New Starting Blocks for the Future of Work

March 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a challenging future rushes towards us, I often wonder whether our democratic values will continue to provide a sound enough foundation for our lives and work.

In many ways, this “white-water world” is already here. As framed by John Seely Brown in a post last summer, it confronts us with knowledge that’s simply “too big to know” and a globe-spanning web of interconnections that seems to constantly alter what’s in front of us, like the shifting views of a kaleidoscope.

It’s a brave new world that:

– makes a fool out of the concept of mastery in all areas except our ability–or inability–to navigate [its] turbulent waters successfully;

– requires that we work in more playful and less pre-determined ways in an effort to keep up with the pace of change and harness it for a good purpose;

– demands workplaces where the process of learning allows the tinkerer in all of us “to feel safe” from getting it wrong until we begin to get it right;

– calls on us to treat technology as a toolbox for serving human needs as opposed to the needs of states and corporations alone; and finally,

– requires us to set aside time for reflection “outside of the flux” so that we can consider the right and wrong of where we’re headed, commit to what we value, and return to declare those values in the rough and tumble of our work tomorrow.

In the face of these demands, the most straightforward question is whether we will be able to safeguard our personal wellbeing and continue to enjoy a prosperous way of life. Unfortunately, neither of these objectives seems as readily attainable as they once did.

When our democratic values (such as freedom and championing individual rights) no longer ensure our wellbeing and prosperity, those values get questioned and eventually challenged in our politics.

Last week, I wrote here about the dangerous risks—like addiction and behavioral modification—that our kids and others confront by spending too much screen time playing on-line games like Fortnite. Despite a crescendo of anecdotal evidence about the harms to boys in particular, the freedom-loving (and endlessly distracted) West seems stymied when it comes to deciding what to do about it. On the other hand, China easily moved from identifying the harm to its collective wellbeing to implementing time restrictions on the amount of on-line play. It was the Great Firewall’s ability to intervene quickly that prompted one observer to wonder how those of us in the so-called “first world” will respond to “the spectacle of a civilisation founded [like China’s] on a very different package of values — but one that can legitimately claim to promote human flourishing more vigorously than their own”?

Meanwhile, in a Wall Street Journal essay last weekend, its authors documented the ability of authoritarian countries with capitalist economies to raise the level of prosperity enjoyed by their citizens in recent years. Not so long ago, the allure of West to the “second” and “third worlds” was that prosperity seemed to go hand-in-hand with democratic values and institutions. That conclusion is far less clear today. With rising prosperity in authoritarian nations like China and Vietnam—and the likelihood that there will soon be far more prosperous citizens in these countries than outside of them—the authors fretted that:

It isn’t clear how well democracy, without every material advantage on its side, will fare in the competition [between our very different value systems.]

With growing uncertainty about whether Western values and institutions can produce sufficient benefits for its citizens, and with “the white-water world” where we live and work challenging our navigational skills, it seems a good time to return to some questions that we’ve chewed on here before about “how we can best get ready for the challenges ahead of us.”

Can the ways that we educate our kids (and retrain ourselves) enable us to proclaim our humanity, secure our self-worth, and continue to find a valued place for ourselves in the increasingly complex world of work?

Can championing new teaching methods strengthen democratic values and deliver more of their promise to us in terms of wellbeing and prosperity than it seems we can count on today?

Are new and different classrooms the keys to our futures?

1. You Treasure What You Measure

Until this week, I never considered that widely administered education tests would provide any of these answers—but I probably should have—because in a very real way, we treasure the aptitudes and skills, indeed everything that we take the time to measure. Gross national product, budget and trade deficits, unemployment rates, the 1% versus everyone else: what is most important to us is endlessly calculated, publicized and analyzed. We also value these measures because they help us decide what to do next, like stimulating the economy, cutting government programs, or implementing trade restrictions. Measures influence actions.

