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Chris Hammon / Leadership for an Emerging Future
Written by A. Christopher Hammon, D.Min.   
Monday, 18 May 2009 00:00
Dr. Chris HammonIt used to be that the professional training we received during the schooling period of our lives when we acquired the initial degrees that credentialed us to do what we do was considered adequate preparation for a lifetime of work with just a bit of annual continuing education to bring us up to date. This approach of banking learning for future use worked once upon a time, sort of. But those days are gone.

Amid an environment of change, survival depends on an organism’s or an organization’s ability to learn and adapt at a rate that is greater than or equal to the rate of change (L ≥ C). The faster the rate of change, the faster we have to learn and adapt.

As we look toward leading into an emerging future, it is much more likely now that the knowledge required for what we are doing this week didn’t exist a year ago, at least not in the form that is called for now. As the Director of Online Learning and Publication for the Wayne Oates Institute, I work in an environment that we were just beginning to envision when I completed my Master of Divinity degree almost 30 years ago. And we use applications and tools that did not yet exist when I completed my doctorate just five years ago. While it is still possible to hold online conferences using the same protocols that we used ten years ago, it is no longer the best practice simply because so many new platforms and more effective approaches are now available. But here is the tricky part. To really take advantage of what I can do now, I have to unlearn parts of how we did it before. The banked knowledge from yesterday has not only lost value and effectiveness; it hinders my ability to work efficiently and creatively with the new knowledge and the new ways we can do things. Not having to unlearn outdated protocols and platforms is the key advantage that younger persons currently have in the online environment. This is true not only for my particular field of ministry but for almost everyone.

The challenge now is how do we adapt our personal learning approaches and the opportunities offered by our educational providers from preschool to post graduate school to serve our just-in-time learning needs for today? How do we open ourselves to innovative approaches that are emerging rather than turning to downloading out of date approaches that we have banked away during previous learning or using the “tried and true” approaches that used to work well? There are currently more than 3,000 new books being published each day and we are currently doubling our total knowledge base every two years. Technical knowledge that a beginning master’s degree student learns is likely to be out of date by the time he or she enters the workforce after graduation. Not all knowledge, of course, but a sufficient amount to raise our concern.

The rate of change is only part of the challenge, though. The more significant challenge is how we adapt to the changes. It is how we adapt our approaches to learning and to providing educational opportunities, particularly for professional learning. The questions I keep asking are what do I need to learn in order to accomplish this next project or to relate to the people with whom I am going to be working? And where might I go to learn it this month? It doesn’t seem to matter whether it is a question of file sharing for collaboration over geographical distance, approaches to pastoral care for families in an era of social networking and multiple identities, or a clinical basis for counseling amid a multiplicity of worldviews.

This is already normative among digital natives; not so much because of our educational institutions but because of the Internet and video gaming cultures that have nurtured the emergence of a new pedagogy of just-in-time, experiential, collaborative learning. Just watch a teenager learn a new video game and you will see what I mean. They jump in and start out hands on, trial and error. Then they do online research and talk to their friends (collaborative, reflective peer group learning), looking for insights for mastering the game. In the process they sort through vast amounts of information from both the Internet and their friends according to their perceptions of the quality of information and relevance to the task at hand. Then they jump back into the game to give their newly acquired insights practical application to see what happens; repeating the process until they master the game or some other reason causes them to interrupt the process. In the midst of this they are accumulating skills in discerning information and resources to trust, as well as skills in the use of various technologies and awareness of discerning concerns amid the presentation of challenges and how to formulate practical approaches to addressing those concerns. Attention deficit? Not when they are learning that which they perceive to be relevant to what they are doing now. But they see no value in learning knowledge or skills that may be applicable at some future date since they have no confidence that the knowledge or skills will still be applicable if and when they might actually need them.

It was interesting to hear Jeff Palfry, author of Born Digital, comment recently on Book TV that when asked for specific information 100% of the teenagers in their study turned first to Google to look it up. There is no sense of a need to have information stored in one’s brain when one can just google it. What was perceived as important was knowing how and where to access information when needed and how to discern which information had quality and relevance. This is key to just-in-time learning.

But what does this have to do with our journey to explore Theory U and leading from an emerging future? Everything; especially since our primary recognition is that the complexity and interconnectedness of the concerns that we are addressing today prompt us to discover new approaches rather than downloading yesterday’s solutions. The temptation is to turn first to the stored data of how we have done it before or to approach solutions out of what we already know how to do. What we are being called to do from a theory of the U perspective, however, is to pause to listen more deeply to the concern we seek to address, penetrate the narratives to a deeper level, and then let go to see what opportunities await us in light of who we are and who we want to be. Then discern what it is that we need to do and what we need to know in order to do it. Then we are ready to act in terms of learning and implementing what seems the right thing to do.

What does this mean for the way we design professional education for the future?  It shifts the valued skills to knowing how to learn and unlearn. It places the emphasis on listening more deeply to the world around us and to discern the greater complexity and interconnectedness of issues that we seek to address. It places value not on storing the data of what we have done in the past within our minds but on our ability to access and sort through collections of that information that is available at our fingertips and to then discern what has qualitative value to us and what does not. It calls for skills to reflect on our experience and to learn from our experience within our particular contexts. It calls for developing trusted connections and networks for engaging in collaborative and reflective peer learning.

And then we get into the stories of our journey. One of the things that I keep encountering is that until I dump off some of my earlier learning, I tend to go straight to the way that I have done it before (downloading past solutions and approaches) rather than being open to the creative and innovative opportunity I anticipate emerging. More on this in a Part 2 to come.

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