Monthly Archives: March 2016

Thriving on Chaos and Constant Evolution

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Mal Lee and Roger Broadie

In observing the workings of the pathfinder schools that have normalised the use of the digital one is struck by the palpable excitement, the professionalism of the staff, their quest for continued enhancement, the embrace of change, the mess and seeming chaos, the social networking, the belief that anything is possible, the risk taking and teachers singly and in ad hoc combinations ‘flying’, seeking to take advantage of the ever emerging opportunities.

In many respects the culture is akin to that of start up companies.

The contrast with the traditional school culture with its constancy, continuity, conformity, set procedures, micro management, adverseness to risk and change and its body of disempowered, seemingly tired staff going through the motions is pronounced.

It is however a culture that has taken years, an astute leadership and a supportive digital ecosystem to create.

But it is one that every school should aspire to work within.

Contrary to the myth that teachers will not accept change the reality is that the above mentioned cultural shift has occurred in normal, everyday schools with a typical mix of staff. Yes in time the more capable professionals seek out the pathfinders and add to their attraction but early on the pathfinders had the usual staff ‘challenges’.

For schools, like businesses to grow in a rapidly evolving, often uncertain digital and networked world they need a supportive organisational culture that thrives in seeming chaos and with constant evolution.

Peters (1987) in Thriving on Chaos, and Deal and Kennedy (1982) in their work on apt organisational cultures recognised that imperative thirty plus years ago.

It has taken some time but finally the pathfinder schools globally have demonstrated the critical importance of having a culture that fosters and supports their digital evolution.

The challenge is very much primarily human and not technological.

It calls for an astute principal willing and able to create and grow that culture over time, able to roll with the inevitable frustrations.

It necessitates the principal trusting and empowering a usually disempowered staff, student body and parent group, and being willing to distribute the control of the teaching and learning.

The genuine empowerment of the teachers and the professional support staff is particularly important, working to ensure all are treated as professionals – and not factory line workers – who are educated in the macro workings of the school as well as their speciality area/s.

It requires an apt, mature, appropriately governed professionally maintained digital ecosystem that supports and fosters the desired teaching and learning culture and which can accommodate staff wishing to fly while still maintaining a high level of efficiency and reliability.

It most assuredly requires each school to take charge of its own evolution and for the educational bureaucrats to support each school’s decision making and cease using the technology to micro manage the school’s operations and frustrate the growth of the desired culture.

The creation of the desired culture will take years and constant nurturing but the going becomes that much easier when the school moves to a digital operational base and begins shaping the desired school ecosystem.

  • Deal, D.E, and Kennedy, T (1982), Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, Harmondsworth, Penguin
  • Peters, T (1987) Thriving on Chaos NY Alfred A. Knopf

Position on Digital Evolutionary Continuum

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Mal Lee and Roger Broadie

Before embarking on your school’s digital evolutionary journey you need to know where you are and the likely path ahead.

The authors’ have developed an international measure that provides that facility. We’ve identified a now seven point evolutionary scale and a set of explanatory benchmarks that readily allows you, and vitally the wider school community to quickly adjudge the school’s current position on the continuum and the likely challenges ahead.

It is only indicative, but ‘precise’ enough for the planning. Importantly it is a tool all associated with the school can quickly and freely use – with no outlay to consultants.

The measure emerged out of own extensive research with the pathfinder schools and the recognition that schools globally were moving through the same evolutionary stages, and has been reinforced by the parallel research on complex adaptive systems and the digital transformation of business that identifies the key attributes in the evolutionary process.

It appears to matter not where the schools are located globally, whether small or large, primary or secondary, state, Catholic or independent or where they sit on the socio-economic scale.

At the present time we have identified seven major evolutionary stages. In time that number will grow.

Evolutionary Stages 2016 Final

The attributes of each are fleshed out at – http://www.digitalevolutionofschooling.net and within A Taxonomy of School Evolutionary Stages (Lee and Broadie, 2016).

At the Paper Based stage – the traditional school – the majority of the teachers have yet to use the digital technology in their everyday teaching and still rely on the pen, paper and the teaching board.

