Disrupting Disruptive Innovation

In my last post, I made a strong statement about innovation: "Innovation is always framed by inauthenticity". I want to  explore this.

What I mean is that the instinct to make new stuff is part of a pathological process. Stafford Beer complained about this in his 'Platform for Change'. Beer identifies the maker of new stuff as 'homo faber', where homo faber has been the dominant figure in industrialised society. He wants to see the emergence of 'homo gubernator' instead: the steersman who finds the best way to be in the world that exists without creating new 'stuff' to solve individual problems, but instead to find the best ways of organising and coordinating what's already there. By implication, homo gubernator is more 'authentic'. (It's worth saying that Beer's greatest fear is not homo faber, but who he calls 'homo pontificus', the "harbinger of extinction"!)

Whilst it seems crazy to say 'innovation bad', there is clearly a fine line to tread. Innovation enframes: the desperate attempts to deal with the nuclear disaster in Japan at the moment show how one engineering intervention in the world necessitates numerous others to deal with the consequences of the first. It is easy to get lost in the labyrinth of dealing with unintended consequences. This, I think is particularly true of educational innovation.

At some point, there is a moment where someone says "But what's it all about? How have we got here? Does it have to be like this? Given what's happening, what does this tell us about the world?" These are powerful questions and demand a return to authenticity to face them. They are homo gubernator questions. They also demand a level of honesty as people retreat from their innovative ways (to which they have become deeply attached) and are forced to look at the world afresh. It would seem that for every innovation, there may be a corresponding "therapy" where the homo faber instinct is counterpoised by the homo gubernator question: "do you want an iPad2 - or do you want counselling?"; "do you want a portfolio system, or do you want to think what matters in education?"; "do you want an electric car or do you want to rethink our attitude to geography and space?", and so on.

I'm uncomfortable with Christensen's work on Disruptive Innovation because what he's sees as disruptive is just another innovation; just another way of continuing the pathology of the enframing, albeit by coming at things in a different way - but that's often the nature of innovation anyway (if you don't even come at things in a different way, then I would have thought it hardly counts as innovation at all!). Authenticity means going for the powerful question, the homo gubernetor questions, which seek to grasp at the causes of the present condition. Grasping the causes of the world is like an artist understanding their material: one would hope that the intentions of an artist emerge in harmony with the nature of the material which is shaped.

But within this movement to authenticity, the inauthenticity of innovation and the pathology it entails is probably necessary in establishing the conditions for asking the powerful question. That's an uncomfortable conclusion, because it means that within the reflexivity of each of us there is a need to balance the energy of pursuing an enframed making, whilst be sensible enough to know when to stop and think. The serenity prayer springs to mind....!

Risk, Responsibility and Innovation diffusion

To imagine somebody watching the mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima and saying "gosh! that's innovative!" seems an unlikely (and somewhat dark-humoured) scenario. But why? Clearly, it was innovative in the sense that we often think about innovation; and it 'caught-on' - it was diffused as 'early adopters' were rapidly joined by 'early majority' users. We may be beginning to see the 'late majority' (although if the late majority gets its way, there's a risk we'll all be 'late'!).

I think this scenario tells us something about how we imagine innovation and frame it within a restricted social setting. Nobody said "gosh, that's innovative' about the atom bomb because I think anybody seeing that terrible event would immediately feel the ethical impact on themselves and the world. They were not apart from the events; they were part of them. It was humankind which had brought this power into being.

When we do say "that's innovative", I think there is an implied separation between ourselves and our human condition and the technology we are commenting on. The separation is created because for most of the time, we have a view of ourselves as humans which is framed by our daily concerns and preoccupations: we face 'problems' in daily life, and often mistake our being for the dealing with those problems. Our 'selves' as 'problem-facing' entities becomes separate from our selves as authentic beings. The problem-facing self sees something in the world created by someone else who is living a similar inauthentic existence, facing similar problems and dealing with them in new ways. We see these ways they deal with their problems, and then we can say "that's innovative!".

