PILOTed

McKinsey on Design

We are increasingly calling for teaching design in schools. Why is design important?

McKinsey Consulting recently reported that companies with good design processes (top quartile) outperformed their industry by about 2:1: higher revenue growth, larger return to stockholders, and better financial performance.

It’s not just design for designers, McKinsey outlined four characteristics of these organizations that outperform their peers:

The leadership/design connection

Those companies made design a top management issue. Yes, there are people tasked with design, but designers and top management worked together to analytically choose the designs that would have the most impactful effect on the organizations. Design decisions were not relegated to middle management, and top management did not just make decisions based on gut-feel. Top management were well versed in the ramifications of different design decisions so could make objective decisions based on the impact of the designs on their customers.

Design as UX

Design isn’t just about a product, users and customers are making their own decisions based on a total experience. The best organizations consider (and measure) how design affects the customer journey, and also consider how alternative design can affect aspects of the customer experience that are outside of just using the product.

Cross functional design

While there may be a design department, it is working hand in glove with the other functional departments in the organization, sharing responsibility for the design. Design in these organizations is about the user, and however different departments touch the user experience, they need to be part of the process. Isolationist tendencies (or silos) can be hard to overcome and resist, yet the best organizations figure out a way to do it. And designers should be spending their time and efforts touching all departments to enhance products and services for customers, not on creating slide shows or presentations or marketing materials.

Continuous Iteration

The best organizations don’t just design a product, service, or operation and then move on. Ongoing learning, testing, iterating, and measuring with users is critical. The best organizations prototype early, share prototypes with potential users, and use that feedback to inform design modifications. And monitoring externalities like actions of competitors, emerging technologies, and psychometric trends are all blended into the functions of all departments and funneled into the design process.

Organizations that are strong in design outperform other organizations. McKinsey concludes that design excellence is within the grasp of very organization, and depends on design being integrated in all four areas. We should be building that framework into student learning.

By the way at the end of the McKinsey article there is an organization survey. How does your organization stack up?

And if you feel like you would like to take action to improve your organization’s performance or impact, please contact us at [email protected] 

Technology has no effect on student achievement

When you introduce technology into the classroom, and hold learning content, instructional practice, assessment experiences, and professional development constant, you actually hold back learning; students learn less in one year than they learned without the technology. This has been reported in numerous studies, including John Hattie’s Visible Learning.

However when digital tools are leveraged “to enhance highly reliable instructional and learning strategies”, students have been observed learning four years of material in one year. The effect of technology use coupled with the effective execution of highly reliable instructional strategies is greater than the effect of either in isolation.

What are these highly reliable instructional strategies? Strategies that support Hattie and Donoghue’s Model of Learning, which has three phases:

1. Surface Learning: acquisition of facts and content, first in short term and then through practice and rehearsal to consolidate the learning and vocabulary into a superficial understanding.
2. Deep Learning: further consolidation of facts, content linking to other knowledge and abilities, and acquisition of deeper understanding.
3. Knowledge Transfer: consolidation of the deeper understanding into longer term memory and expanding capabilities to be able to apply it to different contexts to solve new problems.

Highly effective instructional strategies are ones that lead students through this process. One system that has documented success is the T3 Framework developed by Sonny Magana, author of Disruptive Classroom Technologies: A Framework for Innovation in Education:

1. Translational Technology Use: translating tasks from analog into digital form, which automates some tasks and allows consumption of resources through digital media.
2. Transformational Technology Use: enacting significant changes in learning tasks and student activities in ways that were not possible without technology.
3. Transcendent Technology Use: learning activities that prepare students to master future learning and utilize what they have learned in ways that may by inconceivable today.

Practically, what does that mean for teachers, students, classes, and schools today?

Here are three ways to find out. 1) Dr. Magana is going to be speaking at FETC. Register, attend, and learn. 2) His books are available from Amazon.

And 3) on November 29, Dr. Magana is going to lead an online discussion on Edchat Interactive. Register and attend; it’s free.

Why did Donald Trump Stress the Importance of Building a Wall on the Mexican Border?

Why did Donald Trump Stress the Importance of Building a Wall on the Mexican Border?

