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In our ever-expanding global economy, we are witnessing the ramifications of what Henry Wendell calls a total economy, where “significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations.”

As we wake up to the consequences of a global total economy on our health, environment, livelihoods and lifestyles, many of us are creating new, local economies that put choice back in the hands of the people who are directly affected by those choices.

The Local Revolution
Increased access to information is exposing the perils behind our societal addiction to cheap imports and hyper-convenience (see The Story of Stuff & The History of Bottled Water) and more and more consumers are re-thinking their spending choices.

In an effort to decrease the negative impact of a dead-end total economy and support emergent local living economies, a growing number of campaigns are inspiring people to Move Your Money to local banks and credit unions or to support locally-owned businesses with at least $50 of spending each month.

But perhaps the most notable effort in this local revolution is found in the production of our food.

Growing Local
Between 1999 and 2009 the number of farmer’s markets in the United States increased by 13%; between 2002 and 2007 direct selling of food from local farmers to consumers increased by 30%.

Across the U.S. a variety of local food movements are gaining ground: people are taking steps to buy local and eat local; they are making the 100-Mile Diet pledge; and they are reclaiming the time-honored practice of canning—the largest manufacturer of canning jars reported a 30% sales increase in 2008.

Michelle Obama’s White House Organic Farm Project and Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution are advancing the mission of food and farming pioneers and taking the call for fresh, healthy and local food mainstream.

Hyper-Local
No longer the exclusive domain of rural areas, farms are popping up in cities too. Agricultural activist Will Allen, a 2008 MacArthur Fellow, is bringing sustainable food production to the dense urban areas of Milwaukee and Chicago and empowering communities to become healthier and food-secure.

The city of Seattle declared 2010 the Year of Urban Agriculture in order to increase access to locally grown food. Here in the Emerald City, an abundance of urban fruit trees provide opportunities for people to share the bounty with local food banks and gardening networks are inspiring growing collaborations; like one urban farmer who provides participating homeowners with fresh veggies in exchange for using their yard as part of his urban farm collective.

Given that urban agriculture initiatives are quickly spreading across countries like Canada, Japan, and England, just to name a few, it’s safe to say that the trend to grow and eat local has gone global.

If you have local growing stories from your part of the globe, click on the response box and share them with us!

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Story. It is a simple word, but conjures up different meaning and implications for different people.

Whether fact or fiction, stories are simply a narrative account of incidents, events, or circumstances.

In our previous post, If You Want People to Learn, Tell Them a Story we explored the brain’s dependence on story to process information, but now let’s explore how stories are told and which forms of storytelling are most effective in helping our brains learn and remember.

How we deliver a story determines how likely people are to remember it.

The often sited research of noted psychiatrist, William Glasser, indicates that we learn or recall:

10% of what we read

20% of what we hear

30% of what we see

50% of what we see and hear

70% of what we share/discuss

80% of what we experience

95% of what we teach others

With all due respect to the power of the written word, if this data is correct, then multimedia stories—those using some combination of sound and images—have the potential to be a more effective means of transmitting a story than text alone.

And if those multimedia stories compel viewers to discuss them with other people, the impact will increase dramatically. The act of re-telling or discussing is the epoxy that fixes the details of a story to our brains.

Try this very unscientific little “test” and observe how you take in information. Below is a story told in three different ways. See how you react to each version…

Sample Story A: Text Only 

So, how engaged were you with the story from reading text alone?  Do you think you’re likely to remember what it said? If so, would you remember enough to tell it to others?

The statistics indicate that you’ll probably only remember about 10% of what you just read. Sound about right to you?

Now, see what happens when the same story is accompanied by visual images…

Sample Story B: Text with Images 

If you’re like most people, the addition of photographs helps you create mental images, increasing your ability to retain more of what you read.

Glasser’s research indicates that you might retain about 30% of the story that includes pictures. But your retention level could rise to 50% if you can hear and see the story…

Sample Story C: Multimedia 

Of course our little experiment is not rigorous, but it may help illustrate what Glasser’s scientific data points to: We are complex beings that use multiple senses to process and retain information.

