Strategic Foresight: Organizational Pilates for Building Adaptive Resilience in Education

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? 

Reframing Education for the Long Now (Part IV):

Reflections on Cultivating a Long Now Mindset in Education

 

Insights about how Pace Layers contribute to a long now mindset in education

 

This article is Part Four of a four-part series, Reframing Education for the Long Now, based on insights from the Long Now Educators Workshop on August 1, 02017, hosted by the Long Now Foundation and KnowledgeWorks Foundation.

This series explored how as a society we might develop a long now mindset to examine and reframe education challenges. The culminating discussion of the Long Now Educator Workshop provided a time for participants to reflect on their insights about the benefits of using the pace layers and long-term thinking in education.

One theme throughout the conversation is the uncertainty about the purpose of a compulsory public education system. Public education lives in the slow layers of governance and culture, resulting in fragmentation of approaches and interventions. Promoting diversification of education reform strategies can be useful for system-wide learning as well as for identifying effective innovations. However, the lack of shared cultural guideposts to steer change is causing resistance, politics, and other obstacles to consume attention and prevent real transformation. It is also enabling the commerce layer to have undue influence over education reform. (as described earlier).

Jason Swanson, KnowledgeWorks Foundation

At first, this dynamic may seem deeply troubling. But the pace layer framework places this complex interaction in a longer timeframe. What might appear in the short view to be ossification of the public education system is in the long view really just temporary stasis. The current dynamic of education reform will shift when new pathways to change are built and are connected across the pace layers. The long now mindset cultivates the connection of the long term with the present moment to guide change. As mentioned in earlier posts, aligning expectations for change to the distinct pace of each layer might encourage more patience when change doesn’t happen quickly in the short term. It also helps to focus actions on achieving long term goals. As Stewart Brand suggests, we need to appreciate and engage the “many-leveled corrective” capability of the pace layers to stabilize negative feedback in the system.

Megan Simmons, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management

 

Benefits of Pace Layer Thinking

The workshop participants reflected about the ways that the pace layers might contribute to their thinking about systemic transformation in education. They identified several specific benefits:

Supports systemic narratives. The pace layers encourage big storytelling across many layers and time periods that has the potential to reveal deeply embedded cultural values and their manifestation across societal dynamics. This creates the potential to shift cultural values that may no longer serve broader educational goals for society.

Encourages perspective taking across the system. A pace layer lens exposes motivations and intentions of diverse stakeholders and their deep histories. This opens up the possibility to build empathy for stakeholders and hope for the future. It also sets up education leaders, designers, decision-makers, policy-makers, and philanthropists to look for connections and opportunities to coordinate strategies for maximum impact.

Frames complexity. Big systemic narratives can help illustrate multiple cause and effect relationships of actions across the pace layers and how they connect to stakeholder intentions. Pace layer-driven narratives and analysis helps make complexity concrete. They help education decision-makers hold a complex picture of change in their minds and make sense of the apparent messiness of the system.

Clarifies expectations of outcomes. A pace layer framework for analysis can help set reasonable expectations about the scope and time frame for outcomes. Pace layers can become a shared language to form questions and discuss projects, outcomes, and partnerships. Example questions include: What layer is the focus of your program/project? What outcome can we reasonably expect from this layer? What if we focused on a different layer?

Re-contextualizes failure. Building on outcome clarification, pace layers have the potential to reframe failure and provide a richer language to discuss negative outcomes. What might have been considered a failure may just be a focus on the wrong pace layer or metric.

Diversifies innovation and problem-solving. The pace layers provide six domains of activity to explore solutions and interventions for transforming education. This allows for additional perspectives and prompts for brainstorming and prototyping new ideas.

Mark Kushner, education strategist and innovator

Now Lengtheners

To wrap up the workshop, participants playfully brainstormed and prototyped actions that might lengthen the now in education. Specifically, they considered the kinds of aspirational images, projects, or activities would shift the mindset in education to a longer term societal context.

Some compelling examples include:

The long view of human learning. What if we showed human learning in the context of the learning of the species? How would this expansive time frame influence system priorities outcomes?

