“Everybody” Improves Whole Systems

Marvin Weisbord

I am always looking out for simple models that illuminate more effective ways of acting, especially when they relate to teams and organizations since these are the units of work in today’s world. Thus, I was pleased when I came across the following model at yet another excellent OSR seminar during which Marvin Weisbord spoke of his life’s work of experience exploring and describing how to improve organizations and communities. In particular, he showed a simple diagram, which I have scanned from the brand-new 25th anniversary, 3rd edition of his book Productive Workplaces: Dignity, Meaning, and Community in the 21st Century:

Marvin Weisbord's Learning Curve

This diagram illustrates how our strategies for effective organizations have evolved over the last 100+ years. In 1900, the trend was for experts to solve problems. Insights into group dynamics in the 1950s led to adding a new strategy to the mix: “everybody” solving problems. The rise of general systems theory in the 1960s resulted in experts improving whole systems. This evolved in the 2000s to be “everybody” improving whole systems. Each addition provided a new set of tools and approaches that are helping to drive productivity to new all-time levels. Experts have led the way creating knowledge and practices that were then adopted by “everybody”.

Marvin goes on to say:

“While the four learning curve strategies coexist, if you aspire to dignity, meaning and community, you won’t be satisfied until you get everybody improving the whole. Not if you seek the economic benefits from ever-changing technologies.”

Dignity. Meaning. Community. Those are laudable goals. And essential parts of what make us human. And economic benefits are needed along the way.

The Cynefin framework

Since becoming a professor in September 2010, I’ve been thinking more and more about our higher educational system and how to improve it to become even more effective. Marvin’s diagram resonates with me. It connects with my understanding of the complex systems in which we live and act: biology, organizations, products, teams, etc. One of the most illuminating descriptions of complex systems that I have found is David Snowden’s video describing the sense-making Cynefin Framework.

In complex systems cause and effect are only obvious in hindsight, changes to the system are largely irreversible, and the system has unpredictable, emergent outcomes. There are no “best practices” or “right answers”. The system is too large, too diverse, with too many interacting parts for any one person to understand the system. This is no longer the domain of experts. Every practice needs to be contextualized, adapted for the particular context of that person, and the context is always changing as is the person. Thus, practices need to be continually modified to respond to the emergent behaviors of the system.

In such complex systems, the most effective leadership move is to create an environment in which “everybody” does lots of experiments to continually learn about how to best adapt their practices. In other words, create a situation where “everybody” improves whole systems.

So what does this mean for UW Bothell, where I work?

UW Bothell is in the upper left quadrant of the Cynefin framework: it is a complex system (an organization) working with complex systems (students, staff, faculty, their families, communities, industries, etc.) doing complex activities (learning). We need to continually adapt to the changing context of the systems that we are in. We need to be acting in the upper right quadrant of Marvin’s Learning Curve diagram.

Are we training our students to effectively act in complex systems? Are we providing them with tools, principles, practices, and experience of being part of “everybody” improving whole systems? Do they understand that there are different types of systems with different ways of acting effectively? Do they understand what “whole systems” means? Do the faculty and staff emulate these practices?

And perhaps most important, how can we get “everybody” improving the whole UW Bothell system?

Beauty in Work

Every once in a while, I find something beautiful related to my interest in great teams. Here are 2 recent examples.

Yesterday, I was revisiting the Liberating Structures website and took a pause to enjoy the beautiful and authentic images in the slideshow on their homepage. I was especially taken with the layered and semantically rich beauty of their Graphic Tapestries & Facilitation images, such as this one:

One of Keith McCandless's illustrations from the Liberating Structures website.

Then even devote an entire page of their website, Gallery & Aesthetics, to showcase beautiful images. I can admire a group that does things like that.

Today’s discovery was the Group Pattern Language Projectwebsite devoted to the topic of “a pattern language for bringing life to meetings and other gatherings”. Their multi-year collaboration resulted in a beautiful and impressive set of cards describing aspects that help facilitation of group processes. “The Group Works cards express shared wisdom underlying successful approaches that is more specific than general values and less specific than tools and techniques.” Here is one that seemed particularly pertinent to this post:

An example card from the Group Pattern Language Project's deck of 91 full-colour cards.

What would it be like if such beauty was in all of our products? In a similar vein, my colleague Skip Walter asks, “What would business look like if art making were an integral part of work?”

