The What Goes Around Blog

Vulnerability – A Hot Ticket

Vulnerability – this exciting, scary, beautiful and yet somehow oddly misshapen word has been featuring in my mind and work a lot lately. When we think of doing something that makes us feel vulnerable, we typically associate vulnerability with weakness, and when we see someone sharing their vulnerability, we usually associate that with courage. When it comes to vulnerability and how we roll with it, we’re our own worst enemy.

I think vulnerability is an important part of doing authentic work, and as someone who likes to challenge the way people work, and to lead by example in encouraging people to do things differently, I’m familiar with the anxiety it brings. It’s an essential ingredient of creativity, just ask anyone who has stared at a beautiful, pristine sheet of gloriously white, flat, smooth 200 gsm paper with a pencil in hand just prior to bringing the two together, and they’ll give you a sense of what vulnerability feels like. And although it’s nerve racking, vulnerability can be exciting too.

Speaking of exciting – we have a rare opportunity to experience cutting edge thinking on vulnerability today. Dr Brene Brown, who was catapulted into the front line of vulnerability thinking after her 2010 TEDx talk on the subject went viral, is speaking on vulnerability at The RSA today at 1pm UK time. Understandably the auditorium is full, but the good people at The RSA are live streaming the talk. I know where I’ll be at 1pm today, how about you?

photo credit

How to Change Education – from the ground up?

Today’s blog post title may look slightly familiar. I recently wrote about a talk to be given by Sir Ken Robinson at the RSA about changing education, then my name popped to the top of the waiting list and I was offered a ticket, so I rolled into London on Monday July 1st to have a listen. The talk took place in the recently refurbished Great Room (the room struck me as more ‘very nice’ than great – though that’s not such a snappy title eh?), and was live streamed too. The room was full, I’d guess it holds about 120 people. At 1pm the CEO of the RSA Matthew Taylor took to the stage to introduce Sir Ken Robinson. Matthew said that the two hot tickets in the last few days were this one, and the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury. He mawkishly went on to suggest that what we were about to receive was somehow the winner in this two horse race and oddly used the word ‘elite’ to introduce a talk about change from the ground up for education. Hmmm? Anyway, to keep the rock theme going for just a moment longer, if Matthew Taylor was in Spinal Tap, he would have just turned the smarm all the way up to eleven. On with the show…

Confusing intelligence with academic capability

Sir Ken Robinson (I’ll refer to him as SKR from now on) started by telling us how the current model of education confuses and conflates intelligence with academic capability. There is a misapprehension within government that education at the highest level = Oxford and Cambridge. We can’t all go there, and many of us don’t want to – so this aspiration is a disastrous waste of human talent. SKR talked about how education is built around an outdated factory model. Every 40 minutes the bell rings and we all change rooms. He suggests that were we to run a business like this, we’d be broke in a week. I didn’t think broke, I thought of sweat shops.

The factory model is wrong

This factory, or industrial model which works as if humans are machines is wrong at every level. Governments everywhere seek to mechanise people through their approach, SKR asks us to listen to policy makers language, they believe that you can deliver a system improvement by shouting commands at it. Input equals output. In part, the task is to persuade politicians to do things differently, and because they have short time horizons, they are unlikely to change. But if we do things differently first, they will follow.

SKR then briefly referred to the STEM principle – the in vogue focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as being necessary and not sufficient to prepare learners for what comes next in the world. So what other things need focussing on?

Economics – education is vital, and powerful for economic advancement, but not if education continues to follow an outdated industrial model. SKR referenced research by IBM who asked companies in 18 countries what keeps you up at night? 2nd most popular response was the need for adaptability, and here SKR used the Kodak story to illustrate how an essential brand can become redundant through failing to adapt to a changing market. The most popular response was the need for creativity, and here SKR believes that education currently enacts a systematic quashing of the appetite for creativity.

Culture – most conflict is this way inclined, conflict around ideologies. We need to understand cultural identities – the arts, languages etc. Then SKR read a glib quote about being British these days means driving home in a German car, having an Indian takeaway in front of a Japanese TV etc. before ending on, the most British thing of all is suspicion of anything foreign. This got a lot of laughs but I’m not sure it was a particularly helpful point.

Social – communities matter more than ever, politics is disenfranchised. SKR referenced Emily Davison who famously stepped in front of the King’s horse at Epsom race course in 1913 as part of her campaign for votes for women. The injuries caused by her actions led to her death four days later. And here we are a hundred years on with fewer and fewer people voting. Civil discourse is important.

Participation – education needs to be more personal – about people, different talents, interests etc. Diversity is nuanced, education is not. 30% of USA kids don’t finish high school.

Theatre of education

SKR got round to a bit more government bashing, saying that top down directives don’t work. The government cannot improve education through vilifying teachers, their involvement and support is what’s needed. He asked, what can you take away from education to get back to the core? By way of an analogy, SKR said that theatre is the relationship between performer and audience. The same goes for education. Children have voracious appetite for learning, and yet they don’t need to be taught everything. We don’t teach kids to learn how to speak, they learn how to. Education currently dissipates this appetite for learning and the conceit of education is to think we can do this (teaching) better.

