Thinking Aloud ~ Meeting the exponential demand for creativity, ingenuity and Tacit Skills in the #oneplanetworld

An email to a friend

Hi Andrea

 It good to catch up again last night at the Lancashire Construction Best Practice Club event; This was a really interesting meeting and after  I mentioned Sugata Mitra’s new experiments in self-teaching. Here is the link to the TED Talk he gave last year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU

He has virtually proved that learning is an emergent property when small groups of students have access to information they can share.

I feel we are failing our learners if we do not lever the potential of social media and the internet to liberate the creativity all children possess and largely lose as they grow up with the educational model we have used since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution  . Ken Robinson makes this point in probably the most watched TED Talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

Alison’s ideas and work with her Classofyourown Project www.classofyourown.com  is similarly inspirational and a vital tool in engaging children in the STEM subjects.

The problem, of course, as Alison has pointed out, is not with the children, it is with the Teachers and the industry, simply because they were not exposed to this concept of ‘emergent learning’ and the unlimited expectations of their mentors as they grew up.

In reality this educational model never served, but in this time of exponential change, where more children will be passing through education in the next fifty years than have ever done, we cannot create inspirational teachers fast enough to liberate the necessary creativity that will enable us to solve the problems presented in the One Planet World we now inhabit.

The other key issue of course is the necessity we have to reduce the resource and carbon intensity of the built environment by considerable amounts. We must liberate the creativity to do this by design, or resource availability at a price we can afford to pay as a society, will do it for us.

In all this a key point is being missed and this is the need to maintain and generate the ‘tacit’ skills our society requires as my generation passes from the scene. These are not created by this ‘Mitra’ process, powerful and vital though it is. Initiatives like Classofyourown are key to liberating these tacit skills as well.

These thoughts apply to all sectors of society of course not just construction, but the built environment does consume 50% of our resources.

Attached are two articles  that were in the Professional Engineers’ Handbook in 2005 and 2006. There is no point in my being unduly modest at this critical time and I feel they are both prescient and could have been written last week.

The third article attached is from the May 2008 edition of the CIBSE Journal and addresses the other key issue, our need to understand, as an industry the concept that the sustainability journey is just one of continual improvement towards perfect quality.

Kind regards

Derek

 Attachments

Sustainability and the Energy Gap sustainability-and-the-energy-gap2005

Building Towards the Future Sustainability, Building Towards the Future 2006

The Double-headed Coin Double Headed Coin – unformatted – BS

 

Lean Enterprise Institute Webinar Library

LEI Webinar Library

 

LEI webinars are concise, convenient ways to bring you and your team members practical knowledge from leading lean experts. If you’ve got about an hour, an LEI webinar will give you real-life insights into solving the technical and human challenges of sustaining a lean transformation. Webinars include a presentation followed by audience questions.

http://www.lean.org/Events/WebinarHome.cfm

 

Leaders explore systems thinking

Academic, industry and government leaders explore systems thinking

More than 300 guests attended the two-day MIT SDM Conference on Systems Thinking for Contemporary Challenges to hear experts from MIT, industry and government discuss how they use systems thinking to solve some of the world’s most pressing and complex problems.

Sponsored by Global Project Design, Werfen Group/Instrumentation Laboratory, John Deere, Merck, MITRE and United Technologies Research Center (UTRC), the conference addressed Large Complex Systems; Sustainable Systems; Service Systems, and Health Care Systems.

Commissioner George Apostolakis of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) delivered the keynote presentation. He described how the NRC, charged with ensuring that nuclear use is as safe as possible, is implementing a synthesis of Defense in Depth with a Risk-Informed approach based on system thinking. The goal is a safety culture that takes into greater account the psychology of individual behavior.

Mark Jenks, a vice president in Boeing’s 787 program, described the complex process of how the 787 was brought to market; Kevin Otto, founder and president of Robust Systems and Strategy, a research and development consultancy, addressed issues affecting the construction of Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEBs) that will reduce — rather than enlarge — the atmosphere’s already untenable carbon load………………

full story at http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/systems-thinking-conference.html

Presentations from the conference can be viewed at http://sdm.mit.edu/conf10.

Videos are scheduled to be made available on http://sdm.mit.edu by mid-November.

 

The Peak Oil Crisis: The Midterm elections

Friends and colleagues will know that I try to avoid direct discussion of Peak Oil, but every so often an article comes up that is worth dissemination. Such an article is The Peak Oil Crisis: The Midterm elections and it can be found at http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/7671-the-peak-oil-crisis-the-midterms.html .

It ends

“It seems almost certain now that we are actually going to drive ourselves over a great economic cliff with banners of “growth,” “jobs,” “return to the good old days,” and “no taxes” streaming in the wind. It is going to be one hell of a train wreck – unlike anything the American people have ever known.”

