Robert Paterson's Weblog

IMA 2007 - Conference Design

What a great conference that was. Why do I say that?

I saw great design well executed. Mark Fuerst had worked diligently to find a process that would have a chance of meeting an important aim beyond entertaining.

It is clear to  me that his aim was to get system movement. His design was focused on achieving that aim.

For the the first two days there was the CEO part. Put another way, this was an intimate group of about 50 plus people where it was possible to have real group dynamics. Because there was a supporting conference of hundreds that followed, he could generate the funds to have a simply outstanding array of speakers.  I normally cannot bear to be sitting passively in my seat whole another person speak. But when I hear brilliance or hear a real story, I am as riveted as the next person. There were several speakers that I felt disappointed about - disappointed that they could not speak for more - Scott Anthony and Lee Rainie come to mind.

But it was not simply the excellence of the speakers that was good. It was Mark's design. The conference had an arc. We were on a journey that had been designed intentionally where the mind and the heart would come together and have a moment of clarity and decision.

We began on Tuesday in a small group. Mark confronted us with the most challenging issues that we had not dared speak too in public. He used outsiders, who did not threaten, to create a compelling realization of our need to change. They also brought with them compelling evidence of what we had to do to have a chance of success. This is where his choice of speakers struck gold. They had the expertise to move the minds. They made the logic of our situation so clear that it could no longer be debated. It was Change or Die. Much of the Change was also described.

We were told again why we had to set up an organization, separate from our day jobs to do the new and this this group had to be protected from the power of the  old. We were shown the evidence that our business model will fail in less than 5 years. We were shown that trying to start with mega projects was going to fail. We shown how by sending out expeditions that we had a chance.

Of course, none of this was new but it was timely and so well told and in such intimate surroundings that it landed. There is no room now for avoidance - avoidance of the problem and for the route to take to find the opportunity.

Mark also expanded the task and finally included the whole family.

TV was seriously brought into the room as well. When I first started to meet you in Public radio I could not understand, being a stranger, why TV was not in the mix. You all gave me your reasons. I am so glad that they are now partners.

All of this - powerful messages given expertly, the right people being in the room, in a small enough group to "take' provided a moment of magic on Wednesday afternoon.

The magic was that Mark then brought the heart into the room. The mind had been prepared. To get movement, he had to reach the heart. He did this by exposing his own heart first. He stood before us as a man who was trying his best and who asked us if we would do the same.

It worked. People began to speak from their heart as well. I heard many leaders say in effect "Hi I am a senior executive in public radio/TV and I admit that I am not doing enough and I now commit to you in public that I see this and that I will act differently". Implicit is "I will help you and please I need help too." This is true progress. This is the truth spoken publicly and as such creates a covenant.

The covenant was - a public and personal acknowledgment that we were not doing enough and that we had to organize for success. That the Mission would inspire us and that maybe if we put 2008 as our rallying point, we could find the energy and the will to act.

The rest of the conference was designed to amplify this covenant. It was Social Media in real life.

It was a huge opportunity for everyone in the system to meet each other. Again, Mark set up a great array  speakers driven by the scale of the event. But Mark also designed the event mainly to work well socially. It was both a conference and an unconference - lots of open space to meet. He knew that what happened in the corridor would be the meat and potatoes. The speakers were the desert.

I spent two days in the corridor catching up with friends - it was an unparalleled opportunity to work socially. I was not alone. Tons of business was getting done and there were many conversations that linked the Wednesday meeting to the rest of the work on the table.

At the end much of the hope and the buzz had infected most of us. I left more hopeful than ever and with things to do that I feel will help. I suspect that many others left feeling the same as I.

Finally I would like to say something about Mark.

If you just build a space it does not mean people will either come or behave well. Mark gave us all a lesson in the power of Hosting a Conversation. He held the space open. He acted truly not as an organizer but as a host. As such, he set in motion energy that allowed the truth to be spoken. It was spoken by others because he told his truth. People were frank and yet gracious because he modeled frankness and grace.

