The Journal of Petroleum Technology recently published a piece by David Goldberg on how the Six Minds of a Whole New Engineer can be applied to the petroleum industry:
Petroleum engineers have played a pivotal role in the rise of the modern engineer, and they can once again join hands to rejuvenate their own discipline and engineering as a thriving whole.
Read the full article, here.
@OlinCollege and @BigBeacon are pleased to announce the short course Facilitating Change that Sticks, 9-11 June 2015 (Tues-Thurs) at Franklin W. Olin College.
This three-day workshop develops participant skills and strategies for creating change that “sticks.” In particular, we dive into a set of personal and organizational skills that will help participants develop both personally and professionally as effective change agents:
Through provocative readings, transformative experiential activities, and lively discussions we develop crucial frameworks for thinking about change, increase participants’ hands-on skills thereby enabling participants to return home as qualified change agents, and increase participants capability to be reflective and supportive in their teaching practice and their change leadership efforts.
More information is available at the link here or write deg@threejoy.com or sharon.breitbart@olin.edu.
Olin College admissions officer Grant Hooton reviewed Dave Goldberg and Mark Somerville’s A Whole New Engineer.
The purpose of the book is to give insight on how to bring about change successfully, and explain and justify the necessary changes. These are captured in the five pillars of education transformation: ‘joy,’ ‘trust,’ ‘courage,’ ‘openness,’ and ‘connectedness, collaboration, and community.’ The authors propose that letting these pillars guide our instruction, we will produce the kinds of constructive education experiences that are necessary for tomorrow’s engineer. This should not be surprising to Oliners, because we live and breathe these pillars in all aspects of our lives.
Read more of Hooton’s thoughts, here.
“What a jerk!”
“I’m an idiot”
“WTF?”
“Yes, but…”
“That’s not the correct way!”
“It ought to be like this.”
“How could I be so stupid?”
We tell these things to ourselves and others on an all too regular basis, to the point where it affects our productivity at work and in everyday life. How can we make our self-talk healthier? David Goldberg leads us to question the source of our discontent:
What is the judgment about? Whom is the judgment about? To what extent is judgment of others mixed with judgment of self. What is the balance between positive and negative judgment? To what extent does the judgment serve the client? To what extent does the judgment lead to useful action? To unproductive action? A key in bringing it to light is to not judge the judging, but to be curious about it, wonder about its purpose, consider its sources, and the degree to which it serves the client.
Read here for more ways to handle critical self-talk.
David Goldberg and Mark Somerville’s A Whole New Engineer outlines the challenges facing engineering today and offers solutions on how to adapt to 21st century needs.
Today’s civil engineer increasingly needs to combine the leadership spirit of the profession’s pioneering days in the 1800s with today’s technical and social knowledge and know-how. This situation calls on today’s civil engineers to be more broadly educated and capable than in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when a narrower kind of training and practice were the norm.
What are the Six Minds? Learn more here.
I gave a talk at NUS on Thursday entitled Are You Ready to Flip? Responding to Deep Faculty Challenges in an Era of MOOCs & Pervasive Online Expertise. Here’s the abstract:
The blogosphere is abuzz with MOOCs, massive, open, online courses, in which lectures are conveyed to thousands or tens of thousands of students around the globe, and the possibility of the flipped classroom, where such widely available online content is assigned outside the classroom, and classroom time is used for active learning and reflective activity. These most recent changes come at a time when the role of the professor as research authority is challenged 24/7 by ubiquitous online resources and expertise available to graduate students at the push of an internet button
Though much has been written about the technological side of these changes, the human challenges these developments pose for successful professors and lecturers are less frequently addressed. This talk begins by considering how all these challenges stem from a reduction in information asymmetry and how this reduction challenges the very notion of the faculty member’s privileged position as expert.
The talk then turns to work in deep faculty development (DFD) pioneered at NUS over the last 2 and a half years. Since its inception, this approach has spread to the US through work at iFoundry & Olin College (i2e2.olin.edu) to South America at UFMG and with the aid of Harvard-affiliated LASPAU (www.laspau.havard.edu) and to Europe through work at TUDelft and Politecnico Milano. Using an amalgam of results from leadership studies, executive coaching, neuroscience, and mindfulness research, the approach helps faculty members develop deep noticing, listening, questioning (NLQ), and narrative design skills necessary in these fluid and creative times.
