Starting a benevolent movement
Like Fairtrade. Black Lives Matter. TedX. Climate. Civil Rights. Me Too. Linux. The list is long (enough).
Few committed individuals. A clear mission. Taking the dive for the first steps. Learning through feedback and experience. Attracting more like-minded individuals.
Rinse, wash and repeat. In most cases, fading away due to being over-engineered. But in a few others, having a life of its own. And transforming lives and futures.
With so many domains in the world ‘hurting’ today, which ones are ripe for someone to initiate and architect positive change to get the key stakeholders to reconsider and redraw the usual ‘party’ line approaches?
As Moisés Naím wrote in his book, The End of Power, institutions of all types, from corporations and governments to traditional churches, charities, and militaries, are being disrupted, saying that “Power has become easier to get, but harder to use or keep.”
And so as Greg Satell noted in his 2016 HBR article, power isn’t enough “because movements made up of small groups are able to synchronize their actions through networks. So if we want to effect lasting change today, it’s no longer enough to merely command resources — we have to inspire opponents to join your cause.”
There have been countless papers written on how education needs to be transformed, so it can emerge stronger than before the COVID-19 crisis. In a Brookings Institute paper, the authors outline key global trends and potential pathways for the way forward. One of the four trends outlined there that connects wells with the power of movements noted earlier is the increased engagement and ‘activation’ of a far broader group of actors — parents, NGOs, impact investors, media organizations, technology giants, community welfare institutions, and many others — than ever before. And the related pathway, one of five presented there, that could leverage this trend, is that of employing an iterative approach viz “principles of improvement science required to evaluate, course correct, document, and scale new approaches that can help power up schools over time.”
To take this further, what IDEO style design thinking principles and underlying conditions can we set up at the ‘back end’ to make this iterative feedback looping an everyday practice?
An education platform launched in 2020 from Dubai in conjunction with Expo2020 could well pave the way for this open-source experimentation and iteration to get the rocket fuel it needs to deliver innovation and impact at the other end.
As Richard Branson said “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over”
What could we do if we weren’t afraid (of falling over)…?