At the Early Digital stage a critical mass of the teachers, in the region of 70% plus, are using the digital in their everyday teaching and the pressure is on the remaining staff to make the shift.

By the Digital near on all teachers are using the digital technology in their everyday teaching, but the focus of the teaching is still primarily on what happens within the school walls, with the school unilaterally controlling all operations. Vitally when the school’s main operation – its teaching – goes digital, and is coupled to a largely digital administration the school moves to a digital operational base.

At the Early Networked stage the school begins to recognise the educational benefits of social networking in its widest sense, to reach out beyond the school walls and vitally begin genuinely collaborating with its homes and community.

By the Networked stage the school walls are coming down, the school is distributing the control of the teaching and learning, collaborating with its homes and community and vitally is willing to embrace BYOT and trust the students to use their own kit in class.

The Digital Normalisation stage sees the school having normalised the use of the digital technologies in every facet of its teaching and daily operations, created a tightly integrated, increasingly mature and higher order school ecosystem, social networking and is providing a mode of schooling largely antithetical to that of the traditional school.

With digital normalisation and the creation of a sophisticated and mature digitally based school ecosystem that transcends the old school walls and agrarian school timetable the school moves to a 24/7/365 Schooling stage, positioning the school to take advantage of the rapidly evolving digital and networked world and to move into historically unchartered waters.

Where does your school sit on this continuum?

Download the Taxonomy of School Evolutionary Stages if you would like to consider the fuller attributes of each of the stages.

 

 

 

Schools as Complex Adaptive Systems

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[ Another in the series of blogs intended to support those participating in our 10 week Leading Your School’s Digital Evolution program.

The next of the 10 week program begins on April 26, and is open to any who are interested.]

Mal Lee and Roger Broadie

It is vital in addressing the digital evolution of your school you view the school as an ever evolving, complex adaptive system, exhibiting in its evolution the traits found in all other evolving organisations, it becoming an increasingly higher order, more sophisticated, integrated and productive ecosystem.

While you don’t as a school leader have to be expert in complexity science and the evolution of systems it is important to appreciate digital schools like all other digitally based organisations will continually evolve and transform their nature in a remarkably common manner. Moreover they will do so at an accelerating pace, often in a seemingly messy and chaotic fashion, and will in their evolution demonstrate the attributes found in other complex adaptive systems.

Ready yourself to lead a school where constant, often uncertain change will be the norm.

You need to cease, if you haven’t already done so, seeing your school as a distinct one-off entity, and believing schools are immutable, constant in form and will forever stay the same as we have known them for the past century plus.

While each school is unique each will in its evolution display the attributes of like complex adaptive systems.

The reality is that schools globally, like all other organisations, are evolving at pace – albeit at very different rates – displaying in their evolutionary journey a suit of remarkably common attributes, the major features of which have long been identified in the research.

In 2000, 16 years ago, Pascale and his colleagues astutely observed:

‘The science of complexity has yielded four bedrock principles relevant to the new strategic work:

  1. Complex adaptive systems are at risk when in equilibrium. Equilibrium is a precursor to death.4

  2. Complex adaptive systems exhibit the capacity of self-organization and emergent complexity.5 Self-organization arises from intelligence in the remote clusters (or “nodes”) within a network. Emergent complexity is generated by the propensity of simple structures to generate novel patterns, infinite variety, and often, a sum that is greater than the parts. (Again, the escalating complexity of life on earth is an example.)

  3. Complex adaptive systems tend to move toward the edge of chaos when provoked by a complex task.6 Bounded instability is more conducive to evolution than either stable equilibrium or explosive instability. (For example, fire has been found to be a critical factor in regenerating healthy forests and prairies.) One important corollary to this principle is that a complex adaptive system, once having reached a temporary “peak” in its fitness landscape (e.g., a company during a golden era), must then “go down to go up” (i.e., moving from one peak to a still higher peak requires it to traverse the valleys of the fitness landscape). In cybernetic terms, the organism must be pulled by competitive pressures far enough out of its usual arrangements before it can create substantially different forms and arrive at a more evolved basin of attraction.