It’s much the same with the measures we obtain from the educational tests that we administer, and in this regard, no test today is more influential than the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA. PISA was first given in 2000 in 32 countries, the first time that national education systems were evaluated and could be compared with one another. The test measured 15-year-olds scholastic performance in mathematics, science and reading. No doubt you’ve heard some of the results, including the United States’ disappointing placement in the middle of the international pack. The test is given every three years and in 2018, 79 countries and economies participated in the testing and data collection.

According to an article in on-line business journal Quartz this week, “the results…are studied by educators the way soccer fans obsess over the World Cup draw.”

No one thinks more about the power of the PISA test, the information that it generates, and what additional feats it might accomplish than Andreas Schleicher, a German data scientist who heads the education division of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which administers PISA worldwide.

Schleicher downplays the role that the PISA has played in shaming low performing countries, preferring the test’s role in mobilizing national leaders to care as much about teaching and learning as they do about economic measures like unemployment rates and workplace productivity. At the most basic level, PISA data has supported a range of conclusions, including that class size seems largely irrelevant to the learning experience and that what matters most in the classroom is “the quality of teachers, who need to be intellectually challenged, trusted, and have room for professional growth.”

Schleicher also views the PISA as a tool for liberating the world’s educational systems from their single-minded focus on subjects like science, reading and math and towards the kinds of “complex, interdisciplinary skills and mindsets” that are necessary for success in the future of work. We are afraid that human jobs will be automated but we are still teaching people to think like machines. “What we know is that the kinds of things that are easy to teach, and maybe easy to test, are precisely the kinds of things that are easy to digitize and to automate,” Schleicher says.

To help steer global education out of this rut, he has pushed for the design and administration of new, optional tests that complement the PISA. Change the parameters of the test, change the skills that are measured, and maybe the world’s education-based priorities will change too. Says Schleicher: “[t]he advent of AI [or artificial intelligence] should push us to think harder [about] what makes us human” and lead us to teach to those qualities, adding that if we are not careful, the world’s nations will be continue to educate “second-class robots and not first-class humans.”

Schleicher had this future-oriented focus years before the PISA was initially administered.

In 1997, Schleicher convened a group of representatives from OECD countries, not to discuss what could be tested, but what should be tested. The idea was to move beyond thinking about education as the driver of purely economic outcomes. In addition to wanting a country’s education system to provide a ready workforce, they also wondered whether they could nurture young people to help to make their societies more cohesive and democratic while reducing unfairness and inequality. According to Quartz:

The group identified three areas to explore: relational, or how we get along with others; self, how we regulate our emotions and motivate ourselves, and content, what schools need to teach.

Instead of simply enabling students to respond to the demands of a challenging world, Schleicher and others in his group wanted national testing to encourage the kinds of skill building that would enable young people to change the world they’d be entering for the better.

Towards this end, Schleicher’s team began to develop assessments for independent thinking and the kinds of personal skills that contribute to it. The technology around test administration enabled the testers to see how students solved problems in real time, not simply whether they get them right or wrong. They gathered and shared data that enabled national education systems to “help students learn better and teachers teach better and schools to become more effective.” Assessments of the skill sets around independent thinking encouraged countries to begin to see new possibilities and want to change how students learn in their classrooms. “If you don’t have a north star [like this], perhaps you limit your vision,” he says.

For the past twenty years, Schleicher’s north stars have also included students’ quest to find meaning in what they are doing and to exercise their agency in determining what and how they learn. He is convinced that people have the “capacity to imagine and build things of intrinsic positive worth.” We have skills that robots cannot replace, like managing between black and white, integrating knowledge, and applying knowledge in unique situations. All of those skills can be tested (and encouraged), along with the skill that is most unique about human beings, namely:

our capacity to take responsibility, to mobilize our cognitive and social and emotional resources to do something that is of benefit to society.

What Schleicher and his testing visionaries began to imagine in 1997 have been gradually introduced as optional tests that focus on problem-solving, collaborative problem-solving, and most recently, so-called “global competencies” like open-mindedness and the desire to improve the world. In 2021, another optional test will assess flexibility in thinking and habits of creativity, like being inquisitive and persistent.

