Nine Lies About Work
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure…that just ain’t so.” This quote, which opens the tome Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, frames an important issue—namely: we think that we know a number of things ‘for sure.’ Reality, however, may be otherwise. Nevertheless, we continue to insist that we know things ‘for sure.’
The 4iR and Its Discontents
Like many, I find the 4iR concept fascinating; it pushes me to contemplate how education (let alone ‘society’) might adapt. In my darker moments, I envision education being squashed by the 4iR because we are rarely timely in our response to such transformations (with some notable exceptions). In my more optimistic moments, which is where my mental musings tend to live, I question whether the entire thing is a load of rubbish. In other words, have we overestimated the impact and utility of those technological elements (AI is a great example) that represent the 4iR? Have we reduced ourselves to a world of algorithms to the extent that we are willing to let the algorithms programme our lives, effectively leading to a conformist society…a sort of monoculture?
Craft Schools
What if schools (why not education in general) were run by craftspeople? As Henrietta Thompson writes, “From houses to handbags, models of consumption are changing. Increasingly, we look to borrow rather than buy to ease the pressure on our over-burdened storage units, savings accounts, and souls. But, while many learn to make do with less, as with any major trend there is also big business to be found on the flip-side: collecting.” (Trends, Business Life, February 2019).
Of Ethics and Artificial Intelligence
Bias, privacy, and security issues are challenges that we already face in our very human lives, and they are mirrored in the development of AI. Strangely, it might give us a small degree of comfort to know that, although we don’t know exactly what AI will bring, it exhibits risk characteristics with which we are already familiar and against which we already strive to stay ahead of the game. Such risks will need to become part of risk management in schools, which includes the governance level as well as the senior management team.
Contagious
Being brave is not a risk. After all, that’s how you stand out. “It’s more of a risk to blend in because nobody notices you.” So goes the seemingly counter-intuitive advice in The Contagious Commandments, co-authored by Paul Kemp-Robertson and Chris Barth. Schools would do well to heed the risk of blending in. The tome is full of ‘commandments,’ a series of admonitions that result in a positive impact, whether that is increased brand awareness, attitudes toward a brand, or performance.