unblocking innovation

The Opportunity of Uncertainty

Few would argue that across the globe we need to rethink what education looks like, at scale. There are certainly pockets of innovation, but by and large, those embedded in the current system see and feel the tremendous need to create learning environments that are considerably different than what we currently have. While some innovative educators may be inspire and excite us by dreaming up what is possible, most stakeholders in the system are gripped by uncertainty and fear. Such a daunting task of reinventing such complex environments and systems that can enable deep learning for all our youth. 

That fear and lack of clarity about the direction forward can be paralyzing. Jonathan Fields’ new book reminds us that “Uncertainty is a signpost that what you’re doing matters, that what you strive to create will not be derivative.” So at the very least, educators should take heart that a large source of the fear comes from the importance of this work. That aside, not letting the uncertainty paralyze you is not something that most people talk about. Fields’ book demonstrates that great work requires decisions and actions, and in fact, research demonstrates that the ability to tolerate ambiguity is directly related to creativity. So, if collectively, we are largely paralyzed by fear, it is likely that we won’t create a critical mass of creativity and innovation need to turn the tide on system transformation. 

Therefore, getting comfortable with uncertainty, and critically, taking bold action in light of it, is a critical capacity and skill of all key stakeholders in the current education system—and that includes teachers and parents. Fields’ advocates to spend as much time training in the mindset that allows you to embrace uncertainty as you do training in your actual chosen medium, and to specifically focus on four areas: changes in work flow, daily personal routines, shifts in your working environment, and outlook prompts.

So don’t keep calm and carry on, get excited and make things,

       get inspired and try things,

                 get moving and do things, and

                        see the opportunity in uncertainty.

The ‘Gamification’ of Educational Innovation

In my current full-time role at the Learning Games Network, I spend a lot of time looking at opportunities for partnerships and collaborations with various organizations, and explore innovative business models to help extend the livelihood and reach of educational technologies. But there’s one fun, educational media company (which shall remain nameless) that we currently collaborate with that does incredible work—yet for the life of me I can’t see how they are able to stay afloat financially. That was until someone informed me they are largely underwritten by a wealthy professional in another field than education. Despite the initial disappointment that this therefore implied their success and impact was largely un-replicable or scalable, it did make me smile to know that regardless, thousands if not millions of kids benefited from the incredible work this organization puts together, to make new ideas more accessible and memorable.

But wait, why can’t it be replicable or scalable? Big business and the for-profit sector has been crying out for years for an improved educational system—as of late, to an almost deafening degree, with significant research and reforms in even assessment being bull-dozed into education. At the same time, we’ve never been at less of a shortage of educational innovations. Although they span the spectrum in terms of quality and likelihood of effectiveness, they are literally coming out of the woodwork—as evidenced by the number of start-ups and entrepreneurs at last week’s Venture Capital in Education Summit in New York City. 

If big business really desires a significant change in education, then perhaps it’s time each stepped up to the plate and backed a promising educational innovation. While for the most part, each of these start-ups may not have the capacity to reinvent education, collectively it could translate into serious disruptive innovation. 

Of course, just expecting CEOs to step up and do this is more than highly unlikely…so following the trend of the latest business hype, let’s put a game layer on it and make it competitive. Funding companies can compete to see who’s educational startup got the most users in a set span of time, which generates the most revenue, the most return-users, and so on. And the government can put together a tax break for having taken the leap and gotten into the game of fixing education. In the end, important educational innovations are getting funded, students are offered a compounded range of available learning technologies, and big business is putting it’s money where it’s mouth is while having fun too. It’s a win-win-win…and you’ve just leveled-up.

The Problem with Patterns

Our brain is wired to see patterns. It’s a very useful feature. It actually helps us learn and keeps us safe. Through daily experience in the world, we begin to internalize the things we see and experience over and over again, and eventually we can react instinctively due to the pattern recognition we’ve built up in our heads. But unfortunately, patterns also limit our openness to new possibilities. The initial ‘rub’ of a new idea not fitting into the existing pattern we hold so strongly in our heads can be what kills an innovative idea before it has a chance to take a breath.

Think about all the existing patterns in our current education system. How many schools have you seen that don’t operate in 42 minute classes? Don’t chunk students into grades? If you were a school administrator, how willing would you be to start the new school year abandoning these models? 

But, “remarkable innovation happens outside of existing patterns.” Rethinking existing models and patterns will be critical to redesigning education. There will be, to varying degrees, the challenge of innovative ideas to our cognitive patterns. Unblocking innovation will require being aware of our initial push-back to anomalies to the patterns and enable people to go beyond the uncomfortableness to really entertain new ideas.