BootCamp Artwork

Want to create great products together? Want to be more innovative or creative? Do artwork. With your team.

This past weekend I had the honor and privilege of hosting and being part of the UW Bothell Innovation and Creativity BootCamp, part of the UW Bothell Innovation Forum. From 7 PM Friday through 3 PM Sunday, 17 campers (UW Bothell students, staff, faculty and spouses) joined 7 consultants for an immersive simulation about how to create great products and how to be more innovative and creative.

Art is an integral part of BootCamp. There have been over 200 BootCamps, and in every one there has been art. In our case, a corner of the room in which we started the weekend had a table of canvases and acrylic paint. From the moment we opened BootCamp through to the very end there was a steady stream of campers working on the canvases. It was exciting to see the energy around the art table. And breathtaking to see the beauty of what they produced. Here is a sample of the art they created:

Marrowstone Island beach wood

In February, 2010 my family and I stayed at a friend’s house on Marrowstone Island, a small island near Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula. We always take a walk on the beach, and I always bring my camera. This time I took pictures of interesting textures in the wood on the beach. In this collage, the images appear in the order in which I took them.

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Speech Recognition Poetry

What happens when you accidentally leave your speech recognition system running while having a conversation with someone? Well, it keeps on working, doing the best it can. And sometimes, the results are almost poetic.

Here is a clip from a moment ago. My wife was having some problems entering addresses into a Microsoft Word table, in preparation of printing Christmas card address labels via mail merge. She just came into my office for some help while I was dictating an e-mail. I forgot to turn off Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and here is what I found in my e-mail when I looked back at my computer:

Guess who took the step has 2 arrows to swallow okay you want one template size that could then it doesn’t matter these things rap’s from these small shoot. I very get by the Academy for a small and a test is a success okay okay and yes I’m just so I can do now and really in some ways rather do well to listen to a spreadsheet probably thought I’d be gagging daily is a really simple social work and other but we also allow North

Gibberish? Yet, it was based upon coherent sentences that I had spoken. Honestly!

Is Designing a Course the Same as Designing a Product?

After class last week, a student asked me “Is designing a course the same as designing a product?” “Yes,” I replied, “they are both quite similar though there are some differences. They both have users. However, courses are rarely designed by using the human centered design practices that are so effective for products.”

Upon further reflection, I think I was wrong. Designing a course is quite different from designing a product, and the differences might not be good for any of us. The cost of a standard education has become prohibitively expensive for many. The world’s people need global access to knowledge. Many educators are already reassessing their role in the changing dynamics of this world, and new models of education are emerging, such as the Khan Academy. It is very likely that the range of educational opportunities in 20 years will be quite different from what we have today. And that these changes will be good for the vast majority of us.

How can we increase the rate of innovation in education? Can product design tell us something useful about course design? Is it time for educators to adopt some of the principles and practices from product design?

Here is an initial list of the similarities and differences between course design and product design. What other similarities and differences do you see?

