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.
ConversationHighlights:
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?
The distinctive human advantage in careers and life is shifting beyond cognitive skills to include relational, creative, and emotional competencies. Complex thinking will remain critical, but it will not be a sufficient foundation for individual success as computing power grows exponentially and as workplaces become more diverse and engage in complex problems that require inclusive and collective talents.
Successful organizations, from corporations to community-based movements, are recognizing the growing importance of unlocking individuals’ creative, relational, and emotional powers. We’re seeing an emergence of a new kind of smart, resulting in the need for a new kind of readiness and educational experience—one that prioritizes individual emotional and cognitive development with extreme social awareness and cultural navigation skills. In order to develop the necessary practices to thrive in the future, schools will need to invest in building their students social-emotional core.
Future Readiness Relies on a Social-Emotional Core
Source: KnowledgeWorks Foundation, 2016
A Rapidly Transforming Workplace
Business professor Ed Hess writes,“The new smart will be determined not by what or how you know but by the quality of your thinking, listening, relating, collaborating, and learning.” (1) Columbia Business School professor Katherine Phillips further explains the criticality of these relational skills for navigating complex diversity in order to leverage its robustness and drive organizational creativity and innovation.(2) People who differ by race, gender and other factors bring unique information and experiences to the task at hand. As diversity and inclusion shape a more equitable organizational culture, groups begin to anticipate the need to navigate perspectives and provide deeper rationales, thereby engaging in richer cognition and achieving better outcomes.(3) With collaborative work growing as an essential feature of the future workplace (expanding 50% in the past 20 years) (4), learning how to cultivate inclusive, productive communities will be a highly valued skill. For schools, Gurin argues that a diverse student body is as critical a learning resource as quality facilities, faculty and libraries.(5)
Many organizations are already aligning their training, hiring, and work practices toward relational competencies to adapt to global markets and drive outcomes.
FedEx’s “People First Leadership” program teaches managers how to develop their emotional intelligence to make better decisions and create a culture in which everyone feels the dedication to strive for exceptional performance. (6)
Google’s “Search Inside Yourself” course trains its engineers in emotional intelligence skills to support collaboration, more open communication, transparency, and less posturing.(7)
A LinkedIn survey of business recruiting and hiring managers, 78% identified diversity as the biggest game-changing trend for business; more than half of these are focusing on implementing “diversity-inclusion-belonging” strategies to foster wellbeing and high performance.(8)
Educators Driving Change for the Future
The powerful partnership of relational competence and machine intelligence that augments our human sense making will transform society and bring us to a new threshold of creativity and fulfillment. In order for everyone to get there, educators must prioritize social-emotional intelligence and cultural competence as the building bocks of student growth. Many schools are beginning to take up the challenge and prioritize emotion-based and relational competencies in their school designs.
A recent OECD study examining skills necessary for social progress and wellbeing found that SEL positively contributed to students’ academic, career and life outcomes.(9) In fact, they reported that low levels of social-emotional skills can prevent the use of cognitive skills, becoming an obstacle for students to reach their educational and life goals. Schools nationally are seeing positive results in academic achievement, classroom climate and pro-social behaviors when they implement the RULER approach, an evidence-based social-emotional skills training from Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence.(10) Pioneering independent schools such as Prospect Sierra School,(11) the Keys School(12) and the Park School(13) are integrating SEL, cultural proficiency and pedagogy, and social justice strategies to create multifaceted approaches for fostering equity across the learning experience at their schools.
Relational Readiness for the Post-Industrial Age
Together, these strategies will help graduates build new kinds of adaptive careers necessary for the future, post-industrial age that are fueled by creativity and innovation and require emotional, relational, and collaborative competencies.
Industrial Age Careers
Post-Industrial Age Careers
Human as asset of production.
Human as instigator and creator of novel work.
Work tasks are discrete and specified, requiring specialized knowledge.
Work tasks are complex, ambiguous, and problem-based, requiring diverse talents.
Rapidly changing market forces shape roles and makeup of collaborative teams.
Careers are linear; sequential pathways are determined by employers, professional silos, and industry needs.
Careers are personal, creative journeys emerging from purpose driven challenges, professional and lived experiences, and interaction with diverse social networks.
Individual skill building is periodic, and externally determined by the market.