If we want people to learn and understand data, we need to employ elements of story or narrative to help their brains process it. And the more sensory pathways we provide them (i.e. sound, visuals, discussion), the more likely it is that they will recall that story information.

Now, to complete our little exercise, try re-telling our story to someone else and see what impact that has on your ability to remember.

Rate this article and click the “Response Box” below to add your comments!

]]> http://catalytica.biz/360salon/2010/03/02/multi-sensory-pathways-to-learning/feed/ 2 http://catalytica.biz/360salon/2010/02/16/tell-them-a-story/ http://catalytica.biz/360salon/2010/02/16/tell-them-a-story/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:26:46 +0000 Catalytica http://catalytica.biz/360salon/?p=275

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Human beings are natural meaning makers. Like it or not, we simply can’t help but create connections and make meaning of our experiences.

Story is a fundamental component of the human meaning making process. Having narrative brains, we are predisposed to use elements of story to organize and store information.

By employing even simple nouns and verbs, humans communicate meaning in a nutshell and create a sort of mini-story, which Dr. Renée Fuller identifies as a basic unit for organizing information. She calls this organizing unit a story-engram and points out that, “bits of information cannot function as thinking units unless we make story-engrams with them.”

These stories or narratives, intrinsic to our thinking, help us to organize and make sense of stimuli and make connections between seemingly disparate things. Narratives, or stories, actually help us think and learn.

Back in 2001, when I started working with philanthropic organizations to document and share stories related to the work they fund, the Internet was just beginning to change how people access and share information. The possibility for digital storytelling to deliver wide-reaching awareness campaigns was tremendous; and the potential for digital story-learning to make strategic connections in support of positive change seemed unlimited.

But I soon came to witness that these organizations limit how they think about, gather, and share stories. Most often stories are only valued as an emotional appeal—a way to generate donations or influence public opinion—and not vital learning tools that directly support the mission of the organization.

This narrow view of stories overlooks the fact that they are fundamental to how we think; central to everything we do. Stories are so ubiquitous to our thinking and communication that we simply fail to notice them. Of course they appeal to our humanity, but not just our emotions. They connect our thoughts; give context to concepts and meaning to data.

When it comes to organizations that seek to make a difference in the world, stories help them understand the impact of the work they support. Stories don’t replace statistics, but they give meaning to them, and they help people understand why a particular effort works or how it works or could work better, because stories provide explanation or connotation that statistics alone do not.

A robust approach to storytelling, or what I’ve come to call story-learning, takes advantage of opportunities to make all sorts of vital connections…

• Connecting siloed parts of an organization to cross-pollinate ideas and efforts
• Connecting and encouraging separate grantees to work synergistically
• Connecting complementary approaches to the same issue
• Connecting lessons in one area to serve another area
• Connecting disparate audiences to a unified mission

Over the years, my team and I have used stories to make every one of these types of connections. Although it is not usually what was expected, because people’s expectations of stories are very limited, time and time again I’ve seen a strategic, skillful use of story-learning reveal important new perspectives, deliver valuable insights, and communicate complex issues in succinct, memorable ways that support an organization’s mission.

Any organization with a mission to bring about positive change must prioritize learning and then share that learning. If you want people to learn, you need to communicate in ways that help their brains process, store and understand the data you’re sharing. This is the role of story.

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Ten years into the new century, one could argue that while we are in the Information Age we have yet to break down many of the confines of the industrial era. A characteristic of industrialization being the linear organization of work and people to maximize efficiency—in short, the “siloing” of our work and our world.

Digitization of incomprehensible amounts of information, moving freely, in unpredictable directions, compels us to rethink and explore how to adapt and “unsilo” our antiquated thinking and systems. Technology not only allows for, but also pushes us to think and learn in new ways. It demands that we redefine the ecosystem we inhabit and move from linear pathways to infinite points of contact; from reliable certainty to mental agility.

