What matters versus what works

Yesterday I was reminded of the well-known expression which I have often held very true “culture will eat strategy for breakfast”. As part of a national programme commited to improving tertiary education with smarter use of digitalization (Npuls), we are tasked to define how we are going to do this. And also define what “smarter” is for the long term. When your context is changing so quickly how do you bring the long term into focus? My go to expression which helps keep me on track is to ask the question “What Matters?” versus “What Works?”.

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I stumbled upon this helpful guideline when I was preparing for a podcast I was invited to do for the NRC. I felt an urgency to clarify the impact AI was having on education and I wanted actually to focus on the meaning underlying the impact. I was reminded of one of the wonderful (and many!) life teachings my political science professor Gerd Junne had given me, namely “the steepest learning curve is achieved while preparing to teach something”. When you are tasked to explain something, you better understand it completely before trying to communicate it to somebody else. It was in this struggle of making ideas explicit, where meaning morphed in and out of a grey cloud heading and led to my eureka moment when I stumbled across the expression; what matters versus what works.

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There are huge shifts happening, and pressure on our educational system is coming from all sides. The biggest pressure being the mismatch between the ever-increasing wicked problems in our world which need a more flexible, quicker and multidisciplinary knowledgebase to tackle these problems. And this pressure makes sense because we originally created formal educational systems to better deal with the ever-increasing complex problems in our society. Pre-educational systems we relied on lifetime in apprenticeship models to train knowledge and skills. When society became complexer we designed institutions to help us better deal with this complexity.

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Yesterday we were granted a wonderful presentation by Derk Loorbach director of the Dutch Research Institution for Transitions (Drift) which included the introduction of the X curve of transition.

We also talked about regimes and niches within regimes and how very important it is to recognize these and the norms and values they enforce. The essence as to why we have educational institutions is because we believe in them and we believe they work. But in this current day and age, are they working on what matters?

Asking the question What Matters takes us out of the daily routine of keeping the regimes we are familiar with afloat, which we can be very good at doing. Let us stop doing things the way we always have, because we always did. Take a step back, zoom out, and re-examine what we are doing. Let all colleagues working within education ask themselves the question, what matters, and just imagine the impact this could make.

The answer to the question what matters is layered, and messy and nuanced. But most importantly, are we asking ourselves that question often enough? It is a scary question to ask because it makes the foundations rumble. But I would rather hear some rumbling and make some shifts, versus hearing a crash and end up in the bottom right of the X of transition.