  4. One cannot direct a living system, only disturb it.7 Complex adaptive systems are characterized by weak cause-and-effect linkages. Phase transitions occur in the realm where one relatively small and isolated variation can produce huge effects. Alternatively, large changes may have little effect. (This phenomenon is common in the information industry. Massive efforts to promote a superior operating system may come to naught, whereas a series of serendipitous events may establish an inferior operating system —such as MS-DOS — as the industry standard.) (Pascale, Millemann and Gioja, 2000, p6).’

All four of these principles have been evidenced in all the authors’ research on the digital evolution of schooling over the last decade, but it is a message that doesn’t appear to have been grasped by most governments, educational bureaucrats or indeed school leaders.

In looking to lead the digital evolution of your school do draw upon to the lessons of complex adaptive systems and appreciate the guidance they can provide your journey.

  • Pascale, R.T, Millemann, M, Gioja, L (2000) Surfing at the Edge of Chaos NY Three Rivers Press

 

A Culture for a Digital and Networked Society

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Mal Lee and Roger Broadie

The challenge all schools wanting to prepare the young for a digital and networked society have to successfully meet is the creation of a school wide culture of change.

For the vast majority of schools that entails a fundamental, 180-degree turnabout, and the creation of a culture antithetical to what has long been regarded as the desired norm.

That change in culture will take years of concerted astute effort and skilful school leadership.

It entails moving the school from a culture of constancy and continuity, that is highly risk adverse and anxious about change to one that embraces and thrives upon on-going, rapid and often uncertain change, evolution and transformation and which actively encourages and supports risk taking and innovation by all within the school’s community.

It places the learner rather than the teacher at the centre and moves the school away from teaching mass groups to a more individualised and differentiated approach.

It requires the school to move from its traditional highly hierarchical organisational structure where the executive unilaterally control operations and the vast majority of the staff, the students and the parents are disempowered and simply acquiesce, to a flatter organisational structure that trusts and empowers all members of the school community, that distributes the control of the teaching and learning and actively collaborates with all in school community in the 24/7/365 teaching and learning, and growth of the school.

Critically it entails the shift from an insular, loosely coupled organisation where each silo like unit is largely autonomous, strongly resistant to change, to a tightly integrated, ever evolving socially networked, digitally based ecosystem with the agility and desire to rapidly and continually transform its operations. Where the former takes literally years to respond to the changing circumstances the latter can adjust in months.

Bhaduri and Fischer (2015) posed in the Forbes business magazine the question, ‘Are You an Analogue or Digital Leader? (http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfischer/2015/03/19/are-you-an-analog-or-digital-leader/) While written with business in mind in two pages they succinctly describe the culture found in most schools and that required to succeed in a digital and networked world.

Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull rightly observes that while this is one of the most exciting times in human history it requires of the nation, of all organisations a mindset, a culture willing to embrace the on-going digital transformation, to take risks and to learn from failure.

This is the kind of culture found in the pathfinder schools globally (Lee and Broadie, 2016) and the digital masters in industry (Westerman, et.al, 2014).

It is an anathema to the majority of schools and educational bureaucracies, set on maintaining their unilateral control of the teaching and learning.

For schools, like business to thrive in a digital revolution they must adopt a culture and a mindset apposite for that scene.

It is not merely about acquiring the technology, but rather it entails the creation over the years of an ecology, and a school community wide culture that facilitates and supports on-going evolution and transformation.

Until schools create that culture their growth will be stymied.

  • Westerman, G, Bonnett, D and McAfee, A (2014) Leading Digital. Turning Technology into Business Transformation, Boston, Harvard Business Review Press

 

Meeting Your Client’s Rising Digital Expectations

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Mal Lee and Roger Broadie

The digital transformation research underscores the critical importance of organisations continually meeting and astutely building upon the client’s ever rising, increasingly higher order digital expectations.

The customer experience is at the heart of digital transformation (Forrester, 2015).

The Economist concludes:

Evolving customer expectations are the most common driver of digital transformation (Economist, 2015, p2).

The same imperative will increasingly hold with the school, and its ability to continually meet and accommodate its current and prospective client’s rapidly rising digital expectations.

In a digital and networked society where the young and their parents have normalised the use of the digital to the extent that its has become virtually invisible the expectation is that they will naturally use their current technology in every facet of their lives and work. Indeed we are shocked when we can’t and are scornful of those enterprises that don’t provide fast, ready and sophisticated online access.

