In honor of my return back to work this week, I present FLIP WEEK. Today is Part 1- The Four Forces of Change Producing Increasing Complexity
“Increasing compression of time and space produces increasing complexity.” Increasing Complexity is the second of the four forces of change impacting on us, as described by Peter Sheahan in his book Flip.
There are six factors driving increasing complexity.
1. Rapidly interconnecting networks of ideas and people.
“Did you know, for example, that 20 to 25 percent of daily searches on Google are unique? We are generating content—opinions, survey results, perspectives, ideas, or just pointless garbage—so fast at any one time more than one quarter of the World Wide Web is brand new.”
We are going to have to develop standards and practices to teach our students how to navigate through all this information, make informed and appropriate choices, and judge content for usefulness, bias, authority, etc. We will certainly do our students a disservice and our country a disservice if we don’t provide our students with the skills and knowledge to navigate through this environment. It is not a skill most of us needed as we grew up. One trip to the library or flipping through the World Book Encyclopedia was enough.
Times have changed and we need to adapt to ensure we are meeting our students’ needs.
According to Time magazine, the world produced 161 exabytes. That equals 161 billion gigabytes. Imagine that. In other words, the world produced three million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written in one year. Understanding how to type a search into Google is not providing our students with the tools they need to succeed in the future.
2. Disruptive technology—innovations in product and process almost always have unintended consequences that challenge our ability to adapt, and reward those with flexibility to flip into new modes of acting and thinking.
Cell phones with built in cameras and texting capabilities are nice features, but of course our students use them to cheat. That is the law of unintended consequences. Social Web 2.0 technology is a wonderful tool that connects students, but then we fight against cyber-bulling and Internet stalkers. As technology is rapidly developed and adopted by our students, we are going to face the challenge of adapting to the consequences they bring to our schools and classrooms.
3. Explosion of choice—in a globalizing economy, no one has a monopoly on any product or service for long, and the consumer’s biggest problem is often choosing among apparently identical offerings.
Teachers and administrators are faced with increasing choices in curriculum, teaching materials, educational software, and technology. Being able to sort through all these choices requires an enormous amount of time, energy, and use of resources. Teachers and administrators are being asked to be savvy enough to make informed and fiscally sound decisions in an environment where the amount of choices is growing daily.
4. Increasing intangible desires of the market—rising affluence shifts the business imperative from supplying customer needs to meeting customer desires for emotional fulfillment, no matter how mundane the product or service.
The increasing desire for school choice and schools that specialize in the arts, science, or technology is all a part of fulfilling customer needs. This will only increase in the future.
5. Increased sophistication of technology, systems, and processes—complexity begets complexity.
For example, many schools purchase educational software that becomes obsolete in just a few years or is not functional on quickly aging computers. The effectiveness of the technology becomes more difficult to measure as we struggle to integrate it into our literacy plans while managing all of the technical issues. Should you go web-base or buy a server? What is the long-term service agreement? What about software updates? Is this something teachers or administrators should be forced to spend time working through?
6. Legislation—whether it’s financial transparency, safety, the environment, or human rights, the world’s governments are regulating it.
No Child Left Behind, Quality Education Investment Act, High Priority Schools Grant Program, etc, etc. Need I say more? We have binders full of legislation monitoring everything we do. Make a mistake, and have it printed in the papers or posted on the web for the world to see.
As you can see, we in education are facing the same extreme forces that businesses and organizations around the world face. The challenge will be to adapt quickly and successfully. It is going to take some creative and innovative thinking, because what we have done so far, will not take us past where we need to go. One thing is for sure, it's going to get more complex.
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