I first heard this phrase when I was in my teens working as a lot boy/mechanic’s helper at a car dealership. A former race mechanic was explaining to a customer that there are always trade offs when it comes to performance and one has to choose what is most important. He told the customer to “pick two… good, fast or cheap.” Since that time I have heard this constraint triad referenced in IT, Educational Technology, Instructional Design, Web Design and many other projects. The challenge is that all three constraints of a project are interrelated and it is impossible to realize all three. One of the contraints or properties will always suffer.
Personal experience with many projects confirms that if you want something that is good and cheap then it won’t be fast… if you want something that is good and fast… then it won’t be cheap and if you want something fast and cheap… then it won’t be good. I have yet to find an situation where this principle doesn’t apply and more recently I have seen an expansion of this constraint triad apply to another area – the glacial pace of change in Education.
Consider the following constraint triad for Education:
“Pick any two—innovation, change or stability”
To ensure that we don’t get caught up in semantics I will use the following definitions sourced from dictionary.com:
- Change: to transform or convert or make something different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone.
- Innovation: the introduction of new things or methods.
- Stability: the state of being stable or the status quo.
If you want innovation and change in Education then you won’t have stability. If you want innovation and stability then you won’t have change and if you want change and stability then you won’t have innovation. This is NOT a new idea. Clayton Christensen the author of the concept of disruptive innovation points to the challenges that Education faces in the book Disrupting Class which focuses on K-12 Education and the book Innovative University which deals with Higher Education. Christensen points to years of research that confirms that true innovation is disruptive because it introduces something new and upsets or disrupts the status quo. He also uses the term of sustaining innovation that explains that a product or service can improve over time but this type of innovation has no real transformative effect because it doesn’t introduce something new or significantly different.
Therefore, when you examine the stated positions of the leadership and faculty in Education you will note that while they may be willing to talk about innovation in Strategic Plans, Vision and Mission statements, Academic Plans or even list innovation as part of their organization’s Core Values, their actions reveal a preference for stability. Once again I am not the first author to point to this inconsistency. In the article Innovation in Higher Education? HAH! Ann Kirschner Dean of William E. Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York argues that College leaders need to move beyond talking about transformation to actually transforming Higher Education before it’s too late. If you have any doubt about the lack of innovation and proactive change in Education please refer to the dozens of articles, blog posts and books that I have reviewed or summarized in the Change category on this blog.
Since stability is so important to many of the leaders and faculty in Education it comes at the expense of innovation. When you pick stability and innovation you do so at the expense of change and at best you may get sustaining innovation which really is just a slight improvement on the status quo – blackboards to whiteboard, overheads to PowerPoint, large lecture halls to MOOCs and so on. When you pick stability and change you loose out on innovation all together. Unfortunately, educational reformers dating back to the likes of John Dewey and earlier (see post Progressive Education – Are We There Yet) have been pointing to the need for innovation in our educational system.
Perhaps if we challenged the leaders and faculty in Education to “pick any two—innovation, change or stability” then we would at least be able to account for why things change so slowly…or better yet may be able to motivate educational leadership and faculty to face the reality that if they really want innovation then they can’t have the levels of stability that are they are so accustomed. The renowned educational reformer Ken Robinson argues that we don’t need evolution in Education we need a learning revolution. Where do we start?
Stop hiring so many traditional risk adverse leaders and faculty. I have sat on many selection committees where the majority of the group is simply looking for the “safe bet”. Rather than embrace an individual’s potential, entrepreneurial spirit and unconventional career path or out of the box thinking most selection committee members will look for a stable work history, a traditional promotional path and other safe factors. We need to heed the advice often attributed to Albert Einstein. Although he never actually offered the following quote this notion of challenging conventional thought is still useful:
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
It is impossible to become an innovative or entrepreneurial organization by continually hiring traditional and conventional people. Educational organizations need to hire innovators and entrepreneurs and once they do, let them do the work that they were hired to perform. This takes courage. Innovative, entrepreneurial and out of the box thinkers push the limits, ask uncomfortable questions, offer unique solutions and make some people feel uncomfortable. But this is good. Educational institutions should be learning organizations and learning must be at their core. Learning is a messy, uncomfortable endeavour and innovation and change is just part of the learning process–shouldn’t it be part of organizational culture?
Does your organization genuinely embrace innovation and change? Or is stability and the status quo the top priority?
