Shift to the Future

It is so easy to be busy in our jobs.  You know, doing email, returning phone calls, and having meetings.  Some days on my commute home I wonder what happened during the day.  Busy does not equate to progress and most definitely isn’t strategic.  What does it mean to ‘be strategic’?  Why is this important to making positive progress?  Is strategic planning still a relevant business function in this ever fast changing world? My wife and I visited Greece this past year and saw amazing examples of architecture and focused energy in creating complex structures and infrastructure.  When you think of the resources they had at their disposal, it seems impossible that they could have done the things they did 1000’s of years ago.  Take the Isthmian Canal for example. It was created to replace the more difficult method of rolling ships across land on logs.  But, it took incredible focus and resources to complete.  It was a very strategic goal d...

The more I read about history, the more in awe I become of the numbers and types of transformational changes that have occurred.  I read (audio book) Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest this past year.  Empires as we know, rise and fall but their stories are impressive.  A rise and a fall are both transformational events.  We humans experience transformational events personally and on larger scales, all the time.  Being born is a pretty transformational event don’t you think.  Something seems to happen to many of us along the way through life to reduce our tolerance of transformation, “a change or alteration, especially a radical one” ( free dictionary, Dec. 14, 2014 ). We become comfortable with the status quo and resistant to change.  Ruben Puentedura’s in his discussion of the SAMR model describes stages of change as Enhancement: Substitution to Augmentation and Transformation: Modification to Redefinition.  His context i...

Once upon a time, people who could learn to read, write, and calculate were deemed competent to participate in the democracy, work in a factory, and live the good life.  Don’t you just long for the simplicity of that era?  Some days, I think I do.  Our fast paced world where “ [c]hange is accelerating, to the point where it will soon be nearly continuous ” ( Present Shock : When Everything Happens Now) is not simple, and old competencies are the very basic minimum requirements to prepare a person to fully participate.  Our world has changed dramatically since the days when learning was simple and slow. Competence (or competency ) is the ability of an individual to do a job properly. A competency is a set of defined behaviors that provide a structured guide enabling the identification, evaluation and development of the behaviors in individual employees. A key responsibility I have in my role as CIO is to develop and lead an IT group.  Overall, I am impresse...

I wonder how much we really think about where we’re going on this technology amplified journey we are all on.  We are so enthralled with each new invention or improvement that we clamor to do everything we can to get the new.  We’re kind-of like Alice… “she ran across the field after it [the rabbit], and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.  In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again”. ( referenced Oct. 28, 2012 ) We need now to be more thoughtful than ever in our adoption and pursuit of technological solutions.  We need to think beyond the “rabbit hole” about what may lay down the path.  We need to ask “why” before determining our journey with technology.  Too often we simply follow the crowd.  In a world where funds are scarce and technology is abundant, we need to “choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the ...

It seems that more people are increasingly thinking and worrying about, or at least pondering the future.  I watched a show the other night, well as much as I could handle, on CBC Doc Zone called Apocalypse 2012 .  They covered the various doomsday, conspiracy theory, and scientific perspectives on 2012, the Mayan calendar running out in Dec/2012 and the end of the world, etc.  Personally, I don’t buy into this view of the future.  But, I do believe it’s more important in our day than previously to be considering the future, particularly since the pace of change is on the tail end of an exponential trajectory.  Those of us involved in formal leadership positions in educational settings have a responsibility to do our part to prepare the people we work with, for the future.  Leaders in education aught to be students of the future and being ready to lead others in new directions before the future happens “to us”. As a technology leader in a school district,...

I was fast walking a steep incline on the treadmill at the gym the other day and all around me are people BBMing, texting, tweeting, Facebooking, emailing, and sometimes talking on their mobile devices.  I thought, ‘this is crazy, can’t people escape their devices for even an hour?’.  It occurred to me that perhaps people are becoming ‘slaves of their machines’ – they are becoming obsessed . We often read about the decline in readership for magazines and newspapers.  People have moved over to reading on their machines.  TV viewers have become Internet viewers and participants, via their machines.  Entertainment has moved to becoming machine orchestrated through XBox, Kinect, PS3, Game Boy, World of Warcraft, and ‘apps’, etc..  We can’t travel without a Google or Bing map, a GPS, or a cell, er smart-phone (for safety of course).  We use stoves, ovens, microwave ovens, toasters, griddles, irons, washers, dryers, furnaces, freezers, drills, saws, coffee...

Before I dive into this tricky little topic, let me tell you about what I did Saturday.  9 of us climbed Golden Ears in Maple Ridge, BC, Canada.  It’s a grueling 9-11 hour round trip covering 24km in distance and 1.5km up and down vertical.  This picture shows our destiny in the background. At this point, we’re just over an hour from the top.  It’s a scramble, we encounter a significant ice field that we have to navigate around (it’s steep, sketchy). Here’s some of the crew at the top (about 1700m) chillin’ and taking in the 360 degree view.  We could see to Whistler, Vancouver, Mt. Baker, etc.  We relaxed for about an hour before making our way back down.  Most of the group had never been to the summit so it was pretty inspiring.  By the way, my legs are still killing me… So what does this have to do with creating an IT Service Catalogue?  Well, I’ve never done it, I’m finding it quite a challenge, and I’m in un-charted territory (fo...

It’s Sunday, the day after the intense 2010 World Future Society conference and it’s time to reflect.  I bumped into Ken Shepard this morning whom I met on Thursday in Holacracy class and we debriefed for about an hour.  I’ve got to admit, there’s a lot of disturbing aspects to what I heard this week in presentations and conversations.  I am an optimist but am finding the views of others about possible futures to be challenging to accept.  To start off, here’s the titles of the sessions I attended and what has struck me most about this week: Organizing at the Leading Edge: Introducing Holacracy Keynote: Navigating the Future: Moral Machines, Techno Saplens, and the Singularity Sustainable Innovation: A Strategic Road Map to the Future 2010 Humans in 2020: The Next 10 Years of Personal Biotechnology Oceans and Our Global Future Internet Evolution: Where Hyperconnectivity and Ambient Intimacy Take Use Keynote: Building the Human Mind Levers of Change in High...

It’s amazing how quickly the menu of IT services has filled out.  I remember back in 1992 when I was asked to connect my employer of the day to the Internet.  I wasn’t quite sure what that meant or where to turn to do it.  It was difficult, expensive, and slow…  18 years later, the Internet is the underpinning to everything we do. We have many teachers and students that use free Internet services such as for encyclopedia, for finding info, people, tools, and storing / sharing documents, for instant messaging, storing documents, networking, for access and storing / sharing educational videos, for screen casting lessons, for professional networking, to host their blogs, and to write collaboratively.  I am interested in what steps teachers or Districts take to address privacy concerns with free services.  I know in our District it’s not a formalized process.  Teachers learn from others and use their own good judgment to take certain precautions.  T...