Education Innovation

Seek Innovation or Seek Greatness?

What does a Harvard business blogger, bad meals, school plans, parents, and innovation have in common? Let’s put them into the Education Innovation blender and take a look.

In his recent blog post at Real World Innovation, Harvard Business blogger Scott Berkun thinks about Why Innovation Is Overrated.

“When was the last time you, as a customer, called the support line for a product you own to complain about its lack of innovation? Or sent a meal back to the kitchen at a restaurant because it wasn't innovative enough? In the course of ordinary life the word innovation doesn't surface much, and this is good. Innovation, as a word, a concept, or an agenda, is entirely overrated. It's a vague, subjective term that distracts from what you're really trying to do: enjoy your life. Or in the case of a business: profit by making good things.”

Or, in the case of Education, trying to educate students. But, what Scott asks is true. When was the last time a parent came to your classroom or office and complained about a lack of innovation or original thinking? Students often complain that they are bored, but I have never had a student complain about a lack or creativity or innovativeness in my approach to a lesson or assignment. I have real several school plans, but I have never hears of anyone complaining about a lack of creativity or innovation in the plan.

As Scott says…

“The truth is making really good things is difficult -- it requires a commitment to craft, an attention to detail, and a love for work that has always been rare. And while we'd never call these three attributes innovations, it's the success of creating an organization that rewards these things that leads to the products we often herald, after they're done, as innovations.”

So maybe education lacks innovation because to be innovative is not rewarded, and in fact, may be ignored or punished. Maybe, education is so focused on ensuring that all the boxes are checked, the paperwork is in order, and, if anyone ever asks, you can provide that piece of paperwork. A commitment to details!

The fact is that the people in education I meet are generally committed to the craft of teaching and love their work. However, the bureaucracy of education is committed to measuring growth, monitoring programs, and maintaining itself. Innovation is not something large organizations do easily. Large organizations spend much of their time maintaining the organization and less time on innovation in the mission.

So, maybe as Scott says, the idea or concept of innovation is overrated and distracts us from what we are supposed to be doing. But, I ask, if what you are doing is not working something needs to change. Further, what if what you are doing is not aligning with or preparing your “product” for the needs and the reality of the society in which you are operating? Sounds to me like that organization needs some innovation…or whatever other words you would like to use.

Scott ends it with this...

"Instead of asking 'How can we be innovative?', a toothless and vague question with mostly useless answers, we should be asking 'How can we make great things?'"

Catalytic Questions:

When was the last time you felt truly innovative? What were the circumstances of that feeling? Can you reproduce those circumstances?

In what ways is your school or district committed to or supportive of innovation?

Thinking about a current problem or issue at your school or in your district, how might that problem or issue become a source of innovation?

How might a Peter Drucker, Seth Godin, or Edward De Bono think about your issue?

In what ways might asking “why” impact the problem or issue?

How might believing you are innovative help develop some new ideas?

In what ways might you be able to overcome the underlying principles of the educational bureaucracy to make things truly great?

What might that look like at your school?

Recommended Reading:

Do you doubt that anything is possible?

Teach Students to be Pirates and Plagiarists?

So, what do you get when you combine a book on youth culture, a futurist, Thomas Edision, Disco, pharmaceuticals, Hollywood, the iPod, and school research reports? Let put in them in the Education Innovation Blender a take a look.

Is it piracy and plagiarism, or is it creativity and innovation?  Which do you suppose we should be teaching our students to do? My two previous posts have inspired this discussion.

Plagiarism and Pirates

Plagiarism Is A Good Thing?

We live in an age where anybody can produce, mix, or repurpose information and ideas.

When we pirate information and ideas, we may just be innovating new ideas and creating new ways of doing things.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and musicians viewed it as piracy. He was pirating their music, recording it, and selling it. They feared the end of live performances, instead an entire industry was born, the music industry.

MP3 players existed prior to the iPod, but the iPod pirated that technology and created it’s own phenomena. Music lovers, wanting to share music with each other without paying, created digital music sites like Napster. They were pirating their way around and outside of what the music industry existed to do. Steve Jobs figured out that to beat the pirates he had to compete with them and built iTunes. The pirates ideas had become mainstream and put old music sellers out of business. It is piracy or innovation? Is it plagiarism or creativity?

The iPod itself is just a combination of pre-existing ideas; the battery, operating system, hard drive, screen, MP3 technology, etc.

