mip's scan

Can You Boil the Ocean?

My 7 year old daughter asked me what I meant while I was talking on the phone and used the phrase "Don't try and boil the ocean?"  I was working from home and talking to a client and used the term that we are undoubted all familiar with.  When I got off the phone she asked me, "Dad, how come you can't boil the ocean?"

I simply said, "It's an expression sweetheart.  You know, if you try and do something too large you can't do it.  Just like you couldn't boil all the water in the ocean away.  Understand?"

She scrunched her nose and I could see she was thinking.  Then she replied, "You could if you used mom's pot."

I replied, "A pot would be too small wouldn't it?"

She answered, "Yeah but you would just do it over and over again.  One pot at a time."

To this I smiled and chuckled as I reflected on the truth of her statement.  It got me thinking about the approach that my consulting group and I take when approaching client problems.  Project X leverages a Rapid Results approach, striving to chunk things down into 100 day initiatives that deliver value.  In effect, our approach for producing value through short engagements that make up a larger organizational strategy is akin to boiling the ocean one pot at a time. 

Transforming Education

I've spent some time over the past few months carrying out some strategy work in the education market as a part of our Education Transformation solution offering.  The way technology is leveraged by kids has always been something I've been interested in (here are past posts), both because I have children of my own & because I am always looking for ways that organizations can extract real value from their investments in information technology.

As I have worked with my own children over the past couple of years, I've come to see more and more that this generation of children is really changing due to being a digital generation. I saw this as well when I created and operated the Youth Technology Camp program for children.

Our children are changing, the world they will enter after school is changing, so why is it that education has not changed that much?  I don't think that it has kept up with the changing nature of the world with which it has found itself (a good video that drives home the point of rapid change is this one titled Did You Know).

So how is education changing and where is it all going?  What does it mean to transform our education system into a 21st century model?  To best understand this change, we need to understand the changes as they relate to the various stakeholder, processes and objectives.  The transition from Education 1.0 to today's Education 2.0 and eventually the future Education 3.0 is causing a fundamental paradigm shift in various aspects of education.  The diagram to the left tries to capture this change.  Most importantly is the move to a customized approach for each student.  That is truly disruptive.  It is akin to the the level of customization we receive in so many other areas of our lives.  For example, banks have embraced technology to try and deliver us a more customer-intimate experience, a one-on-one relationship between the bank and its customers.  The expectation is part of the culture today and kids are growing up with that.  Education needs to strive to deliver that type of learning environment to today's youth.