Its a strange moment isn't it? Our financial institutions are failing because there is something called 'confidence' (Gordon Brown 12/10/08) missing in the system. The confidence is founded on a sense of security and assuredness that the way of doing things around the place is basically sound and at present the banking system doesn't feel that this capacity is present. In effect this locks them into a self repeating cycle, where they don't feel confident so they won't lend to other banks so they feel even less confident so they are even less likely to lend...
Why am I interested in this? Well, confidence crosses organizational boundaries. I spent a very pleasurable morning last week in a local authority with a group of people from the LA and headteacher colleagues and one of the themes that was presented by the LA adviser was concerned with taking risks in times of change, to move our organisations and systems to another place more suited to changed demands. A headteacher colleague raised the matter of confidence to take risks, a sentiment that resonated with others in the group I felt. Reflecting on this during the session with colleagues, and on my way back home, I think there are some important messages to examine around the theme of risk. In a very obvious way risk seems to be present in an educational context as a daily condition - any learning activity is inherently 'risky' because we don't really know what might happen - what direction it might take as it is dependent upon the motivation of the learner and the capability of the teacher. However, we are not confident with risk because perhaps we don't see learning in that way, instead we have grown accustomed to learning taking place as a series of predetermined packages that function within predictable boundaries, whilst this generates confidence and assurance, it also enhances our perception of risk if we undertake activity that serves to undermine, alter, challenge or question the appropriacy of the curriculum on offer. Not knowing is risky, to know is to be confident and in a time of accountability, we need to be able to demonstrate we are in control - knowing is king.
But what is clearly demonstrated in the current banking crisis is that we don't know, on a regular basis, what to do in response to new situations. If we alter our mindset to this and if we accept risk as a feature of our daily life, then what other complementary attributes are required to enhance our ability to deal with risk - to make it 'less risky'! I think we need to recognise that we often don't know what to do. A colleague of mine, Kathy Hall from Cork University coined the phrase ' what do you do when you don't know what to do?' - her observation on the question was that we draw on three things - resilience, resourcefulness and reflection.
So what of these attributes? If we need the confidence to take risks, to move our personal and collective minds to another way of seeing the problems we face, then what will facilitate resilience, resourcefulness and reflection?
My feeling is that we need to attend carefully to the social technology. We have got very good at creating technical indicators of the measurable and the manageable in our organizations - but as yet it seems that we lag behind on the social technology - the source of informing our knowing from within.
I will give you an example: the LA presented at the meeting a detailed analysis of the performance their own LA against the trends of other, similarly defined local authorities across London and more widely across the UK. From this broad analysis they were also able to present data on schools across the local authority, they were able to identify the high performing schools and the lower performing schools against a range of indicators. They were able to go further, on further analysis they could report on specific social groupings, for example 2 of 9 traveller children living in the local authority achieved level 4 English. This depth of detail available is very impressive, alarming in what it reveals and yet it also serves to amplify the problem that we in the room collectively faced. As we have grown ever more efficient at the statistical data, a recognition has grown that existing solutions are exhausted, in LA terms, leaders need to take risks to invent new solutions. Leaders need to work on what to do when they don't know what to do.
If we attend to how we communicate, how we construct knowledge together, how we hear and feel the world through the viewpoint of others I think we can really begin to make some significant inroads into knowing what to do when we don't know what to do - we will begin to have faculties that are more resilient, resourceful and make best use of reflection.
Not knowing what to do is a common response to the challenges I outlined in an earlier piece in the blog - but it seems to me that an attention to dialogue, (coming soon!) to empathy and to generative thinking and listening begins to make a move from the collective reliance on a central plan, towards seeing the emerging whole.
When I am thinking about risk, and where we might need to go next in our educational journey, I bring with me the view that if we are to tackle the challenges of these propositions, we need to focus on resilience, resourcefulness and reflect on both what we think and how we think, personally, in teams, in our organisations and as a whole.
All education is environmental education.
The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter but mastery of one's person.
Knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.
We cannot say we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on people and their communities.
Minute particulars matter - we can usefully attend to the power of example
The way in which learning occurs is as important as what we learn
If we do this we build trust. Trust comes through familiarity, conversation, sharing ideas and meanings and working on constructing a shared appreciation of both the immediate and the desired state to which we wish to move. Trust between people is the feeling of a communicative state, it is a feeling that we can and will fail - but fail within an environment of acceptance, tolerance and appreciation that in failing we add to the collective knowledge of what to do when we don't know what to do. The failure will happen because in much of what we need to do, we simply don't know the best thing to do because the context within which we function are unprecedented.
The banking crisis gives us a great example of how to look at our own system, realise it is a system, and then deal with it as a system.
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