Reggae, Disco, and Hip-hop music demonstrate that we can repurpose music into something new. The pirate old songs and create new and innovative versions. These versions become so popular that they create entirely new music genres. It is piracy or creativity?

Moviemakers, not wanting to pay high fees in New York pirates their way around the system by setting up studios in California. Today we call it Hollywood.

India reverse engineers drugs for the poor pirating what they themselves could not afford to do. Drug companies, sensing the good public relations they can benefit from, begin selling their drugs at huge discounts an in some cases giving them away. They respond to the pirates by creating an entirely new approach of serving the poor of the world. Piracy or creativity?

So, is piracy and plagiarism just another way of being creative and innovative? Are they are source of new ideas, methods, and models. Are there links to each other or are they mutually exclusive? 

A senior business executive needing the most current research on a company or economic trend asks his junior executive to find the best and most current information. The junior executive doesn’t start his or her own research project, rather he or she Googles the information looking for the most current research on the topic that has already been done by the most respected and knowledgeable experts. He or she copies it, rips it, digitizes it, scans it, re-purposes it, integrates it, synthesizes it, and puts into a usable document to give the senior executive. This is what we call good research.

In the classroom we call plagiarism.  So, it is plagiarism or creativity?

Most of the examples I shared, which come from Matt Mason, would be examples of plagiarism and cheating if they happened inside a classroom.

Doesn't there seem to be a disconnect from what we do in the classroom and what the real world expects of them? I know most of you are saying it's about the process. But if that is true, then why do we spend so much time evaluating and grading the result?

If it really is about process then Pat Dixon has an idea;

• Give the students a question they know nothing about.
• Give them 30 minutes to put together a 3000 word report on that question.
• Grade for Correctness in the answer
• Authoritativeness of sources used
• Uniqueness of of the pieced together report. 

Catalytic Questions:

In what ways could you re-purpose your research report assignments to develop real world skills that focus on the process, the correctness, the authoritativeness, and uniqueness of synthesis?

What might that look like in your classroom or school?

How does your current understanding of technology, business, and innovation impact your thoughts?

How might your students be better served with the assignments they work on?

In what ways have you been successful in the past in adjusting assignments to meet the changing needs of the students and the world they live in? How might you draw upon that experience?

In what ways does the discussion of plagiarism and pirating vs. creativity and innovation force you to think in new ways?

What are the underlying principles at work in this discussion and how does it/they impact your approach to education?

What if you were to reverse the process and have students examine existing reports and determine how well they meet the criteria for a good research report?

Which assignments could you substitute with these new ideas?

Recommended Reading: 

Where's the Respect? A 21st Century Learning Question

Professional Learning Communities on the Rocks- Part 2

 Professional Learning Communities on the rocks! Part 2

Professional Learning Communities should be put on I.C.E. Education Innovation’s definition of on the rocks actually means on I.C.E. cubes.  An I.C.E cube is an acronym for Innovation, Imagination, Creativity, Collaboration, Experimentation, and Exploration. The six traits form the cube, the I.C.E. cube.

In his book Group Genius, Keith Sawyer describes 10 conditions that must exist for group flow to emerge. Today we will look at conditions 6-10.

6. Equal Participation
Group Flow won’t happen if everyone isn’t participating.

“Group flow is more likely to occur when all participants play an equal role in the collective creation of the final performance. Group flow is blocked if anyone’s skill level is below that of the rest of the group’s members; all must have comparable skills.”

Now this presents an interesting question. Do all teachers in your grade level or department PLC’s have comparable skills?  Yes, they all have credentials (or we hope), but there could be varying levels of years of experiences, staff development training, and technology knowledge. Is this a factor?  Maybe, but maybe not.

Group Flow is also blocked when one person dominates the group, believes he or she doesn’t need the group, of looks down on the process.

Another potential block to PLC flow, is the principal sitting in the meeting. If the principal does sit in the meeting it is important to, “…participate in the same way as everyone else by listening closely and granting autonomy and authority to the group’s emergent decision process.”

7. Familiarity
PLC members need to learn to the styles of each of the members because familiarity increases productivity, decision-making effectiveness, and the ability to understand what is happening in classrooms.

“When members of a group have been together for a while, they share a common language and a common set of unspoken understandings. Psychologists call these shared understandings tacit knowledge—and because it’s unspoken, people often don’t even realize why they are able to communicate effectively.”

However, here is an interesting paradox to the point above. Tacit knowledge is a part of group flow, but we don’t want PLC’s made up of people who think so exactly alike that nothing new can come out of the meeting.

