Looking Into the Extreme Future
My notes and takeaways from Ian Jukes and Lee Crockett’s session titled: Looking Into the Extreme Future.
We live in exponential times. What does this mean? How do we quality that? 30 linear steps get you to 30. 30 exponential steps get you to one billion. Change is so rapid know we can no longer predict what is 30 steps or even 10 steps away.
Moore’s Law (1963) stated that technology capacity will double every two years
and cost half as much. For fifty years that has proven to be true. Presenters gave examples of how this has played out in technology since the 1950’s, from mainframe computers to the iphone. Now, Gordon Moore has revised his prediction and estimates doubling every 18 months.
The presenters make the case for Disruptive Innovation, a term I hadn’t heard before. It goes like this: when something new is innovated, it causes its predecessor to become obsolete. Its not just an improvement on something, its a replacement of it. Take for example the phone. The first phone required the user to ring the operator and ask for a connection. Theinnovation of the rotary dial phone let the user dial the number directly. The rotary phone wasn’t just an improvement over the old way, it made it obsolete. That process plays out in cycles to the iphone, for exapmple. The new replaces the old and makes it obsolete. We are living in times if Innovation Disruption.
new things completely replace paradignms
So whats the connection between disruptive innovation and education? Ian shows a chart tracking the growth/decline paths of certain career groups as measured by the US Dept. of Labor and statistics. We focus on thefour larget career groups: Agriculture, Manufacturing, Service and Creative. In 1950, the Ag and Manufacturing jobs comprised 70+% of all jobs in the US. The education system in the US was built on this model. Too bad, though, that today those jobs represent -30% of our workforce. Creative/Prefessional is not our largest area of job opportunity but the existing education system is built for that. we need a new/disruptive system.
“Even good people and good organizations will dissappear if they dont understand disruption innovation.” When the rate of change outside an organization is greater than the amount of change inside the organization, the end is near.”
-CEO, General Electric (i think?)
“In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves perfectly equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
-Eric Hoffer
The theme of thepresentation is that Disruptive Innovation is what’s needed for schools. We need a new model to emerge that renders the existing system completely obsolete. My opinion is, that just as Edison could have never forseen an iPod, neither can we see what the new model should/could/will look like. While I appreciate their passion for wholesale reform and revolution, we can only take one step at a time. We can take only an incremental step forward, that over time, will result in exponential change. We should continue to dream big and make our steps large and in a different direction than before. GREAT session.
More information about Ian and Lee at http://www.committedsardine.com/