Big data perspectives. What if we used big data to develop scale models and maps that let individuals put their experience into this bigger, longer perspective?

Learning legacies. What if we based our designs of education keeping mind the education needs and aspirations of our grandchildren’s children? What could be our individual and societal learning legacies to future generations?

Global/generational challenges. What if we trained students to solve intergenerational problems with intergenerational solutions? Many of our most complex challenges require strategies that endure centuries. Some examples include: interstellar space travel which requires generations to complete a mission; preserving the redwoods which requires an institution and people who understand the problem to span generations.

Values shift immersive game. What if we could immerse people in future scenarios that are guided by different societal values to show long term impacts? The experience might help reveal long term benefits and consequences to education of specific decisions, actions, and inaction.

Conclusion

Nasif Iskander, San Francisco University High School

Fundamentally, the pace layer framework is a thinking tool of hope and possibility. By expanding perspective to the breadth of civilization and timeframe to include centuries, pathways for positive change become more abundant and visible. One participant summed it up well.

“Each of these layers, while they have their own pace, each have their own values and motivations. And in all our conversations about school we tend to focus on what effectively is one layer and one set of values, and wish the others didn’t exist. The realization that all of this is at work all the time, and all this is necessary, and that this is a part of a functional system of the evolution of civilization is actually quite liberating. And I start to think of these different paces and different motives and values as opportunities rather than obstacles.” — Nasif Iskander

Unleashing Innovation in Teachers

“In the future I am going to do something that scares me more often.”
Big Ideas Fest 2014 Participant

MadLibImage

Reflections like the one above are what keep me coming back every year as a designer and facilitator of ISKME’s Big Ideas Fest — an annual immersion in collaboration and design for educators around the world looking to make meaningful change in teaching and learning.

As someone who works behind the scenes, as well as in the midst of the action, I am always thrilled to see the diverse collection of educators arrive with enthusiasm, some with a degree of healthy skepticism, and leave Big Ideas Fest as experienced BIFniks— open, collaborative, and hopeful education change makers, equipped with new tools and concepts, and inspired to put them into practice in their own learning environments.

The Action Collab—ISKME’s design thinking process— frames the Big Ideas Fest experience as it gives BIFniks a chance to immerse themselves in an innovation and collaboration experience in order to learn it and apply it to real world education challenges. It provides a common language for the way we interact, pose questions, and look ahead to post BIF engagements.

We asked BIFiks to reflect on their Big Ideas Fest experience at its conclusion to learn about the impact of the BIF and Action Collabs on their work. Three important outcomes, listed below, emerged from their comments about their Action Collab experience.

It demystifies and democratizes innovation by breaking it down into practical activities
BIFniks leave with a grounded experience in creative problem-solving and with an understanding of how to set themselves up for innovating at home. They learn to become open collaborators less concerned about perfection and more focused on generating possibilities to explore.

Today I learned:
“How to move forward from a juicy question to a specific innovative solution.”
“Letting go of my own outcome leads to new discoveries.”
“The design process is messy but generative.”

It instills fearlessness and confidence in their own abilities as creative problem-solvers
They learn how to trust their own creative instinct and gain an appreciation for the uncertainty and surprise factor that accompanies true innovation.

My biggest take-away is:
“There’s something productive behind frustration!”
“You can’t predict where an idea will go.”
“I can’t be wrong, my ideas matter.”

It gives them skills and practices to act on right away
BIFniks walk away with clear, practical tools for collaborating and unlocking creativity in themselves and their colleagues.

In the future I’m going to:
“Live ‘Yes, And’ more often.”
“Resist suppressing my creativity.”
“Listen in order to receive”
“Use student collaboration right away in my own work.”

I’m looking forward to our upcoming Facilitator Training for Action Collabs on April 27-28, 2015 in San Francisco. If you want to learn how to facilitate an Action Collab process in your own organization, ISKME is offering a 2-day immersive training where you will learn the Action Collab process and its rationale, by participating in an Action Collab, and learning how to set up Action Collab modules for your own groups. Check out the following announcement for more details, and email andrea@iskme.org if you have additional questions.