Disruption #2: Digital Technology

As I argued, with respect to markets, disruptions are not necessarily destructive: they don’t necessarily destroy professions. But they exert pressures on professions and on professionals who are not always ready, willing, or able to resist those pressures.

In the “good old days,” clients either trusted professionals qua professionals, or they relied on the advice of their friends (who might or might not have good judgment with respect to the professionals and the professional expertise in question). Nowadays an enormous amount of information is readily available online about the competence of specific professionals, including a variety of rating systems. In general, it is more helpful to know what 100 or 1000 individuals think about a specific lawyer or doctor than simply to know what your three best friends have to say. But it is certainly possible to manipulate rating systems—for example, by mobilizing friends (or enemies) of the individual or site in question. It is also possible that large numbers of individuals could be seduced by irrelevant criteria, and still others could create procedures or apps that automatically tilt the scales of judgment.

When people invoke “the wisdom of crowds,” I often wink and respond, “And what of the stupidity of crowds?”. Similarly, when I am curious about the quality of a recently published book, I feel on much firmer ground reading, or speaking to, a few experts on the topic rather than valorizing the number of stars or “likes” the book received on a website. At the same time, if I have access both to experts and to the less discriminating but more numerous crowd, I am better off than if only one source of evaluation is available to me.

In general, cooperation between expert professionals, on the one hand, and experts in the digital media, on the other, can be salutary. Professionals need help in getting their messages out, and nowadays, only a naif would rely largely on the traditional media. Experts in the digital media are essential for transmitting messages and for tracking their impact; but unless these experts actually understand what is important for the professional who wants to fulfill her role completely and competently, they are likely to give feedback that is not helpful and perhaps misleading. As one long-involved in educational reform, I have considerable doubt that experts working for management consultancies can offer advice that is useful for educators; based on my own observations, what McKinsey has to say may be relevant for General Electric or General Motors but is rarely helpful for the public system in Big City, USA.

As a convenient example, let me use the launching of this blog. Without having financial resources to devote to it, I benefited from the advice of individuals with experience in the digital media. These included my assistant Danny Mucinskas, who divided the piece into sections and added illustrations that visibly(!) improved the attractiveness of the presentation. The number of responses received was extremely gratifying to me—because these responses came from individuals who are knowledgeable about the professions and thoughtful about the issues that I raised. But unless an expert on digital media could actually evaluate the feedback, he or she might erroneously conclude that forty or so responses was a tiny number without any conceivable impact. Better 400 or 40,000, whatever their range and their quality.

As a few commentators noted, we are at the earliest stages of understanding—indeed, of conceptualizing—how professionals in one or another domain can work expeditiously with experts in programming, social media, and big data. This terrain is ripe for experimentation. It is possible, as Charles Lang argues, that we may be able to develop algorithms that are more effective than groups of “live” experts; or as Richard Weissbourd suggests, that automated systems may be able to bring to bear diverse perspectives on complicated problems. But I worry about what we should do when there are hundreds of candidate algorithms, and I would not want to put any algorithm in charge of making that judgment call!

Let me take this opportunity to note a new and very important kind of expertise—the ability to ensure that digital communication tools are used in ways that are fair and accessible and that do not compromise privacy or promulgate privileged information. While those individuals who take care of servers and other features of the digital grid may not be officially designated as “professionals,” we depend on them to behave in a highly professional way!

Thanks to commentators Kendall Bronk, Henry Jenkins, Charles Lang, Seana Moran, Jake Seliger, Dennis Thompson, and Richard Weissbourd.

This is the fifth in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.”

Disruption #1: Markets

In characterizing markets as being disruptive in my essay on the future of the professions, I intended to use this term in a neutral or disinterested way. But it is quite possible that in that essay, my own uneasiness about market forces came through. I may have conveyed the impression that markets are necessarily destructive, as opposed to merely being disruptive.

Don’t get me wrong: I am a fan of markets in many places and in many ways. My family and I are and have been the beneficiaries of markets and market forces; so have millions of people in China and other countries. I’m glad that I live in a society and a world where markets exist and are allowed to function smoothly and without undue restriction. But I am by no means a market absolutist.

Indeed, in earlier centuries, markets were balanced or tempered by religious, ideological, or other political architectures (e.g. primogeniture, royalty). On the whole, I think that this tempering is a good thing. The reference in my essay to the year 1980—with the rise of market supremacy or hegemony around the globe, often called “the triumph of neo-liberalism”—was meant to be cautionary. I am sympathetic to the argument put forth by philosopher Michael Sandel: some things (body parts, as a reasonably uncontroversial examples) should not be for sale. And I believe that professions are more likely to maintain and display their virtues when they are, at least to some extent, protected from market forces.

As one instance, I am a skeptic about the role of markets in education, certainly for the education of younger persons and perhaps throughout the formal educational system. Once companies whose motivation is (inevitably) the seeking of profit invade the educational landscape, they are all too prone to confuse proceeds with progress. To be sure, many non-profit educational entities behave as if they were “for-profit” enterprises; but at least they operate by a different set of rules and do not explicitly create monetary incentives for employees. (I don’t approve of university management companies who compensate employees in terms of the profitability of their specific portfolios.) I do not object to charter schools in general but remain unsympathetic to for-profit charter networks and to voucher systems.

