Rethinking Complexity

Complex Change Calls for Cross-Sector Collaboration

I had the opportunity last week to help facilitate a session for non-profit, business, technology, education, and media leaders who came together for the inaugural summit of ConvergeUS.

Co-Chaired by TechNet’s CEO, Rey Ramsey, and Twitter’s Co-Founder, Biz Stone, ConvergeUS drives technology-based breakthroughs for critical social problems and thus accelerates social innovation. ConvergeUS—the non-profit arm of TechNet—is a bipartisan, political network of technology sector CEO’s and senior executives. It was founded this year to mobilize corporations, academic institutions, and other nonprofits to leverage technology to create positive change on critical issues facing American society.

The goal of this organization is to bring together dedicated people across sectors who can identify systemic challenges within our society, who can define ways to address them applying technological approaches, and who can work collaboratively to achieve sustainable and ideally transformative change. To meet this goal, each year ConvergeUS will identify no more than three problem areas to concentrate its resources and reach out to people in business, government, social services, media, and education who have an interest in collaborating to design and implement change.  They also intend to apply research methodology to build a methodology that can be duplicated in many areas.

Rethinking the Complexity of Learning Organizations

Today’s educational system is wrought with complexity—from the work of educating students to the lack of financing in heated political climates.

Working in the educational system can be complex, but it can also be rewarding.

The challenge is finding the right people with the right passion who are able to view the world from a systemic view—people who are willing to fearlessly delve into the chaos of the current system and make sense of it.

I work in an office that focuses on career and technical education programs. Even though our role is limited to vocational education, we try to keep a whole-student view of the educational system—a view that makes student success the primary focus supported by a system that encourages this success.

Earlier this year, I had a long conversation at work with two of my colleagues for a Saybrook class paper concerning complexity in the workplace. Our discussion helped me see that a lack of clarity seems to be fueling the complexity issues affecting the current educational system.

Some employees don't have a clear understanding of the expectations they're required to meet while others find themselves struggling to figure out how to move the system forward holistically rather than just focusing on individual pieces.

Humanistic Education: Remembering Our Interconnectedness

This is the first week of the fall semester at Saybrook University and we launched it with the residential conference in San Francisco. We are a distance learning institution, but the sense of community and connection that I have with colleagues and students is deep and real.

At commencement on Friday, the room was filled with the overflowing sense of gratitude that graduates expressed to their faculty, fellow students, family, and friends. The stories shared were testimony to the transformative learning journey that their education entailed.

I have always seen learning as a powerful, lifelong process. Collaborative learning—especially when it is connected to issues of care and concern for learners—has the power to catalyze change. This is the kind of learning that I have experienced here at Saybrook. We call it humanistic education.

For me, humanistic education is about learning for life. That is, meaningful learning that is relevant and enabling for each human being to become who they truly want and need to become. It is learning that celebrates life—learning that nourishes the human spirit in ways that make it possible to love and care for each other, for all living systems, and for the planet as a whole.

Helping students “get a voice” through collective courage

I have been working with Laurie Mandel, Ed.D., founder and Executive Director of Get-A-Voice™, recently. As I dove deeply into her philosophy, I ended up revisiting elements of systems knowledge intermingled with a motivation to establish conscious school cultures—from the student level!

After nearly two months of work, these foundational systems Laurie “suspected” would spark cultures of acceptance have been interconnected through a comprehensive plan to bring Get-A-Voice™ (or GAV) to the national market. The GAV systems may appear to skirt around the real issue it intends to address—bullying in schools—but it doesn't. Instead, Dr. Mandel has opted for a systemic way to address human relationship building in the formation years of social interactions.

By contrast, last year I witnessed a school in a bit of a half-witted attempt—though I'm sure, well-intentioned—attack and reward students in a Pavlovian manner. It struck how the administrators were over-rewarding children with “blue slips” for standard behaviors—didn’t anyone read Ed Deci and Rich Ryan’s seminal work on self-determinism theory and human motivation? How unaware are administrators in establishing systems of sustaining humanistic values? What systems are baked into our schools that breed visions of limitation and reduction versus possibility and potential? Students are not dogs and blue slips aren’t biscuits.

The internet is a playground of the rich - because there are no shortcuts to social justice

Are you old enough to remember when “the internet” was just getting big?  Do you remember what people thought it was going to be?

It was going to revolutionize democracy and do away with racism (because we’re all one color behind the screen);  it was going to level the playing field between rich and poor because we’d all have access to the same information superhighway. 

Now that we’ve got Facebook, Twitter, and the Huffington Post, how’s the future working out?

Not as predicted, except perhaps by the cynics.  According to a recent survey by UC Berkeley professor Jen Schradie, less than 10 percent of the population is participating in most “online production activities,” and as a result the internet has become a playground for the upper classes, representing their concerns and fixations and ignoring the issues of those on society’s bottom rungs. 

"Conventional wisdom tells us that the Internet is leveling the playing field and broadening the diversity of voices being heard," Schradie said. "But my findings show the Internet is actually reinforcing the socio-economic divisions that already exist, and may even heighten them, which has all sorts of implications as more of civic and economic life moves online."