If you’re on the left, could it be because he is racist or is catering to racists?

If you’re on the right, might it be because he wants to cut down on immigration which will open jobs for US citizens?

Do you have a different reason that you’re sure caused this?

We all have this model about how we make decisions. There are all these things we know. There are our desires and wants. We weigh the two and then decide on and take action on a plan to reach the things we desire.  There must be some view of the world and some set of desires that drives every decision, and once we understand that for any action, we have the explanation and that part of the story is complete.

The drive to ascribe reasons to actions and decisions that people make is part of what has defined being human. Philosophers call it the Theory of Mind. The human mind is either pre-wired or pre-disposed to learn that the way people make decisions and take actions is that they have a collection of beliefs or facts, and another collection of desired states, and that the brain looks at the desired state, analyzes what exists and then decides on and executes actions to move to the desired state.

We all use this theory of mind to explain what we and others have done, and to predict what we and others will do. We are the only species on the planet (that neuroscientists know of) that are capable of this as it requires not just conscious thought, but also expressive language. There is evidence that humans have been able to do this for at least 50,000 years, and that by the time infants are 6 months old, they have already formulated the theory of mind and are acting on it (“Oh, mommy is looking at that object and saying this sound, so she must be using that sound to mean that object.”)

There is just one problem with this understanding of decision making. Our knowledge of the brain has expanded so much in the last 35 years that neuroscientists now know that it’s not actually the way the brain operates.

As neuroscientists have been able to more finely track how neurons work, what the different parts of the brain actually do, and how they all work together, they’ve been able to determine that, while the Theory of Mind is useful in many circumstances, that’s not at all what happens in the brain.

Following is a simplification (probably an oversimplification) of what Alex Rosenberg explains in How History Gets Things Wrong, The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories.

Neuroscientists have been able to trace interactions in the brain and record in what part of the brain they occur and when. There are specific cells in the brain that are triggered by location information. Others that are triggered by speed. Others that are triggered by happiness, and others by anger, hunger, sex, visual stimuli, etc. There is a region in the brain where decisions are made and others where actions are triggered. And still others that are involved in conscious thought.

By watching these different parts, and when they are triggered, scientists have been able to determine that the neurons that make decisions fire up before the ones that are involved in consciousness.

Basically, the brain makes decisions based on the activation of neurons that are located in a completely different part of the brain than the ones involved with conscious thought. Milliseconds after the decisions are made and (usually) after signals are sent to start acting on the decisions, the hippocampus sends signals to the conscious mind, which then essentially justifies the decision and provides what we consider the “reasoning” behind it. But crucially, the decision has already been made.

So all the reasons we give for why we do things and why others do them are basically all wrong. Those are just the stories that our conscious mind has made up for decisions that our unconscious mind already made.

If we are all making decisions based not on logic and careful consideration, what are the implications? To me, a big lesson is to accept that decisions are more likely to be fallible. And if decisions are likely to be wrong, then it becomes even more important to be sensorily acute to feedback, iterating based on highly adaptive feedback loops. In other words, be flexible and don’t dwell as long on making the “correct” decision. There is an old saying that you can’t steer a bicycle if it’s not moving, but even if it’s initially moving in the wrong direction, you can adjust and change course.

Perhaps we can explore these with Matt Joseph in the Edchat Interactive on Active Learning Strategies in the Classroom.

So, why did Donald Trump stress the importance of building a wall on the Mexican border?

That’s a trick question.

For the same reason he and we all decide and do anything. A series of chemical and electronic impulses in his hippocampus that were not logic or content-based started him and kept him going in that direction. All the other reasons are just stories he or we tell. Success will go to those who use feedback best to adjust their strategies and actions.

What if what we know is wrong?

What if what we (think we) know is wrong?

For example. We know that when people know how to evaluate news sources they are less likely to fall prey to fake news and false images. So we educate students how to evaluate news sources and determine which ones are likely to publish images and articles that are trustworthy.

