Systems thinking and the simple plan
Planning is something that is done all the time, but the shape in which these plans unfold is often
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Beyond the Big and New: Innovating on Quality
Innovation is a term commonly associated with ‘new’ and sparkly products and things, but that quest for the bigger and
Read moreOne leg, two leg, three leg, more?
In Orwell’s classic Animal Farm the characters often oscillate between their evaluative assessments on the merits of two or four
Read moreScaling Education: The Absurd Case of the MOOC
The MOOC offers enormous potential to re-shape the way people learn and promoting access to content and expertise that many in this world could have only dreamed of years ago. But the naivete that such learning can be done in an monocultural way without losing something special about the context in which people learn and use what they learn might lead to some expensive lessons.
Read moreMythmaking about speed and scale in social innovation
Yes, but does it scale? – Question asked at nearly every presentation on a social innovation ever made* It is
Read moreWet and Dry Design for Social Innovation
Create systems that are too bounded (dry) and we risk sucking the moisture from the human elements (the wet) that make real social innovation happen. Our challenge is finding the right balance between the controlled, stable environments that these new technologies afford and the self-organized, emergent and innovative environments needed to implement and scale our initiatives more effectively.
Read moreDo Relationships Scale?
Meaning is something that requires attention to create and use and the more variables competing for attention in your life, the less meaningful things might be. If this is the case, can we design programs and initiatives that scale up from small to big? Or do we need to reframe the way we see scaling to something akin to a network, whereby there are a lot of small nodes connected together? Networking nodes seems to be a way to go big and go small.
If so, what does this mean for designing systems that scale?
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