Ongoing self-discovery drives continuous learning, relationship building, and re-assessment of purpose.
Source: Saveri Consulting, 2019.
The author would like to thank Rebecca Hong, Director of Institutional Diversity, The Spence School and Adrienne Barr, Executive Director, New York Interschool and Faculty Diversity Search for their review and input.
Since then I have worked with many organizations in the K12 and postsecondary education space to think strategically about the impacts of accelerating technologies on education and align their visions toward the emerging horizon of change. What does living well as a lifelong learner with meaningful work look like in 2040? What do we need to put in place today to enable a system of teaching and learning that will help our youth thrive in the future?
A summary from one workshop focused on the strategic needs to re-imagine technology integration; re-design school and learning with social-emotional learning at the center; and re-contextualizing college admissions. Download the report for more.
Looking at education through the lens of the pace layer framework provides several insights about the dynamic of education as intellectual infrastructure in the U.S., and where long-term transformation might emerge. In The Clock of the Long Now (01999), Stewart Brand describes education as intellectual infrastructure, situating it in the middle of the pace layers.
The Pace Layers diagram at Long Now Educators workshop, August 1, 02017.
There it is bracketed by the turbulent, questioning, and disruptive forces of fashion and commerce on one side, and by the stabilizing constraints and forces of constancy and preservation from governance, culture, and nature on the other. In this middle pace layer position, infrastructure is capable of moderately-paced change — which should be measured in decades. As a form of intellectual infrastructure, education is well-positioned to take advantage of both the rapid testing of new ideas and approaches from the fast layers and the ability of the slower layers to purposefully integrate selected, meaningful disruptions.
As intellectual infrastructure, education represents society’s approach to developing its future generations with the purpose of ensuring its sustainability. It is society’s platform for developing its people — its human creativity and acumen—which in turn feeds the faster layers of fashion and commerce and supports the stability of slower layers of governance, culture, and nature.
The challenge of education as society’s intellectual infrastructure is to provide reliability and effectiveness to its constituents. That means being receptive to the propositions from fashion-art and commerce layers, even sometimes encouraging disruption and shock, while also seeking continuity and holding to society’s deeper values and principles. Any form of infrastructure requires large investment to do its job well, producing high but delayed payout over future decades. As Brand reminds us, societies need to be able to span these delays of payout and reward:
“Hasty societies that cannot span these delays will lose out over time to societies that can. On the other hand, cultures too hidebound to allow education to advance at an infrastructural pace also lose out.”
— Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (01999).
This is the delicate dance of education as intellectual infrastructure: to cultivate societal patience in order to set innovation free and to use deep purpose to filter and integrate disruptive propositions in ways that make education more relevant to new societal circumstances.
The Effectiveness of the Slow Layers for Education Transformation in Finland
Finland seems to be striking this balance well, with culture and governance acting in partnership with educators to guide and evaluate innovation in schools at a steady pace. Its current adaptive innovation is intended to enable more fluid, integrated learning. That approach combines open-space layouts for learning environments with multi-age learning cohorts and the elimination of rigid disciplinary boundaries between subjects.
A Finnish school. Source: Kuvatoimisto Kuvio Oy
The approach is built on trusting educators and students. It allows teachers to drive curriculum, rather than follow a standard set curriculum. The benefit is the ability to effectively create ways to integrate competency development freely across subject matter and collaborate across grade levels to create higher-level thinking and multidisciplinary learning experiences. Students navigate physical spaces and social groupings to support their own learning. To effectively implement and achieve the benefits of this innovation, Finnish educators have broader society’s trust.
“The kind of freedom Finnish teachers enjoy comes from the underlying faith the culture puts in them from the start, and it’s the exact kind of faith American teachers lack.”
Operating at the infrastructure pace layer, Finnish teachers drive change in the education system with the support of the culture layer and enabling structures established by the governance layer. In the U.S., the culture layer has become fragmented with competing narratives about the value and purpose of education creating churn at the infrastructure layer that the governance layer struggles to help manage.