The silos that bind us come in many forms, both concrete and conceptual; some by default and others by design. And while boundaries can sometimes be constructive and prevent disastrous results (think “too big to fail”), many outdated silos have come to inhibit both our creativity and productivity.

Ask yourself: “What divides my world and my work from that of another?”

Silos can be economic, organizational, societal, or geographic. At work, the silos of department, budget, grant, or location can squelch collaboration and potential.

Private vs. public, global vs. local, conservative vs. progressive, proprietary vs. open-source, me vs. we, these silos of perspective, point of view, and ideology also create boundaries, which keep us from seeing a more holistic picture of our world and ourselves.

While the fragmentation of information has the potential to drive us deeper into our silos, a key to liberating ourselves from them is creating pathways for meaningful engagement, collaboration, and opportunities to develop trust and mutual respect. It may all begin with simply framing our questions differently, creating a forum for open dialogue, or finding new ways—high tech and low tech—to share our ideas and learning.

The College of the Environment at the University of Washington is an example of removing institutional barriers by uniting previously siloed schools, in an effort to foster greater collaboration and share resources.

Encouraged to explore innovative alliances, The School of Forestry, within this College of the Environment, partnered with University of Southern Mississippi and The Nature Conservancy to create the Climate Wizard. This visual climate data generator was then made available to both the scientific community and the general public—yet another barrier buster.

When we allow ourselves to see beyond perceived differences, adversaries like environmentalists and transportation agencies team up to build highways with wildlife bridges that are still on budget and ahead of schedule.

As Eric Fingerhut, Chancellor of Ohio Board of Regents, illustrates, when we dare to defy turf mentality, we can begin to think systemically to address our limited resources. He urges the trustees of Ohio’s Universities, “If you see a need in higher education in Ohio, the question is not how should my institution respond. The first question is, which institution should respond? How should we respond to this need collectively as a system?”

On a larger scale, the development of the European Union and the euro currency are radical examples of economic and societal unsiloing, with consequences that are still being debated and won’t be fully seen or understood for decades to come.

Although unsiloing often presents more questions than answers and brings with it many unknowns, it is in the territory of unanswered questions and unknowns where innovation happens. Innovation may be a result of competition but exponential innovation is a result of collaboration.

The first step is asking: “Who is on the other side of the wall, down the block, and around the world? What can we learn from them and how can we share our learning with others?”

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When budgets are cut, reduced spending is a natural consequence. This is a widely accepted cause and effect relationship being proved out all over the world.

There is also a pervasive notion that if spending is reduced, then a decrease in quality or level of output must follow. For instance, there are countless examples of companies reducing their quality standards or giving you less for the same price in an effort to reduce their costs.

In higher education, this thinking can translate into the assumption that increasing the number of students an institution graduates in a given period of time, without an increase in spending, must lead to a reduction of quality in the education those students will receive.

This is certainly a fair concern given the myriad examples of this sort of correlation between quality, quantity, and cost. But couldn’t there be another possibility? Could it be that economic challenges are presenting us with an opportunity to cultivate new perspectives that will allow us to adapt to the complex challenges of our world? (See our previous post, Physicists, Elephant, & Innovative Thought).

So many of our human-designed systems—industrial, governmental, educational etc.—were constructed in a different time and based on many outdated circumstances and assumptions, leaving them ripe for review, re-evaluation, and renewal.

This is certainly the case for our system of higher education in the United States, where there is mounting pressure on long-established institutions to reduce costs and increase their number of graduates, if they are to stay relevant and support this country’s need for a well-educated citizenry and workforce. As Mark Yudof, president of the University of California system, recently said, “It cannot work as currently constructed.”

While we certainly would not argue against the requests of many for increased federal spending on education, we suspect that the next great wave of innovation in higher education will emerge due to financial pressure that will compel people in the system to completely re-think how we educate people in the United States, if we are to thrive in this new era.

