A Futures Context
Rethinking Process
Framing a Learning Community
Rethinking Capacity
Suggested Community ActionRethinking Meaning
Taking the First Step
Conclusion
References
About the Author
Rewiring a Community’s Brain for the 21st Century: Aligning the Cosmic Dance
by Rick Smyre
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There are unseen connections growing in our local communities as a result of constant change. The fast pace of these connections creates complex cultural and historical processes that call into question traditional underlying assumptions of how we learn, educate, govern, economically develop, lead, and especially how we think. Look around. Tectonic plates of cultural change are in evidence everywhere. In all sectors of society, there are apparent contradictions at work. Business gurus tell us to “think globally, act locally.” Concepts of education differ, emphasizing both updated, traditional public-school approaches and new market approaches. “Small is beautiful” coexists with the age of the huge. And everywhere there are increased connections in an increasingly fast-paced, interdependent, and complex world.
But just as soon as new connections are made, others are broken. Knowledge is quickly obsolete. Management students in the ‘60s were taught to build models that represented the future. Today, students are taught to develop probable scenarios in order to respond to different situations as they occur. In the ‘60s the concept of accurate prediction was a central principle of strategic planning. Now computer models look for patterns instead of specific outcomes.
It is as if new organizational and community brains are emerging, connecting diverse people and ideas without prediction, offering innovations that build on the backs of past thinkers, yet shifting in basic concept as we move to a totally different type of society—one increasingly mobile, interconnected, and constantly integrating the old with the new.
As society becomes more fluid and changing, underlying concepts of how society works also change. There is transformation, moving beyond the type of change that improves what has existed for years, i.e., reform.
Traditions break apart as larger and more complex systems emerge from the integrations of existing values and structures. Many of the assumptions that have undergirded our industrial society for two hundred years are crumbling. This chapter will attempt to establish a framework for understanding how new concepts of learning will be needed to help identify, develop, and apply a few of these new assumptions.
As a result of our present societal stresses, a twenty-first century futures context seems to be evolving—as if a new community brain were developing, connecting diverse people, new ideas, and fundamentally different concepts, methods, and techniques.
Few local leaders have recognized that communities are in the early stages of a dramatic transformation. Most leaders who have begun to see change as important, have continued to use a traditional filter to understand it. First identified by Alvin Toffler in the book Future Shock in 1972, the idea of an increased pace of change as a cultural phenomenon seeped into the consciousness of communities over the next thirty years, as if a new neurotransmitter suddenly increased the connections of an expanding brain.
By the early 1990s, the idea of a “learning community” was introduced by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline. Over the last decade, it has become apparent that the dynamic of constant change and the transformation of society require a different approach to learning in several ways. Without the structure of the learning experience adapting to the evolution of a futures context, communities will continue to utilize obsolete ideas within the context of inappropriate structures.
Traditional learning focuses on content. An underlying assumption has been that appropriate knowledge is already known and must be transferred from one generation to another. As new knowledge is gained, it is added to the old. Accountability and testing reinforce the idea of standard knowledge. Tradition focuses on the one best answer. True/false and multiple-choice testing have been the mainstay of evaluating whether learning has occurred. Learning in a Society of Constant Change
But as the pace of change increases in society, knowledge explodes, more people are born, telecommunications expand, and connections increase exponentially. A society of interdependence replaces a society of independence. New patterns emerge from new connections. There is a richness of outcomes as the cosmic dance of reality unfolds.
In a society that is changing and evolving, standard answers are not appropriate. For example, someone who studies civil engineering in college will need to understand that 25-30% of the knowledge learned by the time of graduation will be obsolete. Thus, the concept of content must change from absolute information to core competence. The learner must become a dynamist, comfortable with new information and challenging old knowledge. Learning in the future will be generative, not static. For this to occur, any learner will need two additional skills—the ability to ask appropriate questions and the ability to connect apparently disparate ideas within a futures context. The connection of these skills will lead to continuous innovation.
Recently I was asked to design a new approach to learning that would allow students in various parts of the world to take advantage of our Community-of-the-Future concept of transformational learning. I attempted to create a research and development project that would test my ability to frame a new type of experience leading to real, individual “transformation” of thinking on the part of those with whom I would be working over the Internet. Realizing that time was limited and that my initial two test students were motivated, I designed a radically different approach of interaction. I titled the project “reciprocal learning” to reflect the fact that I would be learning to facilitate a new approach to systemic thinking within a futures context (transformational learning), and at the same time the students were hopefully benefiting from my guidance.