Pace Layer Tensions in U.S. Public Education
Change in public education in the U.S. is strongly shaped by the dynamics of the commerce layer, with market values, business rationales, and global economic imperatives shaping education decision-making. Commerce is rapidly introducing new educational technologies and pedagogical approaches at a pace that outstrips the capacity of other layers to engage effectively and exert their influence. This dominance of the commerce layer has been recasting education with language, values, and purpose that serve commerce stakeholders — business interests — but not society at large. The result has been a shift form treating education as the public service it should be to treating it as a market good.
Exacerbating this imbalance, accelerating technological change has created flux at each pace layer and has heightened uncertainty about the future.
Long Now Educators Workshop, August 01, 02017.
Workshop discussion about the impact of an unchecked commerce layer on education included the following insights:
The market determines the value of education. Both hyperconnected global markets and increasing automation and digital augmentation are challenging established economic and business models, the structure of organizations, the notion of work, employment patterns, and even the nature of what it means to be human. The cultural narrative emerging from this context is that people are human capital — an asset whose value is determined by the market. Our societal definitions of success and how we determine student readiness to navigate society have become tightly tethered to the global market. Education critics have written about the link between the origins of compulsory education and the factory model school with the needs of early industrial society, so this link is not necessarily new. The challenge is whether the purpose of education continues to be narrowly evaluated in terms of serving the requirements of commerce rather than broader societal needs, such as the needs to support pluralistic society, democracy, and a sustainable planet.
“Solutionism” shortens the time frame and scope of reform. The education technology sector has grown rapidly, shaping the process, language and expectations of education reform. The ed tech rationale argues that the way to “fix” education is to configure the right suite of applications and devices without much concern or understanding for the root causes of education’s most pressing challenges such as achievement gaps, inequity, teacher support and professional development, and student engagement. The language and process common in Silicon Valley of “solutionism”—promising quick fixes, profitable return-on-investment, and scalability—has a stronger role in guiding decisions about education investment. Solutionism has permeated the education reform space in ways that has shifted mindsets and expectations about the timeframe and scope of change. Linking such activities to longer and slower processes of transformation in the governance and culture layers is lacking.
Mismatched metrics. The spillover effect of technological solutionism is that the expectation for change is measured in months and years rather than in decades. While it may be appropriate to measure reading and mathematics performance yearly (or more often), measuring social and behavioral practices and cultural shifts in meaningful ways takes longer and require metrics that span years and decades. Carol Dweck, the pioneer of the popular “growth vs fixed mindset” concept, has written articles and changed her book to warn against the “the false growth mindset” to counter simplified, shortcut, ineffective implementations of her concept. She reported that teachers were not able or willing to commit to the longer time frame to integrate fully and develop the growth mindset practice in their classrooms. The allure of quick solutions is that they make us think that there are immediate outcomes.
Implications for Long-Term Change
While the commerce layer seems to drive decision-making and innovation in education in inappropriate ways today, this pace layer does do well at absorbing disruptions and responding quickly to immediate needs. A challenge for education decision-makers today is to find ways to better harness commerce to provide a more equitable system and one whose purpose serves broader society. The venerable Peter Drucker reminds us about the link between the tension of short- and long-term interests:
“Building around mission and solutions is the only way to integrate shorter-term interest.” — Peter Drucker
Brand also warns that any meaningful long-term change will need to integrate the slow layers of culture and governance.
Source: NASA
In the current education narrative, nature is largely left out as a significant influence. However, this layer may provide inspiration for reframing education and designing interventions across the pace layers to shape a new purpose for education that speaks to our collective humanity, global interconnectedness, and shared responsibility to steward our delicate relationship with nature.
The earth photo from the moon showed that national solutions were not sufficient to solve global ecological challenges. Education solutions may also need to transcend national borders, taking their cues from a globally interconnected and planetary context.
The next blog post in this series will explore the possibilities for leveraging pace layer strategies to create system change in education.
“Now” is the period in which people feel they live and act and have responsibility. For most of us, “now” is about a week, sometimes a year. For some traditional tribes in the American northeast and Australia, “now” is seven generations back and forward (350 years). Just as the [first] Earth photographs [from space] gave us a sense of ‘the big here, we need things which give people a sense of ‘the long now.’
— Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation founder
Education is inherently a long-term proposition. Just as species adapt by learning and thereby ensure their survival, so too societies educate their people to ensure longevity through the ingenuity of future generations. As a system, education straddles the pressures of individuals’ and society’s immediate needs and inequities on the one side with desires for long-term positive outcomes and sustainability on the other.