This begs the question, how long should a grade level be kept together? Obviously, departments are dependent on credential, but at the elementary level, this isn’t so. Teachers can move grade levels easily. So, how long do you keep your current grade levels together before they become too stagnant?  Principals need to balance the need for familiarity, which allows for good decision-making and creativity, with the need to avoid over familiarity and stagnation.

Another interesting fact is this, familiar groups are great for problem-solving creativity, but unfamiliar groups are better for problem-finding creativity. So PLC’s and the need to examine student work, data, and teaching benefit from familiarity, but school wide problem solving that requires new ideas and innovation might benefit by being made up of teachers and staff from various grade levels and departments.

8. Communication
“Group flow requires constant communication.” 

Principals should be talking with their groups frequently. Feedback on how the PLC is doing and fact finding on what the PLC has discovered or decided on is key.

But, group flow can happen outside of the meeting too. Spontaneous conversations allows for group flow. Not every conversation has to take place around the conference table.

9. Moving It Forward
“Yes, and…”

This is a powerful sentence stem for your PLC’s to use in their meeting. When teacher are sharing ideas, members should listen closely, accept it, and build on the idea by using, “Yes, and…” Members validate the ideas of others, while simultaneously building on the idea with other ideas. This is a great way to generate powerful plans for improving student learning.

10. The Potential for Failure
Before lifting weights or going for a run, we should all warm our muscles up. The same could be said for our minds.

“Many groups require a preliminary warm-up period to move into group flow.”

Also, some ideas to improve student learning won’t. It’s just that simple. The principal and the PLC member need to understand that creativity is often accompanied with failure. We must allow our PLC’s to come up with ideas that fail. If we don’t, the quality of ideas and instruction will suffer because they won’t feel the trust they need to innovate.

Creative Tension is the just the right environment. “Group flow happens when many tensions are in perfect balance: the tension between convention and novelty; between structure and improvisation; between the critical, analytic mind and the freewheeling, outside-the-box mind; between listening to the rest of the group and speaking out in individual voices.”

Catalytic Questions:

Is the timing right at your school in develop and inculcate these conditions in your PLC’s?

What patterns have you detected in your PLC’s that might prevent or allow for these conditions to flourish in your PLC’s?

In what ways might you loosen your control of PLC’s to give them autonomy in decision making and planning?

How might you challenge the prevailing conditions your PLC’s operate under?

In what ways might you connect what you know about group dynamics and creativity to your PLC’s?

What alternatives might you employ to create the 10 conditions of group flow?

How might these 10 conditions for group flow change the way your teachers think about PLCs?

In what ways might your view of PLC’s change if you viewed it from the perspective of a visiting teacher or visiting administrator?

In what ways might new a new idea for your PLC’s make a positive impact? What might that idea be?

Recommended Reading:

Professional Learning Communities on the Rocks- Part 1

Keith Sawyer's blog

Defining Professional Learning Communities (PLC)

All Things PLC blog

New Questions = New Answers = New Ideas

What happens when you ask, "Why are we doing it that way?" 

What happens when you question your assumptions about what is possible?

What happens when looking for answers to new questions you produce new ideas?

Take a look at what happens!

Early Innovation and Creativity Education

Gordon MacKenzie is sort or a personal hero of mine. Though he has now passed away, I still turn to his book In Orbit Around the Giant Hairball for inspiration. In his book he relates a famous and oft repeated story about a trip to visit an elementary school.

As he meet with each grade level, he related to them that he is an artist. He would look around the room and notice all the student work and then wonder aloud who had created all the wonderful artwork.

He would then ask, “How many artists are there in the room.”  “Please raise your hands.”
The responses were very telling. In kindergarten and first grade class rooms, every student threw their hand up in the air. In second grade classrooms, about three-fourths raised their hands in response. In third grade, only a few students help up their hands, some very timidly. So it went, each grade a little worse than the one before it until he finally reached sixth grade. In response to Gordon’s question, most students looked around to see if anyone would admit to being an artist, as if such an admission was a violation of group norms.

In the span of Kindergarten to sixth grade, students had un-learned their naturally tendency to be an “artist.” Why?

Sir Ken Robinson has been the rage lately on the web. He gave a talk at the T.E.D conference several years ago about how schools systematically kill student creativity. I posted a clip of his talk several months back. You can find it here (Is Creativity As Important As Literacy). I am hoping to finally get to his book one of these days.

