Get There Early: Positive Responses in Health and Public Education

[This is an extract from Chapter 3 of Bob Johansen's new book, Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present. The previous extract, which starts the discussion "the VUCA opportunity" is here; the introduction to the chapter is here. -Ed.]

Health in a VUCA world. The threats to health are everywhere, from global pandemics to the products we use in our homes. Health has become a filter for purchase of a wide range of products and services, beyond just response to disease. Now, health criteria are important for food products, beauty products, cleaning products, and even products to ensure healthy housing, air, and water.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), based in Atlanta, is focusing its strategy on global health and safety—but health is what everyone is most concerned about. The CDC has also recognized that, even though it is a U.S. government agency, health is a global challenge. Pandemics are a concern because the world is interconnected in many ways, including the spread of infectious diseases. The dilemma for the CDC, and for us all as a global society, is how to be responsive to treating and preventing disease while creating more effective approaches to long-term health. The vision for the CDC is long-term health. The CDC is attempting to raise the health aspirations of Americans, encouraging us to focus on healthy living within the context of radical uncertainty.

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Meanwhile, the CDC is also the center for emergency health response. Its new Emergency Command Center in Atlanta has sixty-six workstations, sixteen large-screen displays, and fourteen team rooms circling the Command Center. The CDC is better prepared than ever for global health emergencies, even though it is placing its emphasis on heading off the crises before they occur. The new Command Center was developed with corporate support through the CDC Foundation, a creative organizational structure that allows the CDC to mount new initiatives with business without going through the normal governmental procedures that are just too slow be able to respond to global health emergencies.

On 9/11, the CDC had only crude emergency response facilities that it set up in a temporary conference room. In the six years since 9/11, the CDC has responded to twenty-five health emergencies with “command center” activities, which led them to create the more permanent— and much more advanced—Emergency Command Center. Using simulation gaming, it now practices to develop its agility in responding to the next health crises, which are uncertain in nature but certain to come.

The following are the CDC’s strategic imperatives, all of which address various facets of the chaotic world around us:

• Health Impact Focus: Align CDC’s people, strategies, goals, investments, and performance to maximize impact on people’s health and safety. (Alignment in this case is a kind of strategic intent about overall direction and purpose.)
• Customercentricity: Market what people want and need to choose health. (The CDC is increasingly market sensitive and market savvy.)
• Public Health Research: Create and disseminate the knowledge and innovations people need to protect their health now and in the future. (Networks are used heavily within the CDC to spread news about innovations and prepare for rapid responses to emergencies.)
• Leadership: Leverage CDC’s unique expertise, partnerships, and networks to improve the health system. (This imperative links back to clarity and intent, as well as to the CDC’s increasingly wide circle of network connections beyond government.)
• Global Health Impact: Extend CDC’s knowledge and tools to promote health protection around the world. (Health concerns, no matter how locally defined, are increasingly global. Health issues bleed across national boundaries.)
• Accountability: Sustain people’s trust and confidence by making the most efficient and effective use of their investment in CDC. (The CDC has an incredible public relations challenge, to engage with diverse people and organizations all around the world.)

Notice how these imperatives bridge the goals of both creating a sustainable health culture and responding to global health crises.

Whereas health care (that is, disease response) used to dominate, the CDC is now making a major strategic push around healthy choice making. Although it is still very interested in the health care system, it is taking a growing interest in health behaviors that are more basic and more likely to have lasting impacts.

In order to hone its own readiness, the CDC executive leadership team uses a set of global scenarios against which each of these strategies has been tested. How might each strategy do in a range of possible future worlds? Readiness exercises like these prepare the leaders of the CDC for the dilemmas that they face, but they also allow them to periodically reevaluate their strategies and the tactics they are using to bring them to life.

Public Education for a VUCA World. Although every other major institution has gone through radical changes in the past few generations, public schools are changing more slowly—except for the core of amazing teachers who bring life and hope to the classrooms. It is almost as though the public school administrators were hoping the VUCA world was not really there, even though any teacher or student could tell you it feels chaotic already inside many schools.

The KnowledgeWorks Foundation (KWF) is an operational foundation based in Cincinnati that has a focus on improving education for disadvantaged kids. IFTF does an annual forecast for KWF on external future forces likely to affect education and learning, thinking ten years ahead. Our goal is to identify high-impact zones in which investments by KWF are likely to have major impacts on improving education for disadvantaged kids.

One of the dilemmas we identified is the tension between the marketplace for increasingly personalized learning and the social mandate of the public schools to provide foundational education to everyone— regardless of background or income. New media, especially interactive media, are introducing new ways to engage with students and new opportunities for learning—but access varies depending mostly on ability to pay. Public education is funded mostly from public sources, but new media learning resources tend to be marketplace driven. What is the role of public education in a marketplace-driven learning environment?

Other directions of change in the world of education, each of which introduces dilemmas that challenge educational policy makers, are highlighted below:

• VUCA Community Schools. Increasingly, schools need to be safe zones, centers for hope and positive expectations. Tension is greatest in urban communities, with extreme conditions of wealth and poverty, uncharted social challenges with increasing diversity, and few shared norms to guide constructive change. A school can be a healthy life advocate, playing a core role in communities in dealing with problems such as youth obesity. Community schools can provide a vision for dealing with the volatility of most communities. To be successful, this vision must be understood and shared widely.
• The Learning Economy. The trend is from reliance on a dominant system of public schools toward a diverse marketplace for learning and from one-way classroom-style learning to multiple ways that are personalized to the needs of the learner. Think of this as a grassroots economy for learning, a direction that is likely to be a challenge to the centralized methods of the public schools.
• Realignment of the Learning Professions. The learning professions, such as teaching, are moving toward becoming agents for formal and informal learning, from “sage on the stage” to “guide by your side.” Teachers unions are major players as the incumbent learning agents and can be a source for innovation or an impediment to constructive change.
• Pervasive Learning Ecologies. The trend is toward anytime, anyplace learning, with a blending of the virtual and the physical. Schools need to help frame conversations about learning within a community, with an emphasis on providing opportunities for disadvantaged kids. Youth, even poor youth, are growing up with media all around them. These digital natives have the media savvy to learn in new ways if teachers can learn to use the media that the kids already know how to use.
• Deep Personalization. The trend is toward customization for everyone, with experiential lifelong learning. Empowered learners with smart networking skills are developing new ways to learn. Listening, understanding, and trust are required to deliver authentic personalization.

The VUCA world is creating dilemmas of learning for disadvantaged kids that can’t be solved with either-or thinking. New strategies are required that go beyond problem solving. The education and learning hot zones summarized above present new challenges, but they also highlight new opportunities for change in how kids learn and how teachers teach. Pub- lic schools could be an important part of the learning economy, but the challenges for them are extreme.