Category Archives: forecast

Strategic Foresight: Organizational Pilates for Building Adaptive Resilience in Education

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Like many people, I’ve taken up a few new activities while sheltering in place due to Covid-19. Some more admirable than others: late night Netflix binging; sourdough bread baking; optional grooming, cocktails at 5pm-ish (ok 4pm); daily walks with my daughter; and pilates.  

The last two I hope to continue after we’ve moved through the shelter-in-place stage of the pandemic and have a bit more range in our wanderings and interactions. The walks with my fifteen year old have been transformative for me. They’ve been a time to reflect together on how we are as a family and as a society. They’ve given me a window into the person she is becoming—her values and sense of purpose and agency.

The pilates started as something to do with my daughter, but now I do on my own.  At first I groaned through it, barely lifting my leg off the mat as I struggled to balance and “bring my navel to my spine,” something I’d never considered before.  But I continued. I enjoyed the time with my daughter and noticed that I was getting better.  My core muscles became stronger.  I gained flexibility and more control over my movements. I became more confident.

Flexibility. Strength. Confidence. 

These are the attributes that organizations, and schools, need to face the uncertainty of our VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. This pandemic will not be the last shock to our societal systems and structures. Rather than freeze in the headlights of disruption, we can practice imagining the future in order to develop the strength and agility to approach the long term horizon with confidence.  As with pilates, we can strengthen organizational resilience by exercising our strategic foresight muscles and practicing possible futures and their implications for schools, teachers, learners and families.  We can exercise our ability to map uncertainty, explore provocations and imagine strategies. 

Strategic Foresight as Organizational Pilates

What if schools and educational organizations practiced strategic foresight regularly, like pilates?

Could they reduce the anxiety and discomfort of facing an unknown and uncertain future and build the courage to innovate and create more life affirming systems of education?

This was the topic of discussion in a webinar I participated in, hosted by Chelle Wabrek, Assistant Head of School for Academic Affairs at The Lovett School in Atlanta, Georgia. Chelle is hosting a series, The Curiosity File, to cultivate the creativity and generative thinking among her staff, and educators who tune in, while they practice social distance and plan for the coming Fall.  You can listen to the podcast here, and to others from this link.

Conversation Highlights:

  • Strategic foresight helps to regulate anxiety about innovation and the future by shifting educators away from their fight or flight responses to challenges and toward creative generation of provocations and possibilities.  By mapping uncertainty and naming threats and opportunities, educators can move beyond fears and assumptions of constancy and uncover opportunities for meaningful change.
  • The proliferation of smart machines—automation and artificial intelligence—is one of several significant system disrupters. It doesn’t, however, have to lead to a robot apocalypse. To counter the “robots as overlords” narrative, another one describes smart machines as organizational power tools that will support us in building flexible, human-centered organizations and experiences. 
  • Imagining schools as ecosystems offers a framework to generate creative responses to the VUCA world while staying aligned to values and purpose.  As we’ve seen recently, teaching and learning is looking a lot different post-Covid19 than it did pre-Covid19.  Visions of success will look different in the future, perhaps in unexpected ways. Ecosystems pose the question: are you a school, or do you have a school?  What is your teaching and learning ecosystem and what role do you play in it? 

Notes on Conversations of Education Transformation: Frames Shaping the Stories and Solutions

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As I participate in discussions about the future of education, I listen for how the conversations get framed.  Underlying most discussions about innovation and transformation in education are assumptions that tend to set the boundaries of discussions.  Sometimes these frames are overt, sometimes hidden, but in any case they influence the kinds of questions that get asked and shape the solution space.  They highlight some players over others and may orient towards particular solutions.  Ultimately they shape how we view opportunity and visions of what is possible.

Here are three frames that I have noticed.  I’m sure there are others out there too.  When I sense that we are moving into one of these frames, I draw it out so that we can be explicit, work the frame to deepen our conversation, then move to another frame.

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The performance frame is typically technology driven.   It frames discussions by focusing on innovations that drive what teaching and learning could look like.  (Time on the x-axis and performance on the y-axis.) These conversations tend to focus on what is possible from innovative ideas and new technologies.  Questions focus on how emerging technology clusters and new conceptual paradigms enable improved system functionality and value.  The key here is how performance is measured.  It could be increased access (as with MOOCs) or greater affordability and relevance (as with competency-based education programs). Over time, as incremental gains decline and are exhausted a new set of technologies comes along and boosts performance to a new level.  The benefit of this frame is that it can serve as a springboard for imagining new constellations of innovations that collectively could increase the performance of the system.  It also focuses on highlighting definitions, measures, and values for system performance.