But there are so many people who seem to get it. I was very interested in what Doreen Lorenzo had to say at frogblog in his post Innovation Needs to be Nurtured Early.

He says…

“I believe that the emphasis on this frantic search for innovation is a result of our inability to foster this concept starting at the elementary school level. Shouldn’t we all be innovators? Part of what makes us human is our ability to think and reason. With that in mind, innovation should be part of our fiber. Why can’t children maintain their creative innovation past the 2nd grade? At some point the concept of innovation is ripped out of their souls. They are told to follow the rules, prepare for the standardized tests and think about getting a good job that pays well.”

In an age where standardized tests are the measuring stick by which schools and students are measured, we are creating an environment where we can’t afford to spend the time necessary to allow children to be as creative as they can be. We focus on getting the one right answer for each question because this is what the system has forced us into.  Politicians do not brag about the quality of educational programming, or how school X has made growth over time. Newspapers can’t print growth over or quality teaching. They can print a test score. The can print it next to the scores of other schools. It is very neat and orderly. Who is good and who is bad is a matter of running your finger up and down a column of scores.

Doreen goes on to say…

“Finding great creative talent continues to be the biggest issue in our world where in reality it should be the easy part. However, since schools begin to dismiss the notion of creativity once a child leaves kindergarten, the pool of applicants gets very small by the time they actually enter the workforce. How can we shift the focus to allow kids to explore, think bigger, reward their drive and ambition as not just an anomaly but a must-have in today’s world? Instead, creative kids are often labeled ‘creative,’ which means ‘different.’ And different is too often not a good word for a child.”

Education is beginning to have the conversation, but with much in education, the wheels turn very slow. Doreen’s voice is another to add to the growing call for change. I for one believe in Tom Peters call for NO INCREMENTALISM. But that is the prerogative of the idealist. I hate to wait.

Also check out these posts.

Free Your Mind

Color Within The Lines

Do We Limit Our Children's Creativity?

How You Think Is Everything: Think Creative

From Busayo Akanro

"Why do people hate intentional creativity? Why must things be done in one particular way or another? Who makes the rules? Who sets the boundaries? Life itself imposes no limitations on us. After all, even though the law of gravity is fundamental, it can be broken through once one understands the principles of aerodynamics. Even then, the law of gravity doesn’t have as much relevance as it does on earth outside the earth.

"Who says everything that goes up must come down?  Someone who lives in space would give you a strong argument because what he knows is that you can throw something up and it will never come down in your life time. It would keep going on and on since the force of gravity is six times weaker there than on earth. So I guess that will help someone like me who has always wanted to be superman. You can be superman once you are on the moon.

"Take a look at this: A survey was done to discover the creativity level of individuals at various ages. After all the testing, the statistics indicated that 2 percent of the men and women who were in their forties were highly creative. As they looked at younger people, the results emerged that 2% of the 35-yr-olds were highly creative; 2% of the 30-yr-olds were highly creative. This went on down to each age group until they reached the 7-yr-old children. 10% of them were highly creative. However, further study showed that 90% of the 5-yr-olds were highly creative.  

"Between the ages of 5 and 7, 80% of us who are highly creative develop an image, a picture, an attitude that we are not creative, and we begin to deny that particular part of our God-given equipment. Pablo Picasso the great artist said “Every Child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

I agree. Those of is in education need to keep the "artist" alive. We need to be intentional about helping our students be innovative and creative.

White Lines Go Away: Creative Idea for Innovative and Greener Paper

Last night I was reading Peter Sheahan's book Flip. Chapter 4 is titled Absolutely, Positively Sweat The Small Stuff. His theory is that all businesses have to be fast, good, and cheap, but they must offer an x-factor in addition to the other three. A business must be all all four, that is they must be fast, good, cheap and green, or responsible, or beautiful, or easy, or fun, or healthy.

Today I came across a great example creativity, innovation, and, in this case, being green.

Whitelines is a paper company that used the creativity of thinking the opposite and came up with a great idea.

"Writing paper with dark supporting lines has been around since medieval times when iron gall ink was used for its lasting dark colour. It took until our recent time before the idea of making a writing paper with white, “non-conflict”, lines got known from an idea of the designer Olof Hansson. Writing paper with white lines is now a patented solution."

There X-factor is being green.

"Whitelines is glad to announce that a great step to reduce our environmental impact has been taken through a deal with the paper producer Stora Enso. Whitelines will by that be able to offer a carbon dioxide neutral paper as base in our products."