One knowledgeable observer of these initiatives, Douglas Archibald, credits Schleicher with “dramatically elevating” the discussion about the future of education. “There is no one else bringing together people in charge of these educational systems to seriously think about how their systems [can be] future proofed,” says Archibald. But he and others also see a hard road ahead for Schleicher, with plenty of resistance from within the global education community.

Some claim that he is asking more from a test than he should. Others claim his emphasis is fostering an over-reliance on testing over other priorities. Regarding the “global competencies” assessment for example, 40 of the 79 participating countries opted not to administer it. But Schleicher, much like visionaries in other fields, remains undaunted. Nearly half of the countries are exercising their option to assess “global competencies” and even more are administering the other optional tests that Schleicher has helped develop. Maybe educators are slowly becoming convinced that the threat to human work in a white-water world is too serious to be ignored any longer.

A view from Kenneth Robinson’s presentation: “Changing Education Paradigms”

While Schleicher and his allies are in the vanguard of those who are using a test to prompt a revolution in education, they are hardly the only ones to challenge a teaching model that, for far too long, has only sought to produce a dependable, efficient and easily replaceable workforce. The slide above is from Sir Kenneth Robinson’s much-heralded (and well-worth your taking a look at) 2010 video called “Changing Education Paradigms.” In it, he also champions teaching that enables uniquely human contributions that no machine can ever replace.

Schleicher, Robinson and others envision education systems that prepare young people (or re-engineer older ones) for a complex and ever shifting world where no one has to be overwhelmed by the glut of information or the dynamics of shifting networks but can learn how to navigate today’s challenges productively. They highlight and, by doing so, champion teaching methods that help to prepare all of us for jobs that provide meaning and a sense of wellbeing while amplifying and valuing our uniquely human contributions.

Schleicher is also helping to modify our behavior by championing skills like curiosity about others and empathy that can make us more engaged members of our communities and commit us to improving them. Assessing these skills in national education tests says both loudly and clearly that these skills are important for human flourishing too. Indeed, this may be Schleicher’s and OECD’s most significant contribution. Their international testing is encouraging the skills and changes in behavior that can build better societies, whether they are based on the democratic values of the West or the more collective and less individual ones of the East.

That is no small thing. No small thing at all.

This post is adapted from my March 10, 2019 newsletter.

Between a Practical and an Enriching Education

November 24, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The cultivation of your mind & spirit and your preparation for a job are always in tension in higher education.

With a crippling recession and the rising cost of a college degree, there seems to be a higher emphasis than ever on vocational training. But even with more internships and technical apptitude, the last half-decade of graduates are still struggling to break into the job market. Indeed, liberal arts champions are noting that narrow training for specialized jobs is leaving those students who don’t manage to land one largely unqualified to do anything else.

Broad. Specific. Enriching. Practical. Critical thinking. Hands-on learning. The best education is equal parts creativity and application, learning how to identify a problem and then trying to solve it, discovering unexpected abilities at school while refining developing ones on the job.

It is unusual for one educator to draw so much of his energy from these tensions, but that’s what Sebastian Thrun seems to be doing.

Thrun is the co-founder of Udacity, one of the young companies that is beginning to turn the bricks & mortar approach to higher education on its head. Massive open on-line courses (or MOOCs) are the vehicle. In a post a few weeks back, I discussed one of the recent directions they have taken: a collaboration between national employers like UPS and companies like Thrun’s to jointly develop “niche certification programs” that will give students an affordable shot at an available job and employers a qualified applicant pool for unfilled positions.

This could be just another way for enterprising employers to cultivate a roster of applicants for cherry picking. But from another perspective, it could be more of a win-win. As observers like Andrew Kelly have noted, most of those taking MOOCs today are either in traditional degree programs or have gotten their degrees already. Because these certificate programs are building on the broad base of a more traditional education, the too-narrowly-focused student becomes less of a concern.

For his part, Thrun seems to be motivated instead of discouraged by the vocational detour MOOC providers like his are taking.