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The adoption frame originates from Everett Rogers’ early work on the diffusion of innovation and recently is described as the “two curve” challenge, in Ian Morrison’s book, The Second Curve.  (Time is on the x-axis and penetration rate is on the y-axis.)  This frame is more human, and organization centered.  It focuses on the threats and opportunities of innovations to specific users and stakeholders.  It helps orient conversations around what might enable or inhibit adoption of innovations.  For example, who doesn’t want to move to the new curve and what economic or political drivers may be the reason? Are there other barriers in the market or within an organization?  This frame also is a good way to discuss what kinds of risks emerge, and when, from remaining on the existing curve too long or leaving it too early.

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The concept of the adaptive cycle is at the root of the ecosystem frame.  This lens on change in education helps us look at the breakdown and disruption of the traditional education system as part of an adaptive process to a newer system that is better aligned to its context and conditions.   After a mature forest experiences breakdown and loss from fire, it re-generates itself by opening itself to unknown possibilities from potentially new species and relationships among plants, insects, wildlife, and nutrient flows.  Productive relationships thrive and over time the ecosystem rebuilds itself in response to its new conditions.

The ecosystem frame is particularly useful for orienting education system discussions around new opportunities, potential value, and relationships.  The frame highlights the generative dynamic of relationships and novel responses to threats and disruptions. Rather than resist disruptions (such as new technologies and innovative organizational models) or fall back on existing (ineffective) responses, the ecosystem frame points out adaptive responses by examining opportunities created by the release of resources, re-organization of relationships, and exploitation (leverage) of new niches in the ecosystem.

We’re currently in the early period of exploitation in which novel combinations of players are testing the ground and seeing what kind of sustainable value they can create.  Content and curriculum development is proliferating among open educational resource spaces that support new combinations of teachers, experts, and learning agents like librarians. New ideas like blended learning and competency-based assessment are attracting experimentation and pilots.  The most damaging action to the education ecosystem now would be to stifle experimentation (the exploitation of opportunities presented by new ideas, technologies, and players) and the learning obtained from successful and failed initiatives.

The adaptive cycle is nature’s learning process that supports its resilience over time.  For this reason, the ecosystem frame is a useful one for challenging the rhetoric around experimentation and failure (as in “don’t experiment with my children”) and creating a more productive conversation focused on learning and system improvement.

See my earlier post for a detailed explanation of the adaptive cycle.

Making the Future of Education Actionable Today

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One of the challenges of foresight work is to make new insights about the future relevant to our own situations and actionable in meaningful ways.  Foresight needs to be matched with processes that help leaders move past “This is interesting, but what does it have to do with my organization?” towards something more like “This reframes our professional development needs (or choices for strategic partners, etc.) and here are 3 things I can do now!”

The KnowledgeWorks Foundation recently released a new toolkit that is intended to help education stakeholders do just this.  Creating a New World of Learning: A Toolkit for Change Makers is an action planning guide that helps leaders design and facilitate customized learning experiences that help them think long in order to take action now.  The toolkit supports the forecast content that KWF have been developing and sharing for the past several years, such as their 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning and Learning Agents of 2025.

I worked with KWF to develop the toolkit and one of my goals was to make sure that education stakeholders had an opportunity to engage creatively and play with ideas about the future of education.   Rather than look for proven answers, it seemed important to create opportunities for leaders and groups to ask “What if?” and explore possibilities, even if they seem a little crazy or silly. With this in mind we broke out the activities into four sections:Imagine, Learn, Apply, and Prioritize.


Imagine and Learn sections focus on expanding the visions of what is possible in the future of education and developing a shared language and set of concepts to talk about future possibilities.  The Apply and Prioritize sections focus on applying new concepts and possibilities to a group’s organization and identifying opportunities for action.

The toolkit works a bit like a Chinese menu. Each section has multiple activities that facilitators can pick from to structure their learning experience.  The document is web-enabled so viewers can jump around and check out each section, the resources in the back, end even sample agendas.

There is also a rich set of audio, video, and text based resources to support activities.  There are audio and video clip stories in which future learners and learning agents describe their teaching and learning experiences.  There are text-based scenarios about future learning systems that describe how stakeholders might interact and how resource might be allocated. And education artifacts from the future provide an opportunity for practicing a bit of future focused archeology.   Participants can explore new ideas through hands on activities such as card games, prototyping, storytelling, and news headline generation.  And ultimately, there are opportunities for participants to use their new insights to identify new goals and actions for change.

Since the activities are modular, sessions can be flexibly planned to last 2 hours or as longer half or full day sessions.  The hope is that this toolkit brings some fun and safe risk taking, and thoughtful play to the education transformation process.

From Pedagogy to Sociogogy

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I recently watched the video of the  Independent Project and caught some of the commentary like this and this from the NYT .

