AI Fails to Understand Strategy
It has been my position for years that strategic plans are rarely strategic. In fact, following a review of over 100 strategic plans that I did in 2010, I came to the conclusion that strategic plans were dangerously formulaic. Some thirteen years later, having reviewed hundreds more, I hold to my earlier assertion. Key learning: if something is formulaic, it can be replicated easily by means of an algorithm.
Metrics for Sustainable Ecosystems
We talk a good deal about ecosystems in the education sector. Indeed, the use of the term has become common parlance over the last ten years. It can apply to an individual school, in terms of the school being its own ecosystem. Likewise, and more aligned to what one might call a business ecosystem, there are membership associations, which are groups of independent organizations (schools) that choose to work together in order to create and deliver coherent solutions to the members of the association.
On Creative Construction
School leaders are reading about (or seeing) a relentless influx of new enterprises (organisations of all types) that are proposing new and innovative ways of doing things. These new ways of doing things result in challenging existing organisations with unanticipated business models, sometimes using new technologies.
Our Bigger Dream
In Eastern philosophy, there is a great question posed: what is the nature of this age? What is the nature of our age? I submit that it is the globalisation of superficiality. Being ‘friends,’ for example, can mean one thing in a bricks-and-mortar school, whilst meaning something entirely different in the largest country on planet earth, Facebook. Lest you think I am joking, consider that Facebook has borders (virtual, bandwidth all around you), it has a population, it has rules of conduct (terms and conditions of use), it exhibits a certain ethos. I’m not providing a value judgement; I am only looking at it, as an entity. It should shock you, at least somewhat, that I would want to categorise Facebook as a nation. Yet, what is the nature of our age?
Reimagining Global Citizenship
We all would say that we are educating global citizens, that such citizenship is a hallmark of international education. Though I am ideologically aligned to that statement, I submit that we are (perhaps dramatically) out of alignment with reality. We are educating citizens for a world dominated by traditional power arrangements, yet those arrangements are being undermined by new, networked approaches to which the traditional arrangements don't (yet) know how to respond.