The talk highlights the concrete benefits of this approach to faculty career development, success, and happiness and concludes with an invitation to attend a short series of deep faculty development workshops open to NUS faculty this semester (semester 2).
I have written and spoken about the need for engineering education change, but this is the first time I directed similar arguments at an individual faculty member’s expertise in teaching and research.
The powerpoint slides from the talk are available in the viewer below:
[slideshare id=16414270&doc=ready-to-flip-2-7-2013-v2-130207225809-phpapp02]
Those interested in workshops like those described should consider the I2E2 workshop, Change that Sticks, this summer (here) or write to me at deg@threejoy.com.
In “Do Universities Retard the Development of Their Faculty?” (October 21, 2012), David Goldberg highlights a seldom-observed consequence of the modern academic organism. Drawing on his review of literature in the field of adult psychological development, also known as constructive-developmental psychology, Goldberg concludes (in my own words) that universities’ focus on securing and strengthening knowledge comes at the expense of their own faculty members’ acquisition of greater wisdom. Goldberg laments this limitation on an individual faculty member’s “yearnings to develop and move beyond the bounds of [Expert stage of development, as described by Jane Loevinger et al.].”
Inspired by such authors as Bill Plotkin and Margaret Wheatley, and roused to action by the current era’s well-documented, unprecedented complexity, I join Goldberg’s lamentation while suggesting a subtly different view of universities, a perspective informed by abundant appreciation for their gifts to humankind as well as their limitations:
Humankind is experiencing need for capacities greater than those cultivated by universities up until now. Like a skeleton or a particular genetic sequence, today’s universities support certain forms of development and prevent others. Their strengths are, paradoxically, also their weakness. We ought to consider generating wholly new organizational structures, as well variations within universities, to support individual development beyond Expert stage.
Hooray for Universities and Education!
Let’s truly celebrate the contribution of universities to our species’ development of the capacity for self-authorship. Once upon a time – and even today in some places on Earth – education has sought to generate sufficient knowledge and wisdom for a child only to conform to social expectations and not to exceed them. Many girls and women today feel the press of this expectation more tightly than do boys and men.
Yet today, we largely take for granted the pursuit of intellectual independence, whether by man or by woman, if undertaken for the sake of discovering scientific truths that happen to contradict the prevailing mindset. To an extent greater than before the advent of universities, parents today encourage their children to leave home, learn about the world, and strike out on their own independent paths.
Our educational systems and their flagships, universities, serve as defenders of both expertise and Expert-ism. They form bulwarks against a society’s Diplomat-ist tendency to hold students and faculty alike within the constraints of deference, politeness, or social station. We ought to appreciate the great evolutionary gift universities have given to our species: Universities have secured an individual’s right to develop an independent sense of self amid a world of tangled human commitments, statuses, and proprieties.
A Design Feature, not a Flaw
Seen in this light, we can return to the question of “retarded development” for university faculty with a fresh perspective. Universities do not fail at the task of developing their faculty members (or students, or communities) to later stages of development so much as they excel at promoting development up to Expert stage.
Indeed, setting aside some approaches to continuing education, universities have accepted no developmental task beyond consolidating their learners at Expert stage. The learning contract involves students absorbing data, acquiring a technique, or otherwise expanding their knowledge without having to change the fundamental ways in which they make sense out of the world.
Further, universities largely presume that their faculty members already possess Expert meaning-making capacities, and universities generally accept no claim to existence for the purpose of transforming the mindsets of their faculty-as-faculty (versus faculty-as-learners). The faculty contract involves professors researching external and immutable truths, publishing communications about those truths, and imparting those insights to learners enrolled in their courses – all of which, I hasten to add, is noble, honorable, necessary, and transformative work in its own way. Yet today’s complexity also demands inter-systemic capacities that conventional psychological frameworks cannot hold.
