Education Design Thinking- The Balance of Exploitation and Exploration

Should schools get better at what they do or find better ways of doing what they do?

Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, James March believes that organizations may engage primarily in two types of activities, exploration, the search for new knowledge, or exploitation, the maximization of payoff from existing knowledge.

In public education terms, schools can look for new strategies, methods, and models for delivering education, or they can refine, hone, manage, and systematize the delivery of their current models of education.

In his new book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage, Roger Martin explains that while both are valuable and both are critical, it is hard to do. “…they are hard to engage in simultaneously; most often, organizations choose to focus on one activity, either exploration or exploitation, to the exclusion of the other and to their own detriment.”

In other words, education focuses on either the exploration of new models and methods, or focuses mainly on managing and administering their current model and methods.

Roger explains that there dangers of an organization that focuses only on exploration. “An organization exclusively dedicated to exploration will expire relatively short order. Typically, exploration alone will not generate the returns needed to fund further exploration.”

If education is always looking for the next best thing, the next model, method, or strategy, they will fail to produce the student achievement results demanded of them. They will not capitalize or leverage the good models, methods, strategies, and ideas that have been developed.

But there are dangers too for the organization that focuses solely on exploitation.

“ On the other hand, many organizations flip quickly from an early exploration phase—the generation of the founding idea behind the business—to the steady exploitation of that idea, never returning to exploration. These organizations, solely dedicated to exploitation, might last somewhat longer than exploration-only businesses, but the business that creates value only through exploitation will exhaust itself in due course. It can’t keep exploiting the same piece of knowledge forever. If it tries to do so, the cost of the business can be devastating.”

If education is never looking for new models, methods, strategies, or ideas for delivering education to it’s students, it is inevitable that the model they exploit will eventually cease to produce the results desired of it.

Roger provides the following table for reference. I have added the education references.

	Exploration	Exploitation
Organizational Focus	The invention of teaching and learning	The administration of teaching and learning
Overriding Goal	Dynamically moving from the current knowledge stage to the next	Systematically honing and refining within the current knowledge stage
Driving Forces	Intuition, feeling, hypotheses about the future, originality	Analysis, reasoning, data from the past, mastery
Future Orientation	Long-term	Short-term
Progress	Uneven, scattered, characterized by false starts and significant leaps forward	Accomplished by measured, careful incremental steps
Risk and Reward	High risk, uncertain but potentially high reward	Minimal risk, predictable but smaller rewards
Challenge	Failure to consolidate and exploit returns	Exhaustion and obsolescence

 

Roger Martin argues that what is needed is balance between exploration and exploitation found in Design Thinking.

“The design thinker therefore, enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, and originality and mastery.”

The education design thinker enable a school to balance finding new and better ways increasing student achievement and delivering effective instruction, while mastering, embedding, and refining the effective methods that are in use. Schools that get better at what they do while finding better ways to do it. That is educational design thinking. That is Education Innovation.

Comments

[Kevin Washburn]

Superb application of these principles to education! The need to be looking outward and inward and maintain a healthy balance is critical to maintaining the health of an organization. A mindset that's always outward often lacks focus, while a total inward mindset often lacks relevance. The design thinking applied to education is a good model/perspective for educational leaders to strive for and maintain. Excellent synthesis of ideas! Hope you'll be writing more about this in future posts!

[Rob Jacobs]

Thanks for the comments Kevin. The call for new models of education must be coupled with a new mindset. The exploration phase. Only then will be able to capitalize these new ideas through exploitation, but we have to find them first.