If you have never heard of a MOOC is stands for Massive Open Online Course. Watch the video below and ask yourself, "Could this be the next wave of church and organizational collaborative learning? Could a MOOC generate Lateral Wisdom among churches, organizations, and teams distributed, but connected across the globe?
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said, …”there are known 'knowns.' There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.”
He was basically describing 3 levels of ignorance—lack of knowledge or information.
Level 1-Things you “know.”
Level 2-Things you “know you don’t know.”
Level 3- Things you “don’t know you don’t know.”
But Innovation expert Steven Shapiro in a this post, thinks there might another dimension or level.
Level 4- Things you “don’t know you know.”
Steven explains it this way. “Inside of organizations, there is so much untapped knowledge. To combat this, over the past two decades, companies have invested millions of dollars in knowledge management systems. The objective has been to capture the company’s knowledge."
Your organization or church is filled with untapped knowledge.
But as Steven explains there is a problem. “The problem is, the knowledge management databases usually become so large and unwieldy that they are unusable. I can attest from experience that these systems often end up becoming digital piles of untapped information. Finding what you want can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Or, more accurately, it is like finding a specific needle in a stack of needles.”
What’s Steven’s answer to this dilemma you might ask? Reverse Knowledge Management.
“Instead of posting knowledge which sits passively in a database waiting for someone to find it, you post your question to your “community” so that it can be answered at the time of need.”
How much untapped knowledge is in the heads of your staff and teams. We need to become aware of what we know.
I use the acronym- AWARRENESS to describe how organizations and churches can think about their knowledge.
Of those, lets look at Relationships and Networks.
Often times we forget just how important the relationships outside of our department and even our organizational walls can be. Each staff member has a network of relationships that pass outside your walls, which they can leverage to provide insight, help, advice, knowledge, and wisdom for their work.
The relationships developed by each person can provide a myriad of useful outsiders to help overcome problems, create, and innovate.
It’s an inherent advantage of the “network.” These vast arrays of connections and “weak-ties” are combined and blended to create networked churches and organizations. Fluidly moving between physical and virtual networks to communicate, collaborate, and share ideas, collect ideas, data, strategies, and information. Each person being a portal or node to their individual network makes the church or organization exponentially stronger, knowledgeable, and wise.
We are able to maximize individual members’ Relationships and Networks to the advantage of the whole.
Steven says, “Sometimes the solution can be sitting in your knowledge management system…and you don’t even know it because it is too difficult to find.”
The answers we are looking for, the knowledge that we seek, may reside within our relationships, our networks, and ourselves. We may be surprised to find out that we have been dealing with Level 4 Ignorance all this time.
By practicing a little “reverse knowledge management,” we may be surprised to learn what we already knew.
In their book The Power of Pull, authors John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison describe what they call the "Big Shift."
The Big Shift has large implications for both organizational learning and, possibly even more significantly, personal learning. The Big Shift is creating an environment in which our current knowledge is quickly becoming perishable. And this fact is going to require that we not only become life-long learners, but rapid learners.
Personal Implications of the Big Shift
“We discover, to our dismay, that the significant investments we made in education in the early part of our lives was just the beginning. In order to stay successful in a world of accelerating change, we need to find ways to learn faster, often in areas that we once viewed as quite peripheral to our professions.”
“What we knew yesterday—either as employees or in terms of what our institutions as a whole knows about its business—is proving to be less and less helpful with the challenges and opportunities we confront today.”
What we learn is quickly becoming perishable. Static knowledge has an important and valuable role, but things are changing so fast, and we are being called upon to do more and more, so we need to develop a stream or flow of rapid tacit knowledge acquisition.
Most of the new things we will need to learn are best learned while working with others, not from a textbook or lecture. You need a network and people to collaborate with, to co-create new knowledge and to learn from. You need the tacit knowledge that comes from collaborating and learning from others. A book can’t teach you how to ride a bike. A lecture cannot prepare you to take your first swim in a pool. This is tacit knowledge that must be experienced to learn.
And here is the key. Our current environment is asking us to solve an ever increasing array of complex problems, many of which cannot be solved through the simple explicit knowledge which we learned or currently posses, but rather tacit knowledge that is hard to explain and is learned through experience and often directly from the various people and connections in our personal networks.
So to keep our knowledge fresh we must be rapid learners of tacit knowledge. In other words, we must learn experientially from the source.
In my mind, it's the similar to the differences between a search engine and a network.
