Author: Richard

“The head of the school that ranked top of today’s primary school league tables attributed her success to “ignoring” most of the Government’s flagship literacy and numeracy strategies.
Barbara Jones, head of Combe Church of England Primary School, a tiny village primary near Witney in Oxfordshire, urged teachers to trust their own professional judgement about how best to teach children to read, write and add up. Every 11-year-old at the school was at least three years ahead of their age group in this year’s English, maths and science tests – making it the top ranking primary out of more than 20,000 in England.”

She goes on to say:
“We don’t use the literacy or numeracy strategy as prescriptively as we have been asked to,” she said.
“We use a variety of approaches and that’s where I think the Government has got it wrong in that they advocate one way and then a few years later they suggest another way.
Phonics is not the only answer. There isn’t one ideal way of teaching reading. Children do not all learn in the same way because we are all different. It is a pity that people jump on these bandwagons and quote examples of schools that see their results increase.
You have got to use a bit of common sense. We don’t rush things. If it is going to take a fortnight to do something it is going to take a fortnight. The problem is when you take four days just because the literacy strategy or some other directive says you should. We have never done that. I think what they are doing is eroding teachers’ confidence.
I just feel that sometimes the baby is thrown out with the bath water.”

I have just stumbled across the late Donella Meadows‘s “Dancing With Systems”. My first impressions are that it feels very much in the same stream as the concept of purposive drift .
As she says:
“For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. If you can’t understand, predict, and control, what is there to do?
Systems thinking leads to another conclusion–however, waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of “doing.” The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can’t impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!”

She then goes on to give some tips about how to do it:

“The Dance
1. Get the beat.
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.
5. Honor and protect information.
6. Locate responsibility in the system.
7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
8. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
9. Go for the good of the whole.
10. Expand time horizons.
11. Expand thought horizons.
12. Expand the boundary of caring.
13. Celebrate complexity.
14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.”
I am certainly going to ponder on what she has to say and you may find it valuable too.

A couple of days ago I linked to a piece by Paul Saffo, who was urging us to learn the art of bricolage. Thinking about it afterwards I was reminded of my friend Karen Mahony and her partner Alex Ukolov, who are masters of bricolage. (See here for examples of their work)
Karen is a truly remarkable person. After working successfully for many years in the corporate zone – BT, Wolff Ollins, her own multi-media consultancies, Mahony Associates and Xymbio – she went to live in Prague and re-invented herself.
I have often urged her to keep a record of her activities, because she is one of the few people who really gets network thinking. The businesses she runs with Alex – Baba Studio, The Magic Realist Press and Baba Store are wonderful examples of 21st Century businesses and if she were ever able to find time to write a book about how they have managed to achieve so much in so little time, it would be a great text for people who would like to build “good” businesses.

Thanks to that great linker Creative Generalist, I rediscovered Dave Pollard‘s “How to save the world”. If ever there is an example of my thesis that it is best to regard some blogs as networks well worth exploring rather than just looking at the latest entry, Dave Pollard’s is one.
What caught my eye, since it is a subject dear to my heart, is a list of “the nine reasons we don’t do what we should”. If like me, you sometimes find yourself trapped in ‘can’t be asked’ mode, this one is well worth a careful read and a long ponder.

In an interesting set of speculations about what lies ahead for us in the years to 2015, Paul Saffo urges us to learn the art of bricolage:
“History reveals that even the most mind-wrenching novelties are comprised in large part of cobbled-together bits of old technology. Invention and innovation are a process of bricolage, and innovators are, above all, clever bricoleurs— dumpster divers pawing through the technological wreckage for shiny bits that can be recombined with new knowledge to create new wonders.

