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.

What’s going on here? For one, humans are good at using our big brains to know a lot. But it doesn’t always translate into doing a lot. Second, we are on sustainability overwhelm. Staying current is like drinking from a fire hose – everyday.  And that’s hard to swallow.  Third, amid this explosive growth in knowledge and information the very meaning of sustainability has been diluted to the point of meaning just about anything, and thus meaning nothing.

We all support motherhood, apple pie and sustainability. We know what the first two mean and we know how to create them. Not so for sustainability. Even the Brundtland Commission’s definition – development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs  – is difficult to apply to the here-and-now of one’s daily life. Paper or plastic?

Without an explicit shared agreement about the meaning of sustainability even the well-informed and well meaning among us cannot make much progress. Indeed, this lack of clarity enables avoiding the most neglected problem in sustainable design today: time. There are many projections about when catastrophic environmental events will take place (GHG, ice shelf melting, sea-level rise, water wars). It’s hard to know how accurate they are and it doesn’t matter. The plain fact is that we don’t have time to wait and find out if the projections are correct. What matters is taking smart bold steps now because here’s what we do know: the longer it takes to start meaningful healing of the earth, the less likely we are to have a viable future. In short, we don’t have time to waste.

Is there any hope? Yes, and its not false hope. Design – and design thinking – as a set of solution-seeking tools is spreading to every corner of the world. Indeed, we are all designers now and optimism is an onboard skill of every designer everywhere (sustainable or otherwise).  More importantly, healing the earth is igniting the largest movement of human energy in the history of the planet. It is a movement without precedent; amorphous, unorganized, instinctive, and blessedly uncontrollable. Literally billions of people are on the job. It is already the single largest public works project ever.

In the end, if we can get as good at creating sustainability as we are at creating motherhood and apple pie we could find ourselves being happy, well fed and living long, balanced lives. Cloth or disposable?

“I’m just not going to believe it’s all hopeless” said our host at dinner tonight at the New Media Consortium’s (www.nmc.org) Advisory Group on K-12 education and technology. This is a mix of people assembled to think about K-12 education and new technologies at a time when it’s pretty difficult to think about anything at all without mulling over the general state of the world.

(The lunatic irony of it all is captured in these contrasts: this week, while Citigroup considered whether to take receipt of a $45,000,000 private aircraft for 12 at the same time they take receipt of their $45,000,000,000 portion of the Federal bailout package, we facilitated community meetings in a major CA school district where the only funds not frozen are being used to purchase toilet paper. Taxpaying families are asking “where’s our bailout?” while their neighborhood schools close, and now we’re here trying to have a meaningful conversation about technology’s promise for K-12.)

The crazy thing is that all we can productively do is to cultivate optimism at the very moment we have objective reasons to despair. Hopefulness seems naïve, almost impudent in the face of what’s going on these days, and yet it’s the backbone of innovation—the persistent feeling that you’re on the verge of something better, the intermittent glimpse of something brilliant ahead, and the niggling sense that it’s within your capacity to be an agent of that brilliance in the world.

The Skoll Foundation’s headlines of the future remind us of the possibilities:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was also struck some time ago by Jamais Cascio’s piece at Open the Future on “super-empowered, hopeful individuals”.” http://www.openthefuture.com/2008/03/superempowered_hopeful_individ.html). In our work at Collective Invention, we have observed that transformative ideas emerge at the nexus of the hopeful individual (even in grim circumstances) and the intelligent group. This zeitgeist is manifested in Ashoka’s concept that “everyone is a change-maker” and their support of group entrepreneurship (http://www.ashoka.org/promote). Janet Rae-Dupree’s New York Times article on the lone innovator and “brainpower in numbers” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/business/07unbox.html?_r=1&em also captures this nicely.

My partners and I believe that a new force for social innovation is being born, and that’s what we call “collective invention.” We believe that there are a set of known practices that tend to support transformative innovation, that they are as likely as any others to help us solve seemingly intractable social problems, and that these practices are useful both to individuals and in groups. In coming posts and in our CI bulletins (sign up on our homepage at www.collectiveinvention.com) we’ll tease out the practices, principles and precepts that support social innovation. Some are are drawn from design, some from the social sciences, and all of them are born out by our experience working with individuals and groups on complex problems over the years. I’ll be sharing them here because I’m interested in your thoughts, your experiences and perspectives, and because at the end of the day—like my colleague at dinner tonight—I’m thinking we have cause to be hopeful. Maybe the fact that we’re facing so many challenges simultaneously gives us a chance to show ourselves that we actually do know what to do to promote social innovation, and how to do it, after all

Meanwhile, a few interesting reference points for innovation in technology in education:

http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/01/mapping_maps.html

http://www.projectknect.org/Project%20K-Nect/Home.html

http://www.scicentr.org/Explore/VirtualWorlds/

Click here to view the embedded video.