This is also directly applicable to the UK as a society; unless we recognise that we must direct, on a balance of probabilities, all our education and research effort to accord with the ‘First Law of Sustainability’ – that ‘in a resource constrained world, goods and services can only grow at the rate that their ‘Resource Intensity’ reduction exceeds that needed to balance the One Planet Equation

1 = P*C*RI’ http://trailblazerbusinessfutures.wordpress.com/the-one-planet-equation

Where is the information below in the UK news?

Alaska’s untapped oil reserves estimate lowered by about 90 percent http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/10/27/alaska.oil.reserves/index.html

(CNN, 27 Oct 2010) — The U.S. Geological Survey says a revised estimate for the amount of conventional, undiscovered oil in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is a fraction of a previous estimate. The group estimates about 896 million barrels of such oil are in the reserve, about 90 percent less than a 2002 estimate of 10.6 billion barrels. (this represents around 10 days current global consumption, if it can all be brought to market at a useful Energy Return On Energy Invested, EROEI  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeBtdwPpTQM&feature=player_embedded – my comment)

Derek

 

The Monster challenging us all

The Monster Challenging Us All

……………….Waiting For “Superman” describes that monster in some detail. It says it was created fifty-plus years ago, at a time when the majority of students were expected to become farmers or factory workers. In the world of the 1950′s, most people were expected to do essentially the same thing every day for the rest of their lives. Every worker was part of the great “economic engine” of the United States. If you didn’t wind up working in a factory or on a farm, you were assumed headed for some other “same thing every day” job in a field such as accounting.

The True Nature Of This Monster

That’s what the film says about the system. But what it doesn’t say is what the system doesn’t support: Students who want to be entrepreneurs… innovators… challengers of conventional thinking. Sorry, that wasn’t part of the equation. The system was designed in the 1950′s, when conformity was king.

After all, being an effective factory worker meant adopting a kind of “assembly line mentality.” You had to become a human “cog” in the giant machinery of the company for which you worked, which meant (a) doing what you’re told, (b) not asking questions, and (c) being afraid to make mistakes. The classic sign on the factory wall back then said “We pay you to work, not to think.”

That’s the kind of worker our educational system was designed to produce when it was first created, and that’s the kind of worker our system is designed to produce today. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of the creative, problem-solving, critical thinking workers — and citizens — America needs! But this point isn’t made in the film.

One thing Waiting For “Superman” does do is unintentionally confirm how “assembly line thinking” is the system’s intended result. It does this by animating the educational process so that it appears to consist of knowledge being poured into the heads of children and of children proceeding down different conveyor belts to either high or low quality classroom settings. This is what we knew how to do in the 1950′s: set up a mechanical system to produce workers who would fit into a mechanical employment reality. Today educational experts — those who put human development ahead of antiquated industrial policy needs — know that real education involves much more………………………

full article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-g-brant/waiting-for-superman-and_b_756804.html

Video Waiting For Superman | Davis Guggenheim http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOnAIdIMoeI&NR=1

http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/

 

Civilisation Change – ‘resource intensity’: the future of education

EU to fund ‘resource revolution’, with strings attached

Published: 06 October 2010

 

Brussels will have to come up with stricter conditions in delivering EU funds and citizens will have to make wide – and sometimes difficult – changes to their lifestyles if the EU is serious about accelerating resource efficiency, experts said yesterday (5 October).

Speaking at a panel debate during the Open Days in Brussels, policymakers and industry experts agreed that in order to speed up Europe’s drive to become a more resource-efficient economy, major changes were needed.

Echoing the sentiments of EU Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik, Polish centre-right MEP Danuta Hübner, chair of the European Parliament’s regional development committee, argued that while good laws exist at both at European and national level, this cannot in itself guarantee the type of changes needed.

‘Civilisational change’ needed

What is required is nothing less than a “civilisational change,” she said, which will on the one hand force EU citizens to change the way they live and consume, and on the other hand demand that EU leaders take a truly long-term focus.

Comprehensive new EU rules for resource efficiency will have to widen their scope beyond the traditional questions of energy use and promote changes in transport, water use, food consumption, building rules and the use of metals, to cite a few examples.

Tie funding to efficiency rules – Commission

Rudolf Niessler, a director in the Commission’s regional policy department, said that regional funds have already “accumulated an enormous stock of projects” to improve resource efficiency, so EU efforts are not starting from scratch.

Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go in “generating the new culture” needed, he said……………

Full story at http://www.euractiv.com/en/specialweek-regions2020/eu-fund-resource-revolution-with-strings-attached-news-498527

 

What are Feed-In Tariffs and why have they been introduced?