He spoke of his frustration and also acknowledged how powerless he was. Mark talked of his hopes and his fears for his daughter,as his motive for 10 years of grinding away at this. He had the courage and the grace to open every session with youth, magic and music. He was unfailingly gracious to all his guests both eminent and humble. He stood on the stage as a man and as a fellow human trying to do his best. So he brought out our humanity as well.

As I write these words and as I recall my conversations with Mark, I think of Kipling's great poem that feels so apt.

"Life is Learning" - Learning Design - Natural vs Machine

If we are to design the new, we have to be very careful not to use the asssumptions of the old. An assemblage of the new features in a body does not make a new tool.

Recall that HMS Inflexible on the left had all the gear of a modern warship. But it was Dreadnought on the right that was the breakthrough. Why? Because Dreadnought was built on the assumption that battle would be faught at the most extreme distance possible. As a consequence, all its systems were configured around this objective, Inflexible still held to the Nelson doctrine that real men faught face to face. Dreadnought had the power to sink the entire German Navy on its own who at the time still held to the Nelson doctrine themselves.

Christopher Alexander is again very helpful in explaining the difference in assumptions behind a mechanistc view and a natural view of design.

In the traditional mechanistic design, the entire process is aimed to a known and specific end. After all, the core metaphor is a machine. In education today that end is a credit or a passed test.

As this is a machine design where everything is separated: the teacher from the learner, math from English. Many important sources of growth are outside the box. Sport is outside. Food is outside. Home is outside. Work is outside. Learning from life itself is not counted. Only what is in school is in.

In nature, everything affects the other in an intregrated and in a dynanmic process. The acorn has the potential to be an oak tree just as the infant has the potential to become the adult person. All information about how to be a tree or a person is inside it. What the acorn and the baby need is the right set of linked proceses to interact with so that all this potential can be released. For a tree, it needs the community of other trees and all the substrata of bacteria that links the forest under the ground. It needs the community of the animals that propagate it and defends it from enemies.

The core process for babies is the interaction with the parents and the home. For 4 million years all the tremendous achievement of humanity was generated by this process. This is where our world view is created. It is the foundation of learning. Are we safe or secure, loved or worthless, can we wait for things or not, do we have power or not. Our current view of learning separates and devalues the influence of the home. The only learning process that counts is the school. As the family crumbles so does the foundation.

The second core process was interaction with the immediate community. Today most of our communities are mere dormitories.  So there is no one to learn from naturally in the physical community. What did we learn? We learned how to behave. We learned about how we interacted with the natural world. We learned all the domestic skills. We learned our people's story. We learned our context as a person. Now we only interact with other peers who are as lost as we are. Instead of neighbours, we have the TV! Without a community, we have no social context.

The third core process was work. Today we have separated work from community and from family. Work is a mystery to most kids. To gain a work skill we then spend lots of money later in life to pass a course. Some kids are lucky like my neighbour Logan who has been working as a carpenter with his Dad since he was 5. How will a grad from a community college compete with Logan? How will a Compu College grad compete with say Jevon who has been been under the hood  since a small boy? Without a vocation, we have a declining base of skills.

The fourth process that I can see is the learning of mystery. We have lost wisdom and we have lost the interaction betwen the elder and the neophyte. Instead we have told ourselves that we will never die and we shunt our elderly in waiting rooms for a death we deny. So the mystery of how we will meet our end and its revelatory power to help us live is also lost. We look to priests and to churchs instead and we hope that some book will help us. Without a sense of how we fit into the universe, we have only consumerism.

We have put all official learning into the space of an institution. In the institution everything outside does not count. But in reality, we learn in the context of the space of a community - in the context of many commmunities. We learn by doing and observing and most of all by conversing with others. Our mechanistic view is all about separation and hence works against learning.

Any design for a learning tool that continues the idea of separation will fail. The design that will work will the design that brings the individual back into the communities that we need to be human.

Learning itself of course is not a separate function from any part of our lives. This is the ultimate failure of the old system in that it has made this separation betweeen life and learning. There is no "life long learning" at an institution, there is only life itself.

Life is learning!