2020-12-08

Last updated Aug 15, 2023

Sources/Interdisciplinary Approaches to Creation & Innovation - Class

• VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity
  • Volatile: change is rapid and ==unpredictable== in its nature and extent
  • Uncertain: the present is unclear and the future is ==uncertain==
  • Complex: many different, interconnected ==factors== come into play
  • Ambiguous: lack of clarity/awareness about situations
• Important because it affects people negatively, and therefore business as well
• How to Manage
  • counter volatility with vision
  • meet uncertainity with understanding
  • react to complexity with clarity
  • fight ambiguity with agility
• Benefits
  • Innovation and creativity: consider process and workflow innovation as a way to tackle VUCA, rather than as something that might suffer because of it.
• https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/managing-vuca-world.htm

How VUCA can 2020 get?

Let’s be real. 2020 has hit us with so much crisis to the point that we’re struggling to process them all. Start of the year, we had to face a volcano eruption and a global pandemic; now, we’ve had to deal with political unrest and extreme typhoons. Sprinkle in all the celebrity deaths, and you’ve got yourself the penultimate VUCA year.

However, 2020 has also made me into a better person, personally and professionally (e.g. new careers/ventures, confronting issues). I wouldn’t have been able to grow as much if it wasn’t for the VUCA world I was living in. With the right mindset, I believe we can turn every crisis into an opportunity.

That’s why I’m glad I got to hear of the VUCA framework, because I believe it’s a step towards making a better world. Most of the crisis we’ve dealt with were because of lack of mindfulness (Hi Duterte, where’s the emergency budget!). If we were more prepared, we could’ve mitigated the effects of 2020. But now that we’ve experienced the brunt of it, I’m hoping we can learn from our mistakes, and act for our future.

• Foresight: the ability to predict what can potentially happen in the future.
  • In practicing Foresight, ==we subscribe to the idea that the future is not something we wait for to happen.== Yes, time is not something we control and “tomorrow” always becomes “today” but ==how that looks like is something we have control over.== We use the tools and skills to shape the future we imagine and create specific steps on how to prepare for whatever is to come.
  • Tools:
    • STEEP Analysis
    • Futures Triangle
    • Causal Layered Analysis
  • Creativity and foresight are both very practical skills we need as we move into the inevitable Fourth Industrial Revolution.

    According to an article written by World Economic Forum in 2016 (Links to an external site.), the Fourth Industrial Revolution should be greatly felt by this year. Admittedly, it’s always tricky to think about very technologically advanced concepts/futures/times from the perspective of a developing nation. But this is happening very fast even if the world had to slow down this year. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we have to intentionally think about the role and agency of humans in a world where AI and robotics are more likely to be the norm. However, these are not the only things that this new age will bring. ==The challenge for us is to course our definition and production of creativity and innovation towards a more equitable and sustainable space for all.==

  • aA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khjY5LWF3tg&feature=emb_title

• Supplementary readings:
  • The Future of Human Work Is Imagination, Creativity, and Strategy
  • Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages

• The Futures Triangle, a tool developed by Sohail Inayatullah, is a framework that helps us define a plausible future by defining three parameters: ==the Pull of the future, Weight of history, and the push of the present.== This sets clearer parameters about the plausible future of anything (i.e. Future of Jobs or Future of Education) because it contextualizes creativity and innovation as ==functions of time and space.==
• Plausible Future: a plausible future is a convincing description of a future, which we can hold true, even though this future itself can be factually fallacious.
  • https://cspo.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/read_van-der-Helm-Towards-a-Clarification-of-Probability.pdf
• Important questions
  • The Pull of the Future
    • What would be the ideal future for this issue or topic?
    • Do we have a shared vision of the preferred future and of the futures we want to avoid?
    • Do we have a shared image of the logic behind how the future gets formed in this specific case, or are there competing logical beliefs?
    • If we were adrift in a river, where do we end up in the issue?
    • What tools and resources do we have that can affect the direction and lead us towards that future?
    • What do we lack to influence change? What are our limits?
    • Is it possible to impact the futures? Or is it needed at all?
  • The Push of the Present
    • What trends and technologies are changing the future right now?
    • What things are pushing change forward?
    • What already known new policies, procedures, laws, budgets, decisions and technologies will start to push changes forward in the near future?
  • The Weight of the Past
    • Who benefits from the status quo or loses if it is changed?
    • What are the barriers to change?
    • What is holding us back, or getting in our way?
    • What are the deep structures that resist change?
• How it works: ==brainstorming tool==
  • Select a topic or issue to research and speculate on. (For example, the Future of Schools)
  • Tackle a dimension one by one by answering the prompt questions per dimension.
  • Generate plausible futures given the factors you’ve identified in Step #2. You can do this by reading through the tension between each dimension. Where are we being pushed towards and what could possibly be holding us back?
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoUke2ONX24&ab_channel=KnowledgeWorks

