2. #CopeWithCovid: Learn, innovate, lead and thrive in in addressing the injustices of inequities
Rick Botelho
Unite Equity Muses | Ask ethical questions about co-designing a fair-free-flourishing future
Blog series (07/11/2020). My open peer-reviewed, sense-making learning journal is updated regularly based after discussions with others. Happy to chat with you if curious. This iterative work-in-progress invites you to join a learning journey about addressing the Covid crisis and the 21st century mega-problems from a long term perspective. If inspired, make a comment and share.
Blog warning: Allow time for slow thinking and deep self-reflective learning. Book mark blog to read and re-read the sections. This blog series will stretch your imagination in what you can learn, explore and discover together in communion with others in addressing complex problems. Click on hyperlinks to learn more about key concepts. Make notes in response to any questions that you feel called to discuss.
Read the covid revelations, netinar, network power, leadership failures, journey journal, macro-level perspectives and blog 1. Sense-making netinars prepare and enable learners to understand the vulnerabilities, volatilities, uncertainties, complexities and ambiguities (V2UCA) of addressing mega-problems.
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This blog explores how education has failed us in addressing V2UCA.
- Identify what is most deficient in education
- Counteract Covid misinformation and disinformation
- Understand the limitations of leadership models and brands
- Understand the limitations of sages-on-the-stage
- Mobilize guide-on-the-side learning methods
- Embark on a journey of creating your own learning outcomes
1. Identify what is most deficient in education
Learning about oneself in relationship to others, such as understanding how emotional reactivity affects brain functioning, enhancing self-awareness about mind manipulation, prejudices, biases and mindsets, cultivating virtues such as mindfulness and equanimity, enhancing emotional intelligence, developing critical thinking, polarity management, creative, innovation, entrepreneur and executive servant leadership and management skills for managing the VUCA stresses of complex or so-called wicked problems.
These educational skills are essential for creating complex adaptive learning entanglements, networks, systems, organizations and communities needed to address complex problems.
We need to design new learning management platforms (that goes beyond Zoom and Microsoft Teams) that scale up about how we can up-skilling how people can manage complex problems with greater creative agility, adaptability, social innovation and entrepreneurship.
Self-reflective learning question.
- What is your take on the deficiencies in our education?
2. Understand the limitations of leadership models and brands
Our constrained leadership models were not designed to redress mega-problems, such as the demise and deterioration of personal, population and planetary health with our current path of catastrophic development of hyper-consumerism and declining natural resources. Our incremental responses and regressive counter-reactions to these mega-problems are far too slow, fragile and ineffective to scale up. The failure of our current leadership models arises from the inability to open, expand and align mindsets for the greater good.
Furthermore, personal, professional, corporate, corporate consulting and institutional leadership brands are paradoxically impediments to creating local, national and global transformational collaboration and synergies, because their value propositions are largely predicted on proprietary resources and professional protectionism of expertise. To generate a galvanizing heroic force for the greater good of all, we need open innovation, open source resources and transcendent transformational #ideaviruses to align leadership mindsets to scale up and exponentiate transformational change at all levels.
Self-reflective learning question.
- What is your take on the limitations of leadership models and brands?
Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.
3. Counteract Covid misinformation and disinformation
The Covid crisis has brought misinformation and disinformation to the foreground especially on social media, fueled by the distrust of scientific experts. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the paranoia of conspiracy cults, such as the fear of New World Order that Covid could provide a cover for a totalitarian world government to take over. But on a more realistic level, Covid has given autocrats even greater national opportunities to grab more authoritarian power.
The Covid crisis cries out for an educational revolution on how we can collaborate and respond more adeptly on addressing the mega-problems of the 21st century (listed in blog 3) and future pandemics. At the deepest level, this issue beckons this fundamental and overlooked question. What is education for? Watch Seth Godin's Ted talk for insights about what's wrong in our schools.
We need to educate people about how they can learn to discern the best evidence and practices based on our evolving and dynamic process of seeking truth. The collaborative learning journey of discovering and verifying truth involves challenging mindsets, dogma, beliefs, opinions, prejudices, biases, assumptions, premises and the evolving quality of data, information and evidence.
The cultivation of complex adaptive learning networks provides a scientific and apolitical way to mitigate and contain the rise of Covid misinformation and disinformation. Scientific leadership minimizes the risks of politicization, identity politics, dysfunctional polarizations and irrational authoritarianism that divide countries and prevent them from implementing rational, well-coordinated, contextualized and comprehensive plans to mitigate and contain the Covid pandemic. United, we stand. Divided, we fall.