I don’t know the back story of the project, but I have to say it made me very excited to see a collaborative and supportive model of learning in action.  It boiled down to responsibility and trust for me.

The discussion of the Independent Project’s significance brings me to the term pedagogy and how we have built a system of learning around a very old concept of learning that hasn’t changed much since the Greeks.  A few years ago my colleague Matt Chwierut and I forecast the need to develop social learning platforms and practices that enable “sociogogy” – leading one another.  (The forecast was for KnowledgeWorks Foundation).

The term pedagogy comes from the ancient Greek practice of assigning a slave—literally a leader (agagos in Greek) of children—to escort boys to school and generally supervise them as they prepared for life in Greek society. This paternal teacher-student relationship, of an adult leading a child through a course of study has persisted in basic form since then. The diffusion of Internet connectivity, mobile devices, and participatory media is disrupting this long tradition. The connected, open, and social media context is creating a new context for cultivating relationships among learners and teachers. Like the Internet itself, the structure of learning relationships is flattening, becoming more peer-based and networked than hierarchical, expert dependent, and “command and control” driven. Educator-learner relationships are becoming
more co-creative and self-initiated by individual learners. Many have referred to this learning relationship shift as a move from the “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” but in fact the transformation is more fundamental. Indeed the experimentation with networked, co-creative, peer-based relationships among learners suggests a shift from “pedagogy” to “sociogogy”—in which teachers and students are learning “companions” (from the Latin “socius”) leading one
another.

In the video, the principal remarks how the students moved themselves through learning experiences vs being on a conveyor belt of lessons.  I hope the video sparks new ideas, pilots, and more research so that we can move toward a more sociogogical (ugh, combersome word) system of learning.

A Generation of Caregivers

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All the discussions about health care reform have reminded me of a workshop I did with high schools students last summer as part of a youth forecasting project with the KnoweldgeWorks Foundation.  I developed a curriculum for teens about key trends in technology, community, health, economy, and demographics and worked with the Center for Digital Storytelling to conduct 3 workshops in which high school students imagined their lives ten years in the future.

The stories were personal, about distinct moments in their future lives, and they revealed issues that mattered to them.  One theme that came through in several stories was their recognition that they would be caregivers – not only to their aging parents – but to their chronically ill peers and to their friends and family members who had become ill as a result of toxic environments and food.  Part of their vision of themselves as caregivers involved developing personal relationships with digital para-professionals (robots), with human medical professionals thorugh social netwokring, and through online markets for medical services.

Here are two of my favorite stories.

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MarissaBeckettDV

My big take away from these workshops is how capable and insightful the teens were at imagining plausible futures and teasing out the implications that mattered for them.  It was also rewarding to see how excited they got about the present when faced with a set of possible futures. I need to do more of this work!

Resilience: Enabling New Patterns, New Agency

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I’ve been reading with great interest the posts of John Robb and Jamais Cascio related to resilience. Both make the case persuasively that in a world of black swans, global system shocks and instability, resilience (in communities, institutions, systems) is necessary not only to remain viable, but to thrive.

Jamais offers a clear definition of resilience:  the capacity of an entity–such as a person, an 
institution, or a system–to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks, 
and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards.

I’d like to extend the idea of “recovery” a bit.

I find the significance of the concept of resilience in its adaptive and transformative power—in its dynamic to generate novelty during crisis.  Resilient systems, communities, organizations recover by reorganizing, and possibly even transforming.  (John Robb’s reference to the T-1000 reassembling (through scale invariance) to continue to attack the Terminator is a nice visual of this.)

Fritjov Capra (The Web of Life) argues that a property of all living systems is their capacity to generate new patterns during times of critical instability. Brian Walker et. al., writing in Ecology & Society, emphasize adaptability and transformability as important related attributes of resilience.  They describe resilience as the “capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change” (italics mine).  Sometimes the system transforms.  It creates “untried beginnings from which to evolve a new way of living when existing ecological, economic, or social structures become untenable.” They give an example of the transformation of a rangeland ecosystem from many cattle ranches to a few conservancies managed collectively for ecotourism.

For communities, having the capacity to reorganize and transform to a more viable system seems to be critical for long-term success.  Community resilience is an adaptive practice, enabled by generative capacities to sense, learn, create, and re-organize.  These capacities will support a community’s efforts to generate novel solutions that maintain its distinct identity and wellbeing as it is connected to the global system and subject to global forces.

