:Connecting the Dots

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a somewhat heady but also very funny and insightful treatise on the importance of randomness in our lives – and our complete blindness to it.  He argues that we now live in “extremistan” – a world where it is likely that improbable events will occur- but we still think we’re living in mediocristan, where the bell curve accurately represents reality and almost anything can be explained and predicted through statistical analysis.  To those who disagree, Taleb would point to 9/11 and the current financial crisis, the most obvious examples of events which no one could possibly have forecast.  Taleb argues that life has just become too complex to render accurate predictions about anything worth predicting.  The best we can do is to be ready for anything: “luck favors the prepared”, as Louis Pasteur famously said.

Of course, to those of us in the technology world, this should be obvious.  Early on in Ed Tech, the advice to schools and districts was to write a five-year technology plan and even now anyone who wants eRate funding must submit a three-year plan.  Those of us who have lived through of few iterations of these plans – however throroughly they were researched, however collaboratively they were written – know that things never turn out quite as planned.  For example, my district’s current plan mentions nothing about a global financial crisis in year two that will severely limit our ability to fund purchases of new technologies.  Likewise, who wrote a technology plan in 1998 that anticipated the Columbine school shootings a year later and the subsequent millions of dollars that schools would pour into emergency notification systems?  Are we as in control as our technology plans suggest?

And it’s not all about bad news, either.  New technologies sprout up quickly and in ways we almost never expect.  Is a tech director just supposed to watch opporunity pass by because that exciting new technology wasn’t in the plan?  Who saw Voicethread coming?  Luck does favor the prepared, so maybe the best we can do with these tech plans is to keep them broad and focused on the things that don’t change: hiring the right people, keeping the channels of communication open, clarifying the vision.  I keep thinking about Google’s policy encouraging employee’s to spend 20% of their time on the clock working on side projects: they know something great is likely to come about if conditions are right to allow it to happen and they don’t try to force it.  Hence Google Chrome.

Are schools, with their yellowing technology plans, yearly budget fights, and stifling beauracracy, ready for randomness? 

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