I thought I’d develop those excellent points with three more suggestions:

1) A clear purpose. A pithy and articulate answer to the question: “What is this company/team for”?

2) Founders’ responsibility. Founders should recognise that they are creating a culture, take responsibility for that task and approach it in a conscious way, aware that their own behaviours and demonstrated values will have a great influence on the community they create.

3) Integrity under pressure. When times are tough or mistakes have been made, a great organisation can avoid blame and scapegoating and come together to reflect and, collectively, to find ways to do better.

It’s a great question, Sleepy Fox, and I hope you get meaningful answers. Best of luck with the new venture!

“… the curriculum is disabling rather than enabling for most kids, because it is preparing them for a technological world that is vanishing before their eyes.”

So, so true. Kids don’t just need to learn the features of specific software products; they need an understanding of computing fundamentals, and skills that they can apply to solve a range of different problems, not just the classroom examples. Tinkering with the BBC Micro offered that to a generation of British kids, and it would be wonderful if the Raspberry Pi could reignite the same spirit. Is John Naughton aware of the #codingforkids movement, I wonder?

The framework organises problems into domains according to the relationship between cause and effect. Simple problems have well-known, self-evident cause-effect relationships. Complicated problems have cause-effect relationships, but they are not self-evident and require expert analysis. There is a right way (‘best practice’) to respond to a simple problem. With a complicated problem there may be several valid responses, and someone with the right expertise can choose which they prefer.

Complex problems are fundamentally different: cause-effect relationships are not obvious and are not amenable to analytical tools. They are often only visible with hindsight. We have to act without being certain what effect we’ll have. The grown-up way to deal with this is to experiment, monitor our effects closely and increase or reduce our actions based on what we see.

I come round – at length – to the issue of education and institutions. Education tries to equip kids and young people to understand and contribute to the world. Some of the problems young people will face in the future will be complicated. The world will need domain experts to work on these complicated problems, applying logical, mathematical or scientific techniques. Fine teaching can surely enhance a student’s ability to become an expert. Stronger central leadership, more and better teaching, improvements to ‘the system’ may well work wonders here.

But I’m hardly going out on a limb when I guess that lots of the problems the next generation will face in their adult lives will be complex ones. They will need skills that they can’t learn by following rules or by rigorous practice. They will need to adapt fast, to learn continuously, to create cultures that support experimentation. Institutional learning and education systems as currently organised in industrialised countries aren’t well placed to develop these skills. This view is gaining currency within the education industry: the second Education Fast Forward global forum ended with near-consensus on a radical proposition: schooling as we know it is well past its sell-by date. Older generations can’t train younger ones to solve complex problems. What we can do is support and encourage them as they build problem-solving skills by themselves.

I’ve long had gut feelings about the limitations of institutional education in preparing kids for the future. The Cynefin framework is helping me to articulate why. Thanks, Dave Snowden and Mark Foden. I would love to know others’ thoughts on this. From Cynefin users, have I understood the basics of the model, and is this a reasonable use of it? From educationalists: does any of this chime with your experience?

“Microsoft released a survey of college science, math and engineering majors this month that underscored differences between the motivations of male and female students. <...> Fifty-one percent of male majors said they chose their subject in part because of past experience with related games, toys, books, or clubs; for women that figure was only 35%. In contrast, 68% of women credited a particular high-school class or teacher with turning them on to the subject, compared with 51% for men.”

So, if we get more people learning their science and tech by informal, self- and community-directed methods, as I’m advocating, we might get an even greater gender gap in science and technology than we have now. That would be a pretty negative unintended consequence. Hmm … more to think about.

Rees identifies an obstacle to teaching which my husband and I were talking about earlier today: rapid advancements in technology that put a greater distance, or more layers of complexity, between users and the technology they are using. We can’t dismantle an iPhone to find out how it works; we can no longer tinker under the bonnet of a car. Ten years ago, someone creating a personal website would probably have written some HTML directly; now we would create a Facebook page or a WordPress blog instead. Rees and my husband agree that these trends make it harder to engage young people with the basics of how things work. Rees concludes that high-quality teaching in schools is therefore more necessary than ever.