4. Understand the limitations of sages-on-the-stage
We use "sage-on-the-stage" and 'guide-on-the-side" webinars for different purposes. Sage-on-the-stage webinars are essential for raising consciousness and awareness about educational issues. However, academic, religious, corporate and political leaders and experts (sages) are insufficient for mobilizing whole-system synergies needed to manage the so-called wicked or complex mega-problems of the 21st century (as listed in blog 3).
To put it quite simply, the 21st mega-problems have outgrown the limited supply of sages and the limited distribution and dissemination of wisdom from expertise enterprises. We need to democratize the wisdom of the crowd and use distributed leadership and educational models to scale up how we can act for greater good of all.
The neoliberal information technology economy and the zero-sum game of competitive win/lose mindsets of market share and advertising revenues are fundamentally flawed propositions for the new age of the purpose economy that thrives on local, national and global win/win/win open-minded collaboration for the greater good. Watch both videos to learn more.
Self-reflective learning question. What is your take on the limitations of sages-on-the-stage?
Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.
5. Mobilize guide-on-the-side learning methods
We have to accelerate how we can address and manage mega-problems more effectively and efficiently. This calls for developing scalable digital servant leadership learning platforms to generate synergies between bottom-up, "guide-on-the-side" and top-down "sage-on-the-side" approaches that amplifies our peer-to-peer collaborations at all levels. The #CopeWithCovid ongoing interactive webinar series is just one idea to act more effectively and efficiently in responding to the complex questions posed above.
The educational innovation challenge of addressing the psychosocial Covid pandemic calls for developing adaptive, agile and creative learning processes that go beyond the "talking head" content-focused, expert-centered or "sage-on-the-stage" webinars. We need bottom-up, peer-to-peer and "guide-on-the-side" collaborative methods. These methods enable us to learn, lead, innovate and amplify on how we can thrive in overcoming VUCA stresses and recover from the psychosocial pandemic. This creative process involves alternating between states of sacred idleness and sacred contemplation in order to design and test scalable learning prototypes for exponential impacts.
We need dynamic, process-oriented, learner-centered interactive platforms (like online experiential flipped classroom activities) that give people distributed leadership and peer learning opportunities for developing knowledge management communities to thrive.
Self-reflective learning question. What is your take on mobilizing guide-on-the-side learning methods?
Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.
6. Embark on a journey of creating your own learning outcomes
To participate in enriching webinars, we adopt inquiry and discovery modes of learning. Reading #CopeWithCovid blogs in advance, we create our own agendas by coming together with ideas, concerns and questions. This collaborative process enables us to set up our objectives, outcomes and calls-to-action. This is also essential for creating complex adaptive learning organizations, communities and networks to scale up learning impacts.
Our heroes' journeys are about mobilizing the wisdom of the crowd. This involves using scalable learning platforms to create a new human consciousness and civilization that enable us to transition from the information economy into the purpose economy and to adopt regenerative practices for sustainable development.
This learner-centered process is different to "talking head" webinars with transactional Q and A exchanges. The "guide-on-the-side" webinar design is based on inclusivity, diversity, collaboration and dialogues with the goal of creating transformational learning experiences needed to enhance organizational agility, creativity and innovation.
To conduct these kinds of learner-centered webinars, participants are invited to read the blog series in advance to pose questions, identify concerns and share ideas to share in a learning community in advance of the webinar by post items on a shared platform for all to review in advance of the session.
Ask 2-3 leaders to respond to concerns and questions raised by participants in 30 minutes. Identify themes for breakout group discussions. Select small group facilitators in advance to host the small group sessions. Set up small group discussions (30 minutes) with guidelines about learning outcomes. Ask a note keeper to summarize their ideas and calls-to-action about how to CopeWithCovid more effectively and efficiently. Post small group notes on a shared platform after the session to set up the agenda for the next one. Reiterative the process.
Microsoft teams and Zoom are widely available platforms for developing complex adaptive learning organizations and networks. The next blog set the stage for participating in an interactive webinar.
Self-reflective learning question. What is your take on embarking on a journey of creating your own learning outcomes?
Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.
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Read part 1, part 3 and part 4 of #CopeWithCovid blog series
Calls-to-action: If inspired, make a comment below. If so inclined, share this #ideavirus blog series with your connections on social media. Invite them to share this series. Help build a #CopewithCovid infodemic to #FlattenTheCurve and the #DisinformationCurve until we develop new viral covid-19 treatments and vaccines.
Candor and feedback appreciated about #CopewithCovid interactive webinars. Any ideas about leads, connections or organizations to host webinars appreciated. Happy to chat too with kindred spirits. Contact via Linked-in. Pro-bono offer.
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