Effectively that makes the internet a propaganda machine for the upper classes.

The testing scandal of the day isn't about who cheated: it's about who didn't

Who do we punish?  Who do we blame?  Or do we have a better option?

A state investigation of the Atlanta public schools released last week identified 44 schools and at least 178 teachers and principals that systematically corrected student test answers in order to artificially inflate scores on the state’s mandated competency test. Governor Nathan Deal, according to a report in the July 5 New York Times, accused Atlanta school administrators of sanctioning a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation which led to a conspiracy of silence. Pause here and reflect on your reaction to the last two sentences.

I remember hearing about the investigation on the radio as I was driving with my youngest daughter. “Did you hear, that?!” I asked the question in an overly dramatic way in order to signal my indignation and to wrest her attention from her iPhone. I summarized the story for her and waited for a response. Being a wise fourteen year old who understands both my opinions about high-stakes testing in public schools and the quickest way back to her iPhone, she dutifully shook her head and muttered something like, “that’s crazy.” Knowing I had a blog deadline approaching, I used the silence in the car to start composing a rant. That’s when the phrase from Governor Deal’s prepared statement came back to me, “a conspiracy of silence.” Did my fourteen year old actually agree with me that it’s “crazy” for teachers and principals to change answers on a test to intentionally misrepresent their prowess as educators or had she figured out the easiest way to preserve the status quo of the moment: dad driving, daughter playing a game on her phone.

What Should You Learn in College?

I've followed the emerging rules for higher education by the U.S. Department of Education with interest, but also trepidation. While I'm all for accountability in higher education, my concern is that what can be documented is not always the real learning and growth that a student experiences.

This past year I've seen two powerful examples of great college learning that are very different from the norm.

My first experience took place earlier this year when I was as visiting professor at the Stetson University in central Florida. There, I had the opportunity to teach an undergraduate course developed by Professor Greg McCann for young people who came from family businesses. The course didn't just focus on concepts and ideas; it also focused on developing the individual as a leader.

The course asked the students to explore deeply who they are, what they want, and how they can develop skills and credibility as a professional. Challenging and often confrontative, the course forced the students—including those who want to work for their family business someday—to look at patterns in their family and personal life. It asked the students to consider whether they accept these patterns as-is or if they feel these patterns need to be modified. An experiential group experience, the major learning product of the course is a Personal Development Plan. Many students were deeply moved by it because it made them ask two, self-reflective questions: “Why am I in college?” and “Where am I going?”

A sustainable earth needs lobbyists more than it needs visionaries

“The Earth is full,” Thomas Friedman said in a recent column:  we’ve reached the point at which we have too many people using too few resources, and trying to keep on keeping on this way will only lead to more trouble.

The good news, he suggests, is that this makes a fundamental transformation inevitable.  He quotes “environmentalist-entrepreneur” Paul Gilding:

“(O)ur response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”

We will move from a production and consumption based economy to a satisfaction and happiness based economy.

Which is great – I’m sure most everybody reading this post is in favor of that – but it skips a few crucial steps.  How do we get there?

However much we know we *need* to be creating a more sustainable future, the way we are using our existing resources seems to be entrenching our position:  we’re trying to make the current system more efficient, rather than re-inventing it.

Hate is supported by many systems

Are you a hateful person?

The answer may depend on where you live.

Culturally, we think of emotions as individual things: if you “love” it is “you” loving; jealousy, anger, and fear are all matters of the individual psyche. And, up to a point, they are.

But this is only a partial truth, and there is increasing recognition that the systems we live in can predispose us to some emotions. Previous articles at Rethinking Complexity have suggested that the workplaces we spend much of our lives in in can be dehumanizing -- which is another way of saying that they predispose us to emotions like resentment and despair. Some of the most recent research, from demographer Richard Florida, suggests that many of the systems we live in can do that one worse: predisposing too many of us to hate.

Kids aren't widgits - and education won't work as long as we treat it like an assembly line

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
William Butler Yeats

Two weeks ago, my fourteen-year-old daughter summed up her day at school. “I finished the science TAKS [The Texas assessment of knowledge and skill] in about an hour and then slept for five hours.” On this particular day a sixty-question single subject test was the only activity for every eighth-grader in the state.

Sleeping on TAKS days, it turns out, is quite common. In fact it’s one of the three activities permitted after you’ve turned in your test. The other two are reading and sitting quietly. Writing is not permitted; too scratchy. Even if you thought that these tests were important to improving the quality of our kid’s education, you can’t really believe that the sensory deprivation created by a mausoleum-like testing environment helps today’s tech distracted kids perform well on tests. Nevertheless, Teacher evaluations, administrator pay, school rankings and therefore the desirability and property tax base of the neighborhood will be determined to a large degree by the outcome of the TAKS tests.

What assumptions about improving education underlie the kind of high stakes testing in public schools that have become the hallmark of both George Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation, and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top? We hear testing being defended as the best way to hold teachers and administrators accountable. To be sure, there’s plenty of accounting going on:  not much learning though.

Perhaps it’s time to let go of the paradigm that treats five year olds like raw material entering a manufacturing process designed to produce eighteen year olds ready to become productive, independent citizens.