Tag Archives: innovation

organized for constant change…organization’s function is to put knowledge to work

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Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management, 1998 [Hat tip to Mike Wagner (@BigWags)]

… [A business] must be organized for the systematic abandonment of whatever is established, customary, familiar, and comfortable, whether that is a product, service, process; a set of skills, human and social relationships; or the organization itself.

In short, it must be organized for constant change. The organization’s function is to put knowledge to work — on tools, products, and processes; on the design of work; on knowledge itself. It is in the nature of knowledge that it changes fast and that today’s certainties always become tomorrow’s absurdities.”

Could, should, would we substitute “school” for “business?”

Teaching innovation and innovating the system. #BothAnd

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From Thom Markham, as read on MindShift, April 1, 2013

One overriding challenge is now coming to the fore in public consciousness: We need to reinvent just about everything. Whether scientific advances, technology breakthroughs, new political and economic structures, environmental solutions, or an updated code of ethics for 21st century life, everything is in flux—and everything demands innovative, out of the box thinking.

The burden of reinvention, of course, falls on today’s generation of students. So it follows that education should focus on fostering innovation by putting curiosity, critical thinking, deep understanding, the rules and tools of inquiry, and creative brainstorming at the center of the curriculum.

This is hardly the case, as we know. In fact, innovation and the current classroom model most often operate as antagonists. The system is evolving, but not quickly enough to get young people ready for the new world. But I do believe there are a number of ways that teachers can bypass the system and offer students the tools and experiences that spur an innovative mindset. Here are ten ideas: (emphasis added)

Read the full post here.

I think Thom’s post is excellent. The three intro paragraphs are profound and thought-provoking – and, hopefully, action-provoking. Also, I appreciate his willingness and ability to empower teachers and classroom practices. Thom’s thinking and examples resonate strongly with me and with my experience co-designing and co-implementing Synergy – a transdisciplinary, community-issues, problem-solving course for eighth graders.

But I am also left wondering about and wanting more concerted efforts to actually affect the system purposefully and intentionally, rather than feeling that our only, or most practical, choice is to bypass the system.

How are you and the schools with which you are involved systematizing the learning of innovation? All of us – in education, in for-profit business, in non-profit organizations beyond education, and in our personal lives and families – should be more focused on such questions, issues, and solutions. The citizens can affect such change and impact current and future quality of life – if we commit to doing so. Of the people, by the people, for the people enables us to do so. We can affect the system. The system is made from us, by us, and for us. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

School Innovation Teams – Start with Outrospection #WhatIfWeekly #StudentVoice

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Education faces a design challenge. From what I know about design challenges, it seems that the best designs begin with intensive stages of immersion and discovery – putting the designers in the positions of chief empathizers.

One of the best examples I know of related to this commitment of being chief empathizers comes from Dan and Chip Heath’s book Switch. The story of Dr. Jerry Sternin harnessing the local wisdom of Vietnamese mothers who were rearing healthy children amidst a malnutrition epidemic stands out to me. Actually, the story inspires me. Dr. Sternin did not swoop in with pre-conceived notions and ready-made solutions. Instead he committed to a process of immersion and discovery to find sustainable, scalable solutions that came from within the community. He leveraged empathy to create a most-likely-to-succeed solution that honored the end users.

Countless other examples come to mind, but I’ll restrain myself and offer only a few here:

  • When I enrolled in a design-thinking course from IDEO and Design Thinking for Educators, we began with a mini design challenge, and step 1 was to interview someone about their morning commute. “Learn how they feel, what they wish for, what gets in their way. Your job is to ask great questions, listen, and learn. TIP: Don’t be afraid to ask ‘Why?'”
  • When I participated in Mount Vernon Presbyterian School’s Design Institute, before we began designing our ideal outdoor classroom, we interviewed students. We collected insights from them before we even thought about preparing solutions to our own notions of classroom design.
  • When Emily Pilloton asked her student designers to imagine a better chicken coop and design it, they started with observing how chickens behave. “In three days, students would get to know their feathered ‘clients’ by observing their behavior. How do they eat? ‘They like pecking out of the straw, not eating from the trough,’ noted Kerron. How do they sleep? ‘They huddle together up in the roosting box,’ said another student. After three days, our students knew far more about chicken behavior than they ever imagined or wanted.”
  • When Imagining Learning formed to help crowd source ideas for redesigning education, they began with Listening Sessions – for students.
  • When University of Missouri-Columbia freshman Ankur Singh thought to study standardized testing, he decided to take a semester off of school in order to ask those most affected – the students.

So, for all of the schools facing essential questions of innovation, I am wondering how you are factoring in “immersion and discovery.” How are you building empathy into the design challenges?