But it turns out that’s wrong. The biggest predictors of whether a person is able to discern that a story or image may be false are

1. The individual’s knowledge of digital photo-editing and social media posting
2. The viewer’s attitude toward the depicted issue

Social and heuristic cues of online credibility (such as trustworthiness of the site or intermediaries) had no significant impact. (Source: Fake images: The effects of source, intermediary, and digital media literacy on contextual assessment of image credibility online)

If we find out that what we previously believed if false we can take action.

In this case, we can dig deeper. We can find out that, because of time or effort constraints, people tend to believe online images, that they don’t tend to actually seek out other source to validate information, but they make quick judgments; that people who already familiar with techniques to fabricate images or stories are more likely to spot potential falsehoods than those who do not, and also that people who already agree with the information depicted are less likely to be critical.

And then we can adjust our actions accordingly. In this case…

• Since we know that we are inclined to trust pictures and also inclined to trust information that supports what we already believe, possibly we can check ourselves whenever we see online images, especially ones that support stereotypes that we tend to accept.
• When working with students, instead of focusing on “good” sources and “bad” sources, we can involve them in exercises in photo-editing to achieve different objectives or re-writing articles to slant toward different viewpoints and then lead discussions about those techniques.

But how do we catch ourselves when we think we know what we’re doing, but we’re wrong?

Like what if we were starting an EdTech business and were sure you knew the market: the potential buyers, what they would pay, how to reach them, how they would use your product, and how you would sell them? I wonder if talking to Academic Business Advisors would help you determine if there were any unanticipated obstacles or more efficient tactics?

Leveraged Learning: How the Future of Education Might Play Out

 

How would you prepare if you knew you were going to embark on the most important project or task of your life; but you had no idea what it was, what skills or knowledge you need, the specific fields of operation, the scope, or the tasks involved? Think about it.

Interestingly, you'll likely come up with the same skills that tend to lead to career success, the ones that are most needed by society, and the ones that schools should be tasked with providing.

In his book Leveraged Learning: How the Disruption of Education Helps Lifelong Learners and Experts with Something to Teach, Danny Iny talks about the societal forces that are changing education, what is likely to come out of it, and what we can be doing today to prepare.

Danny talks about education as moving to a three-phased system: 

1. Foundational: base skills and knowledge
2. Last Mile: skills and knowledge needed for specific life choices
3. Continuing: skills and knowledge needed for whatever happens to be the current or next task

While large organizations like the existing institutions are likely to continue to dominate foundational education, new opportunities exist and are emerging in the areas of last mile and continuing education.

What are these skills that we'd need to prepare for the unpreperable? Iny outlines the following:

1. Salience: The ability to pose central problems and to ask important questions.
2. Novelty: An interest in and ability to find solutions for problems not tackled before. It is intellectual nonconformity, the ability to distance oneself from the established scientific theories and concepts, or artistic forms.
3. Ability to relate old knowledge to new problems: The opposite of novelty, this is the ability to recognize familiar patterns in seemingly new and unique problems.
4. Generativity and mental flexibility: The ability to generate multiple and diverse approaches to a problem is essential to the creative process in science. A scientist would be exceptionally lucky to hit upon the solution of a daunting problem from the first go.
5. Drive and doggedness: In a sense, the opposite of the previous, an ability to deploy sustained effort toward tackling a problem. This is about the relationship between inspiration and perspiration.
6. Mental wandering: The mysterious capacity for the productive and seemingly effortless pursuit of ideas wherever they take you.
7. Mental focus: The opposite of mental wandering, this is an ability to systemically pursue a logical train of thought.
8. Iconoclastic frame of mind: In order to forge ahead of society, a creative individual must be driven by a sense of dissatisfaction with the intellectual, scientific, or artistic status quo.
9. Resonance with central societal and cultural themes: A creative individual, and certainly a genius, is ahead of society, but his/her work must be recognized by society as important and valid in order to survive.
10. Social grace: Certain supremely creative individuals were known to history for their social suaveness and adaptability, and others for a notorious lack thereof.

If you're interested in options for transforming your classroom, school, or district, you might want to join in our Edchat Interactive discussion with FETC speakers Randy Ziegenfuss and Lynn Fuini-Hetton this Thursday night. For more information and to register, click on Leading Transformation, what works and what doesn't.