A useful mindset

All good things are said to come in threes:

One: The Principle of Good Enough

I recently saw this little tidbit in someone's email signature and promptly looked it up. Here's Wikipedia's spin on the Principle of Good Enough (POGE): It favours quick-and-simple (but potentially extensible) designs over elaborate systems designed by committees. Once the quick-and-simple design is deployed, it can then evolve as needed, driven by user requirements.

We've all seen the paralysis of indecision in focus groups and committees that continually motion to wait for a more perfect solution (to whatever problem they want to solve). In many cases, however, the solution in shiny armor never materializes and there goes another year of having done nothing...again. And sometimes -- again.

Two: Disruptive Innovation

Chew on this:

"...disruptive innovations typically start out as primitive; early on, they can only solve the simplest of problems, so people tend to deride them. But disruptive innovations improve predictably over time-often over several decades-to solve harder problems. And as they do so, over time, people abandon their old ways of doing things, shed their conceptions about how things have to be, and adopt the new."

This is Good Enough's first cousin. The above quote was brought to my attention through our state's Ed Tech news list. It is an excerpt from an article by Michael Horn on the topic of online learning, but the concept can be applied to anything else in an organization that needs to be changed or improved.

Three: Don't be an expert!

Wes Fryer, award winning blogger and educator was the keynote speaker at our state's annual technology conference two years ago and I haven't been able to let go of one simple thought: you don't have to be a techno-expert to start integrating technology in your classroom. You just need to be willing to let go and try something new. Our classrooms are filled with Digital Natives who possess an innate ability to figure out what button to push when you can't get something to work.You can follow Wes's blog at http://www.speedofcreativity.org/

Done!

And so - this post is good enough. I've dispensed with the long-winded examples of how these three mindsets apply to my own teaching or to the dynamics in our organization. Instead, I simply present these mindsets to you the reader in the hope that they will strike a resonating chord and become a song that you just can't get out of your head. Now go sing in your own key!