Work is becoming increasingly project-based; the ability to navigate networks and work within a team towards the completion of simple and complex projects will be required of the future workforce. Unfortunately, we are still basing our education system today on models and content that were appropriate 50-100 years ago but that are no longer so in our interconnected and post-digital world. Not only is a lack of engagement in students inevitable, but it is also a disservice to young people who are not being equipped by schools for the future of work.
Standardized vs flexible
Innovation in education today faces a conflict regarding standardized knowledge and testing vs. flexibility and personalization. What kind of systemic solutions can emerge form that conflict?
Using the systemic thinking process known as the Core Conflict cloud, we arrive at solutions by invalidating the assumptions (mental models) that keep us trapped in between two conflicting positions. The diagram at the bottom of this post shows the conflicting positions, the underlying assumptions in the blue box, and the statements that invalidate those assumptions (the solutions) in the pink box.
Where schools are stuck: mental models
We are kept stuck in outmoded educational practices by assumptions that we can and must challenge. Firstly, we must have the courage to examine and refute such assumptions as:
Moving towards post-digital solutions
Once we challenge these mental models, we open up the space for new solutions that break through the barriers of anachronistic thinking and practice. We then have the opportunity to design a school system that fully recognizes the paradigm shift to our new, systemic understanding of the world and its interdependencies, and close the yawning gap between what goes on in most schools today and the way we actually live and work in a post-digital world. We need to create schools for an age of complexity, one that requires new knowledge, new skills and a different, more systemic kind of active, collaborative intelligence.
The solutions (see pink box) can then embrace the notion that once a school has decided the basic elements of information and knowledge it wants to deliver, it can develop in students the ability to interconnect those elements to develop new knowledge. By equipping students with the tools, both physical and mental, to think and analyze systemically and see the interdependent network among bodies of knowledge, they simultaneously learn and put into practice a lifetime skill. They will also be creating knowledge as opposed to simply receiving it passively.
Within the curriculum, accelerated learning patterns can be designed to accommodate and leverage students’ natural inclinations, and alternative assessment methods to standardized testing (which essentially test students’ ability to cope with the test as opposed to their knowledge) can be developed through original projects. By placing emphasis on developing students’ ability to plan, execute, validate and improve projects (inherent in Deming’s PDSA cycle) students learn and acquire the ability to become valuable contributors to any organization. As we stated at the beginning, the future of work is increasingly project-based; the ability to navigate networks and work within a team towards the completion of simple and complex projects will progressively be what is required of the future workforce. We need to educate in that direction.
The Intelligent Management Partners are trusted advisors to leaders of organizations. We blog about how to shift your thinking towards broader, systemic possibilities for yourself and your organization. Sign up to our blog here. Intelligent Management provides education and training on systemic management, W. Edwards Deming’s management philosophy and the Theory of Constraints (Decalogue methodology) in North America and Europe.
See our new books The Human Constraint – a business novel that has sold in 27 countries so far and ‘Quality, Involvement, Flow: The Systemic Organization’ from CRC Press, New York. by our Founder Dr. Domenico Lepore, Dr. .Angela Montgomery and Dr. Giovanni Siepe.
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