Innovation is framed by inauthentic experience.

Innovation in education then becomes problematic, because education, in dealing with human goods, must deal with authentic experience. If it doesn't, it may deepen the sense of alienation. Of course, alienation and inauthenticity may lead to new 'innovation' which in turn can lead to new inauthenticity and alienation, and so on. This is the pathology of 'homo faber'.. a sort of pathological autopoiesis. I suspect it is also a key mechanism in the manufacture of risks in society.

Phenomenology and the risk society

In today's world, everyones' experiences and the actions that arise from them are hard-wired into the things that happen, which in turn feed into our experiences. I'm tempted to say (tentatively):

Experience, maybe more than money, power or class structures, will be a key determining factor in the social transformations of the future (be they good or ill). 

This is why my primary concern is phenomenology (the study of experience). Unlike other techniques of phenomenology (e.g. Husserl's, for example), I use cybernetic tools for understanding how experience works. I think a scientific understanding of how experience works is important as we move away from an industrialized manufacturing economy towards a service-based, reflexive economy, which produces risk and where the experience of risk plays the driving role in keeping our society functioning, and the economy going.

I don't think experience has always had such a dominant role in social emergence: Power and Class could over-ride experience. In less equal societies, were the experiences of the poor worth anything? - at least to the rich? Was it only the rich who determined the patterns of social emergence? Yes.. I suspect it was. I think this is not the case now: the experience of the less wealthy is as important as the rich because everybody consumes as part of the risk economy (and the rich need the poor to consume, which they will only do if they have 'good experiences'). However, what is meant by 'rich' and 'poor' here needs deeper definition: it's not about money, but control. The means of production of risk is Capital.

I think that with Capital which is servitised (riskified?), the rich have become adept at manipulating experiences to keep the process of consumption going. I want to understand what's going on here, because it seems to be at the root of some of our deeper social problems - particularly those concerning the experience of fairness.

OER and Riskless informal learning

I've been at the OER Hackday today. I wasn't intending to go as OER isn't really my thing, but I found it useful anyway. Before I went, I started to think about how OER might link into my thoughts recently on the Risk society, and how Education relates to the societal manufacture of Risk that Beck describes.

There are many use-case models of OER. One is its use in 'informal learning'. I'm a little uneasy about the definition of 'informal learning', but I guess in comparison to 'formal learning' there is a difference in the risk that learners are subjected to by institutions. Formal learning imposes a risk of failure which is absent in informal learning, although informal learning may still carry an imperative related to the context within which the learning occurs.

This leads me to think that one of the questions I've been thinking about, "what is the risk produced by education" can be answered by saying that education creates artificial risk situations which are intended beneficently to aid learning (without the risk of failure, would students do anything?). (it's interesting to compare beneficent risk production with malevolent risk production: Ryanair's risks are intended to catch people out!)

How might this work? Possibly, it could go like this:

EDUCATIONALLY-PRODUCED RISK -->
LEARNER ANXIETY -->
LEARNER CURIOSITY + LEARNING -->
which produces more risk, etc.

Informal learning might then look like:

SOCIETALLY-PRODUCED RISK -->
LEARNER ANXIETY -->
LEARNER CURIOSITY + LEARNING

If the latter is a use-case for OER, then OER must fit into the final stage. However, there is a problem and it relates to what the ANXIETY actually does. If the learner reaches for OER in response to societally-induced RISK, fine. But my reckoning is that this is probably not going to be the first thing they reach for.

If they reach for education at all, then I think it will be through formal learning in institutions. In assessing how the risks of the institution might affect them, there may well be a case for OER ("this is the sort of experience you will have as a student... look! here's a lecture..."). The fact that education carries RISK in response to RISK may be significant.. I'll have to think about that!

OER in itself is essentially RISK-less (at least for learners; not for teachers!), and I think there is a question as to whether a riskless resource can be useful for education (but I'm not sure..).

