Change is not loosing what you have it is adding to what you have…Change is Development…
Archives For Change
In Adam Kahane’s powerful address at RSA he sums up his Transformative Scenario Planning approach as simply:
“Telling stories about what might happen. Not stories about what will happen, not forecasts; not stories about what should happen; not proposals or visions or positions but stories about what MIGHT happen–relevant, challenging plausible clear stories about what might happen. And in this way building new understandings new relationships, new intentions and hence new actions.”
Kahane points out three challenges to this approach which have been transcribed directly from his talk:
“First of all in working in this way we are trying not only to implement an idea or a way forward that we already have but together to discover a way forward. One of the features of complex conflictual problematic situations is there is agreement neither on the solution nor even on the problem. This is above all an emergent process which means it’s not predictable and it’s not controllable and for many people including for me who who like knowing where we’re going and like being in control of where we’re going this feels uncomfortable and difficult and risky.
The second way in which it’s not easy is that it requires us to work not only with our friends and colleagues but also with strangers and opponents. We’re were working on affecting transformations that we are unable to affect alone or just with our people. If you work not just with friends and colleagues but the strangers and opponents you will find yourself in real conflict, deep conflict, and for people like me who like things to be rational and nice this feels deeply uncomfortable and difficult and risky.
The final way in which it’s not easy and this is the most fundamental of all is that we’re working here not simply to adapt to unpredictable world, were working in this way to transform the situation which we find to be unacceptable, unstable, unsustainable. In this way transformative scenario planning takes conventional scenario planning and turns it exactly on its head. And what’s required is exactly the discernment which Reinhold Niebuhr pointed to in this very famous invocation: lord give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. This here is where the real difference between advisers and actors that comes into the story. There’s that joke that in a in a ham omelette what is the difference in the contribution of the chicken and the pig. The chicken is involved and the pig is committed. This is the big difference if you’re trying to affect systemic transformation between being an observer, an advisor, and being an actor. Are you willing to be committed? And for for many people including people like me who are used to standing on the sidelines this is profoundly uncomfortable and difficult and risky. But these days it is exactly this stretching this uncomfortable difficult risky stretching that is needed of us. This is how we can create futures.”
In 2007 Abilene Christian University (ACU) produced and filmed a video called ACU Connected (select #3 Standard Def for the fastest download and quality balance) in which they told a story about what might happen if an entire University were to deploy mobile devices and embark on a mobile learning initiative. The video really was just a story about what might happen because when the script for the video was written the iPhone was not yet released and all of the scenarios portrayed were, at that time, just wishful thinking. The ACU Connected video simply presented what might happen, how relationships would develop, and most importantly how a new understanding of learning could be enhanced through mobility. The ACU Connected development team later referred to the video as a video vision cast because the vision that the video created was the primary catalyst for the success of the ACU mobile learning initiative. Faculty, administration and students watched the video and bought into the vision of the future that mobile learning could offer. More importantly faculty, administration and the students created that future.
I had always pointed to the ACU Connected video as the single most important catalyst for the mobile learning initiative at ACU and now with the help of Adam Kahane’s Transformative Scenario Planning approach I can substantiate my hypothesis. Change in higher education is very difficult to foster because of the complex conflictual problematic situations that are central to the academic setting. In addition there is seldom any agreement on whether there even is problem that requires a solution and as a result technological change is often avoided until it has been proven elsewhere.
The story that the ACU Connected told was big and plausible enough that an entire university to buy into. The realization of that vision took several years and is still ongoing but in only four short years there is ubiquitous mobile device usage at ACU and the learning culture of the institution has been positively changed. This does confirm that if we do dream big enough and share those dreams we can create new futures.
So if we really want to bring about change in our organizations we can use video to create and project a plausible and realistic a story of what could be. As Adam Kahane points out “telling stories about what might happen” goes a long way to actually making those stories a reality.
Pearson Plc chief learning officer Sir Michael Barber argues an avalanche is coming to Higher Ed that is caused by:
MOOCs, globalization, technology change, rising educational costs, changes to the value of a degree. Bottom line: more competition.
Pearson has made available Barber’s report An Avalanche is Coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead for free.
It’s MOOAs, Not MOOCs, That Will Transform Higher Education – The Conversation – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
While professor Laurie Essig’s post calling for Massive Online Open Administrations or MOOAs instead of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as the salvation for higher education must be recognized as a good work of satire, the post does reveal that we have a fundamental problem in Higher Education.
Whenever an industry is being radically disrupted the constituents within that industry will start to entrench their positions and defend the status quo that they know so well by taking pot shots at the people or groups who they believe are disrupting their world. This post reveals that many faculty are being threatened by MOOCs and technology in general and are opposed to being forced to change the way that they have been teaching. Similarly, many administrators are turning to the technology flavour of the day to improve the bottom line for the University and are often asking faculty to change simply for the sake of change. Yes, it is much more complicated and involved but the reality is that higher education cannot sustain it current practices and must change. The proverbial writing has been on the wall for a very long time. Change is happening.