• STEEP is an external analysis framework that allows you to look at your topic/issue/concept from ==multiple drivers of change.== The STEEP Categories - ==Sociological, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political== - are 5 lenses you can use to assess the general trajectory of your central idea.
• Factors
  • Sociological: Values, attitudes, lifestyles, consumer trends, demographic influences, income distribution, education, population development, security. Aspects within society such as family, friends, colleagues, neighbors and the media
  • Technological: New technologies, technology effects, research, development speed, new products and processes, product lifecycles, technology investments, and government research expenditure
  • Economic: Economic growth, inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, taxation, unemployment, income, business cycles, world trade and resource availability
  • Environmental: Material, resources, disposal, emission regulations, energy, transport routes, life cycles, effects of the ozone hole and global warming
  • Political: Policy frameworks, labor market policies, government policies, competition oversight, legislation, political stability, tax policies, trade barriers, security requirements and subsidies
• How this works
  • Identify your central issue/ topic/ concept (i.e. Future of Schools)
  • Define how each STEEP Category looks like in relation to your central idea.
    • For example, the Sociological Analysis of the future of school can look like this (especially in the context of where we are today):
      • Physical space is no longer necessary, people don’t necessarily all live at the same place with the same timezone. Population can grow big because classes are no longer necessarily tied to a classroom. The teacher-student relationship has now shifted because teachers don’t have to be present only during class time.
    • This is basically how it goes – you extrapolate from the current realities and describe how that category could look like
  • Keep going until you’ve described all your categories.
  • Develop/ideate possibilities and innovations specific to your central idea based on your analysis.

• Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) is a Post-structuralist Futures tool developed by Dr. Sohail Inayatullah. This method works by ==identifying many different levels, and attempting to make synchronized changes at all levels== to create a coherent new future.
• The CLA has 4 layers: ==Litany, Causes, World View, and Myth/Metaphor.==
  • Litany: The surface level description of an issue.
    • Events
    • Trends
    • Problems
    • “Word on the street”
    • Media Spin
    • Official Positions
  • Causes: The systems and structures that perpetuate the litany.
    • Structures
    • Inter-Relationships
    • Systems
    • Policy analysis/technical explanations/ role of the state and interest groups
  • World View: The values and perspectives that uphold the systems.
    • Culture
    • Values
    • How language frames/constrains the issue
  • Myth/Metaphor: Immediate visual imagery associated to the litany.
    • Collective Archetypes
    • Gut/emotional responses
    • Visual images
• Sources
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwDmp1yY5A&feature=emb_title
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImWDmFPfifI

The CLA is an interesting tool because it show us how the things and issues we see today go beyond the surface level. In fact, a lot of the problems and opportunities we see today did not come from nothing – ==these are products of the history of mankind.== All of the things we encounter today are rooted to and potentially upheld by myths and metaphors we may unconsciously use to define how we perceive the world. Using the CLA can help us ground our brainstorming process. Whether we’re looking for solutions to problems or searching for ways to innovate on anything, we can use this framework to see why the things are the way they are and how we can flip things back to arrive at solutions or concepts that can also be supported by what we already know.

In this exercise, we will be using the Futures Triangle to understand a Plausible future for the central idea you are most curious about. Here’s the task:

• Identify the task (i.e. Future of Dining In)
• Do a quick research on each of the triangle pillars of the Futures Triangle as it relates to your central idea
• Propose a plausible future for your central idea. This can be in the form of a narrative, bullet points, illustration, video, or podcast. Whatever makes most sense for you.

FUTURE OF LEARNING

• Pillars
  • The Pull of the Future
    • ideal future: learning is decentralized and democratized
    • futures we want to avoid: a world where information and knowledge is for the select few
    • how this future gets formed: innovation that informs and inspires people, instead of complicating and obfuscating them.
    • this can also be used for manipluation
    • tools and resources we have: products and education. not just those in edtech, but tech in general
    • what we lack: coorindation. imagine what all these companies could do together instead of pursing their individual goals
  • The Push of the Present
    • trends & technologies: tech! esp edtech platforms, when everything went online. creator economy also
    • innovative startup act; local accelerators and startups in this field (e.g. Kumu)
    • emerging startup ecosystems
  • The Weight of the Past
    • who benefits from the status quo: those who have money to afford “elite education”
    • barriers/holding us back/structures: profit over purpose; financial maximization value
• Plausible Future
  • A world of embedded education: the practice of educating people through encounters that they already have with systems that exist primarily for non-educational purposes
  • thriving creator economy, for education
  • more alternate forms of learning: e.g. bootcamps, online courses, become normal. people become more open to them
• Sources
  • https://fakepixels.substack.com/p/fkpxls-special-volume-embedded-education