His vision, and that of other innovators in on-line education, was to bring practical as well as enriching learning opportunities to everyone who was too poor or too busy working to pursue a traditional degree—a potentially transformative global vision. Unfortunately, very few of those sigining up for a MOOC actually complete the course today, even with “really good” teachers, regular mentoring and the promise of low-cost college credit. But the apparent fact that the market for the first wave of MOOCs is smaller than Thrun (and others) expected is only causing him to double down on his efforts to meet the broader need that’s out there.

Why is that? I think it’s because the animating principle is Thrun’s own curiosity, his own appetite for learning.

We pursue most vigorously what we embody, or as Thrun prefers to describe it, what he wants for his son.

I hope he can hit the workforce relatively early and engage in lifelong education.

Instead of four years in college, what Thrun envisions is an on-going shuttle between theory and practice, discovery and pursuit, critical detachment and engagement—exactly what he is doing to unlock the full potential of MOOCs.

It is an education that is supple enough to nurture your basic qualities of mind while also helping you to develop skills that will help you keep up with the accelerating pace of workforce change (what fellow entrepreneur and Linked-in founder Reed Hoffman calls “the continuous start-up of you”).

Watching Sebastian Thrun as a teacher, an innovator and a father is to catch a glimpse of what this vision of lifelong learning could look like for you and me.

Just Plain Funny #2

December 16, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I like a newspaper I can hold in my hands because sometimes the stories across the folds can talk to one another in ways that never seems to happen on a screen. That kind of exchange took place in my newspaper today.

For as long as I’ve been reading it, the Wall Street Journal has a funny, odd or just plain ridiculous story at the bottom of Page One. At some point, the Page One editor must have decided that stories like this are good antidotes to the calamities, logjams and shenanigans chronicled above. These daily stories always froth over to the last page of the “news” where they brush up against the beginnings of the “commentary” section on the other side of fold. It’s here that strangely compatible bedfellows sometimes meet.

Page One’s dollop of the day today was about a long-standing West Point tradition celebrating the graduating cadet, who by academic and other standards, finishes dead last in his class each year. Because of some “informal” information sharing, everyone but The Goat knows who he is on the big day, and when his name is called out from the graduating roster, the cadets erupt into the loudest cheer of the day.

There are two kinds of Goats, according to a disappointingly dry piece in a publication called Failure Magazine. There are cadets who labor through the muck to the bitter end, and those who take the experience just seriously enough to fall inebriatedly over the finish line. Of course, several of the Good Time Goats were actually pretty smart and went on to make history (Generals Custer and Pickett, for example). Several middling cadets did pretty well too. (Eisenhower reportedly said: “If anybody saw signs of greatness in me while at West Point they kept it to themselves.”) But it’s the ones who always struggled to do their best, while barely making it to the end, who are the real heroes of the story.

Unclear whether to be embarrassed or proud of their accomplishment, most of these Goats eventually seem to settle into being good sports about it. For example: “In my class, no one else can say that they’re the Goat and no one else can say that they’re part of this special lineage that dates back so far,” said good sport Roberto Becarra, Jr. in 2007. Somewhat earlier, the bespeckled Goat (below) seems to have had a similar reaction.

When asked about these persevering Goats by the Journal reporter, James S. Robbins said:

The tradition of the Goat is important because it kind of encapsulates that American spirit of—yeah, you’re going to have the top and they’re going to get recognized and they’re going to get stars by their names and all that other stuff. But, you know what? The guys further down, they have their chance too, and they can succeed too and it’s important to recognize them.

While his insight might have been more penetrating had he been a psychologist or meteorologist instead of an historian, Robbins’ remarks did manage to counterpoint similar observations about the value of “keeping your head up” and “putting one foot in front of the other” on the facing page of the paper, where a Journal writer reviews a new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Antifragile.

Taleb’s singular perspective is that theories follow practice instead of the reverse. It’s not “the Soviet/Harvard notion that birds fly because we lecture them how to.” We learn by doing it first, and make up the theories that contain all of our how-to-do-it wisdom later on. It is, as the reviewer notes, “a startling [chicken v. egg] insight,” because what Taleb’s debunking allows is a flat-out celebration of the creativity involved in doggedly keeping at it. The many virtues of trial and error.