Search Engine |
The Network |
| Sermon |
Preacher |
| Book |
Author |
| Photo |
Photographer |
| Data |
Researcher |
| Idea |
Innovator |
| Music |
Musician |
| Invention |
Inventor |
| Program |
Programmer |
| Historical Event |
Participant who experienced it |
| What to do |
Voice of experience that tells you how to do it and why |
| Public information |
Behind the scenes |
| We have to know what we are looking for |
Anticipates what we need and directs or provides it for us |
| Created |
Co-create new knowledge |
|
Find it |
Attract it |
| Algorithm |
Thinking |
| Static information that is locked on-line |
Dynamic knowledge that can cross over into touch space (face-to-face) |
| Explicit Knowledge and Information |
Tacit Knowledge and Know-how |
That's the "Big Shift"- It's Rapid Tacit Learning
Ambidextrous Learning is...
Push and Pull
Systematic and Free Flowing
Defined Period of Time and Life-long
Education and Learning
Freedom and Structure
Open and Bound
Individual and Collective
Questions and Answers
Physical and Virtual
Personal and Platform
Facts and Imagination
External and Internal
Teaching and Learning
Teacher and Learner
Organizational Learning and Personal Learning
Predictable and Change is Normal
Tacit and Explicit
Ambidextrous learning is the future of learning in your organization
One trait of a learning organization is having awareness. More than just having it, a learning organization needs to demonstrate A.W.A.R.E.N.E.S.S- (an acronym for focusing on A specific task/goal, Wisdom, Abilities, Response-ability, Education, Network, Experiences, Skills, and Scalable.)
The “W” in AWARENESS is Wisdom. By Wisdom I am referring to Wisdom Stewardship. Wisdom Stewardship is the term I use for the surrounding, broadening, learning, capturing, collecting, and sharing of the best ideas and solutions within a learning organization.
Surrounding
Learning Organizations that practice the Wisdom Stewardship associated with AWARENESS surround themselves with the best knowledge and the best talent.
The “best knowledge” simply means that the learning organization seeks the best information, data, ideas, practices, methods, strategies, research, etc., from the best sources. Learning organizations that practice Wisdom Stewardship have a drive to obtain the “best knowledge” they can get their hands on, from the best sources, and use it to increase organizational effectiveness.
The “best talent” means that individuals in the learning organization are constantly using their individual and overlapping Personal Learning Networks to network and connect with the very best sources of “best knowledge.” It is important to note, that the “best talent” may be sitting at the table or maybe across the country depending on what is needed. Learning organizations that practice Wisdom Stewardship must always view each other as starting point for “best knowledge” and “best talent”, but be humble enough to extend out into their networks and scale up their membership as needed.
In other words, learning organizations that have AWARENESS combine the “best knowledge” and the “best talent” to create wisdom which they then become stewards of.
Broadening
While the primary starting point for pursuing “best knowledge” and “best talent” will always be the members of the learning organization sitting together, having AWARENESS requires the individuals use their Personal Learning Networks to broaden their scope and their reach to obtain “best knowledge” and “best talent.”
Technology based collaborative networks (Twitter, Facebook, Ning, etc.) allows learning organizations to increase their “surface area” of reach and access to knowledge and talent. Using technology to increase “surface area”, learning organizations are demonstrating good stewardship of wisdom, regardless of geographic location or formal connection to the enterprise.
Broadening insists that teams and individuals use their technology based Personal Learning Networks, and their any other network, to seek out diversity of perspective. Teams should have multi-disciplined networks filled with people from a many disciplines in, and I would suggest, even out of the enterprise. Teams should seek the greatest cognitive diversity (to a point) that is possible. Broadening from themselves to a diverse team of “useful outsiders” whose wisdom can be called upon and leveraged by the team.
Learning
As Michael Fullan would say, “Learning is the work.” Learning organizations demonstrate Wisdom Stewardship when they learn together, especially when they learn in context together. Learning organizations that practice AWARENESS should make every attempt to learn with each other before, during, and after the work and in context as much as possible. Learning organizations that use Wisdom Stewardship develop capacity of individuals as well of teams. Growing in skills, in knowledge, in methodology, experience, and ability, together, is being a good steward of personal, team, and organizational wisdom.
Capturing
Wisdom Stewardship also requires that wisdom, those best ideas, best practices, innovations, etc., be captured. There are numerous technology platforms that can be used to capture the wisdom of the team and teams can follow their own preferences, but whichever technologies teams choose to use to capture their wisdom, the best choices will be those that are easy to use, easy to access, and easy to share. Being a good steward of wisdom means that there must be a way to go back, to re-trace your learning journey, to remember what has been learned or what has been done. Wisdom Stewardship asks the learning organization to gather, collect, save, archive, and memorialize their wisdom for future use.