For many U.S. schools and districts, this bridging might translate into reconciling immediate goals such as ensuring that all children read at grade level in the elementary years and helping students with trauma learn to self-regulate with longer-term goals such as rethinking curriculum for a future employment landscape that will be automated and digitally augmented. Yet even when education stakeholders see the value of addressing both time horizons, it can be incredibly difficult to imagine and pursue true transformation.
As Stewart Brand describes in The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, after the Apollo program began returning color photographs of the earth from space, the earth’s problems lived in a new context, “the big here”, and took on new dimensions, stakeholders, and rationales. Having planet-scale perspective on atmospheric health, ocean health, and climate stability made national approaches obsolete. What might a similar context shift for education be? When considering education as a long-term proposition, what might the “long now” in education look like? What forces and dynamics might shape it? How might we cultivate a “long now” mindset in order to reframe pressing education challenges in ways that reveal purposeful approaches and thoughtfully-scaled solutions?
Long Now Educators workshop, August 1, 02017.
This was the domain of discussion and collaboration at the Long Now Educators workshop on August 1, 02017, hosted by the Long Now Foundation and KnowledgeWorks Foundation at the Fort Mason Center for the Arts. Insights from the workshop will be presented in a four part series of blog posts over the next four months.
The Dynamic of the Pace Layers
The Pace Layer framework is a thinking tool developed by Stewart Brand that effectively stretches the “now” to make long-term thinking (decades, centuries, and millennia) more concrete, accessible, and relevant to the present. It shows how different parts of society (its pace layers) act and change at different speeds, with the fast ones at the top and the slow ones at the bottom.
Source: The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, Stewart Brand, 1999.
The fastest layer, fashion-art, moves in minutes and months. It is irreverent, engaging, and self-preoccupied. At this layer, a society’s culture is set free to experiment, albeit sometimes irresponsibly, learning through creativity and failure. It’s where we find relatively trivial phenomena such as fidget spinners and Lady Gaga’s meat suit, but also more significant developments such as ride-sharing and the breakthrough neo-expressionist painting of graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The barrage of ideas and propositions generated from the fashion layer gets sorted out at the commerce layer. Whether at age-old bazaars or modern-day stock markets and digital crossroads such as Etsy and eBay, commerce brings people together to make sense of new ideas that capture our attention. Commerce tames and harnesses the creative energy of fashion so that society can benefit from it.
In turn, infrastructure changes more slowly than commerce. It is high-cost, high-yield, and delivers delayed payback to society. It provides foundations and platforms for society to operate—among them transportation, communication, energy, and education. It is refreshed and modernized through the innovations from lower layers while being protected and validated through governance and culture. For example, Elon Musk’s company, TESLA, captures our attention through the fashion and commerce layers with its innovative electric cars and batteries, but ultimately aims to transform the transportation infrastructure. Despite its allure at the fashion layer and its transactions in the commerce layer, TESLA is really an infrastructure play, using the various pace layers to support the transformation.
Moving down a layer, the job of governance is to serve the larger, slower good for society. It provides stability. It preserves what we hold to be necessary and true. As Brand points out, social and political revolutions want quick change, demanding that governance moves faster than it is capable of, frustrating society. The constraints of governance force reflection and pause, which can be paralyzing or empowering.
Even slower to change, culture is the essential work of people as they gather to make sense of and integrate the many facets of life together on earth. It includes religion, language, and the enduring behaviors and social norms that help to provide constancy across centuries and even millennia. Nature is the slowest-changing layer, with the earth and the human body changing slowly over millennia. Nature’s power is immense when unleashed, whether as the processing capacity of the human brain or as the magnitude of earthquakes and hurricanes.
In healthy societies, the pace layers exist in relationship, communicating with each other, pushing and checking, yet moving independently, each at its own pace. This “slippage” between layers allows each layer to do its respective job and creates dynamic interactions that drive a society’s adaptability. Fast layers propose, disrupt and learn. Slow layers preserve, constrain and integrate. The dance between fast and slow layers can create adaptive strategies and societal resilience.
Source: The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, Stewart Brand, 1999.