Taleb makes up the word “antifragile” to mean not only hardy, but also something that has been improved through repeated failures, becoming more resilient in the process. From this perspective, the persevering Goats are not just plodders: more than a few of them embody the adaptation that is at the beating heart of natural selection. As Taleb’s reviewer notes:

If trial and error is creative, then we should treat failed entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers.

This is why experience is the best teacher. It’s why “A” students who master the theory often work for the “B” and “C” students who rightly suspect that the magic lies elsewhere. It’s why rigidity and too much seriousness is always a bad idea. And it’s why the loudest cheer really should go to somebody who has not only failed most prominently, but also has the spirit to get up and keep trying.

modern-times — CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN “MODERN TIMES”

Not that it’s always so easy.

What Good is My English Degree?

November 25, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

What kind of job are you going to get with an English degree (or a degree in History, Classics, Religion, Music, Art History, Anthropology, Philosophy or French)? You’re wondering. Maybe your parents are too.

Or then again: you studied the humanities and now you’re 10 or 15 or 25 years out of school. But every workday, you feel like you need a crash course in technology, social media, marketing, engineering and accounting? Why does what you studied seem to have so little value? Why do all these other things seem so important?

What you learned by studying the humanities does have value—tremendous value. But there are many reasons you might not think so, and a brief look at some of them might be helpful before discussing how the humanities can bring the greatest value to your job today.

The Industrial Revolution kicked off an explosion of technological advancement that has only accelerated in our lifetimes. (It’s x amount of memory on that chip today, twice as much tomorrow, and so on.) At the same time, advances in science created an experiment-based way of explaining the world that clashed with—and has now largely overtaken—a faith- or story-based worldview, at least in so-called “advanced societies.” (It’s less church attendance and more individualized spirituality, when faith remains a part of our lives at all.)

In their upward trajectory, technology and science were also vastly improving our standard of living. At the same time that questions of meaning and purpose became more personalized, many of us were also feeling that we no longer needed the humanities to improve the quality of our lives. Technology and science were attending to our material comfort along with our wellbeing.

Or so we thought.

Several writers have lamented the sidelining of the humanities. For example, Anthony Kronman has argued that as the arts have lost their prominence in our schools, we have almost lost the ability to develop an important dimension in our lives.

Where education used to mean exposure to a canon of Western thought to help students determine “how I should live my life,” that canon has increasingly come under attack. Some viewed it as propaganda from a group of white, Eurocentric oppressors, while others challenged these texts for presenting “subjective” interpretations of reality instead of the “objective” (and therefore more reliable) view that science and technology provides.

So in the face of this powerful onslaught, where is the value in your English degree?

Its value is to give you something that science and technology never can: a personal story that gives your life as well as your work both meaning and purpose. Despite our human flaws and ultimate mortality, the story you’re writing recounts how you can make a difference for yourself and others in your community by what you chose to do everyday. Through the humanities, you have lifelong access to role models and ideas that help you to live a good and fulfilling life.

It is the insight gained from these stories that business needs the most today.

In his “How to Avoid a Bonfire of the Humanities,” Michael S. Malone notes that since the best products and services aim at meeting real human needs and making our lives better, the best way to bring them to market is with stories that resonate in people’s lives.

Given the dominance of science and technology and its associated impacts today, fewer people know how to find what’s meaningful on their own, and fewer still can deliver it to them. Asked what made his company special, Steve Jobs said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

Think about it. It’s not what the product is that makes you buy it, or how you use it, but why it makes your life better. (Simon Sinek’s much-viewed TED talk is about just this point.) Your humanities degree has economic value precisely because it enables you to understand “the why.”