“Its main asset is the number of PhDs it has working for it, ceaselessly trying to figure out how to extend the principle of search into everything, unbounded by time, space and (soon) language barriers.
The company refuses to hire people more than a year or two out of university, for fear that experience in the conventional business world will taint their freshness of mind. Google googles the Internet for its own purposes, ceaselessly.
It tried to recruit a South African schoolboy I know because it was so impressed with his web page. (He turned them down in favour of going to university, probably a mistake).
Google’s business plan seems to be a simple one: its people start things, and then work out how to make money out of them. This is an internet land grab of extraordinary dimensions.”

Robert X. Cringely raises an intriguing thought:
“In the U.S. the Baby Boom generation includes anyone born from 1946-64, which means everyone 41-59 years old. Those ages generally cover the top technical management positions in most companies and universities and they are starting to retire. But as anyone who reads magazines knows, this generation of upcoming retirees acts younger and healthier than the generations that preceded it and they plan to have very active older years. At the urging of reader Joel Franusic, I’ve been thinking of what implications this has for Open Source software.
The implications are huge. Imagine 100,000 engineers and programmers leaving the U.S. work force every year for the next 18 years, because that’s what is going to happen. Some of those people will find other careers, but most of them will be motivated less by money than they were earlier in their lives. Most of them will want to remain active. And once a nerd always a nerd, so I think many of them will gravitate to Open Source.”

A few weeks ago I enjoyed one of those jolts of the pleasure of recognition, when I began reading a piece in The Guardian by Mary Midgley, which began:
“During my long life I have had a lot of luck, one instance of which may be worth mentioning. I missed out on one of the regular phases of academic education. I never had the normal discipline of the PhD. In fact, I have spent much of my life in philosophy without ever getting those magic letters that qualify one to teach in universities. I doubt whether anyone would get away with that today.”

Later in the piece she describes why she sees failing to get that qualifications was lucky:
“I am not saying that the PhD training isn’t useful. It provides the indispensable skills of the lawyer. It shows you how to deal with difficult arguments, which is necessary in dealing with hard subjects. But that close work doesn’t help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context – the background issues out of which the small problems arose…”
On a much smaller scale, I too had a similar piece of luck. Back in the Seventies, when I was employed as Research Assistant at North East London Polytechnic I was enrolled as a MPhil student. At that time all Polytechnic degrees were validated by a national body, the Council National Academic Awards. Because the Integrated Design course I did at Ealing, was classified as a “vocational” art and design course, the CNNA had some reservations about whether I was qualified to do an MPhil. Eventually I did get registered with them, but not until some eighteen months later.
By that time, feeling that I was not bound by the restrictions of an MPhil programme, I embarked on a free ranging romp through all the resources NELP’s libraries made available to me along with the support offered by my supervisor and a number of other staff from a range of disciplines. It was a great education.
And, of course, despite a couple of attempts to narrow down my inquiry to produce a MPhil type dissertation once I had left NELP, I found myself caught up in other missions, which at the time felt more important, so I never got the qualification.
Do I have any regrets? Well these days the credentials of a formal academic qualification might be handy and not having one stands between me and some of the things I might like to do. But in terms of a rehearsal for many of the things I have most enjoyed doing since that time my wide ranging romp through the disciplines was a much better preparation than the narrow path I would have had to followed to get the degree.
So, I guess, on balance, I would agree with Mary Midgley and conclude that some times not getting qualified can count as a bit of luck, particularly for those of us in pursuit of purposive drift.

This week’s quote of the week should be engraved on every manager’s heart:
“There’s no way they can cut my wages faster than I can raise their costs.”
This said by an airline pilot, whose company was engaged in yet another cost slashing exercise, reported by the ever-interesting Simon Caulkin in an article about the impact of unproductive work in companies and the alienating effects of the often mindless organisational responses to it.

Some months ago I suggested that Nick Durrant needed a website or some other kind of public presence. I am pleased to say that you can now get hold of some of Nick’s, and his partner Gill’s, insights on their new, relaunched business site, Plot. Lots of good stuff, including a longish video of Gill carrying out the difficult task of eating and facilitating a debate on Plastic at the Dirt Café London – talk about multi-tasking.