Tonight the crew – Diane Huckabay, Jill Hurst-Wahl, Paul Signorelli, Tom Haymes, and Maurice Coleman – was joined by Dr. Ruben Puentedura. Ruben “is the Founder and President of Hippasus, a consulting firm based in Western Massachusetts, focusing on transformative applications of information technologies to education.”
Ruben started by giving us an overview of his work. He has worked around the world and through that work has seen different patterns emerge as he has worked with different educational institutions. In an overview of his work and what he has been hearing, he mentioned anti-fragility, learn from learning, learn from what you have experienced, credentialing processes used in academia, and exploration of new paths into existing planning. He then discussed the lack of portable water in Jackson, MS, and how that situation could benefit from what people are doing/learning in other countries. His final examples – before we began Q&A – was to talk about the change in student test scores during the COVID pandemic. Ruben is focused on how people think through these situations. While we cannot transfer what one group did to another situation, we can learn from how people think in specific situations.
And after a very interesting introduction to all this (above) from Ruben, the group began to discuss and ask questions. During our conversation we noted that data is boring and so telling stories is important. Our stories need to be data informed. As Diane said, “The stories contribute meaning.” Metaphors are important.
How do we teach organizations to be failure tolerant and take risks? We need cultures that are willing to try new things, create communities of practice, and learn from what they are doing. Success organizations are willing to talk about what works and doesn’t work, and learn from that. The organizations must have innovation as a shared value.
You can listen to this episode on TalkShoe or wherever you get your podcast episodes.
Resources
Nassim Nicholas Nicholas Taleb. (2014) Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. (paid link)
Tom Haymes. (2021) Designing Antifragile Learning Systems.
Tom Haymes. (2021) Making Our Learning Networks Antifragile.
T is for Training 