Brainstorm—err, Brainsteering

Every individual and organization faces challenges that the must invent solutions to. Sometimes this is simple and quick internal exercise, sometimes it involves putting your best and brightest brains together. Collaborative brainstorming doesn’t have to be complicated but it can often go awry. From working with over 200 organizations over the past 10 years, McKinsey has developed an approach they affectionately call “brainsteering” which include 7 steps to brainstorming success:

1. Know your organization’s decision-making criteria. “Think outside the box!” is an unhelpful exhortation if external circumstances or company policies create boxes that the organization truly must live within.

2. Ask the right questions. Contrary to popular belief, going for quantity of innovative ideas is not the best approach. According to McKinsey, decades of academic research shows that traditional, loosely structured brainstorming techniques are far inferior to more structure approaches. They recommend using questions as a platform for idea generation; the trick is to identify questions with two characteristics. First, they should force the group to take a new and unfamiliar perspective. Second, a good question limits the conceptual space the team will explore, without being so restrictive that it forces particular answers or outcomes. 15-20 questions per workshop is a good amount.

3. Choose the right people. And the right people can answer your questions, which isn’t often represented by the top of the org chart but by those in the trenches.

4. Divide and conquer. conduct multiple, discrete, highly focused idea generation sessions among subgroups of three to five people—no fewer, no more. Each subgroup should focus on a single question for a full 30 minutes. Then isolate the “idea crushers”—including bosses, “big mouths” and subject matter experts. Finally, take the 15 to 20 questions you prepared earlier and divide them among the subgroups—about 5 questions each, since it’s unproductive and too time consuming to have all subgroups answer every question. Whenever possible, assign a specific question to the subgroup you consider best equipped to handle it.

5. Go! Before the division into subgroups, orient them so that your expectations about what they will—and won’t—accomplish are clear. Each subgroup will thoughtfully consider and discuss a single question for a half hour. No other idea from any source—no matter how good—should be mentioned during a subgroup’s individual session. Tell participants that if anyone thinks of a “silver bullet” solution that’s outside the scope of the discussion, they should write it down and share it later.

6. Wrap it up. A typical subgroup has produced perhaps 15 interesting ideas for further exploration. You’ve been running multiple subgroups simultaneously, so your 20-person team has collectively generated up to 60 ideas. One thing not  to do is have the full group choose the best ideas from the pile, as is common in traditional brainstorming. Instead, have each subgroup privately narrow its own list of ideas to a top few and then share all the leading ideas with the full group to motivate and inspire participants. But the full group shouldn’t pick a winner. Rather, close the workshop on a high note that participants won’t expect if they’re veterans of traditional brainstorming: describe to them exactly what steps will be taken to choose the winning ideas and how they will learn about the final decisions.

7. Follow-up quickly. Decisions and other follow-up activities should be quick and thorough. Of course, we’re not suggesting that uninformed or insufficiently researched conclusions should be reached about ideas dreamed up only hours earlier. But the odds that concrete action will result from an idea generation exercise tend to decline quickly as time passes and momentum fades.

Traits of Open Innovators in Education

For educational systems to be innovative and dynamic, they must be filled with people who have an open innovation mindset. What are the traits of an innovative person?

Creative - sees opportunities and drives them forward

• Is aware of and enables new ideas – from anywhere
• At ease outside their “comfort zone”
• Non complacent – boundary pusher

Connector - Relationship building both within and outside the organization.

• Is Genuine – Builds trust
• Represents the partner well to the organization
• Listener – Key for building Win-Win deals

Catalyst - persuades, inspires and garners support

• Politically astute, high organizational awareness
• Knows when, how and with whom to gain support
• Top notch communication skills
• passionate

Learner - self-driven to become up to speed in new areas (critical skill to help showcase and gain support of others).

• Ability to develop expertise, sometimes outside of their area of expertise quickly
• Curious
• Resourceful

Risk Taker & Failure - Not afraid of taking risks and sees failure, when learned from, as a positive

• Manages risks through milestones and keeps moving forward
• Doesn’t plan for failure – plans to avoid it

Passion - energy to more forward and overcome roadblocks

• Infectious energy
• Sees opportunity, not just issues

Igniting Innovation

In a system known for inertia, igniting innovation can be a challenge. Getting a system moving and groving in the practices of innovation is more than just unblocking the barriers preventing it in the first place—although that is the first step! Identifying and removing or mitigating many of the elements in the system that run counter to or inhibit innovation is where the process has to start.
 
Doing that, and then effectively moving forward takes commitment. Getting a system to innovate takes commitment at all levels, but mostly importantly senior leadership, since they make most of the decisions that remove barriers and enable innovation.
 
