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.

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.   

(This post originally appeared at www.radar.oreilly.com)

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. 

For example, companies offer more and better educational content to their employees each year via technology.  The delivery mechanisms become more sophisticated, the market analysis and demographic segmentation become more precise.  The richness of the experience and the connectedness of the learning with the world beyond the classroom becomes ever-broader.  Do employees learn more today than they did in 1970? In 1900?  I’m not sure.  I’ve seen no compelling evidence either way.  The ones who really want to learn, learn more.  The self-starters learn more.  The employees of the best companies learn at a breathtaking pace but that has more to do with these company’s ability to attract those who are committed to their own self development than it does with the quality of the educational technology.  Students who own their own development use new technology well – it serves as an accelerant to their educational success.  But the accelerant is not the spark.   

This is the case for adults – employees in the world’s largest and richest organizations.  Is it the case for children?  I don’t know.  Probably.        

I was hiking with my son yesterday.  It was a long hike for a boy his age and he asked me, “Dad, do your feet hurt?”  I turned my head as we walked and said, “Yeah.  They hurt.  But not all hurting is bad and you wanted to get to the top of the hill.  Do you want to stop?”  He thought about it for a long while, ten, maybe twenty steps and said, “no, but my feet hurt too.  I’ll be glad when we get to the top.”  Ed 2.0 won’t make our feet not hurt.  We’ll just be hiking to more wonderful places.     

Ed 2.0 won’t be a kinder and gentler place, free from conflict and strife.  It will be a hard place.  A place where trolls and naysayers and those who would discourage others have the same loud microphone as anyone else.  For each online Gandhi, an online bully.  It will be a confusing place.  A painful place.  It will also be a wonderful place, a place where real liberation and intellectual progress will be possible in ways and on a scale we have never seen in the history of our species.

Ed 2.0 isn’t only or even primarily about technology.  It is about arming students with the tools and the fierce determination they will need to learn with and through that technology.  It is about encouraging intellectual entrepreneurship – creating of our students hundreds of millions of one-person startups, kludging their way to happiness and success.

Ed 2.0 is about encouraging ownership – genuine heartfelt ownership of one’s own educational destiny.  The institutions will transform faster than we can keep pace.  Between the cracks of our existing educational infrastructure will grow varied species of educational delivery the likes of which we have never seen and cannot possibly forecast.  What our students will need is a love of learning but we should not mistake this for an easy love affair.  A love of learning is a hard relationship.  Learning hurts sometimes.  Learning is scary most of the time.  It’s impact is all-too-often proportional to its agony.  As Benjamin Franklin described it, “Those things that hurt, instruct.”   

To paraphrase MLK, we must teach our students that suffering is redemptive and that that redemption takes the form of learning.    Ed 2.0 is teaching a student what to do when the system doesn’t work, when the teacher is bad, when the school is failing, when the district is broke.  The answer in each case is to rise above the failure and to use the power of technology to surmount each barrier.  That’s the real model of liberation with technology – its not the gleaming cities of glass, its the kluge with wires poking out, too much Cat 5 cable, and the fuses in your house always on the edge of tripping because you’re downloading too much information.  Its turning on the fire hose.  Its taking the spark that is the desire to learn and building into an unquenchable fire. 

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. 

Leadership knows no gender.  Maybe 30% of the executives I’ve coached are women.  They’re as good as the men.  Period.  End of story.  They do things differently sometimes, but there is more variation between leaders from the same gender than there is between the populations of male versus female leaders.  There are competitive, type-A leaders of either gender; there are nurturing, supportive leaders of either gender.  One thing is certain: An organization willing to ignore or neglect the professional and leadership development needs of 50% of its constituent workforce is doomed.  It will be consumed or left in the dust by companies that develop men and women with equal commitment and passion.

The title of the post is from a remarkable video I just saw at Presentation Zen.  I’ve embedded the video below and you can watch the HD version here.  

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. 

How does a leader change feelings?  Not by saying, “hey, team, we should feel differently!” The part of the brain that feels things works by different rules than the part of the brain that thinks rationally.  Both the thinking and feeling brain are closely intertwined but feeling drives thinking, not the other way around.  For a very readable detailed examination of why and how this is so, see this book by Antonio Damasio.  For right now, though, here are three things you can do to change feelings:

• Use metaphors and analogies – the easiest way to get someone to feel something is to get them thinking about something else that they already have strong feelings for and to “import” those feelings in some small way to the context of work.  So, for example, if you want your team to feel responsibility for the outcome of your group’s performance on a certain project, work to get your team to think of itself as a family.  Specifically, by increasing the extent to which they feel that their team (or organization) is like a family they “import” some small portion of the emotion they already have about their family – loyalty, willingness to sacrifice, identification with shared success.  Once imported, this emotion motivates new behavior in the new context.   

