Harold Jarche

our education system stumbles into the future

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It’s back to school time and education issues come to the fore with a provincial election in a few weeks. According to a local professor, the New Brunswick education system is too centralized — but it’s not just education. Addressing the problems of centralization is an issue with all established institutions as we shift from an industrial to a networked economy. First we might look at the underlying premises of the current system. According to SFU Professor Kieran Egan, in The Educated Mind, three premises compete for attention in our public education systems:

  1. education as socialization
  2. education as a quest for truth (Plato)
  3. education as the realization of individual potential (Rousseau)

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Guest Posts

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I frequently receive requests for guest blog posts, which I always turn down, for several reasons.

My website has my name on it, and I feel personally responsible for everything written here. Any guest post would not reflect my views.

Much of my professional reputation is based on my writing, and many of my perspectives were formed here as ‘half-baked ideas’ on this blog.

All of my content is licensed for sharing as: Creative Commons – Attribution, Non-commercial, Share-alike so that other bloggers can easily use it and build upon it, negating any need for guest posts here.

It is ridiculously easy to create your own blog so you do not need mine to post from.

In addition, most of the requests come from people I do not know. Requesting a guest post is like inviting yourself over for dinner. I don’t even know you, but you want a free meal, and then want to tell everyone about it?

Instead, please join in the conversation, add some value with your own perspectives, and maybe we can learn from each other.

The Garden of False Learning rench; Hanging; Textiles-Embroidered Date 1550–80 Medium Wool and silk on canvas Cross stitch, 48-56 per sq. in., 9 per sq. cm.

The Garden of False Learning – Wikimedia

Small thoughts, loosely joined

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With a hyper-connected society, enabled by over 2 billion connected people and an expected 50 billion devices in the near future, the environment any organization is facing is much more complex than it was a couple of decades ago. But this was when most executives were learning how to do their jobs. Many are ill-equipped for the cognitive overload they face, as traditional jobs –  from typing, to customer service, to legal research –  are constantly automated by software. Software enabled teams like AirBNB, Netflix, and Uber, are able to directly compete with industry incumbents, and can do so with significantly fewer employees.

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reflecting on reflection

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Missing from most workplaces today is any time for reflection. Even events that are designed to promote learning, like the ubiquitous professional conference, ignore time for reflection. In these discrete time-based events, there is little time for reflection. Presenters hold back their knowledge in order to ‘deliver’ it just before the big official presentation. This presentation is followed by some immediate questions, discussions, and a quick break. Then it’s off to see the next presentation. Reflection, if it occurs, comes much later, and usually after the participants have gone home. It’s the same at work.

It seems that most of us are in a hurry today, and I meet few people who have read even a few good books lately and have had the time to reflect upon them. Fewer still have taken the time to digest new ideas and discuss their learning with others. There is always a need to balance action and reflection, but the latter seems to be losing out in many of our workplaces.

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Strawberry Jam Finds

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Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds.

I am spending my weeks in Toronto on a consulting assignment (which also explains my infrequent blogging), returning home on weekends, but I thought the last find at the bottom of this post rather appropriate.

“Any plan conceived in moderation must fail when circumstances are set in extremes.” – Prince Metternich – via @k1v1n

@leadingincontxt – Dealing With Complexity in Leadership – with various links

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Error reduction interferes with gaining insights

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Is your organization  focused on merely reducing errors or is it also promoting ways to improve insight?

Fifty-eight of the top Fortune 200 companies bought into Six Sigma, attesting to the appeal of eliminating errors. The results of this “experiment” were striking: 91 per cent of the Six Sigma companies failed to keep up with the S&P 500 because Six Sigma got in the way of innovation. It interfered with insights. – Gary Klein

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Sense-making Skills

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The most difficult part of personal knowledge mastery is developing a sense-making routine. A recent academic paper from the Association for Psychological Science examined various methods to improve learning.

In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students. Also, some techniques (e.g., highlighting and rereading) were selected because students report relying heavily on them, which makes it especially important to examine how well they work. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice. – Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques

This paper was summarized at BigThink.com in an article entitled The lesson you never got taught in school: How to learn! which is how I came across it.

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Networks and Power

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Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@contepomi90 – “Power isn’t power if you need to wait for someone else to give it to you, who can also take it away at any time. That’s self-explanatory.”

@decasteve – “Don’t try to change human nature. Instead, go after the tools. New tools make new practices. Better tools make better practices.”

“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.” – Michelangelo – via @UpSearchRetain

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What does the Internet of Everything mean to you?

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“Cisco believes that many organizations are already experiencing the Internet of Things (IoT)—the networked connection of physical objects. The Internet of Everything is the next step in the evolution of smart objects—interconnected things in which the line between the physical object and digital information about that object is blurred. – Cisco on Slideshare

Here is how the Internet of Everything is viewed from multiple perspectives. What do you think?

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A Swiss Army Knife for the Network Era

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PKM: A Swiss Army knife for the Network Era
PKM: A Swiss Army knife for the Network Era

I am amazed at how personal knowledge mastery [PKM] is adapted to so many different situations, which attests to the usefulness of a simple framework to deal with complex problems. It’s beginning to look like the Swiss Army knife of the network era.

When it comes to workplace transformation, the key is getting people to accept change and more importantly change behaviours, especially those day-to-day routines that reflect the organization’s culture. Part of PKM is critical thinking, or questioning assumptions, which is why it may be threatening to certain management systems. But I am seeing a sea change, or perhaps at least a small tide of change.

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