Toward Wide-Awakeness

Thinking about What if we invited, even prayed for, disturbance? 60-60-60 #55 and reflecting…

Interesting to read both of these posts today:

First, Steve Blank’s Why Innovation Dies.

And then Grant Lichtman’s Keeping K-12 Innovation Alive (which is a riff on Blank’s post).

Life and death of innovation…an ongoing cycle in organizations. I wonder, if we have more administrators and teachers and parents “advocat[ing] for children and schools to be innovative” (as Pat Basset supports in his TEDx St. George School talk), what will this look, sound, and feel like? In the absence of a greenfield schooling approach, Lichtman explains that the following pieces will be present in a school where there is more innovative life present.

• new, faster, messier pilots (possibly without either full consensus or an assessment report)
• people who have demonstrated ability to work in a new paradigm, rather than those used to traditional teaching (content delivery) roles
• increasingly distributed system of responsibility
• freedom to test and adapt, without necessarily requiring that each substantive innovation become an all-school decision
• leadership which is comfortable with the new paradigm and shifting processes, and facile at knowing when, and when not, to reign in rapidly changing responses to evolving markets

**the above bullets are taken almost directly from the final paragraph in Lichtman’s post