In the last year, we at Catalytica have witnessed and documented what could be the beginnings of a monumental shift within the higher education systems of several states. These states are responding to changing social and economic circumstances by re-considering long-established practices, adopting new perspectives, and exploring collaborative approaches to educating students.

Among the participants in these state programs, there has been natural resistance to change, and apprehension about reducing the process of education to that of an assembly line. Yet those involved in these projects understand that higher education must evolve and have taken pioneering steps to move it forward.

The Tuning USA project, led by faculty from Minnesota, Indiana and Utah, is one such endeavor. These state teams have focused on making degrees more pertinent to the needs of today’s students; enhancing the quality of student learning; and reducing redundancy in the process of earning a degree.  The pilot effort crosses long-held boundaries dividing institutions—2-year vs. 4-year, public vs. private, large vs. small—to clearly define what students need to know, understand and be able to demonstrate to attain degrees that are relevant to their pursuits after graduation.

Of course faculty are not alone in addressing the significant challenges faced by our system of higher education. There are, in fact, related efforts being undertaken by the full spectrum of higher education stakeholders and thought partners, each intersecting with and expanding beyond the work of the others, like concentric circles. We will explore some of these other efforts in future posts.

That said, faculty will be fundamental to a national effort to develop collaborative and holistic ways of working to meet the new reality we face; and, if enough key stakeholders join the effort, together they may create a new relationship between quality, quantity, and cost.

Learn more about  the Tuning USA project and hear from participants in the videos below. And please take a moment to let us know what you think of these videos: if they are helpful to you; and if you intend to share them with others.

Please rate this article & click the Response Box below to join the conversation!

Watch all of Catalytica’s Higher Education Videos on YouTube.

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What enables transformational innovation in individuals and societies?

Clearly it is linked to the human imperative to understand and evolve; it also appears to require a certain freedom or flexibility of thought. The ability to step out of a given paradigm and question assumptions creates the opportunity for a new perspective to emerge.

Given the precarious state of our world and the pace at which it continues to change, this question looms large for individuals and the entire human race. The mental flexibility required for vital innovation will enable us to face and, hopefully, respond to our personal and global challenges in positive, life-affirming ways.

This flexibility of mind is what allowed Albert Einstein to challenge the assumptions that confined the minds of his contemporaries. Blindly clinging to prevailing thought or familiar notions and beliefs is to forsake a fundamental aspect of our humanity.

Consider the story of enslaved elephants kept from their freedom by a thin rope tied to one leg. A passing man, who realized that this flimsy tether could not restrain the enormous beasts, asked their keeper why these majestic creatures made no attempt to break free. He was told that the elephants were conditioned, from an early age, to believe that they cannot break away, because this thin rope was enough to keep them from doing so when they were young. Given their current size, the rope could no longer restrain them, but they had long ago adopted the belief that they were powerless to escape.

This story of unknown origin offers a powerful metaphor: like the captive elephants, we humans tend to bind ourselves with thoughts and beliefs that no longer apply, or were passed on and adopted blindly, without virtue of contemplation or experimentation. Even the most learned among us fall prey to this mental trap; like other physicists in Einstein’s day who came up with many components of his thinking, but could not make the full leap to the theory of relativity because they clung to misconceptions of a Newtonian paradigm.

Einstein’s mind was unique in many ways, but the essence of his greatness may have been his propensity to challenge much of the accepted wisdom and blind belief that humans are prone to adopt. Of course, expansiveness of thought alone does not ignite change. Action is a necessary next step. But without the ability to cultivate a more complex perspective, we will attempt to solve new problems within an outdated framework and wonder why our efforts don’t produce results we want.

We need not be geniuses to cultivate this freedom of thought, nor to act on the insights that follow. We have an innate capacity to test our assumptions; we can break the ties that inhibit our continued development and we can share what we learn with each other and actively participate in our collective evolution.

The mission of 360 Salon is to stimulate, support and contribute to our shared, evolutionary process. We hope that you’ll join the community and the conversation.

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