• Model and label the behaviors you want – You can’t talk someone into feeling a certain way, but you can model certain behaviors and those behaviors will help them come to the right emotional place.  In coaching we sometimes say “the smile drives the happy” – that if we are successful in getting people to “do” the right things they will come to feel the right way as a consequences.  Notice, this is different than just trying to persuade them that they should feel a certain way.  Instead, we are showing them how to act in very specific ways and then letting that behavior backfill the emotion.  A good friend of mine owns a wonderful restaurant told the following story:

“I had just hired a guy as a cook and I watched one day as he went about his tasks getting ready to open for the night.  He was out in the dining area and he saw a gum wrapper on the ground, beneath one of the tables.  He stopped, dropped to one knee, and picked it up, and then went about his business.  He didn’t have to.  His job was in the kitchen.  But he knew that when a customer sat down to eat a meal, part of the experience would be the dining room and so he took ownership.”

For my friend, he told this story to the rest of the restaurant staff.  He labeled the behavior and said, “there.  That’s what ownership looks like!”  This took something abstract and made it concrete, giving the other workers knowledge of at least one specific behavior that my friend was looking for and looking to reward. 

• Make team members think carefully about their own ownership experiences – I don’t use the word “make” much.  I prefer “persuade” or “influence.”  Sometimes, though, you have to make people do things to get them to do it.  At your next or a future staff meeting, communicate to the team that one topic you’ll be discussing is ownership.  When the meeting arrives, have each person take out a sheet of paper and write down three things they take pride in owning.  It can be their house, their car, their favorite pair of hiking boots (which is mine ).  Then have them write down a paragraph about how they behave differently toward these things because of their ownership relationship.  Finally, lead the group in a discussion of what they wrote down, reinforcing the good examples, and exploring the ones that might not be as compelling.  The exercise should take about 30-40 minutes for an average sized staff meeting (6-10 people).  The reason this works is because each of your people are being forced to dredge up the feelings of ownership they already have in their lives.  They can then draw the connection to what that would feel like in the context of your team.

All of this is important because there is no more important concept in leadership than ownership.  Great leaders help their people take ownership of their work, their group, and their organization.  This makes the people and the leader more effective and more fulfilled – not a bad day’s work as a leader.   

• Really interesting discussion of the demise of complex business models from Clay Shirky (h/t Wally Bock).
• Practical advice if you find yourself on a panel presentation from Great Leadership. 
• Detailed discussion of “under-commit, over-deliver” from Sharlyn Lauby.
• 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.

The root word for experience and experiment are the same.  We know that people learn from experience, but how many of us are learning from experiment?  What’s the difference?  The primary difference between the two is the care you take in observing.  To experiment is to do the following:  To act. To carefully and objectively observe the consequences of that action.  To form a model of cause and effect from your observations and to validate this understanding through further experiment.  Experiment, not experience, has been the driving force for our increase of understanding in every field of human knowledge.

To experiment means figuring out what you want to understand in terms of cause and effect – what you would identify as the driving feature of a system or a process.  For example, I want to improve my relationship with my co-workers.  I can learn from experience – from the ad hoc happenings of day-to-day interaction – or I can learn from experiment.  I can try, for example, and figure out what role trust plays in building relationships.  One way to do this would be to take one targeted relationship and choose to visibly trust that person.  I tell them I trust them.  I take action consistent with that trust (not checking up on them, giving them a broader scope of action, confiding in them, if that is appropriate).  I then carefully observe the consequences of my action.  Does trust work?  How does it work?  What was most effective and least effective as a technique to convey that trust and what would I change for next time, either with the same professional relationship or a different one.  This is experiment.

Experience is passive – its just what happens to you.  Experiment is active; you take ownership of experience and design it in a way that meets your specific needs.    Experiment is crucial because we are often surprised by what is key and what will be incidental for our professional success.  We have only a murky and half-formed sense of what will combine in unexpected ways to open the door to our success.