When I was a school principal, one of the most valuable things I ever did was to shadow a student every year. For a day, I would partner with a student – most often a sixth grader – and I would trail along beside them and pretend to be a student for a day. I was off limits as a principal because I wanted to be completely immersed in the experience. In the years that I was most committed, I would even do all of the homework assignments that night of the shadow. Often, on blogs like Connected Principals, I read of other administrators engaging in such empathy gathering. Now, I am wondering if schools should not build this process into their regular routines and habits.

Maybe schools need innovation teams. Among other jobs, these innovation teams could commit to shadowing students, interviewing students, observing school days and after-school activities, talking with parents about what family life is like at home after school, etc. I bet devoting just three days a year to such immersion and discovery would yield invaluable insights and empathies. [Why the arbitrary number of three days? Well, if it’s good enough for the chickens in Bertie County, NC, I figured it was a good starting place!]

Our school innovations might improve mightily if we designed with the students’ voices at the core – if we committed to “outrospection.”

Business, Social Entrepreneurship, and Education – Exploring Intersections and Interchanges #School3pt0

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One of the things we do at Unboundary is explore the intersections and interchanges of business, social entrepreneurship, and education. In the past few days, a number of things have crossed my path that relate to this nexus of learning innovation and significant transformation. I thought I’d share just a few of these things…

A dear friend and colleague emailed me last week (we actually stay in touch every week), and with her permission I am posting a little bit from our latest e-correspondence.

Also, I usually check out your blog from time to time. Doing so always inspires some thoughts, connections, the quiet voice I hear inside me… the one who says “teach them they are not who they think they are.” That is what I heard myself say in response to “how do we teach young people to thrive in a world of possibility?”
I really love the time in which I have lived my life. I would not want to go back but I have loved the life I have lived and look forward to the future. I do struggle with the corporate influence on education. Going way back before my time I still like what Thomas Dewey said in 1910… “The aim of a 20th century education is not the creation of a labor force but the enrichment of the individual and society by developing a child’s social power and insight.” The good news I think is that 21st century skills and education really do help to develop social power and insight.

When we spoke by phone, we agreed that education is a “both-and” issue. Education should BOTH enrich the individual and society AND create a high-quality labor force. I’m not really interested in making schools more business like – at least not like many people interpret that “corporate influence on education.” However, I am very interested in examining ALL of the ways and means that business, social entrepreneurship, and education can work together as something like sections of the same orchestra – for the benefit of learners and for the benefit of the challenges and opportunities we face in our world. I may be oversimplifying the complex, but it seems to me that we should all see ourselves as playing for the same team.

With that in mind, and with a few projects happening here at Unboundary, the following two articles are well worth reading. Both articles point to collaboration among business and education. I find the comments at the conclusion of the first article particularly interesting, and I think they provide a compelling segue into the second article.

I’m forming my own hypotheses about the future intersections and interchanges for business, social entrepreneurship, and education. By sharing these bits here in this post, I hope I can contribute just a bit to the hypotheses you might be forming.

America’s Shoddy Education System Is a Business Problem,
by Jeff Stibel  |   9:00 AM December 6, 2012

Jeff Stibel’s company is implementing a three-part plan to help address some of the issues in education. The entire HBR article and the comments are intriguing, and I found these two paragraphs particularly poignant. [HT to Frank Rauss for bringing this article to my attention.]

Our most precious natural resource is not diamonds or oil or agriculture; it is human capital. The seeds we plant grow only with education. While our program will help offset any immediate gaps with existing employees, the primary focus is on the next batch of bright and talented employees — the children who will one day bridge the talent gap for businesses across the nation.

There are many ways to tackle this problem, and it’s time that businesses focus on the ones within our control. We cannot rely solely on the government, parents or educators. This is our problem too. I am honored to say that my company is doing our small part. If other businesses follow suit or take their own novel approaches, we can solve the education and talent gap.

 

School Reform for Realists,
by by Andrea Gabor |   August 28, 2012

Andrea Gabor shares examples of Cisco, NYCDOE, iZone, Global Technology Preparatory, and Houston Petroleum Academies. She also offers some profound takeaways about “best practices” in business-education partnerships. [Another HT to Frank Rauss for making sure I didn’t miss this link in my feed reader.]

On the ground, the most effective business–education partnerships are those that foster innovative education opportunities in which both students and parents can participate, and those that create bridges between schools and the outside world, including potential employers. The following stories demonstrate some of the principles that help these partnerships work. What distinguishes them from many outright failures is the quality of collaboration. In these examples, business leaders did more than donate funds and technology; rather, schools and businesses sought to learn from one another.

Finally (at least for this post), I recommend looking at the relatively new business structure called L3Cs (L3Cs explained on Wikipedia). As I walk Lucy in the morning and as I work, I am enjoying thinking about the potential of L3Cs for the future of schools and schools of the future.

In a “3.0 school” established as an L3C, lines between the labels of “students,” “researchers,” “social innovators,” and “employees” get blurred. Perhaps in the future, L3C “schools” will actually pay salaries to young learners (instead of collecting tuitions from them) who are studying such things as cancer cures, robotic surgeries, and transportation and communications innovations in un-siloed coursework that seems a lot more like on-the-job training complete with degree credits. An L3C working to solve the planet’s energy or water issues could synergize the NGO aspect of that work with the for-profit opportunities and integrated-studies possibilities.