Course	Product
Context About preparing for careers and creating better citizens Always part of larger product (such as a curriculum, a degree program, accreditation, and professional certification)	Context About solving user’s needs (do something better, faster, cheaper) while generating sufficient profits Sometimes part of larger product family
Rarely, if ever, designed by using human centered  design practices	Growing adoption of human centered design practices
Small-scale The number of users is small (at most hundreds), and fairly stable Delivered a few times per year Time boxed (quarter or semester) Few deliveries per design	Large-scale The number users is large (thousands to billions), and often growing rapidly Delivered continuously Used over long time periods (hopefully) Thousands to millions of deliveries per design
Lower system complexity Usually only lightly connected (through the curriculum) to a few other courses Little choice, especially for core courses in the major Usually designed and delivered by an individual Updated every few years One-size-fits-all Simple business model Designed and delivered locally	Higher system complexity Usually connected into an ecosystem of other products Usually many alternatives for the user to switch to Usually designed and delivered by a team, or team of teams Updated quarterly, monthly, or daily, with the trend toward continuous deployment Products are increasingly specialized for niche markets Increasingly complex business models Increasingly designed, delivered and used globally
High and increasing costs Delivery cost is high, and rising High switching costs	Low and decreasing costs Delivery cost is low, sometimes extremely low (e.g. for software), and declining Switching costs are continually decreasing
Artificial environment Delivered in sterile classrooms Contrived reward system for students Often deferred reward (“This will be good for you later”)	Authentic environment Used by people to solve their problems in their home and work contexts Quick reward (usually hours or days)
User community is Small Fixed size for duration Usually local Usually persist for just a few months May have highly restrictive membership (for courses in the major)	User community is Large to very large (hopefully) Continually growing (hopefully) Often global Usually persistent for years (hopefully) Usually open to anyone who can afford the costs
Data User generated data is used primarily for assessment, sometimes for learning Extremely weak data analytics	Data User generated data is increasingly an integral part of the business model Data analytics are increasingly an integral part of the business model
Coaching and mentoring by instructor (the course designer) or teaching assistant	Coaching and mentoring by internal support group, and increasingly by users via online community support
Big upfront design Course is completely designed before it is delivered Students expect instructor to stick to syllabus	Iterative design Product design is continually changing based on user feedback and new insights Users expect problems to be fixed quickly
Instructor wields power Conflict because same person is teaching and grading Instructor dictates course structure, activities, and measures of success Instructor assesses student performance Student feedback is weak (end of course surveys, and perhaps some conversations) Instructor determines pace Can be expensive to withdraw from course Drives course design	User wields power Increasingly, can switch to alternatives is dissatisfied with this product “The customer is your boss” User determines pace of use Penalty for abandoning product often is quite low Product is continually refined in response to user feedback

Successful products operate within enormous complexity, scale, amount of variation, and pace of change. They adjust to the complexity of their users and the marketplace. They operate on large scales on several dimensions (quantity, geographically, diversity) during design, deployment and use. They often go through the hundreds of iterations necessary to systematically improve their quality, decrease costs, increase rates of delivery, and increase variety for different types of users.

Courses, on the other hand, are typically designed by an individual, perhaps with a small amount of assistance from others, and delivered locally to a relatively small number of people. In the absence of a manufacturing process to replicate the delivery, assessment and coaching, the instructor is a bottleneck for many activities. This means that each course is delivered (iterated) at most a few times a year, resulting in a relatively glacial pace of change. It also makes it difficult to adapt the course to the individual needs of each user.

Is a course inherently different from a product? I think of a course as a service with a human touch. Online and hybrid learning can help a course to scale a bit, while maintaining some human touch. Systems like the Khan Academy, however, truly scale by successfully packaging course material in easily consumed and useful chunks that are created once, and consumed untold numbers of times. It scales like good products do. This certainly works well in some domains, such as mathematics. Does it, however, provide the same quality of learning as when the course content is confined with a good instructor who can give individual guidance? How far does it get in covering the territory described by Bloom’s taxonomy? When does scale trump quality of learning? How can we have both?

Next quarter I am teaching a course in human centered design, so my thoughts keep returning to how to generate the insights necessary to allow us to redesign our educational system in order to meet the needs of our local and global communities. In particular, I wonder two things:

What it would look like for education design to use some of the product design practices?

More specifically, I wonder:

What would it look like to design a course via human centered design?

Who are the purchasers, influences, and users for which we would need to design? How could we use the observational and ethnographic practices that are central to human centered design in order to discover insights about the latent, unmet needs related to a particular course concept? How could we have a team of designers that collaborate persistently and intensely during this design process, over the hundreds of iterations necessary for creating truly magnetic products that can transform our world?

What would look like if we could do this? What is necessary in order for this to happen? Is it possible for education to operate at the scales of product design? How can courses scale? How can course design more quickly go through hundreds of iterations in order to increase the rate of innovation? Can course design become more iterative, with shorter iteration times? How can course design be informed by the richness of the data analytics in order to uncover more insights? How can courses become more individualized?

In the end, it is all about creating better learning opportunities and increasing levels of scale. Yet, I suspect many of us, including me, are asking the wrong questions, focusing on changing the existing system, being blind to new and highly effective type of system that will emerge.

How can we get out of our heads, as educators, and into the heads of the people we are trying to teach?  Or vice versa.

Wet autumnal leaves

Took a short walk with the dogs this morning.
Wandering the blocks of Ballard.
It had rained last night.
Wet autumnal leaves stuck to the sidewalk,
Making textures of different shapes, sizes, and colors: