Metaphors are powerful. They work because your conscious mind is limited in its bandwidth – it can focus on very few things at a given time. When someone uses a metaphor to describe something, the power is two-fold. First, you have the direct function of explanation – the person is engaging in description. So, when you say that a company is like a living thing, you are describing it – its ebbs and flows, its cycles of growth, its genuine risk of mortality.
But there’s something deeper going on as well. When people describe their organizations, they default to three primary metaphors: the family, the team, and the nation at war. Each of these gives and takes away. Metaphors are powerful because what they give and what they take away happens almost entirely below the waterline of our conscious attention. If someone can get you to think of your organization as a team or a family, all sorts of other semantic freight will come along with that. Values (what is appropriate conduct within a family), goals (what is the goal toward which a team strives), and a thousand things besides.
As a leader, how do you see your team? How do you convey this metaphor to your team and to your organization? How is this “frame” reinforces and how do the individual stories that you tell reinforce this shared way of making sense of the world. The leaders who do this well do it on purpose, and it is a learnable skill.
On the largest of scales, we rarely have the luxury of designing technological systems. Instead, technologies happen to us – our experience of them being ragged, volatile, turbulent and rife with unexpected interactions. Tim’s posts about the emerging internet operating system here, and here, describe a great example of this – the winner of that particular fight being very much TBD and the factors determining victory or defeat being themselves the subject of lively debate. When we talk about Education 2.0, though, we are prone to think that we can design it – that we can consciously and deliberately lay the groundwork for its effective implementation. Our deliberation, though, may be less powerful than the larger forces driving its rapid evolution. One such force will certainly be disintermediation.
Disintermediation is a process in which a middle player poised between service or product providers and their consumers is weakened or removed from the value chain. Disintermediation is driven by the fact that middle players consume resources and in removing them from the chain, these resources are recovered to enable either lower cost for the consumer, better value from the provider, or both. Disintermediation can be total, in which case a middle player is removed entirely. It can also be partial, in which case an intermediary is carved up and the different ways in which they formerly added value are segmented, replaced, or done away with as circumstances permit. Understanding the process of disintermediation is critical to understanding the ways in which Education 2.0 will evolve.
An example of what disintermediation looks like is what happened to travel agencies. Before the Web, travel agents served as direct points of contact to facilitate travel arrangements between customers and service providers (airlines, hotels, rental car agencies, etc.) . In 1980, for example, a travel agent might meet with a family who wanted to travel to Europe. The agent contacted TWA, arranged for lodging and tour bus service within the European vacation, served as a vendor for “traveler’s checks”; and provided a “one stop shop” for the traveling family. The value proposition for the travel agent was that he or she was the retail outlet for knowledge about travel – in this case European travel. Dealing with the producers of this knowledge (the Airlines, French Hotels and the Italian tour bus service, for example) was cumbersome and required significant subject-matter expertise.
Disintermediation of travel agencies occurred in two distinct phases: an initial phase in which technology enabled travel agents to do their job better and a “terminal” phase in which these same agencies were disintermediated. Phase one of the process began with the shift to computerized reservation systems within the service providers – American Airlines and their Sabre system, for example. This was initially greeted by travel agents as a positive development. Sabre made their jobs easier – they could help more clients faster and with more comprehensive service. As the Web matured, though, services like Expedia, Travelocity, Hotwire and Priceline.com, allowed the end user – the consumer – to make travel arrangements directly and with far greater transparency regarding price and available services than the travel agents had been able to provide. First the savviest of the travelers, the “road warriors” who flew hundreds of thousands of miles a year, but soon “mom and pops,” came to use the electronic services instead of their local travel agent. In a single decade, the number of US travel agents declined by 45%.
The lessons of this example apply rather directly to Education 2.0. Teachers, schools, and districts occupy ground not too different than the travel agents of 1998. Specifically, the value proposition of the current educational system is that it understands the landscape of human knowledge and that it can plan and enable the exploration of this landscape in a way that is cost and time effective. Learning is educational travel.
But we now see the rapid development of Web 2.0, with devices like this:
and an application environment that will do for the landscape of human knowledge what Expedia did for physical travel – organize it, connecting the consumers of information directly with the information itself – classic disintermediation. We don’t know who the Travelocity of human knowledge will be, the Priceline.com of learning. Google is obviously the player to beat. Niche players will abound, though, – specialists in particular kinds of “intellectual travel”, for particular age groups or particular subjects.
How deep could this disintermediation go? Deeper than we would expect. If we take the primary function of school to be the dissemination of knowledge, the disintermediation could be near total. As a thought experiment we can imagine the following: The student’s experience may be ad hoc and fluid – with constantly shifting and boundary-less “classes.” It may be much more spontaneous and self-organizing – and all the more engaging for its voluntary essence. We may see the emergence of services that check a student’s progress against algorithms of likely educational success – simple AI versions of the 20th century guidance counselor. There may be tests that check for subject progress or mastery that any student is free to take whenever they are ready – no need to wait for “test day” Self-paced, self-directed, self-driven. There may be constant and direct input from industry and Gov 2.0 about what students need to know: If it looks like there’s a glut of chemical engineers coming up, for example, students might be advised to shift to a track more consistent with electrical engineering. They might get this information right about the time they’re learning to ride a bike. There will always be physical schools – students need to go somewhere during the day to enable the engine of modern economic progress: two parents working. But these schools will evolve into things that look more like civic centers – hubs for community involvement and rich relationship-building, augmented by more spontaneous micro-communities that span the globe, forming and bursting like soap bubbles. None of these things are certain. What is certain is that disintermediation rarely has a delicate touch. It will change the way we teach and change the way we learn in the decade and decades ahead.