By Matthew Easter, SEC Industrial Battery Company

What are Feed-In Tariffs and why have they been introduced?

In the broadest sense, the UK Feed-In Tariffs (or FIT’s as they have become known) are a financial incentive being introduced by the UK government to encourage home owners and businesses to fit renewable energy systems to their properties and generate electricity on a local scale. There are a number of reasons why they have been introduced but, at the most basic level, like many other countries we urgently need to address the fact that our energy consumption requirements continue to increase, whilst in contrast our ability to generate electricity using traditional methods will decrease in the years ahead, as fossil fuel and nuclear power stations are decommissioned but not replaced. The other key objective of this scheme is to facilitate a significant increase in the amount of power we generate nationally from renewable methods, with the aim of meeting the EU target set for the UK of 15% through renewable energy by 2020.

How do the Feed-In Tariffs actually work?

From April 1st 2010, the UK Feed-In Tariff scheme will start and homeowners or commercial businesses/property owners can apply to receive money for every Kilowatt Hour (kWH) of energy generated using approved renewable energy systems that they buy and have installed on their property. There are several different types of renewable energy system included within the FIT scheme, as follows……………

Fullarticle at http://www.lowcarboneconomy.com/community_content/_tips_did_you_know/9207/rss

 

Going Green With Ford – Announcement Video

 

Today we’ve announced the infusion of Microsoft Hohm’s technology into Ford’s aggressive global electrification strategy. So if you missed the live announcement  from the New York Auto Show grab a seat and click play.

Story  and video at http://blog.microsoft-hohm.com/news/10-03-31/Going_Green_With_Ford_ndash_Announcement_Video.aspx

 

Building Online Communities or teams?

Companies Shouldn’t Build Online Communities

by Boris Pluskowski

Forget about Communities. Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. Oh I know that communities are all the rage currently – companies are falling over themselves to create, build and own their very own communities: But with all of these efforts out there, how many of them are yielding real tangible results for the sponsoring organization? It seems that the very concept of communities is a flawed one for most corporations – leading to wasted time, money and effort – and I think I know why……………………..

It seems to me that the failure companies are making starts right at the beginning with a badly formed misconception as to what they really need – and it’s not an online community – it’s an online team.

It may seem as if I’m nit-picking or playing with semantics in making this differentiation – but consider what this simple change in mindset would mean to projects as you think about how to build a great online team instead of an online community. All of a sudden you add dimensions of:

• Direction and Leadership
• Shared Goals, Shared Failures, and Shared Successes
• Ensuring Participation of Diverse Skill Sets
• Tangible Achievement
• Passion, Purpose and Loyalty

Whist still retaining all the collaborative, cooperative and creative structures usually associated with Communities.

I don’t know about you – but I know which one I’d rather build! You tell me – What’s the more  powerful concept?

Full article at http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/2010/04/companies-shouldnt-build-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+business-strategy-innovation+(Blogging+Innovation)&utm_content=Google+UK

 

Today’s leadership challenges demand innovative thinking

 

Today’s leadership challenges demand innovative thinking

By Jim Hunt
GUEST COLUMNIST
March 7, 2010

Working in today’s unstable economy, leaders are facing new challenges filled with uncertainty and increasing complexity. Competition is intense, and the workforce is struggling to do more with less.

Leaders and managers face problems that are rarely simple with clear-cut solutions. Success now demands that decision makers incorporate targeted innovation and new thinking about their organizations and the challenges they face.

Historically, managerial training has encouraged us to believe that for every problem there is a simple solution. Such a quick remedy, however, may not prove to solve the problem at all. In a world where the slightest mistakes become viral media sensations, it is no wonder we routinely hear Dr. Phil’s mantra, “What were you thinking?” In reality the better question may be “How are you thinking?”

One of Leadership Tallahassee’s 10 guiding principles of leadership is “systems thinking” — recognizing and analyzing the complex interaction of structural, technical, political and personnel issues. Systems thinking integrates new perspective to give leaders the ability to see and understand the big picture. In reality, systems thinking encourages smart design and lasting solutions.

Our fast-paced workplaces are filled with information overload and the expectation of immediate response. Col. George E. Reed, a former director of command and leadership studies at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., speaking on systems thinking said, “While it may be important to orient on values, goals and objectives, the urgent often displaces the important.”

One of the major impediments to systems thinking is the problem of busy-ness, Col. Reed explains. “Immersed in the myriad details of daily existence, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.” Leaders must temper a demand for simplicity and certainty in a volatile and complex environment………………

Full story at http://www.tallahassee.com/article/20100307/BUSINESS/3070336/1003/Today+s+leadership+challenges+demand+innovative+thinking