Unfortunately, for Alberta instiutions the opportunity to be proactive and to control how to deal with the forces of change have passed. The Edmonton Journal article Mandate Letters Sent to Schools reveals:
On Friday night, Advanced Education and Enterprise Minister Thomas Lukaszuk sent out the first drafts of so-called mandate letters to top university officials outlining expectations under the new guise of Campus Alberta.
The notion of the “new guise of Campus Alberta” is not accurate. Various iterations of Advanced Education over the past decade have been warning higher education leaders and faculty that a voluntary move toward a collaborative Campus Alberta was necessary to sustain and improve education options for all Albertans. Unfortunately, time and dollars have run out and the once voluntary option has now turned into a mandate. Despite these strong words there still is an opportunity for Alberta Universities and Colleges to be proactive. Even though Advanced Education and Enterprise is requiring a move toward Campus Alberta the details on what the Campus Alberta will look like, how resources are shared, how institutions will collaborate is open for discussion.
Perhaps there is still time for the administration and faculty in higher education in Alberta to be proactive. Unfortunately, when you look at past performance as indicator of future potential is doubtful that there will be little more than a reactive response to the cutbacks. We only have to go back a few years to the late 90’s to see how well higher education reacted to forced change.
How can so many highly educated people continually miss the opportunity to proactively improve education. Pointing fingers isn’t going to help. When the faculty blame administrators (who were once faculty), when the administrators blame the faculty and when unions and everyone else blame the government we all loose sight of the fact that it will be our learners, our children, who will loose out.
How do we fix it? We focus on the learning. By building a learning culture that prepares our children how to learn how to learn we can prepare our children for an ever changing future. The solution is really that simple–unfortunately, changing or re-shaping our culture is the challenging part. We out it to our children to move beyond our personal needs and ambitions and take on this challenge.
The recent McKinsey report Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works reveals that despite a world wide shortage of skilled workers less than half of students think their education prepares them for employment. Unfortunately almost three quarters of the institutions surveyed believe that they are doing a good job of preparing their students for entry level positions in their field of studies. My recent experience as the Vice President Academic of a small liberal arts University confirms that most faculty, administrators and staff believe their institution is doing a wonderful job at preparing students when in reality they are not. How can so many seemingly intelligent people be so wrong and not fully grasp the changes that society is facing and the need for our educational system to adapt?
I have been considering this question for over 30 years and unfortunately, I haven’t seem any significant systemic changes in the educational system since my time as student in grade school–but this may be about to change. Yes, we are using technology like whiteboards instead of blackboards and some institutions are even dabbling with digital content but for the most part any advances in technology are used to make the delivery of information more efficient. We even give our Learning Management Systems names like “Blackboard” to help preserve the notion of information delivery in the traditional sense.
I think a significant part of the problem is that those who are really good at doing school as students come back as instructors and administrators–it is a self perpetuating system. In the extremely popular TED Talk Do schools kill creativity? Sir Ken Robinson makes the argument that if aliens were to visit our school system they would simply see it as system established to produce University Professors. This perhaps explains the disconnect between what the business world and students expect and what the educational system provides. Most instructors are convinced that the system is doing a great job because they are delivering the content in the same way that they had it delivered to them. They did very well in the system so they are living proof that the system works well. They do unto their students what was done onto them and so on. As we see from the data most of these people in the system do not see any problems. Fortunately, those outside the education system see the need for reform and the power of disruptive innovation is about to change the education system in ways that will be beyond the system’s control.
In the recent Forbes article One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education author Michael Noer argues:
No field operates more inefficiently than Education. A new breed of disruptors is finally going to fix it.
The article highlights Salman Khan’s Khan Academy which is a collection of over 3000 short video clips that can be used in a just in time basis to help understand and learn many mathematical, scientific or other technical concepts. The videos themselves are really not that high in aesthetic quality so many traditional instructors are quick to dismiss them on this basis. But this is a classic example of a disruptive innovation. The disruptor often from outside the industry (Sal Kahn is not even a teacher) comes in and fills a need that the incumbent market leader ignores. Kahn upstages the educational establishment with his instructional videos that can be accessed for free that enable the learner to learn at their own pace and master concepts before they move on. Kahn has not discovered anything new and his presuppositions have been well researched by educational theorists. Self paced differentiated instruction and the promotion of mastery based learning work well. We see small pockets of these methodologies all over the world–the ideas are nothing new. It simply took an outsider to the educational establishment to make it work in a way that the educational system couldn’t.
Perhaps this is the secret–perhaps it will take those outside of the educational system to help the educational system to change. The Forbes article points 15 Classroom Revolutionaries who are exploring disruptive technologies that may change the way we teach and learn.
Perhaps the best place for out of the box ideas is from outside of the box.