The following is a cross-post of something I wrote for O’Reilly Radar. Readers of www.readingaboutleading.com will see my cross-posts from O’Reilly two or three days after they are posted there. For the whole dialogue about Education 2.0, see http://radar.oreilly.com/edu2/ . O’Reilly’s blog is one of the best forums out there – I recommend a careful look for anyone interested in technology and leadership.
I’ve been teaching adults for almost twenty years. First as a lecturer, then as a professor and for the last ten years as a coach and facilitator for large organizations all over the world. I love technology and the possibilities that it represents but I believe that technology can only ever enable educational success. It rarely drives. As technology becomes more pervasive we must shift our focus to the driving factors. I would argue that a key driver for educational success is the internal sense of ownership each student has for his or her own development. If they have this, they will find a way to succeed. If they don’t, the technology enables ever greater levels of complacency. For more about the importance of ownership, hit the jump.
A good friend of mine sent this over and I found it to be a fascinating and helpful read. It is a presentation on Corporate Culture in Netflix. In particular, I liked its emphasis on managing poor or even average performance out of the organization – what may be the rarest skill I see in the organizations with whom I work. Enjoy.
in 2002 or 2003 I was conducting a group workshop on leadership skills which drew participants from all over the world. On a break, one of the students came up to me. She was urbane, well-spoken and competent. She pulled me aside and said something that helps me to keep things in perspective: “Rob, I really like your class – I think this is practical and I’m learning so much. Thank you. I have one other question, though. . . “ She hesitated, and I asked her to continue. She spoke quietly, “I Think what you’re teaching about leadership is true, but how do I get my co-workers to think of me as a human being?” That was her challenge – getting her colleagues to think of her as a person because she was a woman who chose to work – chose to be a leader in a context where such a role was traditionally male. Much has changed in much of the world, but we’re not through yet – not by a long shot. For more on gender and leadership, hit the jump.
There is a lot of controversy right now about a new service called Unvarnished, a system that offers Facebook users the ability to provide personal business feedback for other individuals. There have been good discussions of Unvarnished (UV) at the LA Times, CNET, and TechCrunch (among many others). The service works by allowing users to set up profiles for other people and then allowing reviewers the chance to provide feedback on the quality of service or general reputation of that person. The feedback is anonymous and unsolicited, which seems to run the risk of the site serving as a forum for character assassination and gossip. Unvarnished claims that it takes specific steps to guard against this possibility and to keep the quality of the feedback high.
Here is how Unvarnished defends its service:
Because users have to log in through Facebook, the worst of the abuses are limited. Basically this is the claim that reviewers are only semi-anonymous – that they are known to FB and, presumably, UV. UV’s argument is that this semi-anonymity will keep them from slander and unhelpful feedback.
UV monitors for the worst of the worst – they claim on their site that active defamation or slander will be removed.
UV gives raters a dynamic score reflecting the utility of their feedback. Other raters rate the quality of each other’s feedback, allowing the credibility of each reviewer to emerge over time.
These arguments are pretty weak. Semi-anonymity is pretty anonymous, and people can attack others in many subtle and not so subtle ways, even if their identities are known. To use terms from the blogosphere, UV may remove the posts of the true trolls, but this isn’t much of a defense against the concern trolls (the ones who sound like, “I’m concerned that Scott has integrity issues…”). These trolls sound just like people who have real concerns, but their agenda is simple attack. The rating system for raters sounds good in practice, but at best will end up like Amazon’s community reviewer system – much less useful than Amazon ranking to determine the quality of the book.
The deeper problem that UV doesn’t address: selection bias. I’ve been coaching people using feedback for 10 years and the key variable isn’t the anonymity of the raters or providers – its their motive for participation. If you have an open process in which anyone can provide feedback but no one is asked to do so, participants come from the extremes: those who are angry at the person to be reviewed or those who consider themselves true allies. Neutral observers tend to sit the process out (or if they do participate, their voices are drowned out by the shrill voices at the poles). This problem is much more severe than the ones that UV claims to “solve.”
The future will bring feedback to the web for the public user – this isn’t the system that will do it well.
Ownership is not an intellectual state, it is a feeling. As such, you can talk about ownership and present the rational reasons why individuals on your team should take ownership until you are blue in the face and very little will happen. To understand some of the techniques that work to actually encourage your team to take ownership, hit the jump.
I’m reading Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto right now. It is a detailed, thorough and comprehensive examination of why we so often fail at very simple things. Gawande’s researched based answer: we need to use more checklists. This reminded me of one of the simplest and easiest to use decision-making tools: the side-by-side pros and cons. I’ve added a copy of a simple worksheet to the Library, or you can click on the image below.
Is technical excellence enough? According to this post, its just the beginning.
Two new articles (one on the impact on productivity of FaceBook and the other a great study from CCL on necessary leadership traits, now and in the future) in the Library.
Want to jump start your professional and leadership development? There’s something you can do that will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your change and learning efforts: make the shift from the pursuit of experience to a commitment to experiment. For a discussion of experiment and what it means for those who would own their professional and leadership development, hit the jump.