Events occurring in one layer may force another layer to move faster or slower than its typical pace of change. The popular acceptance of same-sex partners put pressure on legal and infrastructural supports to change more quickly than is customary, helping to resolve tension and conflict in workplaces and hospitals regarding issues such as rights to marriage, benefits, and visitation. Conversely, regulators in the governance layer can slow the pace of releasing disruptive new drugs or genetic therapies to allow for more informed integration into society. The way these disruptions are resolved determines a society’s health and resilience.
Educators using the pace layer framework at the Long Now Educators workshop, August 1,02017.
Cultivating the Long Now: Pace Layers as a Guide to Education Transformation
For educators, the pace layer framework provides a powerful thinking tool that can help re-contextualize pressing issues and questions, such as equity, and achievement, and the purpose of school. Using them can help stakeholders take a broader, longer view of solutions and interventions. It can also put education’s transformation into the context of a civilization’s transformation. When viewed through the pace layers, solutions for the achievement gap or the dropout crisis may come from unexpected layers with varying time frames for outcomes. The pace layer framework enables such possibilities by providing perspectives from multiple layers of society with distinctive stakeholders, intentions, and time horizons. The pace layer framework can help tease apart the complexity of education, revealing actors and events across societal domains and across time. It helps us ask:
From which layer of society is this challenge originating, and what is does its pace and process of change look like?
At what layer might a solution emerge, and how might the other layers be enlisted to support it?
What outcomes should we look for at various layers?
The next blog post in this series explores education as intellectual infrastructure to aid in understanding possible origins and drivers for long-term transformation in education.
When given the opportunity, kids can be wonderful futurists, creating artifacts that help us imagine possible futures.
Two summers ago at Kirk Cooper’s fabulous summer camp Sees the Day in Berkeley,
Finnish Field Phone, WWII era.
California, kids 6-9 years old prototyped devices they thought would be important in the future. Using a forecasting rule of looking back two years for every forecast year, we looked at many historical devices and the kids had to guess their function. A lantern specifically designed for milking cows in the mid 19th century; a wired, “mobile” field phone from the mid 20th century: a cassette player/boom box and an LP from recent past, etc. The campers had to guess what the devices were, how and why were were used.
We then talked about what devices might be important for us in the future (time frame is a squishy concept to nail down with 6-9 year olds). They prototyped and then presented their devices. We talked about why these devices were important, who might use them, and what kinds of things were happening that would make them important in the future.
Two of my favorites: spray on network (when signal gets weak) and backyard, garden grown battery packs!
Everyone had fun. And it was a great way for kids to experience the threads that connect their present with their future.
Yesterday I had a great morning at the annual meeting of the International Forum of Visual Practitioners. These are the amazing practitioners who support our collective thinking, workshop experiences and processes, and pattern recognition through graphic recording, facilitation, process design, hands-on modeling, and other forms of visual practice.
Visual practitioners help make the invisible stuff in our minds visible and sharable in dynamic settings. As we move into a new sensory world of portable social media, smart objects, and location based information, a literacy of visualizing information, ideas, people and relationships will be increasingly important.
The Center for Graphic Facilitation made a nice summary of my talk and have it on video here.
It was really fun to spend the morning talking about the emerging strategic problem space of our clients and think about the role of visual practice. I think we will see some interesting stuff emerge at the intersection of visual practice, new digital publics, and large scale collaborations.
Last year I was fortunate to be invited to speak at the Nlab Social Networking Conference at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. The day focused on discussing the implications of Web 2.0 tools and applications and social networking for small business. It was a great event, in part due to the wonderful hospitality of the folks at the University and the Institute of Creative Technologies, but also because we tried to bridge big ideas and concepts with the practical challenges of managing small business.
This year, my colleague Sue Thomas, Professor at DeMotfort University, invited me to prepare a short video for their NLab event, Amplified Individuals and Business Resilience. I was sorry not to be there, but at least I got to share some ideas, via video, of the opportunities for using participatory digital media to infuse communities and business with resilience – the capacity to reorganize and recover from crisis – to meet the challenges of a complex and uncertain world.
Here is a link to a page with the video and other audio clips from participants in the seminar.
What is most inspiring to me about this topic is the opportunity for local organizations to gain a bit more agency, in the creation of information and the discussion around that information, in the ability to create more transparency in local processes and decisions, and in the ability to create, share, and direct resources.