Last month, Unboundary participated in an exciting meet-up about L3Cs and higher education. Here’s the press release distributed by Americans for Community Development.

PRESS RELEASE

On November 14, 2012, in Indianapolis, Indiana, Americans for Community Development (ACD) hosted a conference on the groundbreaking concept of implementing the L3C business structure as a form of organization for colleges and universities, using the L3C model to create opportunity ecosystems within the higher education system.  This conference was facilitated by the Lumina Foundation and held at their headquarters in Indianapolis. This meeting was the first of its kind in history bringing together a group of professionals from within higher education, business, law and philanthropy. Over the course of the day the main topic of discussion was how to connect higher education, job creation, entrepreneurship and economic development with the L3C business model as an organizational structure for colleges and universities. This concept “reflects a totally new way of thinking about higher education and how to organize it”.  L3C institutions will be individually unique but will resemble each other in underlying structure. This is a fresh outlook on the organization of colleges and universities that create holistic environments in which institutions are giving back to the students and communities and the students and communities are giving back to the institutions therefore creating opportunity ecosystems that thrive. The very first L3C university, Rockport University L3C, was formed just prior to the conference and conference attendees were asked to contribute intellectually to its development. A large number of the attendees asked to be part of a taskforce ACD is forming to advance the concept of L3C colleges and universities. ACD thanks Bo Adams and Govantez Lowndes from Unboundary for being part of the small group we invited to participate in this ground-breaking event.

PROCESS POST: Ludwick Marishane and #PBL – “What’s stopping you?”

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… one question I have for the audience today is, on the gravel roads of Limpopo, with an allowance of 50 rand a week, I came up with a way for the world not to bathe. What’s stopping you? (Applause)

What is stopping us? Ludwick Marishane did so much more than just come up with a way for the world not to bathe. He figured out a way to battle trachoma and fight disease-based blindness in under-resourced areas.

I believe strongly that school should be more community-issue-problem-solving based. As Daniel Pink explained in Drive, we are motivated most strongly when we feel higher degrees of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Purpose has long been a question driver in schools. “When will I ever use this?” “Why are we learning this?” School could live more deliberately at this nexus of desired relevance and purpose and problems craving solutions. Learners want to maintain choice at pursuing things that matter to and interest them. By pursuing such passions, while the hard work can often feel playful, we develop deep mastery.

If you watched the five-minute TED talk from Ludwick Marishane, do you think he got the following:

  • growing understanding of science, perhaps in the integrated fields of chemistry and biology
  • increased cultural thoughtfulness and empathy
  • strengthening communication skills in writing business plans, patents, grant proposals, etc., as well as enhancing oral communications with presentations, sales pitches, etc.
  • heightening proficiency in mathematics, quantitative and qualitative statistics, and application of mathematical reasoning
  • developing sense that he is a creative and critical-thinking problem solver, with agency to make a difference in the world now
  • expanding appreciation for socio-economic and psychological dimensions of getting a solution to market
  • understanding the necessity of genuine collaboration to combat big, audacious goals

I think he got all of the above and so much more. And what he is giving may far outweigh what he is getting. I think he might help more than 8 million people affected by trachoma. And he developed DryBath because he wanted to figure out a way that he would not have to take a bath himself.

I can imagine elementary, middle, and high schoolers engaging in such starts-as-a-selfish-and-seemingly-ridiculous project. I can see them spending time in more time-concentrated laboratories of integrated learning, rather than interrupting their flow because of bells set to 50 minutes and disciplines sub-divided by cinderblock walls. I can see them solving big problems and growing as engaged, empathetic, empowered citizens. I can see them practicing the skills and learning the content that will serve them, and the world, most dearly in the coming decades.

Some schools might want to make wholesale change to such a model. Others might want to revamp their curriculum and instruction so that “lab” problem solving represents 50% of the day and more traditional classes represent the other 50%. Still others may want to discern how to incorporate such community-issues-problem-solving courses into just 20-25% of the school day or week. Whatever the ration, I believe the students and the world would benefit from the increased and enhanced concentration on dealing with real community issues – issues within one’s school, wider neighborhood, city, state, nation, or world.

As I’ve written this post, in less than 15 minutes, I’ve imagined a sort of “kit” that could help a school get started…

  1. Alan November’s book, Who Owns the Learning?
  2. Suzie Boss’s book, Bringing Innovation to Schools
  3. Will Richardson’s e-book, Why School?
  4. frog design’s Collective Action Toolkit

In fact, if you are already convinced that schools are, or should be, doing such community-issues-problem-solving based learning, then you could use just #4 to help you get started.

As Marishane challenged us all, “What’s stopping you?”