paradigm shifts in education and optimising your ways of working

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Welcome to Teams, Talent & Productivity, brought you by Midnight Labs, the remote and hybrid teams specialists. We blend sensemaking, design, and data science to build fully customised talent and team development solutions.

Previous Newsletter

📰 variability, stability and redundancy: variability within teams, AI’s impact on L&D, and optimising your meetings.

In this week’s newsletter: 

• Teams: What current ways of working are not in your team’s best interests?

• Talent: Research paper insights: Weaving a Colorful Cloth: Centering Education on Humans’ Emergent Developmental Potentials

• Productivity: Using Eigenvector centrality to optimise communication and workflows. 

Teams

In February 2014, London became an unintended laboratory for human behaviour, thanks to a strike on the underground network. This event nudged commuters out of their well-worn tracks. With some Tube stations locked in an unanticipated hush, people found themselves exploring alternatives, charting new routes through the city's sprawling web. Intriguingly, research by Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch, and Tim Willems unearthed a small but telling revelation: a slice of these travellers didn't just temporarily detour; they permanently altered their daily voyages. This episode offered a profound peek into the human psyche—our tendency to stick to the familiar, even when it's not quite right, simply because it's what we know.

For teams stuck in routines that no longer serve them well, this incident shines a light on the power and necessity of enforced experimentation. It's a reminder that, just as the unexpected Tube strike prompted commuters to reconsider their routes, a deliberate shake-up could lead teams to discover more efficient ways of working. Often, we settle into comfortable patterns not because they're the most effective, but because they're familiar. Introducing elements of forced experimentation—be it through workshops, cross-disciplinary projects, or new tech—might just be the catalyst needed for teams to find better paths.

This story of London's temporary disruption highlights the critical role of addressing 'informational imperfections'—our gaps in knowledge or misconceptions about what's best. This is further enhanced by the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ challenge sometimes faced by distributed teams. When it comes to team productivity, this might mean leveraging analytics, gathering feedback, and looking beyond our immediate surroundings to understand what truly efficient practices look like. Encouraging the sharing of knowledge and experiences within teams can reveal previously unseen opportunities for growth. And just as journey planner apps suggested new routes to London's commuters, technology can guide teams towards more effective strategies. In fostering a culture where questioning the norm is not just accepted but encouraged, and where risks are seen not as threats but as stepping stones, organisations can unlock new levels of productivity and innovation.

Talent

In this beautiful paper, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang et al. posit that understanding and nurturing the emergent developmental potentials of humans is akin to weaving a colourful cloth, with each thread contributing to a pattern more intricate and beautiful than its individual parts. At the heart of their writing is a call to fundamentally rethink educational practices, policies, and the very fabric of how we conceptualise learning. This is not just about the acquisition of knowledge but about fostering an environment where curiosity, equity, and human dignity flourish, paving the way for a sustainable democratic society.

The five interrelated developmental principles they propose serves as the loom on which this new educational fabric should be woven. These principles—embodiment, socio-cultural embeddedness, emergent holism, adaptive epigenesis, and developmental range—highlight the complex, intertwined nature of learning, where the mind, body, and cultural context dance together in dynamic interdependence. The analogy of weaving cloth underscores the value of diversity within educational systems, suggesting that just as variations in texture and colour add strength and beauty to fabric, diversity in thought, experience, and learning style enriches educational outcomes. By embracing these principles, the authors argue, we can create educational systems that not only adapt to but also celebrate human variability, fostering learning environments that recognise and nurture the unique potential of every individual.

One example shared is a study investigating how educational environments influence learning strategies, Swiss students aged 8-12 from both Montessori and traditional schools showed similar performance in a maths activity. However, neuroimaging revealed significant differences in how each group processed errors and correct answers. Montessori students exhibited neural activity indicating strategic re-evaluation of problems after making mistakes, suggesting a focus on learning from errors. Conversely, traditionally schooled students' neural patterns reflected an emphasis on memorisation, with errors provoking negative emotional responses rather than strategic reassessment. Despite achieving similar scores, Montessori students engaged more deeply with the maths problems, including those unfamiliar to them, and were more likely to correct their errors over time. An algorithmic analysis confirmed the Montessori approach as more efficient, underscoring the impact of educational styles on learning processes and outcomes.

The insights offered in this paper point towards a more inclusive, equitable, and human-centred approach to education. By centering education on humans' emergent developmental potentials, we can weave together the diverse threads of our collective humanity to create a tapestry that reflects the full richness of human experience. This approach not only enhances the educational journey but also empowers individuals to contribute to a more compassionate, innovative, and resilient society. In essence, by reimagining education through the lens of human development, we are not just teaching for today; we are weaving the fabric of tomorrow.

Over the next few weeks we will dive deeper into the five principles proposed and how we might use them in organisational learning. Stay tuned!

Productivity 

Have you heard of Eigenvector centrality? It's a concept used in network analysis to identify the most influential individuals within a network. Unlike simpler measures that might count how many connections a person has, Eigenvector centrality goes a step further. It evaluates the quality of these connections by considering how influential a person's connections are themselves. This approach ensures that being connected to highly influential individuals boosts a person's centrality score more than being connected to many less influential people.

In practical terms, within any team or group setting, Eigenvector centrality can help us pinpoint key players. These aren't just individuals who are well-connected in the traditional sense but those whose connections extend to other central figures within the network. It's a method that allows us to understand influence in a nuanced manner, recognising that the power of a network isn't just in the number of connections, but in the strategic importance of those connections. This can help optimise communication flows, enhance collaboration, and improve team dynamics by focusing on strengthening the roles and influence of these central figures.

Some ways you can leverage eigenvector centrality within your team:

Optimising Communication and Workflow

• Streamlining Communication: Understanding who the central figures are in a team's communication network can help in streamlining information flow, ensuring that key messages are efficiently disseminated through the most influential individuals.

• Collaboration Enhancement: By mapping the collaboration network and identifying central figures, teams can foster better collaboration by strategically placing these central figures in projects where their influence can significantly impact success.

Enhancing Team Dynamics

• Network Strengthening: Teams can use insights from eigenvector centrality to develop strategies that strengthen their internal networks, such as by increasing the connectivity of less-central individuals to central ones, thereby enhancing overall cohesion and synergy.

• Decision Making: Teams can leverage the influence of central members to facilitate decision-making processes, ensuring that decisions are more readily accepted and acted upon by the entire team.

Strategy and Planning

• Strategic Interventions: By identifying central figures, teams can target interventions, training, or development programs more efficiently, ensuring that improvements in central individuals' skills or knowledge have a wider impact on the team.

• Change Management: In times of change, central figures identified through eigenvector centrality can act as change agents, significantly influencing the team's adaptation and acceptance of new processes, tools, or structures.

Instructions for Measuring Eigenvector Centrality

Step One: Capture Data

Step Two: Compute Eigenvector Centrality

Many software packages and libraries can compute eigenvector centrality, including NetworkX in Python, igraph in R and Python, and Gephi for visual network analysis. At Midnight Labs we have built our own program using Python that we use with clients in our Team Dynamics & Ways of Working Design service.

I hope some of this was useful to you, if it was, please feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss the next one 🙂 

Thanks for reading!

Tom