Going beyond Systems Thinking - A Conversation with Dave Snowden

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The trouble with engineers is they can't cope with something unless they've defined what a good outcome is. Probably the single big difference between complexity science and systems thinking is in complexity science, we want to understand the energy gradients of the present, and we want to start journeys often in parallel with a sense of direction because we know we can't achieve goals.

Hi and welcome back to the podcast. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. It's a huge pleasure to be welcoming Dave Snowden back to the podcast this week. As you'll have heard in previous episodes, for example with Ray Ison, Mete Boll, and others, there's a lot of interest currently in systems thinking as an approach in education and a key competency for our young people. But what systems thinking means when you scratch the surface is a question that we definitely need to ask. And if we're supporting our young people as well as colleagues and leaders, in fact, to navigate complexity? Well, I reckon Dave might have something to say about it. Dave is the creator of the Cynefin framework and originated the design of SenseMaker, the world's first distributed ethnography tool. He's a lead author of Managing Complexity and Chaos in Times of Crisis: A Field Guide for Decision Makers, which was a shared effort between the Joint Research Centre, European Commission, and the Cynefin Centre. Dave divides his time between two roles: the founder and chief scientific officer of the Cynefin company and the founder and director of the Kinevan Centre. He holds positions as an extraordinary professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch, as well as a visiting professor at the University of Hull.

Nice. Well, come on then, Dave. I've got a bit, a bit of an agenda today. I hope that's okay with you after our first conversation, first conversation, uh, 3 years ago now, in fact, on the podcast. I think it was like episode 52 or something. So it's great to have you back and thank you for coming. And thank you for chatting. But yeah, let's dive in. So one of the things that I feel really strongly about, and as you know, over the last few years, I'm a big fan of your work and Ellie and Anna and Beth and all the amazing people in the team. But one of the frustrations I have is, is that it's not always as accessible to the education crowd, my listeners, the people, you know, in my networks, people working in schools, school leaders, et cetera, as I think it should be. I'm not quite sure why that is. Sometimes I think it's an, there's a lack of understanding of, you know, where, where this fits, how it would help me as an educator in a school or whatever. But I, one of the things I've, you know, hopefully I can play a role in is, is helping to do some of that translating work or, or at least give you a platform to invite educators in to understand. 'Cause I think there's a really significant amount of an interesting insight in all of the work that you do. So.

Yeah, I think part of the problem there is education is a highly constrained environment.

Yeah.

Yeah, we've had suicides in British schools because of measurement systems.

Absolutely.

Basically, if you're a teacher these days, you've got to deliver a set of numbers. So the system is designed to only permit complicated thinking or ordered thinking. Yeah. And I think that's a real problem. I mean, you know, because we've had really good reception in places like Atlantic College when we've talked about it, but that's not a conventional school. I've got great sympathy for teachers who've, I mean, they've got to just get kids through modules. And when I was at school, I know I'm getting old when I start to say when I was young, all right, but we did exams at 16 and 18. And we had time between those exams to develop ideas and explore ideas. Now it's module, module, module, exam, assessment, assessment. There's no space in that for exploration. If there's no space for exploration, it's going to be difficult to get complexity ideas across.

Yeah, absolutely. But at the same time, I feel there's a really deep awareness that the complicatedness of those systems is not serving the young people. It's not serving the educators. And they're working in a— everybody knows, you can feel it, of course, you are working in a deeply complex human ecology. So there's your living complexity, your understanding that the complicated isn't serving, but there isn't space, as you say, to then really explore what that would mean for a different way of working.

Yeah, I think you've got other problems as well. So you've got the social science problem in spades in that there isn't a validation against natural science. So theories become dominant and go in waves.

Yeah.

And if you're against the particular wave or if policy is determined in the middle of one wave, you've got a problem. So it tends towards ideological uniformity is one of the ways I'd say it. I think the other problem, and you and I have talked about this before, is the belief that any quality you want in children has to be taught.

Right.

That wasn't the case. It used to be qualities emerged. And my, you know, my favorite case on this, again, when I was at school, I was in societies until 7 or 8 at night every day. Yeah. A lot of my education came from studying subjects I wasn't doing, but from the age of 11, we had to do impromptu debating every week. So you walked to the front of the class, you were given a card, you got told to support something you didn't believe in. That process generated critical people who were generalists. We weren't taught to be it.

Yeah.

And I think that's one of the key things coming outta complexity science is interactions and process matter more than this heavy focus on explicit objectives.

Right, exactly. And the, that, that kind of engineering approach with the explicit objectives is just everywhere. I mean, as you say, it's everywhere within the system. But if, if we can, one of, there were 3 things I just felt you had did a great talk at the Stoa recently, which I totally recommend to everybody to watch. But obviously your thinking is evolving all the time through iteration and, and the research you are doing. Applied, you know, theory. But the 3 things I feel strongly about in relation to some of the things that we are struggling with in education is yes, there's that engineering kind of that complicated engineering outcomes focus, but there's also this bigger piece about it's still very much focused on the individual, the disembodied individual. You know, there's a phrase I shared with you, teaching is the art of changing the brain, right? From James Zuhl. And it's very much the individual brain and the art, the role of the teacher is to change that individual's brain. And so there we get immediately into all all of the stuff that you talk about around mental models, mindsets, and all the deep intractable issues around people's obsession with those things when actually the complexity science is saying something very different. So that, so the first thing is the disembodied individual. The second thing is our obsession with bad strategy. So I'd love if we can to get onto that briefly. And then the last thing, which probably we won't have time for, but, um, we'd spoke about previously in our first conversation a little bit, was this obsession with objective quantitative measurements. And the amazing work you do around narrative. Maybe we'll touch on that at certain points, but perhaps we could start with, you mentioned that idea of the natural science, and I think that's one of the, again, really important pieces of your work is bringing this naturalizing sensemaking in. And for me, even the way you define sensemaking as you're making sense of the world so you can act in it is just at a really basic level, a really good description of what an educator does, right? They're helping young people to make sense of the world so they can act in it. Except we've got these particular Enlightenment heritage theories of the way to do that is to input certain concepts or mental models into brains and ignoring the complexity around that.

Yeah, it's eccentric and individual-centric.

Right.

I mean, to be honest, you can trace that back to the Reformation. That's when it hits. And, you know, which, you know, a lot of good reasons for it and all that sort of stuff, but it heavily focuses on the individual, the individual relationship with God. So it's just starting by what's called social atomism, the belief the individual is the primary unit. And you see it in the American Constitution and elsewhere. The idea is individuals decide collectively to join into society. Now the opposition to that, which is Southern Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, virtually the rest of the world, is that we're primarily defined by our social interactions over time. And we don't choose a society we belong in. It's not a social contract. It's an evolving set of relationships. Now the science is now starting to back that up.

Yeah.

In, and anybody with teenage children knows this, you know, when they hit puberty, you worry about their friends up. And any educator knows this. It's the classroom culture which actually often determines whether individuals pick things up or not. And I'm not suggesting we go back to selective education in Britain, but I was the 11+ generation. So you're in a school with people who all expected to achieve. You weren't in the— there were lots of other bright people. You weren't one of the one or two bright people in the much larger group. So the social pressure there was really high. Yeah, we're not a disembodied brain and you can't read, I mean, contrary to what some AI people think, the body isn't a container for consciousness which can be replaced. The body is an essential part of our consciousness. Right, exactly.

Yeah. Can I, sorry to interrupt, can I just take a step back and just ask you, because one of the key tenets of your work is naturalizing sensemaking. So just, so just to orient people, I think this is really powerful because I've, one of the things you've said about educators is they're a little bit prone to fads and a bad science of learning. So I think that idea of naturalizing sensemaking might be actually a really useful kind of frame. So if you could just say a little bit about what that is, and then we could get into some of those implications of that.

So the principle is quite simply, you can't apply a hypothesis-deductive approach to human systems. There are too many variations. And part of the problem that psychology has, and there's a huge amount of psychology in education, yeah, is it's in a crisis, what's called the crisis of repeatability. Nobody can repeat the experiments. Yeah, and we used to say when we studied physics at university, they studied from physics envy, and that was a deliberate play on words, right? So, but what you can say is we know there are things about the way human beings make decisions. So we know the conscious part of the brain only engages when it finds anomalies. Decisions are normally made by your body, by your social pressure, yeah? We know a whole body of stuff about the way neuroreceptors get disrupted. And we know that there's no such thing as a physical subconscious, that Freudian-Jungian thing is just wrong. I mean, it was a cute idea in the 19th century, but we really should stop basing educational policy on 19th century psychologists who abused their patients, all right? You know, the whole field has moved on a bit since then. So we know that we make decisions unconsciously, but that doesn't mean there is an unconscious set of abbreviations for our body or what, what Andy Clark talked to scaffolding. So we use collective narrative as a way to scaffold or reduce the energy costs of making decisions. So our approach is quite simple and we spend 5 or 6 years looking at a problem and we read and we talk with natural scientists and we find out what we know is true and what we know is false. And we use that as enabling constraint. And then we build methods and tools which are consistent with what we know from natural science, and then run them to an experimental phase to refine them. So we don't try and derive the theory from observations of practice because you can never observe enough practice. Right. And if you already came through university, you're going to be educated in a particular theory of education. You're going to be looking for things which endorse that theory. And I think this is a real problem with social science generally, I would say. Less so in the humanities. Yeah, I mean, that's what we draw more on anthropology and philosophy than we do on the social science or psychology.

Yeah, interesting. I was chatting to someone recently about anthropology departments dying out, which is an interest, 'cause I'm an anthropology graduate. So it's an interesting thing to see that they're just under the cosh, but—

Ironically, businesses are starting to pick up on the fact that anthropologists are valuable. I mean, Intel was one of the first and so on. But I think also, to be honest, anthropology, like philosophy, shouldn't be taught in every university. It needs concentration of excellence. Yeah.

But I think then again, the natural science kind of principles that you are using to, to frame the work in all sorts of sectors, I know you work in, but just thinking specifically about education, one of the big ones coming through now, and Guy Claxton I spoke to, who's a big figure in our world of education, he's writing a book currently about embodiment science, he's calling it, but it, it's, it's beginning to come through into the mainstream. And I know you've been—

Yeah, but I know what will happen. All right. Sorry to be sad.

No, no, this is good.

They'll pick on one thing. Yeah. So I mean, we know this, for example, in type 2 diabetes. So they observed, and I'll use this as an illustration, they spotted that people who had stomach stapling operations, diabetes 2 reversed. So they replicated 800 calories a day. It worked.

Yeah.

I actually went through this. All right. But I phoned them up and said, no, I've got type 2. I need to reverse it. And I did. They said, you don't need to go down to 800 calories a day, go to 1,200 and do exercise. If you burn 1,000 calories, you can eat 1,000 calories. That worked, but the NHS won't accept that anymore. They've got very expensive programs based on a doctor-managed diet of 800 calories, which you're not going to be able to maintain if you don't change your lifestyle because they're looking at single causality. And I think the same is true on, you know, when people start to talk embodiment. Well, what about enactment?

Yes.

Yeah. What about extension?

Right?

Yeah. So the danger is this desire for the silver bullet, the single causal factor, this, yeah. The creation of a recipe. You get rewarded these days for not working out how different ingredients work. You get rewarded for creating recipes that people can follow without going through the normal apprenticeships of a chef.

Absolutely. No, no, I, I definitely take that on board. And you know, he's not here to speak, but to be fair to Guy, I think he's talking about embodiment science as a name, but he's actually including enactment and extended cognition and all of those things in that frame. I think, but he's in the process of writing the book. But the reason I bring—

there's a phrase in theology, you, you should always— you should never give up on hope, but you shouldn't be required to be optimistic.

Yeah, absolutely. But the reason I bring it up is because coming back to a classroom environment, and I absolutely take your point about the kind of recipe obsession and we need a silver bullet, but, but actually, if you're a teacher in a classroom, I think understanding that consciousness, cognition, whatever as you say, is a distributed function of the body and brain and the social environment. That's a huge shift in perspective around the work that educators are doing with young people, isn't it?

You can distill this for teachers. You can say, look, if you want a child to pay attention to something cognitively, i.e., to engage the, you know, the active part of their brain, they're not going to do that unless there's an anomaly because it's about energy efficiency.

Right.

We don't engage— that brain is consuming a huge amount of energy. We don't really use its higher reasoning capability unless we see anomalies. Right. So the famous one about radiologists do not see a picture of a gorilla in X-rays because they're not expecting to see it. So you have to understand that to get a child's attention, you create anomalies. Right. But you also need to understand that the social pressure of the people around them, we now know some of the scientific basis of that. Also the social context we know from epigenetics. So Eva Jablonka, I mean, this is controversial, but I have a lot of time for Eva. Major geneticist, is suggesting the level of symbolism in your speech impacts on the intelligence of your grandchildren. And that has major implications because we've tended to assume that you effectively have a blank sheet that comes into school. But actually, that blank sheet has come out of a social context. If you don't get certain type of nurture by the time you're 2 or 3, yeah, there are capabilities you will never be able to exercise, right? Yeah. So it's not difficult. I mean, we, we do this in 1 or 2 days to train people to understand what the science is saying. It's a fairly simple level.

Yeah.

Then you want to see how their practice accommodates that, because you've got to treat kids as individuals, right? But you've also got to manage their social interactions. And as I say, one of the things I think we've lost because of the emphasis on continuous examination is we've lost that social interaction around sports clubs, arts clubs, science societies.

Yeah.

The interactions between people. We, we were quite good at debating because of that thing. We are— I mean, the sixth form went to the adult debating society in the town, took part in it. Not as much from that from school. Yeah. So we we've got education into this rigid outcome-based target. I mean, another example, our headmaster taught English. In those days, headmasters taught.

Yeah.

He never had a teaching plan in his life. He knew Shakespeare by heart. He got straight A's from everybody because he inspired them to understand English literature. But he wouldn't survive in a modern environment. Yeah. Because we've gone for this homogenization approach of outcomes, targets, information-centric, not knowledge-centric. You get rewarded for more from, I mean, I'll give you another example. So my daughter got the university prize for the best master's thesis in anthropology, which I'm quite proud of because it's the leading anthropology school in the world. So that was good news. But the essence of that idea was in her first essay she wrote at undergraduate level, and she phoned me up in tears because she'd failed. And I pointed out that she hadn't actually worked out what the marking plan was. She'd written something which was gonna be rewarded by the university 5 years later as truly original thinking. But she wasn't expected to be an original thinker at 18. She was thinking she was meant to write to a marking plan. Now we never did that.

All right.

And again, I think it is what I've called the tyranny of the explicit, the belief that something only happens if you can measure it.

Yeah.

And of course the only way you can measure it is by measuring information regurgitation, which has nothing to do with knowledge.

Exactly. And that feels like a huge part of the trap that we've got teachers into. And it's, they're just trying to work within that system and do whatever they need to do to survive and do the best by the young people.

But actually it's a systems issue because I think the problem is with the apprentice model of teaching has been reduced. So the inspector is now there to test on measurement.

Yeah.

It used to be, to be honest, you went to teacher training college and you learned some stuff, but most of it was actually in the classroom with experienced teachers. Yeah. And again, that's this belief that you can, you can, I reckon it takes 2 or 3 years for any model or any ability to handle it. My mother was a teacher. She could quell an entire classroom with one look. All right. But that, that couldn't be taught in college. That was learned over time. Right.

Exactly.

And I think we've lost the apprentice model of teaching in favor of actively making teachers go through the same process we then force them to put their kids through, which is information regurgitation.

Right.

Exactly. And all of those things you just described about arts clubs or sports clubs or those, that lived complexity of going out into the world and seeing how it actually happens. And then of course you perceive the anomalies, you, you, you have to deal with a whole load of complexities as they move., but that's living. And then as you say, maybe the desirable characteristics or whatever it is you, you want emerge from that rather than being somehow engineered. Because I, I think as you were saying, the expectations on school hasn't receded with the narrowness of the approach, the systematic complicated approach. They still want very complicated outcomes, increasingly so with social-emotional learning, character traits, et cetera. I think that's really useful, but as you said, one of the The key things is then how does the practice shift? And I, we've kind of begun to talk about some of those practices. Maybe, maybe we move on to the broader school context or organizational context with the strategy, cuz I think there's a similar dynamic that happens there when the strategy becomes about idealized future states, where, you know, visions, mission, all the things you talk about in all sorts of organizations, corporates, et cetera. It's similar kinds of, you know, there's a, a copying of those corporate approaches, the kind of expensive consultancy models and visions and missions, et cetera. But again, it's all based on a very tyranny of the explicit, the outcomes, the idealized future state that we want to get to.

That is 3 decades of systems thinking. Yeah, I mean, systems thinking comes from Shannon and Ashby's theory of information. It, you know, had huge value in many contexts. But it doesn't really reflect humans. I mean, Ashby's law is not a restriction in human sense-making. It's only a restriction in signal-based information traffic. All right. Yeah.

Just say what Ashby's law is, just for people that don't know.

Variety can match variety. You see it in Metcalfe's law as well, which I don't agree with. I mean, the thing about what happened with systems thinking is it brought in engineering metaphors. Scientific management, which is much derided, but was actually quite powerful, used military metaphors. Military metaphors are adaptive.

Yeah.

And the trouble with engineers is they can't cope with something unless they've defined what a good outcome is. Probably the single big difference between complexity science and systems thinking is in complexity science, we want to understand the energy gradients of the present. And we want to start journeys often in parallel with a sense of direction because we know we can't achieve goals. Yeah. And also we know that systems don't necessarily have boundaries. So managing boundary conditions is not sufficient. Yeah. I could go into other differences.

Yeah.

That managing the evolutionary potential of the present is the single most important thing to switch to.

Yeah.

And that means you need to map what the energy gradients are of your school and the social environment in which you're placed to determine what is possible. Rather than having a one-size-fits-all average over the whole company, or based on things like poverty indexes, which correlate, but don't have causality. And we proved that in several cases.

Yeah. I mean, that for me is one of the single, like, as you say, the single biggest shift is rather than thinking, have this obsession with what kind of future do we want, and then articulating that beautifully through all sorts of workshops and expensive consultants and reports, et cetera, of actually just understanding where you are. Like where the hell you are now, as you say, it's like, that's a really significant shift for people. But I think, could you say a little bit more about what kinds of things are you looking for in your ACTANTS model in the current present? How do you make sense of the present with different—

Okay. So some of this is, is picking up on actor network theory, although I think that goes to, there's a longer precedent on that and I wouldn't go to the same extreme. But what we actually say, if you look at a complex system, you have human actors, you have constraints which can contain or connect. Yeah. And that's, that's a big difference between them. But also this key concept from theoretical physics, which is a constructor, which is something which transforms things but doesn't itself change in the act of transformation. So things like processes and rituals are part of that. And constructors, this is really building for us at the moment because they give you stability in uncertainty. You can't have stable output at a system level, but you do know that this constructor will produce consistent output if you give it consistent input.

Yeah. So just give an example of, so the actors is one and then the constraints then, so they have, they imply boundaries, right? And you've got, or they're connected.

Take education. So current constraint might be government requirements for measurement. And I would argue international tables for literacy measurement are causing more damage than good because they're based on a very culturally specific model. Right. But it's a current constraint, so you gotta live with it. Yeah. A constructor is something like ritual acts or processes. Yeah. So I mean, Singapore had a really good, they don't have it anymore, but they used to have this master called the discipline master. And it was the wrong name because they were the mediator between the pupils and the staff. And it was a career pathway to become a headmaster, but they were really important. They, they had agency in the system, which wasn't formal authority because they defined a lot of the interactions. So what we want to do is to map what those are and ideally map the social context in which people have been educated. And then that tells us what is possible next. So we start with where we are and where we can go next. We don't start with some culturally specific third-party ideal about what education should be. And just to give an example from my own tradition, I grew up in Wales, all right? In South Wales, the miners used to employ lecturers to come and lecture at workers' educational funds. In the slate mines of North Wales, they used to carve out a meeting room and debate politics and religion in their tea breaks.

Nice.

And their lunch breaks and keep minutes.

All right. But just the thing that I find interesting about that is that then the strategy, whatever emerges as strategic choices in that environment, reflects that environment as you just described with that example.

And that community. Well, I mean, we're looking at this in hospitals. You can actually admit patients later and discharge them sooner. If the community has the right interaction support to support them. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, human beings are very contextual. And the trouble with engineering approaches is they remove the context. They go for context-free in a context-specific world. Right.

Exactly. And another one of your naturalizing sensemaking principles, if you like, it was, which I heard you speak about at the Stower, was we evolved to make decisions in sexual pairs, extended families, and clans. So if you take that as a, one of your constraints within the naturalizing sensemaking. Again, in that context, not only is there a particular context of interactions and informal networks, you're, we're also just evolved to make decisions in those kinds of complex environments, not future states.

If you look at some of the Maori systems of justice I work with, then the iwi can reassimilate drug offenders without going through the prison system. Yeah. And there's lots of examples on this. Different societies work in different ways. So if you look at the Grameen Bank worked in Bangladesh, which was matriarchal, it didn't work in Africa, which is patriarchal. Yeah, and you're not gonna offend a Welsh mam in the Welsh valleys. Yeah, but in other areas it works very differently. So where's the peer group pressure? Yeah. So you need to understand the context in which education is taking place. Now, yes, you need universal standards on literacy, but also I'll give another example of that. One thing we now know is the thing we were made to do, which was learn a poem every week, is actually really good for cognitive development.

Yeah.

Then there's this whole period of education where they all decide kids should make their own minds up, which actually nobody in any so-called primitive society would ever accept. And the reality is there's cognitive pathways that develop up until just after puberty that you need to do things in routine ways. So we know habituation is very important for the development of the brain, right? But people have got away from that because they're working off this enlightenment model of the brain is pre-given, which also comes in with nonsense, you know, like, you know, adult development theories and stuff like this. The idea that there are stages, that there, you know, things are pre-given. None of that is the case. We're a nexus of social interactions.

Yeah, but it's so interesting because when I hear you speak, there's elements of what you might call more traditional approaches, and then there's elements of more progressive approaches, and it all ends up in this really interesting swirl of clearly people have, over the years, have cherry-picked the bits that suited their own ideology. Right?

And that's my point. That's why we go back to the natural sciences, because you've got enough data there. Right?

Because the habituation piece, I think, is fascinating and so deeply important. But often the way that gets interpreted in school context is just get them to do this thing over and over again. So you overlearn the same routines, the same mathematical routines or whatever it is.

Some of that is good, some of it's bad.

Right, exactly. I'm not saying it's therefore bad. I'm just saying that's the way it's kind of been contextualized in a much more systematic—

Learning your timetables at primary school and learning the shortcuts, like the take one off when you multiply by 9, those are cognitive skills you need to just develop. Right? 100%. I think where it gets destroyed is later on where you start to lose the originality. And that's where learning plans have become part of the problem because they're trying to, I mean, we talk about vector measures, not outcome-based targets. So are we going in the right direction at the right speed? Well, if you start by measuring where you are, you can set a vector target. Yeah.

Yeah. And okay. That's, that's a really important piece of this overall most strategic frame. Cause if you, so let's go back to the organizational strategy approach. If you're mapping the present and you're looking at these actors and these constraints and constructors, and you're looking at that overall picture. And if people want to look at it, it's called, um, you're calling it this whole frame, Esterline mapping and connecting with lots of other methods, but you're mapping the present. And then could you say more about that vector?

Okay. So you're doing two main things. You, you map the present state. All right. You also then define what's called a counterfactual space, the things that you can't change, right? Which is often what you've been told to change by government. All right. Exactly. If you map it properly, you know, you can't. Yeah. What you then do is you focus on changing the landscape so that good education is more likely to happen. Rather than deciding what that education should be. So what you do is you change the dispositional state of the system, then you see what emerges in that case and you reinforce the good stuff, disrupt the bad stuff. So that allows locally contextual solutions to emerge. And yeah, I was looking at, if you ever go to Symfagyn's Folk Museum in Cardiff, there's one of the old schools, which has got the Welsh not in it because the English decided in the 19th century that Welsh was uncivilized and we'd had to be eliminated. But there you've got a school where every, there was very small schools locally. They had one teacher. It was acceptable job for single women. Small things can adapt to local context better than big things.

Right. Yeah.

You need a minimum size school to support a sixth form.

Yeah.

But you don't need that, that to support those. So yeah, there's, I think there's a lot of failure to understand the nature of learning at different ages as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Post-puberty things are starting to lock down.

Yeah, absolutely. But then there's also the kind of more macro layer of the mapping of the present of the, all of the market structures and incentives that are incentivizing private big schools in certain, you know, so you end up with these 5,000, 6,000 student schools in certain areas. And there's a whole landscape of then other incentives and constraints and constructors in the broader picture, which is not incentivizing that more localized, because all your things you're talking about there about this small relational, locally contextual almost gets pushed in the opposite direction when you start looking at market incentives and efficiencies of scale, all of that.

And I think, I mean, you need big, you need big schools to handle a decent sixth form. Yeah. But you could argue we lost really good polytechnics by making them universities in the UK. Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

Because we wanted everything to be a university. And if I go back to the 11+ days, the leadership of the secondary modern schools actually went on to be the leadership of the craft industry. Because they weren't 4 classes down from the brightest people in the grammar school, which happened when it went comprehensive. All right, now I'm not arguing to go back to that, but we need to understand the social process. Yeah. And there was a famous BBC documentary on this, which pointed out that the grammar school kids competed with the private school kids. And when we went comprehensive, the private schools came back into dominance again. You can see that in British politics.

Yeah.

So I think, you know, if you want people to do pure maths and applied maths as separate subjects, you need a really big school because you're only going to get 4 or 5 people capable of doing doing that. But I think, you know, that there are issues about how you organize on that. And I think the other thing is what you teach kids. So we were taught how to use punch card machines and told we'd had a job for life. The modern equivalent is teaching computer studies or Java code.

Exactly.

Anything that— anything they've been taught in schools on technology at the moment will be out of date.

Yeah.

You need to teach them design, anthropology, philosophy, because those are human skills which they need to acquire then. Right.

Yeah.

And I think the trouble is, it's like with the university system in Australia If you want to study computer studies, your fees will be low. If you want to understand the humanities, your fees will be high. Right. So only the elite can now actually learn how to govern. Everybody has become a disposable commodity. And education has been geared up to produce people who can work for fairly low wages once they graduate and then will be thrown on the scrap heap 10 years later as the next generation comes through. Yeah.

And just maybe just to finish, I did love your phrase, AI bullshit. And humans hallucinate. And I think like that goes back to what we were saying about just how multifaceted and kind of interactional the human cognition is.

Well, it's also this scary thing, all right? So you got a problem because there's a lot of lobby groups and there's agencies. So, you know, you should really, when somebody is arguing, Tony Blair's organization is a good example, go and look at where the funding comes from. So what's interesting is the leaders of the tech giants do not have their kids educated by AI. But they're lobbying for it.

Right.

Yeah. The elite American schools are removing computers from the classroom so their kids develop capabilities, which are human, right? So the idea we can handle a teacher shortage by moving in AI is really problematic, I think. It doesn't mean there's not a role to play, but it's not, it can't replace the teacher and that teacher's interaction with other teachers and with the classroom and with the parents.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, Parental interaction is also key.

Yeah, absolutely. But if I can also, the thing that I've heard you speak about and I find also so scary is the algorithmic basis of that takes away all of that, the complexity and the nuance of the sensing that you were talking about earlier.

You've got another problem as well in that the OpenAI, which people are using, is feeding off its own output. Now, anybody with the most basic knowledge of models knows that that produces perverse outcomes. Yeah. Right? And what, what AI is trying to do is give you the most persuasive answer. It's saccharine. Yeah? It's not gonna disrupt you. And I think that's, a good teacher knows when to disrupt a kid and when not to disrupt a kid and when to make you think twice. So I think there's a whole body, I mean, the key thing to think, and I've spent a lot, I've lectured and I've written on this, human beings evolved to make decisions abductively. AI makes it inductively. And anything, human beings evolved to make decisions where there were no training datasets. And the trouble is, one of the reasons why AI is getting to be successful in classrooms is classrooms have been dumbing down human intelligence to what AI does better.

Exactly, exactly. But the abduction, which to a lot of people I think is a new word, is so interesting to me because it's like, because it brings in all of this other sense sensing of you're not just making a decision, as you said, based on this kind of tyranny of the explicit, the things you've read or the things other people have said. You're also making this decision based on what you can smell in the room, what you had for dinner last night, what you can remember of this place that's a bit similar.

And sensory input we don't yet, we don't yet fully understand. Right.

Exactly.

That's it.

Yeah.

So that's important to understand. I think the other thing is art comes before language in human evolution.

Right.

Though language is not a symbolic representation of facts. I mean, Chomsky's theories of language were disproved by Deacon and others years ago, right? And I think that's important because what art does is it breaks you away from the physical so that you see novel connections. And that's evolved in humans to handle high levels of uncertainty.

Yeah.

So we can use metaphors, AI can't.

Yeah.

Because we understand the difference between hallucination and bullshit.

Exactly. And to me, it just is just another confirmation of that need for the kind of the real moving complex lived environments that education should be happening in. 'Cause otherwise they're happening in sanitized boxes with algorithmic thinking and inductive logic.

Yeah, you've got it.

Beautiful. Oh, thanks Dave. I so appreciate it. And I will put loads of links in the show notes to a lot of the work, the SRI mapping and the narrative we haven't talked about, but I think is so powerful and SenseMaker and there's just a lot there that, so I would really encourage educators audience to dig in and reach out if they have questions. So thank you.

Okay, awesome.

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