Learning Peace to Resolve Conflict, not Remove It - A Conversation with Dr Luke Roberts

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

In the real world, it's incredibly important that people find peace because it allows them to imagine new possibilities. If we're in the win-lose binary, then peace can only mean I've won. Whereas if we say peace has a multitude of options, can we both win? Can we coexist without ever having to agree on something?

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me again this week. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. In 1981, the UN established the International Day of Peace to commemorate and strengthen the ideals of peace. We're living in a time now when both the influence of multilateral institutions like the UN is being questioned and the peace that we need is in rapidly shortening supply as violence becomes the norm. My guest this week has been doing amazing work throughout his career with communities to find more peaceful paths through questions of conflict resolution by taking a more systemic and complexity-informed approach. How we engage our young people in responding peacefully to the inevitable conflict they experience in their own lives feels like a critical part of what we do as educators, but so is being open to questioning the way in which violence and harm can also be normalized and perpetuated by the very systems in which we live and work. Dr. Luke Roberts is the founder and CEO of Resolve Consultancy. And the author of Leading Schools and Sustaining Innovation: How to Think Big and Differently in Complex Systems. He and his team work across the private and public sector, helping leaders to understand their ecosystem and apply creative solutions to ill-defined and systemic issues in policy and practice. If you want to find out more about Luke's work, you can find links in the show notes, as well as links to this year's International Day of Peace.

Lovely. Thank you, Luke. Really cool to be able to have this conversation, particularly marking of the International Day of Peace, the day that this episode will go out. And I was looking at it earlier. The theme for this year is Act Now for a Peaceful World, which feels like we need a bit of, right? It's not exactly feeling that peaceful out there. So anyways, it's, uh, yeah, beautiful to meet you and have this conversation.

Okay, pleasure to be here, Tim.

Nice. So there's so much that I would love to explore with you. You do some incredible work around systems and complexity approaches in education. You've done just a wealth of things around different areas related to education, but also in peace and conflict and in prisons. But thinking about this idea of the current moment we're in, where it just feels like there's constantly more depressing news stories of the strongmen out there trying to show their military muscles and flex them. And, you know, I saw Trump's now changed his Department of Defense to the Department of War. And like, this was over the weekend. It just feels depressingly like we are not moving towards peace. But thinking about that from a lens of systems change and complexity, which is where you're coming from, the kind of the stance that you're taking. Yeah. Take us into that topic of peace and conflict. How might it help us think about it a bit differently?

Good question, Tim. So I think if we're interested in systems, then we're interested in context and relationships, I think. And in the present world state, we have systems that seem to want to drive us to polarize. And so we've kind of been in these like binary situations where it's either you must be this or you must be that. And I think partly because of just where we are around issues like climate change, technology, jobs market changing. With high levels of uncertainty, people look for narratives that give comfort and kind of go like, this is the way forward. And the rise of the strongman, as you're kind of saying, is because they can kind of like, let's ignore all of the complexity. This is the single simple solution to this complex world and you don't have to worry about anything else. And so there is a cognitive relief in that. And she's like, ah, I don't have to worry about climate change or my actions and the actions of my neighbors and everyone else because this guy said it's all right. Don't worry about it. And I think what I find really interesting is how many of these kind of strongmen leaders are using the word peace all the time in that, you know, we need to find peace, peace needs to be achieved. And yet their behaviors look the opposite of the language they're using. So I think from our perspective is kind of thinking about complexity, conflict, and peace. What is it that's happening within these complex systems that are creating these challenges of conflict that then need to hopefully be transformed and be resolved into peaceful systems. And peaceful doesn't mean there's an absence of conflict, just means the conflict isn't violent. And I think this is why people like Trump, for example, want to be seen as the great dealmaker. Because if you can get deal, you've created peace. But then what does it look like on the other side? What does sustained peace look like? I don't think there's the moral imagination for that. At the moment because everyone's so focused on their position.

And it, yeah, I mean, what you say really resonates about, it's almost like peace, but on my terms. It's like Putin might say he wants peace. Trump might say that all these people, as you say, using the word, but it's almost like, but only if you agree to come into my way that I have decided that I would like the world to be. If you do that, then yeah, sure, we can have peace. If you, if you don't want to do that, then no.

Yeah. So I think let's put 3 levels of peace here. So there's like personal peace, like, you know, your inner peace. What does peace look like to you? And I think there's interrelational peace. So what does peace look like between Tim Logan and Luke Logan, for example? And that's where you are touching on your peace and my peace can be very different. So how do we co-construct and collaborate to create peace? Which means you're gonna look at negotiation strategies. How does the system adapt and change? To create a coexistence of peace within it. And then I think you've got systems of peace, which is, do the systems themselves actually sustain and maintain peace? Or as you said, some of the work I've done in certain institutions, the system itself perpetuates conflict, perpetuates violence. So it's very hard to remain peaceful in a violent system.

Absolutely. And that's one of the pieces of your work that I just find so interesting and would love to go into a bit if we can. Because I really connect with what you're saying. And I think this is part of the challenge of talking about systems and complexity kind of work is that it's almost, it feels to many people, I mean, you say this in your book, overly academic and almost like a heavy cognitive lift. And yet at the same time, we live in that way. We live in that movement of systems and complexity. That is just how we live. And then we try and tell this story that is a simplified static version of that to help us not feel so cognitively overloaded. So there's, there's some distance between the way we live and then the way we talk about the thing. But I really hear you that there's a challenge to say, lean into the systems and complexity approach because it feels more cognitively demanding or emotionally or psychically demanding or whatever, takes more energy. Maybe we'll get onto energy later, but, but I don't know, there's something challenging there about it being a useful frame, and this is certainly an area of interest for mine, how to bring more of those kinds of frames into education to help young people navigate the world, their world. But maybe just specifically, how would you reflect on that kind of the way to softly bring some of that systemic or complexity kind of approach in that would actually help people feel that cognitive relief or that sense of like, ah, yeah, okay, I finally found something that's describing the actual way of how I live, or, you know, some, I don't know.

Well, let's take it from multiple perspectives then. So I think education probably from the industrial era in the UK has been very much around component thinking, fix the part and the whole will improve. But I think actually a lot of people are intuitively systems thinkers and it is actually educated out of us over time. And I think there is a challenge for education across primary, secondary, tertiary in terms of how do we maintain systems thinking, like to see interconnections and interdependencies rather than trying to go like, let's reduce complexity, let's make it manageable, let's risk assess it, let's metric it because that's how we get success in a world that doesn't seem to be feeling like it's successful at the moment because we, we seem to have educated ourselves out of ways of seeing interdependencies as we fix the parts. So I think hopefully, you know, future generations of educationalists and students will be more intuitive systems thinkers. Because the problems we're facing require an understanding of how the connections between the things are as important as the things themselves. And I think secondly, in terms of cognitive load, I think there is an element of the creative that creeps in here. Like, how do we express systems? So I've been really interested in rich pictures, for example, which is Chepton's work from the self-systems methodology. But I'm also really interested in metaphors. Like, I find When you ask someone to describe their system through the language of a metaphor, it can be quite accurate in terms of the system behaviors that they're seeking to describe. And then you kind of go like, well, what's the context in which that thing, like, you know, Tim's metaphor of his organization is like an octopus. Great. But then what's the habitat of that octopus, Tim? And then you hear those descriptions like, oh, okay, now you're making a relationship between the organization and its environment or the school and its community. And so I think those things become really powerful. So yes, there is the academic language, but I think there's also ways in which we just make systems language more accessible, but not dumb it down. And I think that's the challenge.

Yeah. Right. And in a way, people are already talking in metaphors and, you know, using maybe visual imagery to convey something they can't quite say in other language. So no, absolutely. And could you speak perhaps to that? Cause I heard you then talking about the different kind of the way that the systems encourage certain types of behaviors. And I think just staying with the idea of peace and conflict, you mentioned that systems can maintain levels of violence through just the ways that they are, the kinds of incentives or that they have built into them or the behaviors that they encourage. Could you say maybe a little bit more about what that is? Yeah. How have you seen that manifest in other, maybe in outside of education in some of your other work?

Yeah, sure. So I think if we kind of say that there's two types of this, systems by design that might have inherent violence in them. So for example, and like we take school systems, you know, like in the UK, if you do not conform, you will be suspended, then excluded from the school. We've got rid of corporal punishment, for example, but we still have a model of psychological violence to get compliance. And the problem is being excluded isn't that much of a punishment or a discipline. And so there's a paradox in the system. I want you to stay in school, but when you're not behaving, I want to then take you away from school. So how valuable is education in that system, for example? And the UK had like over a million exclusions this year, like the highest ever. So at what point do we say that the system is so violent, it is no longer achieving the thing it sets out to do? But similarly, some of the organizations I've worked with, like in corporates, What you get is unintentional violence. For example, I remember working in one organization where they had a really nice, like, value statement, but then the values were weaponized because the culture of the system was so high in conflict. It would be like, you know, well, Tim, you are not being compassionate to me. And I'd be like, well, you know, you're not being a team player because those are two of our values. So you can see how the very values themselves get weaponized in the day-to-day conversations. And it's not just enough to say you have these values, but what are the kind of the behaviors that the system may start to co-opt, particularly if you forget that systems have history. And if you've had a history of conflict in your organization, then it doesn't go away just because you put a new value statement in or a new CEO.

Yeah. And I've also heard you speak powerfully about the idea that when there is violence in the system or the conflicts in the system, that kind of, it's somehow a limiting of the it's a narrowing of certain, I don't know, path dependencies or narrowing of possibilities. So you then get those patterns of behavior somehow because these systems of violence or the conflict somehow just encourages particular patterns of behavior, which actually in themselves are quite oppressive, but also are just becomes a vicious cycle somehow of the thing you're trying to stop. Maybe, you know, as you say, with the values statement or whatever, you're trying to bring a different kind of culture into this organization, or, but somehow you end up exacerbating the thing that you're trying to guard against and narrow the possibilities. That felt like a really resonant idea that conflict somehow narrows possibility, whereas peace is somehow an opening up of possibilities.

Well, let's, okay, let's put kind of 3 concepts on the table. So we're all going to experience conflict in our life. So conflict isn't a bad thing. It just means, in my kind of mind, it means there will be a clash or a friction of needs. That are happening between individuals or systems. That's okay because peace can help resolve that. The problem is often violence because violence is destructive. And like Jean-Luc Picard once said in Star Trek, to say you have no choice is a lack of imagination. And I love that because what violence tends to focus on is like, if I'm feeling harmed, can I harm you back? Which is a collapsing of possibilities. Whereas conflict says, we have these needs, how do we meet them? Peace says, what is the trajectories and options that we can take to meet those needs? So it is a divergent way of understanding how to resolve conflict, whereas violence is usually singular, which is just how can I either harm or destroy you?

That's fascinating. So yeah, even I can, I'm probably using those terms, violence and conflict, probably interchangeably incorrectly, because I'm hearing what you're saying, because it's almost set up as a binary, right?

Peace.

Conflicts, like get rid of conflict so we can have peace. And so there's something interesting. Yeah, maybe let's open that up a little bit and say a bit more about like, because sometimes you talk about productive conflict or whatever, people put adjectives in front of it, but I don't know quite what the question is, but something, let's explore that idea of conflict a little bit more as a—

So I think you're right in the sense that often conflict has a negative connotation and depending on which cultures we're in, sometimes we want to avoid it. Sometimes people just go, let's get it on, kind of thing, head on. And I remember working with one CEO once who was really insightful, actually said, we don't have enough conflict in our organization. Like, people are too congenial. And so therefore we're not having richer, challenging discussions because everyone just goes, yeah, I love that idea. Let's get on with it. So like, there was a point where like, you could see he wanted to manufacture conflict to see what energy can be brought into the conversation. And I think the challenge with the kind of the negative connotations of conflict Means that also we get that emotional discomfort when we're gonna hear something we dislike because we don't get given the skills very often to say, how can I sit with the conflict but also then find ways to peacefully resolve it? Because we're often put into, going back to your original question about strongman, if we're in the win-lose binary, yeah, then peace can only mean I've won. Whereas if we say peace has a multitude of options, can we both win? Can we compromise? Can we coexist without ever having to agree on something. So you get this range of possibilities that can come through peace. So I think one of the challenges is often how do you get people to sit with conflict and really articulate what the conflict is without the emotional energy that often comes from a feeling of I'm going to lose or I'm going to be compromised in some way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So can I just, this may be way off, but it just struck me. I'd just love to ask you the question. Is therefore peace a particular kind of approach to conflict? I've never thought that before, but like, because in this kind of binary framing, like I said, you see them as somehow separate states, but it just struck me that maybe there's a different way to approach conflict that is peaceful.

Yeah, I think that's kind of why the United Nations said like, take action for a peaceful world, right? An approach to addressing conflict because the alternative is violence, like let's be destructive, let's end the other. And so I think when we're thinking about peaceful, it's the way in which we can achieve peace between us, but we may get into conflict in the future, but we've got a better way of understanding how to resolve it as well.

Yeah. So, so therefore there's, I mean, this is for me brings back in education because it's kind of almost an educational, problematic word, but educational challenge to like help, for example, young people understand themselves in those situations of conflict and help them develop different capabilities or different dispositions, qualities that will enable them to respond in peaceful rather than violent ways when faced with a conflict somehow.

Well, I go back to my 3 levels of peace.

Mm-hmm.

It can be at peace, but what does peace look like between me and Tim? It means that I have to adapt, I have to learn. How to engage. And then does the system itself help perpetuate peace as well? So we can resolve our conflict, but we like— so when I worked in prisons, we can resolve our conflict, but we're going back into an environment, a situation where conflict is the norm and violence is very much part of the resolution of those conflicts. So again, the system itself helps perpetuate a level of energy and a level of violence that you just have to be prepared for. So I might then have to be in a violent situation with someone else. So for me, it's almost a fractal element to both, you know, If violence is fractal from the top, it will replicate itself down to the bottom. But also same with peace. All, you know, you can go top, bottom, left, whichever.

Yeah, right, right. Interesting. Yeah. And could you give the example of the Peaceful Prisons experience? Because that, that again, that was really instructive hearing you talk about that. That just felt like a really generative flip that allowed for different possibilities to emerge.

Yeah, sure. So years ago, I was asked to reduce violence in the 4 most violent prisons in the UK. And so this is where context really does matter because they were all under 18. And I think, you know, some of them is still a challenge now. And, you know, what you're dealing with is young people who have experienced high levels of trauma, special educational needs. But going like, if we take our system-level violence, the system says it wants to reduce violence. So that's a deficit mindset. So my question was, how much do you wanna reduce it by? Is it by 5%, 50%? 100%? And he was like, no one had an answer because they're like, we just need to reduce the violence. So like when you walk around prisons and you see like this week, you know, violence has reduced by 3%, less assaults. How many assaults were there in the first place for me to go like, is 3% good or bad kind of thing? But what really struck me was it focuses your attention on the violence and not the thing that they actually want. And so as I was kind of doing the work with them, I realized I needed to introduce a concept that was more goal-oriented than deficit-oriented. And that's where I kind of came up with this idea of peaceful prisons. And when I spoke to some of the guys, the younger ones almost fell off their chair laughing at me when I said like, what do you think about peace? Do you know what we have to do, what we have to go through? But then like once they got over the initial giggling of what is peace, it became quite a deep conversation about, well, what does peace mean in my life? It means that I'm not hypervigilant. I'm not worried about who's coming for me behind my back kind of thing. It means that I can actually be cognitively relaxed to get on with the things that I want to do. And it became a really interesting conversation about just wanting things that most people have in their lives. But because you are in this system, well, multiple systems of violence and conflicts, so whether that's in the community, whether that's in gang structures or the prison regime itself, it meant this idea of peace became very powerful to them. And I also spoke to some very long-serving guys as well. And this one guy who was lovely, he was like, Luke, I just want long-term peace because I'm gonna be here for like 10 years. I don't want the drama of having to deal with someone who's, you know, upset that the music's too loud or that the floor isn't clean and we get into an argument. Like, peace is really important to me to get through the time I'm gonna be here. So it became this idea that peace is about, yes, we can have conflict, but we don't need the violence to go with it. And so a bit like you said in schools, how do we start to educate the guys and the officers importantly about not just how to conflict manage, but how to conflict resolve.

Yeah. Okay. And it almost something about the, because we off air, we were just talking about social energy and it was almost like, as you said, you've kind of, by using the term violence, it almost focuses attention and almost feeds more energy into the concept of violence. So perhaps can you do the opposite and feed like somehow this is an implicit or, you know, a subconscious thing happening perhaps. In individuals or in the context, but can you feed more energy into the concept of peacefulness, being peaceful, acting peacefully by the framing? Because I hear myself and I'm like, sometimes people just criticize the kind of the empty words, right? Oh, peaceful prisons. Yeah, of course. It's just a, it's a nice word on a poster or it's a nice statement in a vision statement, right? But it's like, ah, actually how much actual teeth does that have as an idea or as a lived reality in this place, in this context where we have to live and work. So I don't know, like, is there, what's going on there?

Ooh, absolutely right. So one of the things that I'm always concerned about is how systems can co-opt language to hide the lack of behavior change.

Right, right, right, right.

So I'm incredibly mindful of that. And this is where I come back in my PhD. I introduced this idea of social energy because when I was working in schools, lots of schools were saying that, like, you know, they're part of the restorative movement. They use restorative approaches, restorative practice. But when you actually go looking for it, you don't find it very often. So it might be, like you said, it might be in the policy and there might be like a little pocket of teachers who say like, no, we've been trained, but you don't get the interconnection and interdependencies across the relationships. And so when I was thinking about this idea of peaceful prisons, what I was really interested in taking your point was almost like, how do you tai chi systems change? Which is you take the flow of the negative narratives that go around and go, right, actually, how can I start to get people's attention and information into peaceful stories. So I always remember like this one example where this prison officer came up to me and he went, you know, you are never gonna be able to deal with the snitch culture here. The boys will never agree to it, kind of thing. And we had like a really successful conflict resolution meeting between two young people who had a high level of influence on their wings, and they resolved their conflicts. And like 3 months later, nothing could happen between them. And I was monitoring how long it was going to take before there was further conflict between them. And nothing did occur. And so I was like, well, think about the cost we've saved there. So this is my idea, you know, where I talk about attention, information, and money, because there is a cost to violence, both emotionally and financially, that we tend to underestimate. So the fact that there was no further incidents of violence means you've saved prison officer time, class time, movement time. So all of those things matter within that system. And so I went back to him and I said, so, uh, what's the story we're gonna tell now? Because we've got peace. And he was like, all right, all right, all right. So I was like, so now are you gonna start telling them like the boys can resolve their conflict? That shift in narrative from they can't to they can is really powerful, but you've gotta keep the attention focused on it because we are so attracted to violence, to conflict as forms of entertainment. But also they have a threat to them. Like, if that happened to them, will it happen to me? Whereas like, peace seems to be more mysterious in that way. We don't go like, that was a great resolution. Look at how well they're getting on and look at how well they're getting on 6 months later. That story can be easy to be forgotten.

That's so interesting. It's almost like not news, right? Like people are getting on is not news. And almost you see that going back to the strongmen, right? It's like, it's, it's everywhere. Of course it's everywhere in the, in the news cycles, but we are obsessed with these big peak emotion stories of conflict. And actually, yeah, how do we feed the social energy into these, like, into these deeper stories of possibility that are being peaceful or whatever it is? That's so interesting.

I love that. It's not news. And no, it isn't because it doesn't have the drama and it doesn't have the story of drama. So like, whether it's, you know, whichever superhero actually sat down and negotiated with their archenemy that like actually let's live the good life and let everyone prosper. That doesn't have the dramatic tension that's often used. But in the real world, it's incredibly important that people find peace because it allows them to imagine new possibilities, not just for their relationship with the people they're in conflict with, but for new ways of being in the world.

Yeah. And again, that like feels really connected to that idea of energy because it sucks the energy out of when there is a conflict going on. I mean, You know, you're in a conflict at home or whatever, it's, you know, everything becomes about that thing and emotionally, psychically, everything focuses on that as the thing that's happening now, even though of course there are still all the other things happening, but it really draws attention and that feels really important because it does close down other possibilities. So we narrow it somehow, we narrow our attention when there is a conflict, which again feels really understandable, but deeply unproductive.

And again, from an educationalist perspective, peace in education is one of the most underrated concepts. So we talk about behavior and we talk about discipline, but rarely do we talk about peace in education. And so putting it slightly differently, rather than focusing on behavior, what if we focused on peace in classrooms? What if we focused on relational peace? Like just the changing of the focus, the attentional shift, becomes really important because we can get locked into kind of like downward spirals, right? Of attention drain, if we put it that way, like it's going down the plug hole.

Yeah.

Like, you know, they really upset me. I'm really angry. I'm in discomfort. You know, what becomes your options? Usually you want the person removed or you want nothing to do with them. Whereas in education, you can't necessarily do that because you're gonna be with them for a term, a year, 5 years, 7 years maybe. Because the community has to coexist. So how do we find peaceful ways to coexist in these communities? One of the most painful examples of a lack of systems thinking that I saw once, and it really did stick with me, was a young man was in the school and he'd been caught trying to sell drugs. And Hetty's like, zero tolerance policy. No one sells drugs in my school. Off you go. Like, you're banned. And I was like, can I just speak to him? Just before How would you do that kind of thing? And so my first question was like, what's going on? And he said, well, this morning I was stopped on the housing estate that I live on by the local drug dealer. And he said, take these drugs into school, I'll punch you in the face. So like, there's his choices. I think he picked probably the more reasonable, logical one, which is rather than have the violence done to him, probably didn't handle it the best way, could have told him that up, but that means you have to trust the system of peace.

Right?

Like, would he have walked in, if he'd knocked on the headteacher's door and gone, "By the way, I've got a bag of weed on me because I've been threatened," what would've been her response? We'll never know, kind of thing. But my point is, the context of his decision-making was totally ignored. And what we've done in sending that young person back home to his estate is that drug dealer now has someone who can sell more drugs for him because you've freed up time for that young person. So the perverseness of the system is to perpetuate drug dealing by the response it gave in that very moment. And that's why I think context and relationships matter. And the failure to see that, when we simplify and we reduce, that is often where we get these paradoxes or contradictions where we're like, we get the very thing we don't want.

Totally. Because I can also hear people, and I almost feel myself as well, of like, well, But you have to have a boundary somewhere and you've got to, you know, you've got to draw a line in terms of tolerance of particular behaviors or whatever it is. But it's so deep in the system, decontextualizing and a-relational that it's like even the responses that will come, the kind of yes, but responses that will come, it's so deeply ingrained in an approach, which is very much counter to context and relationality. I don't know that that feels like a lot of what I'm exploring on the podcast is like how to allow context and relationality back in to these institutions that have effectively been designed around decontextualizing and a-relationality.

So I think I'm going to go back to my Taylorist point, which is you are part of a production line. You need a hierarchy to make sure there's a chain of command that people do what they say. Hierarchies are great in static environments because what you're saying is not much is going to change. So I don't need to be sensitive to my environment because what I produce will be accepted by the environment. The problem is for societies is that we have become more complex adaptive systems where we can see the interrelationships and interdependencies. And leadership thinking itself hasn't kept up with the changes in organizations and the environments we operate. So system-sensitive leaders are few and far between because your career isn't built on being sensitive to the system. Your career is often built on being internally— well, I was going to say Machiavellian, but that's probably too harsh— internally compliant with the metrics and norms that the hierarchy insists you have to succeed. So this is why you end up with very similar leaders over time, because the system is reproducing itself in that leadership model. And then you get to a moment of crisis where no one knows how to deal with it. Because they aren't system sensitive.

Yeah, absolutely. No, I hear you. I hear you very much. And it also, and I'd love to not miss the opportunity to ask you about this, because I think you brought it in there with metrics. And so it's not just, it's not just the personnel and the leadership. It's also, as we were talking about earlier, the DNA of the systems and the decisions that were made in the past to build these particular systems. And measurement systems is one of the big ones that we inhabit. In education all the time. And it just, it's constantly there for me as the, the tail that wags the dog of education in a way, right? That's some people refer to it as this, you know, if we can change it, assessment, measurement, et cetera, then we might shift education. Not sure it's that straightforward, but there is a real emphasis placed on preparing young people for the exams or the, you know, the way we have accountability in these systems. And I know you, you ruffled a few feathers recently at your keynote that you gave at the UK Evaluation Society conference talking about how we're implicated in violent systems. Are measurement systems violent? So I think it would be, yeah, if we could just talk about that a little bit, just as one of the systems we inhabit in education, I think that's it again, opens it up usefully.

Sure. So bear in mind, I was asked to be provocative at this conference. I thought, okay. So my whole argument was that forms of evaluation that reduce complexity of running an axe. Because then we're always surprised by the system because we, you know, I think what we've been saying all along, which is where we put our focus in the system really matters. When I've worked in the NHS, they had this lovely saying, which was, you can hit the target and miss the point. And I thought, whoa. And I think that's the danger, which is kind of threefold, which is when we think about, we put a metric in place, we're reducing the system. We say like, Nothing else matters, just this bit is one part of the problem. So we deny interconnection and interdependency. I think the second thing that I've seen is we then gamify hitting that target. So it doesn't matter, and I've seen this in large organizations, it doesn't matter how I hit the target, as long as I am acknowledged for hitting the target. So what would it be like in education? As long as we can get X amount of students to their GCSEs. That's great, but if my are holding them back, you know, let's off-roll them. You know, like now our GCSEs look like we've got a high proportion of students passing, for example, because we've reduced the pool at which you would get them kind of thing. And so you can have these kind of, these system gamifications where the target becomes all important and central in the mindset rather than what is the purpose of education. And I take the point about examinations. But we are in a different place than ever before with the introduction of generative AI in terms of how are the jobs of the future going to be accessed by young people sitting exams now. I'm not sure education has answered that question in any deep and meaningful way apart from the hope that like, keep getting your, what is it, 9s or A pluses, I'm using old money there, kind of thing. And I think the third part is that the more the system focuses on the target, becomes an anchor, so it becomes even harder when you try and change it later on and go, actually, that maybe wasn't the right target, because there's not enough thinking about different ways in which we can look at the way that assessment, accreditation, and award happens. And also, what are the worldviews of the young people and their aspirations? If I, if we were going to credentialize peace, I would hope it would be done in a really innovative and dynamic way, not a kind of single 3-hour paper at the end. You've disassociated the embodied from the standardized knowledge that you want to have. So are you creating a peaceful generation or are you just creating a generation of children who know how to go after a 3-hour assessment?

Yeah, right. Absolutely. And it was, it made me think, what would an assessment that allowed context and relation to be the thing which is valued and rewarded and evaluated, measured? Inverted commas, I don't, I think the word measurement itself is problematic, honestly, but there is a sense that we want to have some feedback about where people are at. There is some urge towards saying, ah yeah, you have reached a certain understanding or a certain level. There is definitely that urge in humans. And so there's something there about assessment, but the point of, as you say, where we put our attention, where we put our of value, how could you incentivize more contextual and more relational through assessment? That to me would seem like a really interesting question.

Definitely. And I think for me, there is something about how do we look at knowledge as application? Like, so how do you apply it? I think that's what I find fascinating because in the world of work, often you're being given challenges, problems, tasks, and it's not ability to go, I know the theory of that and I know what is, it's like, well, how do I apply it to make value, to add value to the company, to the organization, to the community? And I think this is where I see a real challenge in lots of kind of early job entrants, which is what are the skills we actually need to be able to do this job? And some, a lot of those are relational actually, right? We've decided because industrial revolution needed people with like, can you read the instructions on the machine? Can you count how many widgets you've done? Like, these are the ways in which we value educational success. I think the stability of that environment is eroding rapidly.

I also wonder if it goes deeper than that. I had some previous episodes on embodiment and 4E cognitive science and all of those things. And I think there's something deeper almost in the way that we thought about knowledge itself as a decontextualized set of ideas out there that are unchanging, that we just grab when we need. Oh, we need a bit of complexity theory. I'll grab some ideas there. And they'll be the same. But actually, like, when you do the application, that is the knowing relating work of taking ideas and putting them into practice somehow. And even just, yeah, I think there's some very deep existential things that we have to grapple with as we're talking about a lot of these things.

Well, I'm still going to rough up Frederick Taylor here. And Taylorism was to, what goal was to undermine craftsmanship because he had no time for it. Like, you don't want people to have like high knowledge and skills to be able to produce unique things. That wasn't the purpose of the Industrial Revolution. It was to produce production line things where people could follow instructions. So you lose embodied contextualized knowledge because you're just supposed to follow the explicit manual that I have given you. And like Taylor did not like production line people. He was quite dismissive of them. And yet that mindset has followed us around for at least a good 150 years. And a lot of management theory doesn't recognize that because it doesn't do the thing you're saying, which was how do we understand the ways of knowing in the world? How do we understand the context of that knowing? And is that context specific or generalizable? Are things that are often lost because it's just like, is there a manual? Is there a PowerPoint? Can I just ChatGPT it? Which only knows certain things, which are probably the reinforcement of particular ways of thinking.

Yeah, exactly. And cultural biases and all of that nonsense. So yeah, I know, 100%. No, amazing. I feel like we've like looped around and gone all sorts of crazy places, but no, I so appreciate it, Luke. It really is such interesting work. I really recommend your book to out there just as a way of thinking beyond the, what is it, the whole school approach to innovation and thinking much more in a much more complexity-oriented and systems-oriented way. Such valuable work. I appreciate you taking the time to chat and yeah, here's to a more peaceful world.

Definitely. Thank you, Tim.

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