POWSAF interviews Dr. Rod King, Inventor of the Fractal Grid Technology (FGT); Part 1 – Dr. King and the Prince of Wales School

POWSAF interviews Dr. Rod King, inventor of the Fractal Grid Technology (FGT), in a three-part series.  This interview will be published in three parts:
Part 1 – Dr. King and the Prince of Wales School; Part 2 – The application and use of FGT for the Prince of Wales School; and Part 3 – The application and use of FGT for Sierra Leone.

Dr. Rod King is an engineer, innovator, inventor, author, and a proud Princewalean. Dr. King believes that personal, team and organizational goals should be F.A.S.T.E.R.: focused, ambitious, space-bound, time-bound, expansible, and reducible in today’s hyper-competitive environment.

Dr. King, thank you for taking the time to answer POWSAF’s questions in your busy schedule. We have prepared nine (9) questions on various topics, especially about the Prince of Wales School, your alma mater.

Dr. Rod King:   I attended the Prince of Wales School from 1969 to 1976. I was the Head Boy (First Place in Upper Six) in 1976. Frankly, I could not have attended a better school in Sierra Leone during those years. I believe that a key reason why POW turned out exceptional alumni is that the School attracted exceptional students especially in Form 1 and Lower 6 (Science). It’s almost like a process of natural selection: the best secondary school attracts the best students from primary schools as well as secondary school-Form 5 (Science).

In our days, POW was undoubtedly the best school in the country. So, it attracted and had the vast majority of brilliant students who passed the Selective Entrance Examination as well as the GCE “O” Level in science subjects.

That’s what I call the “Input (Brand) Advantage.” Once at the POW, the students experienced the “Processing Advantage”, which involved the school’s culture, key activities (habits), and resources. The POW had an enduring culture of strict school and personal discipline, excellence in classroom, excellence in sports, and healthy competition among students. While at the POW, I honed my competitive skills especially in chess and table tennis. I was a national table tennis player while at the POW and in 1975 represented Sierra Leone at the Asia-Africa-Latin America (AAA) Table Tennis Tournament in Lagos, Nigeria. POW’s academic “rituals” or routines included monthly testing and report cards while other schools focused on end-of-term, if not end of year exams.

Also, when we entered POW, the school had adequate resources in terms of qualified staff (teachers), adequate facilities and equipment; we even had an after-school-feeding program (“Kennedy”) for pupils up to Form 3. In terms of management strategy, POW had a culture of continuous improvement well before there was a name for it in the business world as Total Quality Management (TQM).

Finally, with strong national government as well as alumni support (“Old Boys’ Association”) in POW’s environment, students at the POW were encouraged and motivated to excel in and out of school.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention active parental involvement in students’ work especially through the signing of monthly report cards, not to talk about suspensions for tardy student behavior.

Tell us what it feels like to be an alumnus of such a school and your responsibilities to safeguard the educational attainment at the school. 

Dr. Rod King:   I often say to myself, “once a Princewalean, always a proud Princewalean.”  I’ve met alumni from different secondary schools at home as well as abroad. I’d say that, in my biased view, the pride exuded by alumni of the Prince Of Wales school is second to none. Perhaps, the first line of our school chorus could be “blamed” for our unbridled pride:

“For searching Sierra Leone far and wide, no school can well be found; That sends forth truer gentlemen, or stands on firmer ground.”

Jesting aside, I’d say that POW was and continues to be a strong brand for excellence in secondary school education especially in Sierra Leone. “Lion” on our school badge is forever marching FORWARD.

Even my late Dad, who was a staunch Regentonian, used to fondly remind me of our school’s motto. “Procredite,” he would proudly say. “’Procredite,’ that’s your school’s motto in Latin: Forward.” As an alumnus of the illustrious Prince Of Wales School, I believe that we have a duty to pay forward literally and figuratively. We can pay forward physically, intellectually, emotionally, and/or spiritually. We can pay forward in body, mind, heart, and/or spirit. In short, we can pay forward eudaimonically.

I believe that the most important thing is that we continuously and positively pay forward while helping the school, students, staff, and other stakeholders in our ecosystem to pursue POW’s ultimate happiness or “ideal solution,” that is, the ideal or best system that POW could ever grow to be. Otherwise, the school would decline and become an undesirable relic in a Red Ocean of underachievers. And that will and should not happen. And that would never happen. So, we should with all fervor pursue POW’s ideal solution via the Blue Ocean of hyperlearning everything in no time, 24×7 and at little or no additional cost.

As an alumnus, engineer, and inventor, what lessons have you learned over the years that you would consider invaluable to both Alumni and current pupils of the Prince of Wales?

Dr. Rod King:   A non-Princewalean, the philosopher Karl Popper, once said: “All life is problem solving.” In the mid-1980s, I first encountered the work of Karl Popper in his book with the aforementioned maxim. Then, I was doing my postgraduate studies at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and had stumbled across that Popper’s classic in Stuttgart University’s bookshop on the Vaihingen campus.

What a mind-opener that was.

With some modification, Popper’s dictum of “All life is problem solving” has since become my inner North Star, a mantra if you will. For me, everything in life … whether on earth or in the cosmos … is about problem solving and in particular, pursuit of the “ideal solution.” Every “living system” declines, chokes, and eventually dies when it fails to solve its problems. As a student, an engineer, innovator, inventor, and human on planet earth I cannot overemphasize the need for collaboratively, continuously, and rapidly discovering, validating, and solving our most important problems. Wide application of the classic scientific approach of problem solving … problem discovery/validation; hypothesis formulation; hypothesis testing (through experimentation and prototyping) … which we learnt at the POW should be encouraged and “gamified.”

We should rapidly master and apply scientific problem solving within a paradigm of collaborative problem solving, innovation, and hyperlearning as well as gamification. In my 30 years of post-doctoral research on creative problem solving, I’ve discovered that a relatively simple template exists for rapidly discovering, validating, and solving well-defined (“tame”) problems as well as poorly defined (“wicked”) problems. Luckily, that discovery was made not by Karl Popper but by a Princewalean … yours truly.

I believe that every Princewalean past and present should be deeply acquainted with how the Universal Problem Solving (UPS) template works so that we can (collaboratively) apply it to discover, validate, and solve the most important problems not only at the POW but also in the rest of Sierra Leone and the world at large. In short, we should be able to directly and indirectly apply the Universal Problem Solving template at school, home, outdoors, and work.