Where knowledge is the counter to ignorance, wisdom is the counter to self-deception.
As humans we have developed powerful cognitive tools for adapting to our environment, such as our ability to look at a situation and determine what is most important (known as ‘relevance realisation’). Our ability for insight is another, allowing us to re-frame a situation to make meaning of it. Our ability to recognise complex patterns is a third.
Read MoreIn cognitive science there is the concept of ‘problem finding’ which uses a range of cognitive tools such as relevance realisation (perceiving what features are important to consider in a cognitive landscape), insight, zooming in and out, and re-framing to formulate problems in ways that make a solution possible.
Problems may present to us – often the things we resolve day-to-day – but the important problems are often not yet formulated as problems and thus cannot have solutions.
Read MoreThe new book is coming out soon (next month). Where Red Brain Blue Brain and Student Feedback were ‘what’/’how’ books, this is a ‘why’ book. Why we need to make systemic changes and what is their nature.
About 80% of school operating costs are made up of salaries, a systemic change to raise student learning and outcomes sustainably, comes down to teachers becoming more valuable to their students.Being more valuable necessarily means a change in behaviour.
Read MoreAll civilisations have collapsed because of rivalrous dynamics, for us to survive we need a felt sense that we are all connected to each other and the biosphere. Rather than being rivalrous we work towards a common good.
This is a hard problem because, although we are highly adaptive as humans, we are no longer being exposed enough to complex systems only to complicated systems, like cities (a house burns down, it stays burned down, a forest regenerates) or organisations that have a life measured in decades not centuries, tripped up by a change in technology or consumer tastes.
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