On looking for ways of dealing with anxiety induced by Risk, the most common thing people do is to reach for palliatives: entertainment. OER might fit here.. but on the whole, it is pretty un-entertaining. Maybe we should give a bottle of whisky to every learner who actually spends a couple of hours with an OER resource! That would be to balance the boredom of watching with the chance of pleasure in the outcome (i.e. getting drunk!). Of course, the risk would be terminal boredom...

The purpose of education in the Risk Society?

There is a central question: in an economy that manufactures risk, what sort of education is required and what is its purpose?

"Everywhere educational reform is accompanied by a dependence on education. More and more groups get caught up in the race for educational credentials. As a result there emerge new internal differentiations. Whilst these may still respond to traditional differences between groups, the impact of education makes them fundamentally different from traditional ones. [...] In conjunction with novel patterns of upward and downward mobility and increasing local labour mobility as well, new hierarchies and differentiations develop which are internal to social classes. They presuppose the expansion of the service sector and the creation of new occupations."(Ulrich Beck, "The Risk Society")

Beck suggests that Berstein's distinction about linguistic performances is central.  How would we teach that? Would that be sufficient for education to meet the needs of the risk society?

Envy and the Feeling of Fairness

We feel things to be unfair. Within the social dynamic of a society, a business, even a family, we might see others gaining opportunities or advantages that we feel are barred to us. Saying "it isn't fair" is perhaps the first response to dealing with the disappointment.

We might say "how do they manage to have such lovely houses/cars/partners/children when I have to struggle?" At the same time, we know that the means by which others have achieved their advantage is not illegal (on the whole, although this might be insinuated) or even unjust: they are not necessarily subject to 'special treatment', or "one law for them, another for the rest of us!". And the perception of fairness or unfairness can be tinged with envy which has little to do with any objective state of social affairs, but rather a psychological state.

But the attribution of 'unfairness' is common in our society, and often identified by others observing a social relation who have not direct personal involvement. The problem centres around the fact that Justice makes no allowance for the differences in Capabilities between individuals. For the distinguishing feature between those that have the nice house/car/family etc and those that don't rests on their Capabilities. Furthermore, some of those Capabilities owe to capital wealth - either through money, or Social capital ("it's not what you know, it's who you know!"). But they also rest on individual Capabilities in being able to communicate effectively in establishing increased social capital (cultural capital is linked to this, but I think there are other aspects of individual make-up which contribute too).

The capabilities of individuals cannot necessarily be addressed through the increase in monetary wealth. It may be that monetary wealth can even reduce overall capacity as it overwhelms and introduces new complexities. It may be that the capabilities of individuals can only be addressed through education.

Is it correct that education is at the heart of a 'campaign' to combat unfairness? Is unfairness to be combatted, or merely to be managed? Does Ibn Khaldun's definition of government ("to prevent injustice other than that which it creates itself") also apply to unfairness? How does charging for education affect this picture?

Sea Drift

Astrid and I went to a fantastic concert in Manchester last Thursday where we heard Delius's 'Sea Drift' which was a profound experience for me because it took me back to music which I was devoted to in my teens and have largely ignored since (partly through the snobbery about Delius in academic music circles). But it really is pure magic, and all the questions that buzzed through my head when I was a teenager came flooding back: how does he do it? Why does this sound so magical?

My first thought now is that the nature of a music is a caress. Musical caresses take a variety of forms. Much is achieved through texture: a suspended note which is then accompanied with a rich harmony a moment later. Suspensions in 16th century polyphony are of this sort... As are Bach fugues.

What about the melting harmonies of Delius? These are closely related to tritone substitution techniques of jazz (he learnt this when he was on the Florida cotton plantations). What do they do? How do they caress? I think they slow down the caressing motion by subtly disrupting expectations, and hovering between disruption and exhortation.

The caress is there, but it is distended. The technique is similar to Wagner's Tristan. But Delius does something Wagner doesn't... The climax isn't there... Just a continual seduction which suggests the possibility of a climax.  Wagner's prolongations are directed; Delius's prolongation is there for its own sake... Simply there to be magical.