…..out in the marketplace, digital customers are also maturing. Their dramatically transformed expectations of service, speed and personalization 
are just the start (Accenture, 2016, p 6).

We are living in a society for whom the increasingly sophisticated use of the digital has become the norm and which no longer differentiates between face- to-face and online experiences (Westerman, et al, 2014).

The early adopter, digital schools globally have long recognised this reality, have normalised the use of the digital in every facet of their teaching and administration, are providing an integrated digital client experience and vitally have positioned their schools to evolve at a pace where they can continually accommodate their client’s rising digital expectations.

Schools can only do that, and meet the client’s rising digital expectations – known and unanticipated – if they too have normalised the use of the digital.

School can’t hope to meet, let alone build upon the school their client’s rising digital expectations unless they, like their client’s have normalised the whole school use of the digital.

Client’s expectations

With digital normalisation the clients naturally – and largely unwittingly – expect the school to mirror the evolving digital practises of society. There is for example the expectation, particularly among the students and younger parents, that:

  • the children will use the current digital technologies they already use 24/7/365
  • Net access and bandwidth in the school will be on par with that in the home
  • the digital will be used naturally in all teaching and learning, from Kindergarten upwards
  • students and parents can email their teachers
  • students can use their smartphone to photo whiteboard notes
  • the school website will provide all the latest information
  • the school will have an effective integrated digital communications suite, like all other organisations
  • the school’s use of the digital technology will evolve, becoming increasingly sophisticated, while always readying the young to use it astutely.

There is also the expectation the school’s teaching will build upon the young’s normalised 24/7/365 use of the digital technology, recognising the nature of the learning and teaching they do outside the school walls and will adjust and individualise their teaching accordingly.

Possibly largely unwittingly they also expect the curriculum to employ current technological practices, and not be constrained by a dated formal digital technology syllabus that teaches the ways of the past.

In saying ‘possibly’ and ‘unwittingly’ the reality is that the client’s digital expectations will continually grow and change, and will be impacted by their school’s situation. Four years ago apps were largely unheard of: today they are an integral part of modern society. Schools that have normalised the use of the digital and are striving to meet their clients digital needs will engender in the school itself and likely ‘competing’ local schools appreciably higher digital expectations than those found in a traditional paper based school.

To what extend does your school meet the above expectations? How far has it yet to travel?

As a quick test envision yourself as a client, jot down your digital expectations and compare them to your school’s practises.

Building upon the client’s expectations

One of the new arts to be conquered by leaders of digital schools is the reading and continual building upon of the clients’ digital expectations – particularly those of the young.

The continued viability of a school will increasingly be tied to its ability to meet those expectations (Lee, 2015).

That challenge is made that much more difficult by the pace and uncertain nature of the digital revolution and the school’s requirement to identify and address the current digital expectations, those of the near future and critically those as yet unidentified.

In identifying the attributes required by the students in a digital and networked world while schools cannot foretell of the future digital tools that will be used they can and should have an ecosystem agile enough to readily accommodate the emerging technology and changing practises.

Bibliography

Accenture (2016) ‘People First: The Primacy of People in a Digital Age’. Accenture Technology Vision 2016. Accenture – https://www.accenture.com/t20160314T114937__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/Accenture/Omobono/TechnologyVision/pdf/Technology-Trends-Technology-Vision-2016.PDF

Economist Intelligence Unit (2015) Digital Evolution: Learning from the Leaders of Digital Transformation Economist – http://digitalevolution.eiu.com/learning-from-the-leaders-in-digital-transformation/exec-summary

Forrester (2015). Digital Transformation in the Age of the Customer. Forrester for Accenture. October 2015 – https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion-Assets/DotCom/Documents/Global/PDF/Digital_1/Accenture-Digital-Transformation-B2B-spotlight.pdf

Lee, M (2015b) ‘Schools Have to go Digital to Remain Viable’ Educational Technology Solutions July 2015

Westerman, G, Bonnett, D and McAfee, A (2014) Leading Digital. Turning Technology into Business Transformation, Boston, Harvard Business Review Press