Slow Down to Speed Up

We were doing a workshop last week with a group of people who are innovators in education. Innovation in this sector is not easy to do, largely because there are so many social forces that resist change. Many parents, teachers, and adminstrators say, "It was good enough for me 20 (or 30) years ago, so it's good enough for my children."

Except in many cases it's not. The world has changed, and change is accelerating. The education tools and methods of the 20th century may not work now (and they may not have worked all that well then, either).

But introducing change into these systems requires perserverence and cleverness. A strategy that emerged in the discussion as one of the most promising is "slow down to speed up," by which we mean that creating a successful track record in small or incremental changes may create the context in which people are willing to experiment with larger-scale change also.

But hit them with the big stuff first and you're likely to alienate them, which will end up costing you time in the end.

Slow down to speed up is thus an innovation strategy when the controlling context is created by social dynamics rather than technological ones.