I see the argument that more sophisticated technology distances people from hands-on experimentation and practical learning, but I think it is futile to pin hopes for a ‘solution’ on recruiting higher quality teachers. Teachers are as affected by increased complexity as their pupils: we are all equally unable to demonstrate a principle of engineering by taking a gadget apart. Demanding ever-higher standards from teachers as Moore’s Law enables ever-smaller, more powerful black boxes will lead to an arms race that teachers can only lose.

I’d suggest altering our expectations to adjust to these realities. Instead of demanding that teachers carry on doing what they were doing before, only better, let’s look harder at new opportunities for teaching and learning that are opening up, not only to teachers but to all of us. Let’s think of education as something that doesn’t only happen inside institutions. Change always creates opportunities as it overturns familiar norms. Rees hints at this by mentioning citizen science projects such as Galaxy Zoo where images of galaxies are being classified by amateur astronomers: adults and children together. This initiative isn’t explicitly designed to involve young people, but doesn’t it create a wonderful chance for kids and young people to make tangible contributions to ambitious grown-up projects?

Purposeful collaboration with adults who are science and tech-aware, but not professional teachers, can surely be at least as inspiring as great classroom lessons. I don’t mean to minimise the impact that inspiring teachers can have; they can be wonderful. But not all children have access to great teachers, and talented graduates and mid-career professionals may prefer not to join the teaching profession, much as Martin Rees would like them to. They do have other opportunities to inspire kids, though! It’s up to adults who are science and tech-aware, not just teachers, to inspire a new generation to expand scientific knowledge. I’m going to learn more about other citizen science initiatives and look for ways to get involved.

A friend and I were talking about this a while ago – idly speculating on what life might be like in the future, and what people might take for granted. I suggested that someone’s entire history of sensory experiences – vision, hearing, even scent – could be recorded and stored digitally. Unobtrusive sensors attached to us could run all the time, observing and storing all the signals that we’re exposed to. All the signals, all the time. For years on end; for entire lifetimes; creating an archive of all our experience. We had fun speculating about the differences that technology would make to culture and relationships. We wouldn’t have to rely on our memories for anything mundane – would that free up cognitive capacity for learning? If so, how would we use the extra brainpower? Think about the arguments that could be settled, the lies that could be exposed, as well as the potential for embarrassment!

I’m speculating that recording and storing our sensory data would be the easy part. Filtering, querying and organising it would sort the pros from the amateurs. What software would we use to process the data, the way our brains process sensory inputs all the time, deciding what’s important and tuning out the noise? Who will innovate and enable all that sorting and organising and filtering? Who will be the Google of the experience archive?

Matthew and my friend both came back with the same question: “Would this be compulsory?” I completely understand their wariness – brought up on 1970s and 80s concepts of civil liberties, against compulsory ID cards and the like, the thought of compulsory experience archiving makes me squirm. I imagined this as an opt-in technology for personal use, with no compulsion involved. The idea came out of a conversation in idealistic, speculative mood, with no points lost for naivety. If such a powerful technology existed, though, no doubt governments and corporations would get in on the act. What might they create? Monsters or delights?

I’d love to be part of a conversation with other parents and people who are interested in Matthew’s question about how technology will influence our children’s lives and how we can help them be ready for a future in a dramatically different world. So many questions … let’s mull them over, agree, disagree, and no doubt come up with even more questions.

For most of human history the usual way to accumulate a fortune was to steal it …. in agricultural societies by appropriating others’ estates in times of war, and taxing them in times of peace. The way to get rich was not to create wealth, but to serve a ruler powerful enough to appropriate it.

By the nineteenth century … technology had made it possible to create wealth faster than you could steal it.

Paul Graham in Mind the Gap

Coming to terms with change is a basic life skill. If you don’t have it, it’s time to put it on your self-improvement to-do list.

Get with the program! The future isn’t going to be like the past. What’s more, it isn’t going to be like any future we imagine. How wonderful that is, if only we are prepared to accept it.

Tim O’Reilly, on O’Reilly Radar