A great example of doing the opposite as a way to get to a new idea. Being green is a wonderful bonus.
Check out their website for more info. WHITELINES

Thinking Better: Using The Productive Thinking Model Part 1

I read Tim Hurson’s book Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking and have been dying to have an opportunity to experiment with The Productive Thinking Model that he so skillfully describes in the book.

“One of the problems with problems is that they usually begin with a mess.”

I found a mess to work with.

“But if things weren’t messy or getting messy, there would be no discontent, and there wouldn’t be a need for productive thinking in the first place. The mess comes when we begin to realize that things might be better than the are..”

The mess I found centered around the problem of student discipline. While discipline is not officially a part of my job description, I had spent many months watching staff and students get more and more frustrated at the “mess”, so I volunteered to take the staff through The Productive Thinking Model to see what we might find at the end of the process. I was limited to one staff meeting, so we only able to get through steps 1 and 2 of the process, so we will be re-visiting the rest of the process at another meeting.

Step 1: What is Going On?
Sub-step 1: What’s The Itch?
An Itch is described as the discontent or irritant that compels us to want to change.

Most of the staff had and “itch” to be sure, but we needed to go through the process of discovering all the itches. So I facilitated a listing of all the itches that we could come up. I put no limits on what was considered and itch. If it bothered them it went up.

Some of the itches we listed were:
No system, student behavior, “Broken Windows” theory, paper work, before and after school, parents.

We then tried to makes clusters of itches based on common themes or characteristics.

(picture of our partial list)

Sub-step 2: What’s The Impact?
In this sub-step our goal was to discover what it is about our itches that concerns us. Which itches are a priority? Why?

We again made a list and then selected which seemed to be the most important to work on. What I found interesting was that after just two sub-steps we were talking in a way that was very different from what most of the staff expected and we were discussing ideas that may not have come to fore if we had just a “normal” discussion.

(sample list)

Sub-step 3: What’s The Information?
In this step we tried to understand what we already knew about the issue and what we needed to know about the issue. I used a thinking tool called KnoWonder. Essentially I made a T-chart with the word “Know” one side and the word “Wonder” on the other. For those of you who teach, think of a KWL chart.

We listed things that we knew about the issue and things we wondered about the issue. It is a very useful tool for getting some perspective on the problem. I found that some creative questioning helped to generate a good list. I did my best to ask questions that would generate ideas for the list.

(sample list)

Sub-step 4: Who’s Involved?

The next sub-step was getting a clear idea of all the people involved in this itch.
“How we see things depends on where we stand…”

We generated a list that came up with the typical stakeholders: teachers, students, parents, administrators, support staff, and community.

Sub-step 5: What’s the Vision?
In sub-step 5 we attempted to create a vision for the future or what the model calls the “Target Future.”

“The Target Future is the place you want to get to. It doesn’t tell you how you’ll get there; in other words it is not a solution. Rather it’s a brief description of a future in which your issue is resolved and your Itch no longer irritates you.”

I listed sentence stems on the board that said, “I only we could..”,  “I wish…”, and “It would be great if..” I used these sentence stems to facilitate a list of Target Futures. This was one area where I had to be more active in encouraging ideas. Some were hesitant to state their Target Future because the immediately started to think about how it might be accomplished. I reinforced the fact that we are simply stating what we hope for, and not worrying about the details. I think the staff was surprised that what they listed on the board was is some ways very different from what they might have walked into the room initially thinking.

Once we were done generating our list, we then used a thinking tool called I3.

“I3 allows you to determine which items on your list will be useful to work on. I3 stands for the three criteria you use to evaluate the items in your list: Influence, Importance, and Imagination.”

We used symbols (check mark, triangle, and a flower) placed next to the items on our list to get a visual sense of what we had influence over, what we thought was important, and if it would require some imagination.

Some of the Target Futures that seemed to hold a lot of promise was the creation of a flow chart, acknowledging  positive behavior more frequently and systematically, and staff training.

(sample list)

After completing all 5 sub-steps of Step 1, we had a great sense of what was going on with our discipline “Itch.”

I will discuss the result of Step 2 in a later post. I might add here that one of the most useful things for me as a facilitator was having some one who would chart the ideas for me. It was hard to do both and stay in the flow.

Coming Up Step 2: What’s Success?

HOW Week Part 6: Take A T.R.I.P.

In my previous post, Trust Issues, I discussed the impact of our HOWS with regards to trust. So, how do we get to this place called Trust?

