the linear logic that is the focus of much legal education.

Because the legal tools interact with the real worlds of business, technology, psychology and political economy, they don't usually come ready made for difficult problems. And that means I have to find lawyers who are not just technically excellent, but who can create and innovate.

Similarly, I would argue that technical excellence in business leadership or among government officials is not enough. Diversity remains essential to finding creative and innovative solutions. Success lies in finding new ways to conceive of old or new problems.

So as we watch the world's best athletes compete over the next two weeks, we need to remind ourselves that making New Zealand a world beater requires creative and innovative minds, attached to supple and disciplined bodies. That may require major changes in our education system. It may also require a change in the skills we recruit for, and how we approach policy and law reform problem solving. We all have our own "Olympics".

Mai Chen is a principal of Chen Palmer and author of Public Law Toolbox.