Leaders and innovators in education need to do more than address falling test scores, crumbling facilities and a mounting teacher shortage; they need to address those problems in a world transformed by everything from advanced biotechnology to climate refugees.

Grantmakers for Education (GFE), a network of approximately 260 education funders, is working to build a common definition of innovation and to identify investments that can transform our education systems. As part of this initiative, educational innovation specialists from Collective Invention and KnowledgeWorks collaborated with GFE to design and document programs that enable grantmakers to step back from their typical funding procedures and consider what innovations can leverage the most change for learners.

The team utilized expertise in user-centric design thinking. Their process centered around a set of personas designed to help funders understand the how the education system will intersect with emerging global trends.

Meet the Learners of 2025

Imagine that you are Adila Tahawi a 15-year old first generation Arab-American from Minneapolis. Your father is teacher at an underfunded university, he makes ends meet by selling lectures and tutoring online.

You are home-schooled by your mother using a mix of e-learning content and in-person tutoring. You dream of one day going to college, or somewhere rich in intellectual collaboration and innovation, and you struggle daily with anti-Muslim sentiments in your community.

What resources do you need? What kind of education system is capable of providing you with those resources? What can funders do today to ensure that those resources are in place?

Imagine that you are JP Teaero, a 17-year old climate refugee from Kiribati living at a camp in Richmond, CA. NGOs have set up a makeshift education facility in your camp, but your elders are worried about the school assimilating away your already-fragile cultural heritage.

You are interested in pursuing climate science, a skill in growing demand, but are afraid that a refugee won’t be able to become, or be respected as, a scientist. A Federal grant has made first-generation cognitive implants available in your camp, and you are unsure whether to take the risk.

What resources do you need? What kind of education system is capable of providing you with those resources? What can funders do today to ensure that those resources are in place?

The Art of the Uncertain Future

By utilizing systems thinking and scenario planning methodologies, Collective invention and Knowledgeworks were able to lead discussion on how relatively certain trends (such as the existence of climate refugees) interact with trends that have axes of uncertainty (such as the widespread availability of on-demand educational content.) The result was a sophisticated dialogue about how the nation’s top funders can meet the emerging challenges of tomorrow.

The exercise brought a stream of insights. Grantmakers focused on the “need to be more nimble and less bureaucratic,” and to “listen on the ground from many perspectives.” Looking to the future also put the need for educational innovation in sharp focus. Grantmakers discussed creating a “education innovation labs and and venture funds,” while convening “business, funders, systems engineers, product managers, students and designers in… a product development cycle.”

A New Direction for Educational Grantmakers

In the end of the exercise, grantmakers determined that they would be successful in 2025 if…

1. We have fostered public will for new kinds of learning and new learning outcomes.
2. We have advocated policy that enables new kinds of learning and new learning outcomes.
3. We have innovated funding mechanisms to enable greater choice, equity, and/or new learning models.
4. We have identified new forms of governance.
5. We have fostered personalized learning in a community context.
6. We have defined new critical skills and knowledge.
7. We have prototyped and/or scaled new models for learning.
8. We have delivered on the promise of digital media.
9. We have reimagined assessments for (and of) learning.
10. We have framed a research agenda for a new world for learning.

Two new briefs offer further insight into these efforts. Innovation in Education: Redesigning the Delivery System of Education in America documents how funders at GFE’s April 2010 member briefing used three key approaches—systems thinking, design thinking and scenario thinking—to understand what grantmakers can do to transform education systems. Learning 2025 summarizes themes from a working meeting in which a small group of funders mapped their investments in next generation learning strategies.

Grantmakers for Education asks Collective Invention President Erika Gregory and veteran KW executive Jillian Darwish to design an innovation process for national leaders in education philanthropy. USDOE assistant deputy secretary Jim Shelton says philanthropic community can play powerful role in transforming learning.

San Francisco (Vocus/PRWeb) April 8, 2010 — Leaders from the grantmaking world will be immersed in the future of learning at the Grantmakers for Education, or GFE, briefing at the Delancey Street Foundation here Thursday and Friday.

“Innovation in Education, Redesigning the Delivery System of Education in America” is a new kind of convening by GFE designed to help education philanthropists develop a shared vision for transforming U.S. education based on the needs of learners. The design for the event, created with Collective Invention and KnowledgeWorks, thrusts philanthropic leaders into the future by seeing through the eyes of future learners. From their student-based perspective of the year 2025, participants will identify innovations which are likely to have the greatest leverage for creating transformation in the present.

To help bring the future of learning to life, GFE engaged San Francisco-based Collective Invention, a social innovation firm that helps leaders of innovation create, articulate, and implement visionary futures. GFE’s interest in basing the future scenarios on KnowledgeWorks’ 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning led to KnowledgeWorks joining Collective Invention in making GFE’s vision for the event a reality. Together, the two organizations have created a simulation tool and an innovation process that put participants in learners’ shoes as they walk different future paths.

U.S. Department of Education’s Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement, who will address the group on Friday, said the philanthropic community “needs to and can play a powerful role in accelerating the transformation of learning.”

Meanwhile, the collaboration between Collective Invention and KnowledgeWorks marks the first step in a strategic alliance to radically transform national thinking about learning in the 21st century.