Teaching is currently just a delivery system. It should be revered as an art form, you need to know your stuff sure, and beyond that you must excite people to learn – that is the gift. How? Get the kids involved. Harvard is starting to flip the classroom to become much less dependant on the lecturer, increasingly students are learning from and with each other. You can change this now yourself don’t wait to be told. School needs to be a community of reciprocating individuals.

Habits and habitat

Complex adaptive systems – involves loads of different people reciprocating. Do something different and when it works it will grow. Tend to your own microclimate. Values can change, ground up only. Rock n roll, the Internet, these are not government initiatives. iPhone – when it launched there were 800 apps, now 750000. Unplanned – these things just just took off. Organic growth is cultural and already happening, system is adapting but not at government level, SKR hopes they realise and respond. A loving relationship is not command and control, but climate control. Change the micro climate.

Creativity in learning

We need to know how to play the instrument but not top to bottom – creativity is about finding other people who know more chords. Recognise individual learning styles, dissolve more learning down to the individual. Schools that engage and inspire are better. Acknowledge the power of ‘I don’t know’, facilitate more, ask more questions encourage collaboration, balancing instruction with intrigue. Standardised testing is wrong, testing should be a support for education not the point of it.
Quality of teaching and learning – that’s what matters, structure is much less important, gather round the quality aspect.

Breaking the system

SKR asks, is government trying to break public education by stealth, in order to privatise the whole thing? He feels this would be a disaster and if it’s part of the plan then tell us so we can have an informed disagreement about it.

SKR sits down to huge applause, then takes a few questions, all of which were broadly in agreement with his assertions, followed by a very long queue of people buying books and having them signed. I’m afraid I didn’t join the queue.

Reflections

I confess that I enjoyed listening to SKR speak – he is an engaging speaker, and though his humour was at times a little bitchy, he was also very funny. But – having been provoked and excited by the animated version of his previous RSA talk on Changing Education Paradigms, I was expecting something much more radical from SKR. I left the Salon of Disappointment (sorry, the Great Room), feeling…underwhelmed. I felt the talk was aimed more at trying to bolster the egos of teachers, and less about changing the system from the bottom up. A more robust challenge might have been to question whether we need the vast school infrastructure with all of its cost and inflexibility. Home schooling didn’t even get a mention, despite acknowledging the power of community in the talk. This wasn’t so much about changing education, more like a little bit of light tinkering.

Propaganda : Power and Persuasion

Careless talk costs lives

Your country needs YOU!

I want you for the US Army

Buy more beer – get drunk here

Coughs and sneezes spread diseases

All the above are iconic propaganda straplines (except for the beer one, I just made that up), and even though they belong to a bygone age, they still resonate with a lot of people. It seems that effective propaganda sticks. I took myself along to The British Library last Friday to check out the exhibition Propaganda : Power and Persuasion.

Definitions of propaganda abound, and they often contain words like coerce, mislead and humiliate. So on the face of it, you’d think an exhibition about propaganda would be quite heavy going, and to a large extent you’d be right. The black backdrop, subdued lighting and sinister haunting music go a long way to help giving you the creeps, and raising suspicion as you wander through a really well laid out history of…. manipulation.

At first I thought I got it. Fight the baddies, shut up and dig, respect the leader at all costs, blah blah blah. A poster of Chairman Mao for example, published when he was in his 70’s depicts him as a young man ready for the struggle, fist clenched to show determination, wearing a smock for the common touch, clouds parting to show a brighter future. You can clearly see where the propaganda machine is coming from. And you quickly get to see that propaganda is very much in the eye and mind of the beholder. The exhibition plays tricks by showing different perspectives along side each other and this photo of some guy, I think it’s Adolf Churchill, summed up the whole juxtaposition thing nicely.

There’s a section on health, including various pieces exhorting us to stop smoking, eat less crap, take more exercise, don’t get VD. I was less sure that this is propaganda, more like slightly heavy handed common sense.

I was smirking a little about how unsophisticated a lot of the messages were, and thinking how gullible people of previous generations were. This stopped when I came across an exhibit focussed on the suitably unsubtle 1983 campaign Protect and Survive, all about how to survive a nuclear attack. I was in my late teens when this came out and though I don’t recall being ‘fooled’ by it, I do recall reading it at the time. Propaganda is timeless, and as if to prove it, I stumbled upon something that looked remarkably like an advert for Despicable Me 2.

The exhibition finishes with a giant Twitter wall showing how people have related to a few recent incidents including the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, and the Sandy Hook massacre and resulting ding dong between Obama and the NRA. Is propaganda becoming co-creative? Compulsive viewing for advertisers and internal comms specialists methinks.

I left blinking into the light having enjoyed my experience and at the same time feeling a little down, and even a little suspicious. Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? Recommended viewing, ideally when you’re in a good mood.