Ignore, Grow, or Evolve: Three Structural Options for Humanity’s Developmental Future
If we can agree that universities meet a crucial developmental need for our species, and if we can agree that they have not, up until now, met other vital needs, what options exist? I see three options for a way forward:
Perhaps universities will assert that their way of approaching development is the only right way forward, that Expert mindsets crown the pinnacle of human sense-making. Eventually, experience and universities’ own scientific Expert-driven data will require the abandonment of these beliefs, and the other stages of grief will follow.
Some universities may choose to distinguish themselves by opening centers devoted to adult development within their communities. This would be welcome news. Most, however, are unlikely to experiment in that direction anytime soon; it just wouldn’t fit within today’s existing missions, funding conditions, or social support.
The immediate barriers to this option are its novelty and consequent confusion about its meaning; resistance from people invested in the established way who might perceive a new species of organism as a threat; and paucity of available models to aid in initiating, crafting, explaining, or understanding a viable structure.
Whether through growth of experimental variants or through generation of wholly new structures, I expect our species to meet evolutionary demands by transcending the limited capacities of today’s universities. The forms of that transformation will emerge only through our shared efforts.
Graham Segroves is an organizational change consultant and leadership development coach whose DevelopmentLens blog seeks to cultivate post-conventional perspectives on the human experience. Cross-posted on DevelopmentLens.com
Franklin W. Olin College announced ThreeJoy Associates president, Dave Goldberg as a distinguished academic partner (here).
“We are extremely fortunate to have someone with the creativity and passion of Dr. Goldberg working with us in our efforts to change engineering education,” said Vincent P. Manno, provost and dean of faculty at Olin College. “He believes, as we do, that student passion, courage, and initiative are the forces that will bring about the needed change, and we welcome him as an ally and colleague.”
Goldberg joins MIT’s Woodie Flowers in this role (here).
I was an academic for 27.5 years before I left to start ThreeJoy and the Big Beacon, and I’ve been to scores of conferences in a score of countries, but perhaps the coolest conference I ever attended was run by students last week (6-10 August 2012) for students, students who are immersed in giving themselves the educations their formal schooling refuses to provide.
Called JEWC or the Junior Enterprise World Congress (here), 2100 students from around the globe gathered at Paraty, Brazil in the State of Rio De Janeiro south of the city of the same name to celebrate their movement of students creating enterprises or consultorias to provide business services in their disciplines to local business as the royal road to giving themselves the practical education today’s theoretically dominated educational system refuses to provide.
I previously wrote about my interaction with Junior Enterprise at UFMG or Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (post here), and I was prepared to see very cool kids in action, but I wasn’t prepared for the size or scope of the event, the sheer organizational skill required to put on the event, or the professionalism of the student chapters that had gathered from around the world to learn, to be inspired, and to bathe in the collective enthusiasm of their movement.
Two highlight of the visit for me were the opportunity to meet with student leaders of the movement (picture above) and share the Big Beacon with the students and point out how the Big Beacon is aligned with Junior Enterprise. The presentation below suggests how Junior Enterprise has its campuses surrounded and now the time has come to move (a) around, (b) inward, and (c) inside to help transform higher education to be aligned with an era that values initiative and courageous action, not passivity and timid acquiescence to the status quo.
[slideshare id=13957903&doc=three-steps-8-2012-pptx-120813084339-phpapp02]
Junior Enterprise started in France in 1967 (see here) and it still has a big footprint in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, but Brasil Junior (here) is the largest Junior Enterprise presence on the planet, and I hope to go back and learn more about this important movement. Those interested in a model for student-centered and student-run education could do worse than to go to Europe or Brazil and check out Junior Enterprise, today.
Mark Somerville and I have an article out on Huffington Post entitled Three Habits at Three Levels for Improved Engineering Education. The article starts as follows:
Students in advanced economies today want to become anything but engineers (A.B.E.) and often choose to become lawyers, physicians, or businesspeople instead. Even those who do study engineering sometimes leave because (1) they are unable to align their aspirations with the subject matter as taught, and (2) a hostile, dismissive, or indifferent educational culture discourages the young people it is charged with educating.
Changing these things isn’t easy, but to use New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg’s phrase, we can use the power of habit at three different levels — at the personal, organizational, and system levels — to bring about change that attracts and retains bright young people to become the engineers our planet needs.
It goes on to suggest that the three habits are as follows:
Read the whole article here, and read four other HuffPo articles here.