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.

###

In the past two decades, we’ve seen seen explosive growth in bio-, info-, and nano-technologies. But in many respects our social structures–in education, health, and government itself–have not kept pace. While the potential and need for social progress is now greater than ever, its record in recent years has lagged. Institutionalized structures and practices that reward waste and pollution have caused massive environmental destruction. The concentration and deregulation of financial power has led to worldwide economic crisis. Billions of children and adults who could contribute to future progress are malnourished and poorly educated. Fortunately, we believe that a new force for social innovation is being born, one that we call “collective invention.”

For the full text of the manifesto, click here. To sign up for email delivery of our bulletin, please go to our homepage and sign up in the upper right corner.

In a world in which most of our systems, from food to education to health to commerce, are either under significant pressure (buy any peanut butter lately?) or have broken down altogether (how’s your mortgage application coming along?) there is a lot of emphasis on getting to the “right solution”.

But while we may not know what all the solutions are, we’d submit that we collectively do know how to build the right solutions, and that the process knowledge is at least as important as the solutions themselves, because it’s replicable.

The partners at Collective Invention have worked together a long time, though our collaborations have taken different forms over the years. Arnold and I met as co-founders of The Idea Factory, now a Singapore-based company started here in San Francisco in 1997; it was here that we hosted Clark’s UC Berkeley design students and recruited Fiona to build our ethnographic research practice. Meanwhile, other longtime professional friendships, such as those with Jamais Cascio and Adam Kahane, grew out of our all having had the good fortune to work at Global Business Network (GBN) in the mid 1990’s.

The fact that we have collaborated in widely varied settings over time has helped us collectively to reflect on our work, and as part of Collective Invention’s mission we’d like to share some of our working hypotheses about the practices and principles that support innovation in the social sectors. I invite you to add your own thinking to the mix, and meet others with similar preoccupations, by getting involved in the practices and principles group on the Innovation for the Common Good discussion forum.

First of all, we define collective invention as diverse problem-solvers engaging productively together to generate breakthrough solutions. It’s what the X-Prize seeks to incent through offering prizes: “radical breakthroughs to benefit humanity.” And it’s what we seek to do with reliable processes for collaborative innovation. That’s a powerful combination: it will take both funding and technical support to blast open the problems we face and build new solutions together.

Clark, in his earlier blog post, has begun to lay out some parameters for design thinking. Our experience tells us that there are additional principles that provide the underpinning for collective invention in the social sectors:

Innovation for the common good demands focused cooperation between policy-makers, funders, researchers, leaders, and facilitators. The sheer scale of social problems, and the potential for doing harm through ill-conceived projects, requires the influence of policy-makers, the human-centered focus of qualitative research, the energy of venture funding, the topview of enlightened leadership and the process know-how of program facilitation. None of these factors on its own will catalyze real breakthroughs in healthcare, education or sustainable development, but together we can remake the landscape.

Confident leadership creates the conditions in which risk and error actually result in better solutions. Risk, error and deviation from the norm are pre-conditions for innovation, and leadership must advocate for them. Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize, says “especially in the scientific community, people are stuck in how they approach problems. The day before something is a breakthrough it was a crazy idea. If it wasn’t crazy yesterday, it isn’t a breakthrough today. And breakthrough ideas can sometimes be embarrassing if they don’t immediately lead to results.” Perhaps even more around pressing social problems than in the private sector, where innovation practices have been cultivated, leadership must model tolerance for and yes, even advocate for risk, error and deviation from the norm.

Good process generates a productive rhythm between collective intelligence and individual creativity. While experience is the only path to mastery here, there are ways to know when a team needs to be hived off or opened up; when an individual problem-solver needs to work independently and when s/he is ready for new perspectives; when and how to crowdsource and when and how to make meaning from the resulting data. Maybe this is, in part, what Daniel Pink means when he talks about symphony as a skill for this conceptual age.

Innovative teams are cognitively diverse. While it is easier to point to and to accomplish other forms of diversity—geographic, religious, gender, ethnic—when we are building breakthrough solutions what we most care about is cognitive diversity: differing mental models and problem-solving habits. A hypothesis: collective invention requires the ability to identify these differences, recruit participants accordingly, and to provide teams the tools to exploit cognitive diversity.

Mindful organizations, groups and teams are sensitive to their environments. A creative group is mindful of detail and adaptive to changes in the world around them. Collective mindfulness is about the ability to scan for signs of change and monitor particular signals at the same time.

The opportunity of our age is to use both silicon-based and social technologies to illuminate new possibilities. We have the technical know-how to surface and share data from virtually any source. Combined with process knowledge born out of design and organizational development, this gives us the capacity to invent, explore and rework solutions at a scale and speed never before possible. This opens up the potential for new forms of collaboration between technologists, designers and laypeople with shared investments in social innovation.

Thoughts? Comments?

The Art Center Summit 2008

Systems, Cities, and Sustainable Mobility

The day after the first Sustainable Mobility conference in 2007, held by Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, half a dozen people – mostly conference organizers – met and asked, “What did we see? What happened here? How did it go?” Conversations like this are usually called a debrief session, but this was different. It became about designing the future. One of the striking realizations from the first Summit was how many different disciplines were present. In many ways this was exciting; lots of concerned, committed people eager to change things up. But everyone didn’t speak the same language and certainly didn’t use the same work processes. Lot’s of shared inspiration, few shared tools.

The people in the “debrief” meeting were from different disciplines too. But we had one thing in common. We all knew how to create “never before seen” futures. Out of that meeting came an idea that went on to become the Mobility Vision Integration Process or mVIP. From that point on Lloyd Walker, Andy Ogden, Geoff Wardle and Dave Muyres developed the mVIP. It was introduced at this year’s Summit and was used during the break-out sessions in February, 2008 by small teams working to envision future mobility and transportation solutions.

The mVIP tool is a sophisticated deck of cards that lead groups through a scenario-based problem solving sequence using real world conditions and variables. It organizes groups, gathers knowledge and insight, frames in discussion, stimulates new ideas, and drives groups toward new solutions. Compared to most card games, this one is a sure bet.

Lloyd Walker introduced the mVIP tool to the Summit on Wednesday morning. Then people broke into small groups and tried it out. Based on feedback from that session, the development team made adjustments before the Thursday break-out session when the mVIP tool was again put to the test. They’d been working like that for a year; think/do, create and adjust, rapid prototyping. It was the same idea all the Summit speakers have been saying about sustainable mobility and the mVIP team was doing it.

At the end of the Summit, everyone left with an mVIP deck. It’s built to work with any group. It builds a common platform of language, process and outcomes. It allows people from wildly different disciplines to work together productively. During the Summit – with just two short sessions – it had already generated over a hundred new solution concepts for sustainable mobility dilemmas. And, it’s also beautifully designed. But then, aren’t all good tools?

The mVIP tool deck is available from the Art Center website.

Clark Kellogg is an architect and partner at Collective Invention where he focuses his work around design + communication.