Here’s how it worked. I identified a list of books, web sites, and articles appropriate in various ways for an “overview of community transformation.” Ordinarily, I would have suggested specific readings. This time, however, I reversed the process. Instead of asking questions to find out if the students had understood the readings, I asked different types of questions that would help guide the students in their own self-organized learning processes. For example, “What will need to occur for communities to rethink and restructure their local institutions if one assumes that the very assumptions of how we lead, how governance occurs, how we do economic development, and how learning occurs, will be transformed due to an increasingly fast-paced, interconnected, and complex society?”
I wanted each of the students to struggle to think about what factors, issues, concepts, and actions would need to be considered. I wanted each of them consciously and subconsciously to take control of their own learning—and did they ever! Each student achieved more than I expected with the most optimistic scenario. The most interesting outcome, and the center of my learning experience, was that each student developed a different path to understanding the concept of COTF’s Community Transformation.
As a result of my experience, I quickly conceived the first principle of reciprocal “transformational” learning: The role of a teacher is transformed to that of a coach. The second principle of reciprocal learning flows from the first: There are many paths to success and the coach cannot predict the outcomes of learning. From this experience I found that motivated students can quickly increase their learning through self-organization as they integrate new information, form questions, and make innovative, disparate connections. I also found that this type of learning does not occur unless all three factors are involved simultaneously. I now have a better understanding of the great potential of reciprocal learning, and I now know that chaos/complexity theory can be applied to education and be successful.
Diana lives in California, and has a strong advanced educational background with a broad range of knowledge. She is not a typical student. However, I have often found that the more content knowledge one has, the less open to new ideas one may be. I wanted to see if Diana would be open to new ideas, and to see if I could take advantage of her background of knowledge in a positive way. When I framed the learning experience for Diana and for Michael, a student in Japan, my objective was to help them come to an understanding of the new COTF concepts of community transformation. Would it be possible to shift the thinking of well-educated students from old ways of looking at things? Would it be possible to add totally new knowledge in such a way that the students would understand COTF’s twenty-first century approach to community transformation?
After I gave the list of resources and questions to Diana and Michael, I told them to get back to me when necessary—but that I didn’t want them to do so until they needed my guidance. Within twelve days, I heard from Michael and began an intermittent dialogue. However, it was two months before I heard from Diana. When I heard from her, it took me by complete surprise. Not only had she begun to understand our concepts, she had mastered the underlying assumptions. As far as I was concerned, she had met the objective of the course. Sorry to keep you waiting so long. I have read most of the Creating Learning Communities book which has been a great introduction to alternative education philosophies and projects (I will deal with these articles in another message).
However, to address the issues you raised [regarding concepts that help construct a framework for reorganizing the learning experience, ideas on learning, and examples of reforming vs. transforming concepts, and underlying assumptions from Creating Learning Communities contrasted with Hunter¹s article (in Pathways to Sustainability), and comparison of Hunter and Ellis on their perspective of “context”], I found it was helpful to get a better grounding in the COTF/futures terminology and concepts, so I have been reading your articles.
These readings have helped me address some of the areas in a general way. I hope this initial venture into the field combined with a more long-term focus, i.e., the issues you raised which I will keep in mind as I proceed, will be my own parallel processes, and that after additional reading, I will see things a little more clearly. In the meantime, I propose to:
- Read more from the COTF website, specifically follow links on the “Principles” page;
- Go back and read more in Pathways to Sustainability (I have read several chapters already, but reading the last chapter stimulated me to want to read more);
- Find out about The Natural Step (from Sweden) and The Ecological Footprint (Wackernagel and Rees);
- Attend a community planning and development public hearing at which community residents will express their opinions on the General Plan and an Environmental Impact Report;
- Read the booklet about the Blackburg Electronic Village (which I sent away for).
Thanks for any comments you might have on how I am proceeding and my seven points below. At this stage, I am still finding my way around the terms and concepts and will be adding to my understanding of them as I read more, but I feel like I now have a better grasp of them, thanks to your articles. I will keep plowing ahead with the proposed next steps listed above and any others you might suggest.
Sincerely, Diana
Fukuyama, Francis. The Great Disruption. The Free Press. 1999About the Author
Goerner, Sally. Beyond the Clockwork World. 1999
Grossman, Lawrence. The Electronic Republic. NY: Penguin Books. USA 1995
Postrel, Virginia. The Future and Its Enemies. The Free Press. 1999
Restak, Richard, MD. The Brain. Bantam Books. 1985
Sherrington, Charles Sir. Quoted in Restak, The Brain.
Andrew Cohill, Ph.D. and Joseph Kruth, editors. Pathways to Sustainability: