ARPA-ED might just succeed because the education system is in a rare moment of alignment around the prospect of innovation. The issue is building consensus across party lines, bringing President Obama and Republican ex-Governor Jeb Bush together for a recent press conference in Miami. The NEA is also on board, stating that “the technology environment of today’s public schools should match the tools … of work and civic life that students will encounter after graduation.” Wind of this alignment has reached the private sector, where investors are predicting a 28% annual growth rate in the K-12 educational technology market:

There is no question that a shift is happening. Now ARPA-ED and other innovators in the education space must face the daunting challenge of imagining what that shift might look like. As Republicans, Democrats, superintendents and teachers unions all gingerly approach the notion of radical change, they each project radically different images of what that change will look like. Some envision e-schools that can deliver high-quality learning at a fraction of the current cost, others imagine teachers trained to facilitate fully customized learning experiences through technology, others just want graduates ready to compete in the global economy of the 21st century. These competing visions of the future, though often fundamentally compatible, can layer on top of innovation until it is smothered.

Whether ARPA-ED succeeds or fails will ultimately depend not on its skill at ed-tech wizardry, but on its ability to combine these visions into a unified whole. It’s a daunting challenge, especially because more people still need to be invited to the table. Parents need to be given a voice. So do kids, so do teachers on the ground, so do the 21st century industries that will be hiring after graduation. Effective innovation, especially in systems as complex as education, is less about great edtech and more about the conditions that allow it to be developed – overall it is about the ability to construct multistakeholder innovation systems.

Making Innovation Systems Work

Collective Invention’s ethnographer, Fiona Hovenden, has been working with the Stupski Foundation to study how these innovation systems are being constructed in schools and communities across the country. In every case successful innovation networks start by generating a shared vision of the future, often distilled as profiles of the future graduates that the community wants its schools to foster. These profiles can trigger a phase change: they get people to stop worrying about what everyone else will accept and start pushing for what everyone else aspires to.

Once stakeholders have been aligned, a rich and complicated conversation needs to take place. Teachers, superintendents, and entrepreneurs all need to become adroit in the use of innovation techniques that they can take back to their workplaces and classrooms. Ideas need to be visualized, prototypes need to be played with, and new relationships need to form between people and between ideas. Much of this process can and should happen online, but the most powerful components also require a physical meeting place with crowded whiteboards and a busy front door.

Future personas and innovation hubs. Both tools come from a rich history of strategic innovation that should be required reading for innovators in education.

Future Personas

In the late 70s, early creators of business software became frustrated at how teams of designers would often become divided over conflicting visions of a finished product. They found that illustrating and even play-acting a set of concrete set of user personas helped designers step back from their own opinions and come to a consensus around what was best for the end user.

But why profile graduates from the future, rather than graduates today? The answer may lie in the work of the Global Business Network (GBN), which found that articulating likely scenarios of the future had a curious affect on entrenched bureaucracies. Telling stories about likely future scenarios and asking people to plan for them makes change seem inevitable rather than apocalyptic. At Collective Invention we combine macro scenarios with the micro-stories of future personas. Thought leaders in education have already begun to combine these two tactics. Future personas are already being used effectively by the nation’s top educational grantmakers and by top-performing local innovators.

Innovation Hubs

Innovation hubs have a their own rich history, though they have generally been applied to technical rather than social challenges. At centers like XEROX PARC innovators laid the foundation for modern computing and carried around iPad prototypes 40 years ahead of schedule. More recently, innovation centers have been popping up in other social arenas. Healthcare-focused Innovation Center Denmark has proven so successful that it has opened up hubs in Silicon Valley and Shanghai. The concept of ARPA-ED springs from this lineage, and educational innovators should be sure to look across sectors for best practices in making these hubs effective.

What does success look like?

Where could this catalytic moment in education lead? It might start with a set of structured conversations about what we want the graduates of 2025 and 2050 to be able to do in the world. These conversations need to tap into our highest aspirations for our kids and for the communities that they’ll be defining. A struggling mom in LA will be able to tell her story in a place where someone’s listening, where she sees how her hopes overlap with those of her kid’s teachers, the district superintendent, legislators from both sides of the aisle. She’ll feel like the education system is actually changing, and like she and her kid are a part of that change.

Once she’s invested, she’ll plug into regular conversations about how her daughter’s education is transforming for the better. She’ll make friends not just with her daughter’s teacher, but with an entrepreneur who’s prototyping a groundbreaking education game and with a representative from the nanotech conglomerate that would like to hire her daughter when she graduates from college.

Truly groundbreaking changes in education aren’t going to come from highly-paid experts at ARPA-ED, they’re going to come out of these sorts of friendships. Our best hope may just be to build an innovation system that invites everyone to the table and to invite them to dream together.

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.