I had a very interesting conversation last night on Clubhouse about a zillion things, but also about “what” to teach our children in order to prepare them for a future that is evolving faster than our social and educational models.
I’m not entirely sure how to credit the contributors to the conversation – there were many individuals who together shepherded the meandering path of thought with far more brilliance than any one of us alone might have done. ( A.M. Bhatt hosted; Joan Ball; Rebecca Taylor; Jonathan Jackson among the contributors) This is, I believe, a concrete example of some of the emergent behavior the following passage points to as “necessary”. In the conversation we had speakers from multiple specific disciplines, as well as many others that represented areas of knowledge that appeared at times to be tangential or marginally relevant. The group dynamics allowed for the conversation to continuously evolve and entrain the thoughts of both technical experts and generalists.
I.E. – our social and environmental framework appears to become more fluid and mutable, we find ourselves struggling to make meaning of our surroundings, we struggle to retain shared constructs of what “is” is, and grounded in that fundamental lack of coherence, attacking even our ability to communicate and build on shared understanding, we seem to be slipping into a space were the very social fabric that holds us together is threatened. This is, in fact, a form of existential crisis.
Education per se was not actually the purpose of the conversation, but happened to have been one of the most salient topics touched on, for me. I have found myself questioning, specifically, how to educate my children for an unknown future. Many facets of the conversation congealed into an indication of what general direction to probe for further understanding.
Among the ways in which this was discussed was sensing and meaning making. The idea being that it is nearly impossible to teach and prepare people for what is essentially a situation that is changing so fast that it amounts to an unknown. The way to prepare the child then is to teach meaning making, to teach sensing and model application, as well as the modalities and skills which have taught for the past half century.
To that end, a book was recommended, Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. 
I’m very excited to learn more about Finite and Infinite Games because of the importance of the question above in relation to how to prepare three kids for a future that I cannot predict and cannot imagine. The children will need to ably to deal with the unknow: they will need to be able to do everything that our institutions, organizations and society, have always done – set up rights of passage, set up indicators of common purpose and common pursuit (Meaning as opposed to meaning). Not only will they need the skills to generate goals and plans, and then execute (the skills we’ve been teaching and exercising en mass at present across all industrialized societies) but they will also need to do the work that comes before that, making sense out of a far more chaotic social and physical environment than humanity has ever known before. The children of tomorrow (and the adults of today) will need to develop the social skills to collectively, collaboratively, and purposefully differentiate signal from noise, separate the wheat from the chafe, differentiate information from disinformation.
The future will be forged and directed by viably sized groups of people who coalesce around a shared sense of purpose, and synthesize their skills into an orderly whole that is able to ascertain the ground truth of the circumstances around them, and then structure to deliver on their goals and objectives. This is not an unknown kind of organization today, but it is not the most common form of organization. One of the major differences between the social future I theorize here and presently prevalent practices (say, by CEO’s, company boards, institutional leadership as a whole) is two fold:
- An expansion of the “sensing and meaning making” role into more formally studied and practiced specialties, as opposed to reliance on individuals with industry specific experience. While highly experienced experts know the history of the industry and its internal structures, they as individuals may not be able to model the “what ifs” of an environment that is de facto changing faster and faster around us. (i.e. shifts from complicated, to complex)
- Decentralization of organizationally critical roles (today’s C suite) in order to create more resilience and to capture the wisdom of the group as a means to mitigate over-reliance on the experiences and thoughts of a single or a few individuals. i.e. Democratization of the leadership functions (not an absolute).
This decentralization of leadership (or conversely, the rising awareness of individuals’ agency) is a theme that I see more and more often as I come into contact with Leadership thought leaders throughout the western cultural sphere.
Reflecting on this putative future in light of Humanocracy, which I’m currently reading, leads me to believe that some of the challenges our organizations (proxy here for our children, our selves, and our society, in toto the Human Endeavor), will be how to combat the burgeoning of new “bureaus” in the bureaucratic processes that form the scaffolding of our institutions.
The idea of decentralization and inter/intra/supra disciplinary collaboration also appeared in the conversation last night, suggesting that while it will continue to be imperative that society produces people with highly specialized skills, these simultaneously need to be skilled in human/human interactions: negotiation, argumentation, exploration, risk assessment, subjugation of the ego in order to support the mission over personal agendas.
Altogether it amounts to far greater development of individual skills, and simultaneously distributing skills broadly. These socio-structural changes may elevate the role of people that specifically serve as aggregators and facilitators of social exchange … the glial cells of this new kind of social organism.
I say social organism for effect – this is, after all, about the continued progress of our society toward a more free and egalitarian order, and away from hegemonic or totalizing forms which would create a form of “peace” and unity via eradication of competing ideologies or individual self expression.