Tim Logan runs Future Learning Design, a great podcast series in which he scores interviews with some of the most important voices in education. A short while back he posted this one, with Olli-Pekka Heinonen, the former Finnish Minister of Education, who is about to take over as director general for the IB. One of the challenges for education, Heinonen said, was to find a way for a system with high autonomy have its actors all move in the same direction, i.e. without central authority, when there are rapid changes.
Here, Olli-Pekka Heinonen, is a quick sketch of the heuristics model you asked about. It’s a tool for getting complex systems moving towards a common goal while enabling actors to work with a high degree of autonomy. There’s a lot more too it in practice but here’s the essence:
Most organizations, including schools and school systems, define themselves with a set of governing constraints, a list of things that you can do within the organization. These are the policies etc. that govern the behaviour of the org. See figure A.
It’s an appealing structure from a leadership perspective because it makes management easy—everything that happens in the organization is pre-defined and governance is a matter of ensuring compliance.
It’s an appealing structure from the employee/student point of view, too, because all responsibility—beyond ensuring one’s compliance—is taken away.
It is nevertheless a limiting structure. No matter how big you draw the organization’s box, there will always be an empty space where events can occur outside the organization. Because such events are not accounted for in policy, they can become existential threats. All orgs have some flexibility and to a certain extent the org can adapt its policies, but there comes a point where the org has to redefine itself completely or perish. I think education is feeling this sort of pressure right now.
You also cannot draw the org to fill the universe of opportunities because if you do, you actually have no organization—literally nothing is organized into anything at all. Organizations, by definition, have limits.
An alternative is to define the organization by setting limits on what it cannot do, rather than what it can do. These would be the minimum set of things needed to keep people safe and operating within the law. Don’t go boating without a life jacket, for example, after that you’re free to explore the lake. See diagram B.
It’s a challenging structure for leaders to build because it requires a high degree of trust and far more investment in professional development than needed under a system of governing constraints.
It’s challenging for employees/students, too, because it places more responsibility on them and because it takes longer to for them to feel they can operate capably and independently.
It is nevertheless a strong, resilient and capable structure and one that better reflects the real nature of working in complex systems, such as schools. It’s also probably necessarily to long-term survival as an organization.
It takes a long time to build an organization with high autonomy, because, as mentioned, people in it need a lot of preparation and experience. But you can begin building that capacity almost immediately by setting up a set of heuristics, or simple rules of thumb. See diagram C.
Heuristics help people make decisions—for themselves—when facing novel situations. They buy time for professional development and experience to take effect. And because the heuristics are aligned with the larger organizational goals, leaders can be sure that people using them are acting in a way that carries the org forward, even when leadership cannot be (or doesn’t want to be) present.
Heuristics have three qualities: They must lead to a specific observable action (this allows assessment and evaluation); they must be something that everyone, from the youngest to oldest, can do; and they and they must be a simple, direct imperative. For example, at Seycove Elementary in North Vancouver, the teachers of a challenge-based learning cohort are given these three heuristics as guides while they come up to speed on the pedagogical model: give learner’s choice, use an iPad, teach outside the classroom. Property owners in Magome, a beautifully preserved post town of Japan, have these three to help them ensure their town doesn’t succumb to urbanization: don’t sell, don’t erase, don’t tear down.
This very much like the way we raise our children: we give them simple rules which are characteristic of more complex social attitudes and behaviours. When the teachers says to her students, “Say hello to Mr. Heinonen. He’s visiting us from Finland.” she’s not not ordering the kids around. She’s modelling and getting them to model, the complex social behaviours they will eventually learn for themselves.
In my experience, three heuristics is all you need and all people can handle anyway. Fewer leaves blind spots, more creates confusion.
Heuristics are derived from what an imaginary participant, in the org’s ideal, desired future state would do when faced with a novel situation. See diagram D. they are thus a way of bringing the future into the present.
There’s a good amount of work is finding, agreeing upon and communicating heuristics through the org but the effort pays off quickly. And, the work of determining the org’s heuristics itself begins building the trust that a highly autonomous system will need in order to work effectively.
Heuristics help orgs navigate through of turbulent times and eases transition to principle-based operation.
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