Sharing
The final key to Wisdom Stewardship is sharing out the wisdom with others. Learning organizations who practice Wisdom Stewardship are very concerned with K.W.O.K, or Knowing What Others Know. This is similar to the Japanese concept of “Yokoten.” The heart of yokoten is that an idea, or wisdom, must be shared. The value comes in two forms- the idea and the sharing.
Learning organizations must overcome the hoarding culture and develop a culture of yokoten, which insists that for the good of the organization, the enterprise, the team, and the individual, great ideas, solutions, and wisdom must be shared with others.
Wisdom Stewardship surrounds, broadens, learns, captures, and shares the developed wisdom of the team to benefit of the organization. It is a key part of building a learning organization that has AWARENESS.
Do your assumptions about what organizational learning should be leave you with a lack of alternatives?
One of the reasons why many people, including myself, love books like Freakonomics, Super Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational, or The Economic Naturalist is that is takes our assumptions about the world around us and stands them on their head. When what we assumed about our world is discovered to be incorrect, we must develop alternatives in our thinking and our approach to the world around us.
We have created a model of organizational and personal learning based on our assumptions about it. So let's consider our learning assumptions and models.
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
Global-Competitor Companies
High-Involvement Companies
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 in 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 the current system of organizational learning belong?
Does the current organizational model meet the 3 deepest needs of it's employees?
It is our assumptions about what learning is, where and when learning, teaching, and training takes place, and how learning systems should be organized, that control the current organizational face of learning. We have built what we assumed is the best model for delivery of instruction.
What, however, if those assumptions are wrong?
Have you ever considered the fact that the assumptions you make about what organizational learning is and what is should be are wrong?
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.”
Are there alternatives to our current model?
Do your organization have learning alternatives? Are your organizational leaders willing to honestly explore them? William A. Foster said, “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” Is what we have built the "wise choice of many alternatives", or is it simply what we have ended up with?
Archibald MacLeish once said, "What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice." Will your organization and those in it ever have the freedom to develop and create alternatives to the current model. Will we be free to pursue the The High-Involvement Company or the Global-Competitor Company, as described by O' Toole, or a hybrid of the two, or even something not yet discovered?
As O’ Toole says, “The statement ‘I have no alternative’ is one of the surest indicators of leadership failure.”
Leaders are learners. Great leadership is demonstrated by leaders who display and model learning behaviors. One of the easiest ways to model learning behavior is asking questions. Ask yourself...
How can I personally demonstrate that "asking for and seeking help from others" is a sign of effective learning and a strength rather than a sing of weakness?
When I am thinking about and looking at various projects, proposals, and ideas, have I ensured that knowledge from other projects, proposals, ideas, and departments have been brought to bear on this?
When I encounter a problem, how can I reinforce and model the importance of learning from others rather than providing the answers?
How do I react to the failure of those around me. Is it a just chalked up as a loss or as an opportunity for valuable learning?
How often do I ask, "What have you learned from others recently?"
Am I curious about who is teaching others and who is seeking new learning in my organization?
(Adopted from the book Learning To Fly by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell)
A simple set of questions for a leader to use to model learning behaviors as a leader.
Dean Rieck is a highly creative and successful direct marketing copywriter. He posted this piece “Do You Have These 11 Traits of Highly Creative People?” on the wonderful site Copyblogger.
As my title suggests, these 11 traits should be encouraged and developed in our personal and organizational learning. Creativity is an edge personally and organizationally. We need creative learners and we need to do our best develop it.
So with thanks to Dean, here are 11 highly creative traits that learners need to develop.
1. "Have the COURAGE to try new things and risk failure. Every big breakthrough starts as a harebrained idea. This doesn’t mean you should constantly go off the deep end, just that you should balance your routine portfolio of solutions with an investment in the new and untried. Over time, the risk is usually worth the reward."
2. "Use INTUITION as well as logic to make decisions and produce ideas. When Matt Drudge designed his Web site, he listened to his gut instead of the Internet gurus. He kept it simple, small, fast, and some would say ugly and primitive. But it works for him, making The Drudge Report one of the most recognizable and popular sites in the world."
3. "Like to PLAY, since humor and fun are the ultimate creative act. Which is to say you just have to lighten up. We all have goals, and quotas, and deadlines, but it’s not life and death. When you enjoy yourself, your brain relaxes and is able to produce more and better ideas. One of those ideas may be just what you’re looking for."
4. "Are EXPRESSIVE and willing to share what they feel and think, to be themselves. Blogging is the ideal arena for injecting your personality into your work. People are emotional creatures and respond better to people who appear real, honest, and open. Not only is it more interesting, it can also be more persuasive."