I think four trends are converging to drive a creative explosion of ways that communities can develop resilience–their capacity to reorganize and generate novel solutions and strategies:

•    Amplification of sensing and cognition through participatory digital media.  New digital media, from camera phones and sensors to social media such as Twitter and wikis are enabling people to create, filter and track data streams more effectively as well as make sense of it.  Citizen science projects, for example, use mobile sensors to amplify a community’s ability to capture environmental data.  Data visualization applications and collaborative gaming are ways to make sense of vast amounts of data.  This amplified capacity could help detect system threshold points (like its getting too big, or too polluted, or too leveraged).  This could help avoid system failures and recognize them more quickly when they do happen.

•    Super empowered groups as a modular social infrastructure.  The ease of affiliation and group formation has increased tremendously with social media. I see this trend as an intersection of Clay Shirky’s ideas in “Here Comes Everyone: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” and David Reed’s point that group forming networks grow exponentially and can rapidly scale as members co-create their own value.   Communities now can grow very user-centric social infrastructures to catalyze collective action and cooperation around issues and needs that matter to them.  The Transition Towns movement exemplifies this as self-organizing groups in communities across the world have quickly adopted Transition Culture ideas and have started to act collectively in their own meaningful ways.  The Interra Community Change Card (a shop local project) shows how social networks comprised of merchants, producers, and residents can boost local economies.

•    Democratized fabrication and the emergence of community-based micro-economies.   Efforts such as TechShop and MIT’s mobile FabLab program have the potential to transform the productive capacity of communities.  Equipped with 3D printers and computer controlled machine tools, these open fabrication centers amplify the capacity of communities to design, prototype, and fabricate stuff – objects, parts, components.  Community members and local organizations like senior centers or schools, and local artisans can create their own micro economies, repair networks, and production webs.  South Bronx residents used the FabLab tools to make furniture and irrigation pipes.

•    The rise of know-how networks and exchange of practical knowledge.  Opportunities to share, and learn from, practical knowledge is unleashing DIY behaviors and creative capacity in various domains.  Local expertise can attain global recognition and support and local organizations can reap the benefit of others’ experience, experimentation, and insight. Some key areas of growth are: artisan networks that share how-to knowledge and instructions like Instructables; open educational resource networks that exchange curriculum methods and lessons such as Curriki and OER Commons;  and R&D and design networks.

Together these four trends can enhance the resilience of individual communities through flexible platforms in various domains (education, food, health, finance) and could begin to create an interconnected web of pioneering communities with increased local agency and more suited to the volatility of the global system.

NOTE: I will be exploring more of these ideas in an upcoming paper published by the online journal of the Institute of Creative Technologies.

Interview: Creating a World of Learning

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Yesterday Steve Hargadon interviewed Chad Wick, founding President and CEO of the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, and me about the new 2020 Forecast.

The interview was conducted in Elluminate, a great collaborative environment,  and you can listen to just the audio or the full elluminate recording (there were two visuals that we shared – an overview of the map and the interactive map website).

Reflecting on our interview, one of the big stories from the map for me is how we are shifting from a mental model of education as the institution of schooling to a mental model of teaching and learning as a lifestyle of creation and collaboration.  This shift reminds me of the change we have seen in the healthcare industry.  Over the past decade we have seen healthcare shift from a focus on hospitals and acute care to an active focus on wellness and creating a healthy lifestyle.  Health has become a filter for many individual and family decisions with a diverse ecology of services, providers, and individual practices emerging to address this broad wellness focus.  So with education, the focus is shifting to learning, creativity, personal growth and development, and personal relevance and meaning.  Access to opportunities for cultivating and nurturing a “learning lifestyle” is gaining ground as a way to think about the future of education.

The good news is that there is an abundance of experimentation in ways to organize teaching and learning and develop a diverse educational ecology: from amplified classrooms like the Flat Classroom Project to alternate reality gaming, to eco-schools who create the basis for resilient school-communities.  My hope is that we see an ambitious innovation agenda in alternative public systems ( or ecosystems) for teaching and learning so that we can support a diverse world of learning.

Creating the Future of Learning

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The KnowledgeWorks Foundation recently released its new 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning.  This is an important resource for anyone interested in the strategically thinking about transforming the public systems and structures to enable a new world of learning.

As Monica Martinez, VP for Education Strategy, writes, “the world calls not for better schools, but for entirely new kinds of learning environments.”

The forecast focuses on six disruptive drivers of change and their implications for new challenges and opportunities for re-imagining and recreating how we move from a world of “schooling” to a world of “learning”.  I had the privilege of collaborating with KWF on this forecast (and their 2006 forecast) as research director and continue to track these areas (in this blog and elsewhere).

In addition to the forecast itself, KWF offers ways to engage with the forecast material and to take action through various kinds of workshops, policy briefs, group presentations, and even tips for personal action.  This is a terrific resource that I’ll likely be referring to in future posts.