Where the English major is needed is at the intersection between the company and its customers. Having studied “humanity,” you have the ability to focus your company on meeting basic human needs in ways that neither science nor technology ever can. It is a priceless perspective that is needed in marketing, sales, and customer service, but also at every stage of product development and design. Again: Apple ads, Apple stores, and Apple products satisfy Apple customers as much as they do because of Apple’s English majors.

Malone concludes his “Bonfires” article by noting that in the future the market advantage will go to companies like this:

that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.

The humanities have been undervalued and shunted aside, but what they have given us is more essential in the best jobs than ever. Far from putting you at a disadvantage in the workforce, they give you a powerful advantage. And the places where you should want to be working know it.

When Experience is the Best Teacher

September 27, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

You’re at work thinking: I’ve got to get out of here.

Maybe you’re feeling a persistent ache (I’m wasting away here), or the pain is impossible to ignore (this job is killing me!)

It’s that trigger moment when you’ve not only had enough, but also start thinking about what to do next.

But even before the plan emerges, you hesitate. I can’t do anything I want to do without going back to school. I need a degree, and it will take two, three or four years before maybe I start getting what I need to be getting out of my work. (That is, all those things that you’re not getting now.) Will investing more time and money in your education be worth it?

Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

Paying for school used to be the relatively reasonable cost of getting where you wanted to go. No more. Graduates are struggling to find jobs that pay them enough to cover both their loan payments and the most basic necessities. For this reason alone, it may be time to consider whether more education is truly worth it.

Some are also questioning whether the education system is the primary driver of American innovation and wealth creation. Gregory Ferenstein argues that America’s economic success is due to the huge numbers of high performing (that is, “smart”) people in the U.S., a continuous influx of the most talented immigrants, access to the world’s best research facilities, and the largely unfettered economic opportunity all of us enjoy in this country.

Research has consistently shown that on nearly every measure of education (instructional hours, class-size, enrollment, college preparation), what students learn in school does not translate into later life success.

Instead, “[d]etermination, raw intelligence, and creativity are the measures of a successful college student and employee [and] none of those factors are learned in school.”

At this point you may wonder: instead of spending more time and money preparing to do what I want to do, why don’t I just do it?

20 or so students recently did just that, dropping out of top schools to take their business plans directly to market as recipients of a Thiel Fellowship. This highly competitive program pays them $50,000 a year while they work at road-testing their innovative ideas. It also provides them with a network of valuable contacts to help their start-ups to succeed.

These men and women are not “the average person” choosing the lessons of the marketplace over more time in a classroom. With its annual payments, this two-year fellowship is not the classic School of Hard Knocks. But comments made after these young people abandoned their degrees at places like Princeton and M.I.T. speak to those times in all of our lives when experience may be the best teacher.

In recent interviews, the Fellows talked at length about “getting a shot at a better education” by “diving into the real world of science, technology and business.” They had pent-up energy, and couldn’t wait another day to pursue their dreams. “I was antsy to get out into the world and execute on my ideas,” said Eden Full, whose aim was to market a low-cost solar panel. In her real world classroom, she had to learn to count on strangers for help and to become more flexible by finding daily workarounds for unexpected obstacles to get her business off the ground.

Laura Demming was looking to develop medical therapies that target damage from the aging process. She learned that persistence and belief in her ideas were essential to overcoming a string of early failures. The mother of one of the fellows was initially terrified when her son dropped out of school, but ultimately found herself amazed by his trajectory. “This is stuff you don’t learn in a classroom,” she said. “He’s blogging, he’s teaching, he’s writing software.” The father of another student said: “I can’t think of a worse environment than school if you want your kids to learn how to make decisions, manage risk and take responsibility for their choices.”

Wherever you are in your career, there are times when more skills and more knowledge will be essential for what you want to do in your next job. But there are other times when you have enough skills and knowledge already, times when more education is simply a way to postpone what the real world is waiting to teach you.

When you’re sitting at work, hating your job, and thinking about those things that you always wanted to accomplish, consider taking a chance on yourself and your ideas by completing your education in the real world. Your reward could be the empowerment that comes from facing risk, overcoming failure, and gaining practical experience in ways you never imagined.