5. "Can FIND ORDER in confusion and discover hidden meaning in information. Research and critical thinking are key tools for the creative person. Information is to the brain what food is to the stomach. So-called “writer’s block” or creative burnout almost always results from a lack of fresh information and having nothing meaningful to say."
6. "Are MOTIVATED BY A TASK rather than by external rewards. You must like the challenge of writing, explaining, teaching, and persuading. Sure, you can make money along the way, but if you’re in it just for the money, you’re not going to be a fountain of new ideas."
7. "Have a need to FIND SOLUTIONS to challenging problems. Even the most creative writers won’t have a solution for everything. If they claim to, they’ve stopped thinking. Highly creative people are those whose eyes light up at a question they can’t answer. That’s the opportunity to learn something new and produce remarkably creative content."
8. "Will CHALLENGE ASSUMPTIONS and ask hard questions to discover what is real. Writing, blogging, or business rules aren’t really rules, only rules of thumb. If you want to wield true creative power, you will always take what others advise with a grain of salt. (That includes all of us gurus who love to don our pointy wizard hats and pontificate on the secrets of success.) If you don’t know something from personal knowledge or experience, you don’t know it at all."
9. "Can MAKE CONNECTIONS between old ideas to produce new insights. Combine the little doodles you make on a white board with online video and you get CommonCraft, a new approach to explaining things to people in a way they can easily understand. Sometimes the best solutions are simply two old ideas jammed together."
10. "Will PUSH THE ENVELOPE in order to expand the boundaries of what is possible. There was a time when no one thought you could make money on the Internet. Now it’s a huge, multi-national business platform. Instead of dividing the world into the possible and impossible, it’s better to merely divide it into the tried and the untried. What have you not tried yet?"
11. "Are willing to TEST new ideas and compete with others based on results. Isn’t that what they mean by the “market of ideas”? Isn’t that what business competition is about? If you’re afraid of being wrong or losing, your creativity will suffer."
Core knowledge, literacy, the ability to think and learn should be combined with creative traits to create creative learners and creative organizations.
Mindset matters.
When it comes to learning , you can have the most powerful, relevant, and well designed lesson delivered by the highest caliber teacher, but unless your student is in the right frame of mind, the lesson will fail.
By ecastro
So what is that frame of mind? I am sure there are a number of definitions, but I call it "learn mode."Learn mode is when a student is open to what it is that you intend to teach them. It's as simple as that.
The reality is "learn mode" isn't always present. The teacher has to create the conditions that will get the student into "learn mode." The teacher has to build the need.
So, Education Innovation asks...how are you doing that? How are you building the need for "Learn Mode?"
STEM
(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) is being held out by many as the
essential priority of education in America, and in some minds, the key to
saving the global competitiveness of the U.S itself.
I do not dispute the value of STEM. I just believe it is not complete. I believe there is some valuable pieces missing that will complement the power of STEM in meeting the needs of our students and our nation in the 21st Century.
It’s time to move from STEM to STEAMD. The addition of the Arts and Design are significant improvements over the original members four members of STEM.
The
arts are a source of culture, a source of creativity, a source of expression, a
source of freedom, and a way to express ideas and meaning that STEM just doesn’t
provide. Art, dance, theater, music, etc. provide a valuable cultural
connection between past and current generations.
The
New
Horizons website puts it this way, “Always among the highest expression
of every culture, the arts teach us much about every historical period through
its literature, visual arts, music, dance, and drama. Today it is recognized
that to be truly well educated one must not only learn to appreciate the arts,
but must have rich opportunities to actively participate in creative work. The
arts are languages that most people speak, cutting through individual
differences in culture, educational background, and ability. They can bring
every subject to life and turn abstractions into concrete reality. Learning
through the arts often results in greater academic achievement and higher test
scores.”
Art
is important.
The D is for Design. Design and Design Thinking takes STEM and directs it into meeting human needs and centers it on people. It gives STEM meaning and purpose. Design Thinking takes STEM and uses it to solve problems, especially Wicked Problems. The wicked problem was a term coined in the 1960's by mathematician and planner RittelHorst Rittel. He described them as messy, confounding, and aggressive. In 1968, C. West Churchman detailed the issue of wicked problems in an issue of Management Science
Churchman describes wicked problems as, " a class
of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is
confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting
values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly
confusing."
Our students are going to be asked to solve
wicked problems. Wicked problems will need to have designed solutions. Our
students need the skills of design and design thinking to focus STEM on meeting
human needs and understanding the scope of human problems.
The power of combining Arts and Design with
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math makes for a more complete and well-rounded
focus for our students. Most importantly, it provides context, meaning,
application, and wisdom through which STEM can be applied.
So from STEM to STEAMD…that is Education Innovation.
Creator and Developer of E.I--EducatationInnovation
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