Education Innovation

Know How (Knowledge) + How Could (Creativity)

Lateral Wisdom is

Knowledge + Creativity

Know How + How could/might we...

Know Why + Why could/might we...

Know What + What could/might we...

Know Who + Who could/might be...

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High-Involvement Organizations

As part of the book The Organization Of The Future, James O’ Toole contributed an essay titled “Free To Choose: How American Managers Can Create Globally Competitive Workplaces” In his essay he describes 3 “Emerging Employer Models.” He describes them as follows:

Low-Cost Companies

• They are paid at (or close to) the minimum wage.
• They receive few if any benefits
• They have no job security
• They are given only the amount of training needed to do jobs that have been designed to be simple  and easy to learn.

Global-Competitor Companies

• Increasingly hire people on a contractual basis and, where possible, outsource and offshore work.
• Offer their “contingent” workers no security beyond the time limits of their contracts, and no promises of a continuing employment relationship.
• Often look outside to hire even permanent and top-level employees, carefully limiting how much they respond on developing managers and professionals, let alone on the training of workers.
• Frequently offer “then new employment contract,” in which they commit to telling employees what their strategy is and where they think future jobs in the organization will be, and workers then are told that their continual employment depends on their performance and the fit between their skills and the needs of the business.
• Are constantly searching for workers with the skills needed for today’s challenges. And although they pay top dollar for that talent, they expect employees to work long hours and, especially, to be productive.

High-Involvement Companies

• Challenging and enriched jobs
• A say in the management of their own tasks
• A commitment to low turnover and few layoffs
• A relatively egalitarian workplace, with few class distinctions between managers and workers and relatively small ratios between the salaries of the CEO and the average worker
• Jobs organized in self-managing teams
• A strong sense that every employee is a member of a supportive community
• Extensive, ongoing training and education to all
• Salaries rather than hourly wages
• Employee participation in company stock ownership and a high share in company profits

O’ Toole advocates for the High-Involvement Company as the model of the future.

According to James O’ Toole, the most successful companies now and of the future will be those that choose to address the deepest needs of their employees. 
•    Financial resources and security
•    Meaningful work that offers the opportunity for human development
•    Supportive social relationships

So, to which model would your organization belong to?

Is your organization so unique that none of the models described above apply? Is it a hybrid of one, two, or all of them? Could your organization "learn itself" into a "High-Involvement" model?

Assumptions about how to organizations, churches, school districts, and schools should be organized control the current organizational models. What, however, if those assumptions are wrong? Are there alternatives to our current model?

As O’Toole puts it, “Remember, it was once widely assumed that no airline could trust its employees to decide how best to serve customers—until Southwest did. It one was assumed that no company in the discount retail industry could succeed while paying its employees decent salaries and offering them full benefits—until Costco did. It was assumed that poorly educated blue-collar workers in old-line manufacturing firms could not be taught managerial accounting and then left to be self-managing—until SRC Holdings did. Once the conventional wisdom was that employees must be closely supervised and governed by rules—until W.L. Gore proved otherwise. And it was assumed that the first thing a company must do in a financial crisis is to lay off workers—until Xilinx discovered alternatives.”

Does education have alternatives? Are educational leaders willing to honestly explore them? Will union leaders allow for different assumptions.

As O’ Toole says, “The statement ‘I have no alternative’ is one of the surest indicators of leadership failure.”

 

Saddleback Church Harnesses Social Learning

Take “on-the-job” training and learning combine with the exchange of ideas, insights, and wisdom that only comes from living in a community of fellow learners, add some expert teaching and instruction, then a dash of social media, and you have the ingredients for a social learning environment. And that is just what Saddleback Church aims to achieve with a new school for church leadership.

"Resident Interns" will live in a campus community, attend focused practical classes together, get hands on learning in the context of a church planting, ministry, and personal leadership development, and use their social media networks to share and extend the learning with their personal networks.

This is social learning.

In their book “The New Social Learning” authors Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner explain that social learning is, “participating with others to make sense of new ideas…”

Social learning helps us gain perspective and it helps us make better decisions because it expands our perspectives. “…learning happens with and through other people, as a matter of participating in a community, not just by acquiring knowledge.”

While to book focuses on the role of using social media true social learning is more. It’s not just adding social media, but the blend of social media and personal or group interaction that develops a learning community. Community brings collaboration. In our fast paced, ever-changing world, we need to collaborate to meet the challenges of fast moving quick developing problems. As the authors point out, “Training gives people solutions to problems that have already solved. Collaboration addresses challenges no one has overcome before.” Church planters and ministry leaders can benefit from the blend of both.

When we share a workplace, when we share a living space, when we share a virtual space, we collaborate and learn at a much higher level. That is benefit of an environment like the Saddleback Church School of Church Leadership. Resident Interns receiving hands-on learning in context during the day and then return each evening to share, empathize, and collaborate. They share not only with their fellow residents, but with their virtual networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).  This enables each learner to become a teacher and the campus to become a community learning laboratory. To harness the lateral wisdom available to them.

The blending of contextual real-time learning, with the personal and group proximity of living on a campus together, combined with sharing through their social media networks, creates a rich learning tapestry.

On our social media networks, there is no copyright on personal learning. Learners are free to share it, repurpose it, borrow it, copy it, remix it, use it, reinvent it, and give it. This makes us all teacher and learner.

Bingham and Conner describe the 70/20/10 learning concept. “In what is known as the 70/20/10 learning concept, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombrado, in collaboration with Morgan McCall of the Center for Creative Leadership, explain that 70 percent of learning and development takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving; 20 percent of the time development comes from other people through informal or formal feedback, mentoring, or coaching; and 10 percent of learning and development comes from formal training.”

Most settings allows for either on-the-job training (learning in context) or formal training (learning, but without context). The Saddleback model will provide both with the added benefit of the social learning that comes from interns sharing and receiving feedback from their fellow interns with whom they share a community living setting, and encouraging residents to share on their social media networks. 70/20/10 at work each day.

In an interview with the authors, learning industry analyst Ellen Wagner is quoted as explaining that, “Today we assess personal learning mastery of knowledge and skills with how well people can leverage their interconnected networks of connections to resources, information, and subject matter specialists. Workplace success has shifted from individual accomplishment to teams, communities of practice, and collaboration.”

Saddleback Church’s School of Leadership is leveraging these facts by connecting resident interns to other resident interns, to knowledgeable and wise leaders, and to their virtual social media networks; all in the context of the learning---getting the learner closer to the doing.

It’s not just about training...it’s about learning…it’s about community…it’s about extending the learning to our community and our social networks. Harnessing the lateral wisdom all around us.

This is the social learning model of church planting/ministry..and it's on its way to Saddleback Church.