Based in Cincinnati, KnowledgeWorks develops and implements innovative approaches to high school education in the United States. To drive this work, KnowledgeWorks has created a new unit, Organizational Learning and Innovation, or OLI. Veteran KnowledgeWorks executive Jillian Darwish has been named OLI vice president. The OLI team will use its expertise in systems thinking, organizational learning and change management to support KnowledgeWorks’ high school work.

“The formation of OLI is a logical next step for KnowledgeWorks as we continue to assess the future of learning in a way that is more authentic,” said KnowledgeWorks CEO Chad Wick. “Most of us hold deep assumptions about the world, which, left unexamined, limit our future to one based solely on the past. However, when we suspend our current thinking, we make room for a future that breaks free from the past.”

Darwish, who was the founding executive director of KnowledgeWorks’ Institute for Creative Collaboration, said the development of OLI comes at a crucial time in the education landscape, as thought leaders are challenged to embrace innovation that will support the critical education needs of the future.

“When we work with leaders, such as GFE, we create the kind of environment that helps groups and individuals challenge boundaries and conventional ways of thinking, and then to support the development of the conditions for change so that leaders can successfully move from vision to action,” Darwish said.

Following this week’s GFE briefing — which has received generous support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation – the work of Collective Invention and KnowledgeWorks will take on a national scope. They will work with organizations across the education sector, including school districts, helping them imagine what is possible and creating the learning system needed in a 21st-century global environment.

“We now know better than ever how to harness future scenarios, human-centered design and collective intelligence for solutions to these global challenges,” said Erika Gregory, president of Collective Invention. “Collective Invention could not be more delighted to have KnowledgeWorks as a collaborator in the education arena as we pursue our mission: Innovation for the Common Good. We look forward to working with NGOs, government agencies and philanthropies who share KnowledgeWorks’ and Collective Invention’s commitment to social innovation.”

Collective Invention is a multi-disciplinary consultancy that leverages insights from organizational development, anthropology, architecture, design, the arts and business. Based in San Francisco, Collective Invention works with businesses, schools, philanthropies, NGOS, corporations, and government agencies dedicated to innovation that serves the common good. Much of Collective Invention’s work focuses on breakthrough approaches to education, health, and environmental sustainability.

KnowledgeWorks strives to be the leader in developing and implementing innovative and effective approaches to high school education in the United States. Our work primarily focuses on redesigning urban high schools, developing STEM and Early College high schools, and supporting student-centered approaches to delivering real learning and results in our schools.

Grantmakers for Education strengthens education philanthropy in the United States. Its tools, programs and services allow its nearly 250 member organizations to share best practices, learn of new developments, and advance alignment and collaboration among funders. By deepening the impact and effectiveness of funders who support early childhood, K-12 and postsecondary education on local, regional and national levels, GFE improves educational outcomes and increases opportunities for all students.

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I was, to be honest, a little skeptical myself.

But that is exactly what happened when we facilitated a recent experience for the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in order to understand the values and behaviors that will shape consumers of the future. To set the stage, we created an online world rich in detail (drawn from our own primary research and WBCSD’s extensive resources) about how people who care about sustainability will eat, play, learn, work, entertain themselves, communicate and get from place to place in the year 2050.

Because the project’s participants are part of a global consortium of companies who share a commitment to environmental sustainability, those members in our event were executives responsible either for marketing or for the sustainability agenda per se in their organizations. They were highly motivated to understand the lifestyles of the sustainable consumer 10, 20, 30 and 40 years in the future. To make this happen as viscerally as possible, we created an online platform that let them walk in the shoes of 60 fictional consumers, interacting with others along the way, before bringing the group together in a face-to-face collaboration in the UK.

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At another level, I’m not surprised at all that people jumped in so earnestly. Clients of all kinds have proven quite willing to engage in imaginative processes as long as they see a substantive link to their “real” strategic work. The precept that transformative experiences lead to transformative ideas is born out of a series of experiences over the last 15 years, beginning with the design of the Museum of Unintended Consequences for Global Business Network (GBN) in which we took 150 business leaders through an audio tour of ideas and products that have led to unanticipated outcomes, including plate glass, the birth control pill, and, finally, the telescope. In the last gallery each visitor found himself alone, enrobed by a twinkling night sky, listening to Galileo talk about what his contraption had taught him about the cosmos. The final act was for each person to answer (on a 3×5 card) this question: “how did you come to be sitting here today?”

I have kept those cards for over a decade because the responses we received were extraordinary. They wove together lives and careers, events planned and unplanned, epiphanies that could only have resulted from being asked this question at this moment after this particular experience. And they showed me that whatever professional personas we adopt, we are all looking for ways to make meaning out of the actions we take, the experiences we have, and the ways in which we wield our power in the world. As one CEO said in a different context: “what people don’t understand is that, if you want me to take risks that affect thousands of people, I have to be moved first. It’s not just an intellectual decision.”

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After a week of working online with the WBCSD participants, we met them all in Weybridge, Surrey, the UK, for a day and a half. In that setting we focused on exactly the kinds of things that CEO was talking about: the motivators, influencers and behaviors that will affect decisions in the future, moving people to make–we all hope–decisions that are both ethical and environmentally conscious. Our bet is that by sharing in this sort of experiential process, the companies involved will similarly be moved to risk building the products and services that will support the best intentions of consumers–now and several decades hence.