MITx u.lab: Education As Activating Social Fields
Art by Kelvy Bird, Graphic Facilitator Extraordinaire
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GENERATIVE FIELD COMPONENTS
Self -Transformation
Generative Dialogue
Prototyping Practices
Distributed Organizing
Collective Governance
Culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. ~ Chowdhury
When cultural norms keep producing what no one wants,
a generative field provides a space in which society can gather
to deliberately create new business models that are aligned
with new opportunities.
When cultural norms keep producing what no one wants,
a generative field provides a space in which society can gather
to deliberately create new business models that are aligned
with new opportunities.
In communities throughout Kenya, we had the opportunity to examine cultural beliefs
and business models that prevent community wealth.
Here is what we found:
ACTIVATING GENERATIVE FIELDS
We live in extraordinary times. The turn of the millennium brough the pressing realization that every human being, as a member of a globalizing set of nations, cultures, and economies, must find better ways to compete and collaborate. To build a better world in an era of profound economic and enviromental interdependence, each person, each country, each organization is challenged to sift through the wisdom and know-how of their heritage, to take the best from their histories, leave behind lessons that no longer serve them, and innovate, not for change's sake, but for the sake of conserving and preserving the values and competence they find most essential and precious.
~ Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
Our pressing problems can no longer be solved by experts as no one has expertise in solving our complex set of global hairballs. Since we have no way of knowing where solutions will come from, we are best facilitated by participating in a collaborative framework in which everyone's views are honored. When everyone owns the process of coming up with solutions, everyone is more willing to implement the collaborated solutions.
Generative fields give everyone, diverse communities of multidisciplinary individuals, an environment to collectively brainstorm innovative solutions. Once potential solutions are inspired by collectively brainstormed intuitive leaps, they can be quickly prototyped to capture possible ways of contributing to a lasting solution.
The set of components that work together to create a generative field are like the TV Series, Chopped, where participating chefs are given baskets of normally incongruent ingredients (minced chicken, green tea leaves, Wheatabix, Black Muscat grapes) and told to whip up an entrée in thirty minutes.
By learning how to combine the following ingredients, communities create a generative field, a learning environment, that supports all participants to contribute to lasting solutions.
☆ Self-Transformation
Case-in-Point | Harvard Kennedy School of Government
(Ron Heifetz and Marty Linskey)
Case-in-Point facilitates self-transformation by allowing all participants to experience how their current worldview is in the way of solving problems for which there are no ready-made answers.
☆ Generative Dialogue
Presencing / Theory U | MIT (Otto Scharmer)
Otto Scharmer's contribution facilitates a shift from Ego to Eco centric dialogue. Theory U integrates a comprehensive, collective process for co-generating breakthrough solutions to systemically-embedded problems.
☆ Prototyping Practices
Design Thinking | Stanford dSchool (David Kelley)
Design Thinking gives everyone access to being breakthrough thinkers and doers through participating in multidisciplinary teams for radical collaboration. Design thinking uses prototyping to discover new solutions to problems mundane or enormous.
Design Sprints | Google (Jake Knapp)
Design Sprints are a framework for teams of any size to solve and test design problems in 2-5 days.
☆ Distributed Organizing
Change Leadership | Harvard Kennedy School (Marshall Ganz)
Marshall Ganz teaches organizers to work within identified communities to build resources for gaining influence that ultimately affects change.
Professor Ganz is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign. Obama's campaign as grassroots movement became the ultimate example of the neighborhood model in action as it wove together the work of neighborhoods across the United States while maintaining a local feel on a national scale.
☆ Collective Governance
LEAN CULTURE | Collective Governance from the values of the Lean Movement:
Lean Manufacturing | Toyota (Kiichiro Toyoda)
The aim of lean manufacturing is to eliminate all processes that do not create value. The basic insight of lean thinking is that if you train every person to deliver more value at less expense you simultaneously develop everyone's confidence, competence and ability to work effectively with others.
Lean Startup | Silicon Valley (Eric Reis)
Eric Ries brought to the startup world the idea, based on Lean Manufacturing, that it is quantitatively more efficient to work backward from the business results you are working to achieve than it is to work forward from an idea for a product or service.
Case-in-Point | Harvard Kennedy School of Government
(Ron Heifetz and Marty Linskey)
Case-in-Point facilitates self-transformation by allowing all participants to experience how their current worldview is in the way of solving problems for which there are no ready-made answers.
☆ Generative Dialogue
Presencing / Theory U | MIT (Otto Scharmer)
Otto Scharmer's contribution facilitates a shift from Ego to Eco centric dialogue. Theory U integrates a comprehensive, collective process for co-generating breakthrough solutions to systemically-embedded problems.
☆ Prototyping Practices
Design Thinking | Stanford dSchool (David Kelley)
Design Thinking gives everyone access to being breakthrough thinkers and doers through participating in multidisciplinary teams for radical collaboration. Design thinking uses prototyping to discover new solutions to problems mundane or enormous.
Design Sprints | Google (Jake Knapp)
Design Sprints are a framework for teams of any size to solve and test design problems in 2-5 days.
☆ Distributed Organizing
Change Leadership | Harvard Kennedy School (Marshall Ganz)
Marshall Ganz teaches organizers to work within identified communities to build resources for gaining influence that ultimately affects change.
Professor Ganz is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign. Obama's campaign as grassroots movement became the ultimate example of the neighborhood model in action as it wove together the work of neighborhoods across the United States while maintaining a local feel on a national scale.
☆ Collective Governance
LEAN CULTURE | Collective Governance from the values of the Lean Movement:
Lean Manufacturing | Toyota (Kiichiro Toyoda)
The aim of lean manufacturing is to eliminate all processes that do not create value. The basic insight of lean thinking is that if you train every person to deliver more value at less expense you simultaneously develop everyone's confidence, competence and ability to work effectively with others.
Lean Startup | Silicon Valley (Eric Reis)
Eric Ries brought to the startup world the idea, based on Lean Manufacturing, that it is quantitatively more efficient to work backward from the business results you are working to achieve than it is to work forward from an idea for a product or service.
Business Model Canvas | University of Lausanne (Alexander Osterwalder)
The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management template for developing new or documenting existing business models. It was initially proposed by Alexander Osterwalder and is based on his PhD thesis on Business Model Ontology.
The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management template for developing new or documenting existing business models. It was initially proposed by Alexander Osterwalder and is based on his PhD thesis on Business Model Ontology.
A good starting point to design science in IS is provided by March and Smith (1995). They define it as an attempt to create things that serve human purposes, as opposed to natural and social sciences, which try to understand reality (Au 2001). March and Smith outline a design science framework with two axes, namely research activities and research outputs (see Figure 2). Research outputs cover constructs, models, methods and instantiations. Research activities comprise building, evaluating, theorizing on and justifying artifacts. ~ Alexander Osterwalder, The Business Model Ontology: A proposition in a design science approach
Recently, we pivoted our work to Tanzania, where government leaders are leading national community development (rather than finagling to use work like ours to own the next election).