Getting commitment at all levels take collaboration and communication. Co-creating a vision, articulating that clearly, and getting that culture off the ground with motivation is critical to get right the first time. Getting all parts of the system together and moving forward with momentum is key—and that means having a networked inside to get information, ideas and knowledge moving quickly and easily. This doesn’t just happen, it needs a strategy and supports designed into the system.

Most of all, you need action. Nothing kills momentum like not seeing anything happen. All talk and no walk will extinguish your innovation fire pretty quickly. Have some strong ideas and strategies for cultivating innovation ready to go, while listening to your team for the others.

Mind the Gap

Last year I got the incredible opportunity to move to England for 10 months and immerse myself in their educational systems. An order of magnitude smaller in size, with 4 different, unique educational systems within those borders makes the UK a fertile environment for innovation dynamics—allowing for easier comparison and dissemination of knowledge and new approaches. It’s a leg up on the US, who has the opposite dynamics—a massive system in geography and population, with sub-components (states) that don’t vary enough in approach and structure to gain value from analysis in comparison of dynamics and new approaches.

However, in all the education systems I have seen there is a gap that exists—a gap in bridging knowledge of research to practice. It’s a gap in knowledge management, and for innovation that’s a big problem. In any industry, knowledge management is essential—to disseminating best practices, new innovations, failures and approaches that didn’t work, etc. In education, there’s a wealth of knowledge about best practices and cutting edge innovations that is out there, but like other ‘ed-inno’ fanatics, I know that cause I scan for it. The average teacher and school doesn’t scour and pour over the literature, tweets, and websites that hold this knowledge—and we wonder why we don’t tangibly see much innovation in education. There’s a fundamental gap in the system: teachers don’t have time, and really aren’t incentivized to find this knowledge and stay cutting edge, and same is true for researchers and those creating the new practice. Even new practice that comes out of the classroom itself is in the same situation. There’s a fundamental gap in the system—a role that needs to be created a filled to bring the two together and better facilitate knowledge management.

This point was hammered home to me in December when I attended a small gathering, hosted by the NSF, of grantees who have made robust educational innovations to ask the central question, “Why aren’t these used in schools?” By the end of the day, it was clear that there was a missing link that was needed to bridge these two areas…hybrid organizations that scoured the dense literature to turn the knowledge and insights from research into practical knowledge and tools for schools, and serve as a platform for disseminating the innovations and hub connecting both sides together. It got me thinking about the UK, and how their gap in this area is a bit smaller than ours—they have go-to organizations that do some of this stuff, like Futurelab and the Innovation Unit, but also the wildly popular Teachers TV that put academic knowledge into digestible and engaging short videos. While the US has some similar resources, our vast size has been a big part in preventing their systemic integration into practice.

If we’re really serious about unblocking innovation in education, then we need to really pay attention to the considerable block – or void – this presents. Minding this gap could make a tremendous impact in leveraging innovation in US education.

Turn on the “Share” Button

Sharing is critically important in education. The knowledge teachers hold remains in their heads and in their classrooms. Increasing the flow of knowledge, ideas, and getting people collaborating more will greatly increase innovation and education and the evolution of practice and the profession. So, as the blog authors suggest, install a few “share” buttons on your computer, and use them!

See the full inspired blog post at Connected Principals…

A ‘Revolution’ in Learning Games

Games, games, games. The learning games fever has never been hotter. This week I attended the Aspen Institute’s Innovation in Education Forum & Expo in Washington, DC, where games where one of the central components in many of the start-ups highlighted. One of the main themes discussed over and over again at the forum was how difficult it is for the for-profit industry to partner with and enter education. It’s a gap the inhibits innovation in education that is pretty common. It’s a gap commonly sited in digital games…the engagement level with the robust design costs far too much to ever make for educational purposes. 

How can we design around these gaps? Mods! ‘Mods’ are modifications of existing games. Probably the best known in education is Revolution, the MIT mod of Neverwinter Nights. You use a commercial game platform and design a new game, graphics and all, that is built on top of the original game engine.

So many corporations are on the “save education” bandwagon. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has over 30 major companies on the board supporting its work. If each of those invested several million dollars to create a robust ‘mod’ around specific learning content, the US education system would have over 30 rich learning tools around critical topics areas that are lever points for domain-specific learning trajectories. Can we unblock more innovation? Create incentive schemes for federal grants like the SBIR, that have helped get numerous gaming companies get off the ground, to have preference for selection if they partner from the beginning with another organization to make a learning mod for their game; or foundations and philanthropic wings of corporations could partner with the game companies to build the ‘mod’. We should take a lesson from ‘mods’ and start modding our policies and collaborations as well.