Dov Seidman came up with the acronym T.R.I.P. After all, “It takes a journey to envision and learn about trust, but trust also propels it own trip.

 

HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business (and in Life)

By: Dov Seidman
T R I P

Trust
Risk
Innovation
Progress

Trust
“Trusting in a sense, means giving something away and ceding power to others, an essential step in achieving the outward focus needed in a hyperconnected world. Trust empowers others, but because it is a virtue.” 

In the classroom that means taking the first step to give away our perception of control and trust the students. As an administrator, you must give power away to others to develop trust in them and their trust in you.

Risk
If there is no trust, “We drive slower, act cautiously, shrink our circle of friends and associates, and generally default more conservative impulses. When there is trust in the room, however, all of these tendencies are reversed. We are secure and so can act boldly. We feel free to invent new process…”

We experiment and try new things. Imagine how a student would feel if he or she was secure enough to try new things, stretch themselves, and take a risk.

Teachers who feel trusted will be more likely to innovate and create and share better ideas and practices.

Innovation
“In a trusting environment, everyone feels emboldened to take more risks. They challenge the system more, they solve problems, and they don’t stay in small boxes afraid to venture into new territory for fear of criticism (by bosses or colleagues). Innovation flows from this creative spirit.” 

In a trusting environment teachers would be more open to trying a new grade or teaching a class. With trust, a teacher will be more open to sharing new ideas or insight with colleagues. Administrators, if you felt more trust, you would be more willing to experiment with bold programs.  Teacher and administrators innovating new ideas without fear of criticism could generate great benefits for students.

Progress
“What happens when you innovate? You create progress.” 

Progress is not just limited to higher test scores. Progress extends to personal progress.

“We go on TRIPs because we want to accomplish big things. We go on TRIPs because we want to solve real problems and because we want to create lasting value.”

We go on TRIPs because helping build minds and making a difference is why we got into education in the first place. We go on TRIPs to make an impact.

Good luck on your TRIP!

Rob Jacobs

Do Those Who Teach, Learn and Innovate?

No organization should be better at learning than the organizations that teach people how to learn. Therefore, it would follow that education should be the best organization in terms of learning ability of capability.

On his post (Innovation = Learning) on his blog, Keith Sawyer discusses an article in the Fall 2007 issue of Sloan Management Review, by Joaquín Alegre and Ricardo Chiva. They studied organizations high in organizational learning capability (OLC) and identified five core features of high OLC companies:

1.    Experimentation
2.    Risk taking
3.    Interaction with the external environment
4.    Dialogue
5.    Participative decision making.

Keith shares some of his thoughts from his research on each of the five core features.

(1) Experimentation:
“Experimentation as defined by these authors, produces a flow of new ideas that challenge the established order.”

Does education tend to toward challenging the established order or supporting the established order?

(2) Risk taking:
“Risk taking is just what it sounds like: the tolerance for ambiguity and errors.  And as I’ve found, innovative organizations foster idea generation and tolerate failure.”

Does education posses a tolerance for ambiguity and errors. Does education foster idea generation and in what ways does it to do this. How about tolerating failure? Where does education fall on the spectrum or encouraging or discouraging ideas with the potential to fail?

(3) Interaction with the external environment:
“Interaction with the external environment is what I call “collaborating with customers” and is associated with innovative networks that I call collaborative webs in my book Group Genius.  Deborah Ancona, in her 2007 book X-Teams, has likewise discovered that successful teams have an outward focus, and strong social network ties with people outside of their team.”

Has education developed an outward focus? In what ways has education collaborated with its “customer base?” How has education fostered strong social networks with people outside of their classrooms, schools, and districts?

(4) Dialogue and (5) participative decision making:
“Dialogue and participative decision making are what I call improvisation–a style of communication and an organizational culture that is egalitarian, open to flows across status levels.  Improvisational organizations excel at a type of dialogue that opens up possibilities, a style of conversation in which new and unexpected ideas emerge.”

In what ways has education embraced dialogue and participative decision making? How could education benefit from a greater use of dialogue and participative decision making? Does education encourage idea sharing across job functions and management levels?

Keith concludes by saying, “I firmly believe that organizations high in learning ability are more likely to be innovative organizations, and I’m delighted to read of this fascinating study confirming the link.”

I too hope that education has developed a high learning ability because we need all the innovation we can get. I think the jury is still out whether we who are high in teaching ability are also high in learning ability.

Please take a look at this great post on the
Freakanomics Blog-  How Can We Measure Innovation? A Freakonomics Quorum