Competing Commitments
Organisational Culture, Systems Thinking Kevin Ruth Organisational Culture, Systems Thinking Kevin Ruth

Competing Commitments

It has been a consistent narrative in education conferences for the past ten to fifteen years: "we need to become more agile, more innovative, more digital, adopt a growth mindset, and focus more on the user..." I have attended a fair number of conferences during this time period, and I think that all of them have featured speakers and workshop leaders who repeat either this exact mantra or something quite close to it.

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Aggregation of Individuals?

Aggregation of Individuals?

Senior leaders looking to effect organisational change can serve as champions of that change, provided that they go system-wide and motivate people to learn and change, create the conditions for them to apply what they’ve studied, foster immediate improvements in individual and organisational effectiveness, and put in place systems that help sustain the learning. To make it work correctly, we need to acknowledge that an organisation is not simply an aggregation of individuals.

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Reimagining Global Citizenship
Power, Systems Thinking, Strategy Kevin Ruth Power, Systems Thinking, Strategy Kevin Ruth

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.

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On Imaginative Gridlock

On Imaginative Gridlock

More learning (data gathering and theoretical application of technique) will not, on its own, change the way people see things or how they perceive them. "There must first be a shift in the emotional processes of that institution [in our case, international education as a sector]. Imagination and curiosity are at root emotional, not cognitive, phenomena. In order to imagine the unimaginable, people must be able to separate themselves from the surrounding emotional processes before they can even begin to see (or hear) things differently. Without this understanding, it becomes impossible to realise how our learning can prevent us from learning more." (Friedman, A Failure of Nerve, 31). In the event that this doesn't make sense, consider Galileo, who offered naysayers an opportunity to utilise his telescope to observe the movement of cosmic bodies, to look for themselves. So many naysayers, in those earliest days of his efforts, refused to observe, even when offered the chance. Consider just how much longer it took for things to evolve because their "learning" got in the way of learning, of becoming something more.

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