Let me emphasize two other points about markets:

First, markets can exert quite healthy influences on professions. While American institutions of higher education are largely non-profit, the market-like competition among them over the decades has on the whole been a good feature (so, too, the competitiveness among arts institutions, science museums, and the like). And certainly within professions, the market competition among hospital chains, or among law firms, has its positive benefits, as does the emergence of competition for specific services, such as the creation of prototype legal documents or variations within the same family of drugs.

Second, in corporate life, there is not an inherent zero sum game between profitability and a high ethical standard—that is, a standard that goes beyond simply remaining within the law. Ben Heineman has made that point eloquently in many articles and in his book High Performance with High Integrity. My colleagues William Damon and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi concur, adding that high ethical/professional standards are good for business in the long run. But the enormous pressures in the United States to achieve short-term profitability, as well as the imaginativeness (and even implicit endorsement) of efforts to cut corners while avoiding frankly illegal behavior leads to this unfortunate conclusion: professionalism in a highly marketized economy is always at risk. All too often, professionalism takes a back seat to profitability at any and all costs.

Thanks to commentators Steven Brint, Anne Colby, Stephen Gardner, Ben Heineman, Norman Ornstein, and Amelia Peterson.

This is the fourth in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.” 

A Conversation Between Evelyn Chow and Howard Gardner: Challenges to Common Spaces and the Common Good

By Daniel Mucinskas

In the exchange below, the Good Project’s Howard Gardner and former Harvard student Evelyn Chow discuss the creation of common spaces for the examination of ethics at work and what barriers may impede that type of communication.

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Evelyn: You have written before about the need to establish common spaces where individuals can discuss the ethical dimensions of their work. I believe that establishing a common space is predicated on open lines of communication between members of the commons.

And so I wonder: what are the limitations of the commons if communication is restricted in some structural or possibly insuperable way? This restriction could come in the form of regulation (e.g. a public market participant can only talk to bankers through highly controlled channels); hierarchy (e.g. an organization where those of different levels may rarely convene); cultural differences; and probably other factors as well.

Howard: You raise a good question about barriers to the construction of common spaces. I have written a bit about this—for example, in Daedalus, in my article “Reestablishing the Commons for the Common Good.” It’s a difficult challenge to construct a shared space for discussion that is viable across the board—one complicating factor is that an online forum is far from ideal. Instead, it’s preferable to have a face-to-face community and communication between people in person. Of course, when there is hierarchy in place, secrecy, and/or an ingroup/outgroup mentality, this may be impossible.

Evelyn: I also wonder about the role of trust and flatness in constructing a commons, especially in standard “professional” settings.

I have come to appreciate select aspects of hierarchy—these may enable the ethical worker to excel in his or her role, free from some of the concerns that might trouble others higher or lower in the organization. Maybe there could be a Wormhole Theory of corporate culture—the ability to collapse space, time, power, and wealth when confronting issues of common importance, but still operate in different galaxies for the most part, where the citizens of each are more relaxed in their respective atmospheres.

Howard: It’s easier to behave ethically when you remain in your own wormhole—or, to use a metaphor I like, remain in your own foxhole. When you are young and new, this is probably the best pattern. But as you gain in knowledge, influence, and power, you become more of a trustee—and that role requires that you examine operations in their totality, not just from your own vantage point, and that, when necessary, you blow your whistle loudly.

Evelyn: I think that this conundrum may also occur at a national, even a global level.

Recently, I read an interview with Mohamed El-Erian, the former CEO of PIMCO, on China.  El-Erian noted that China is facing a situation almost unknown to any governing body in history: a major global superpower with significant influence on global growth and markets that itself is still a developing economy. He argued that it would be in China’s own best interest to devalue their currency as much as possible to stimulate domestic growth. Yet, its induction last year into the IMF’s select group of reserve currencies, a mark of its systemic importance, precludes the Chinese government from doing so without introducing significant global volatility. This situation presents an interesting test of the boundaries of neighborly morality/the ethics of roles.

Howard: Thanks, Evelyn, for your astute comments and for broadening a contrast that was originally developed with respect to the professions, to a much larger stage—that of the world economy.

What’s Confusing about the Professions?

If what is (or is not) a profession was ever crystal clear, it is certainly not so any more. Nowadays almost any area of expertise can lay claim to being a profession. Not only does Expertise ABC call itself a profession, but this Expertise also lobbies to be recognized as such by degree granting schools, the courts, and the general public.

To make the situation even cloudier, non-professionals may borrow terminology from professions—as when a person who is involved in any kind of planning calls herself an “architect,” or, less formally, “a curator.” And nowadays, almost anyone who purports to know “anything about anything” feels free to label herself a consultant, a coach, or an adviser—official-sounding titles which, alas, all too often signify nothing. These individuals often mimic the paraphernalia of the “real professions”—and may also charge as much as degree-holding professions. After all, if you charge hundreds of dollars an hour, you must know a lot!

There is no “Pooh-Bah of the Professions”—no single voice or court that can declare a candidate profession as legitimate or disqualify it from consideration. Workers militate to be considered professions, and on occasion, as with the barber surgeons of days of yore, an occupation can lose its professional status. I believe that the burden falls an on any aspiring profession to demonstrate that it, and it alone, fulfills the desiderata that I outlined in the original essay and recapitulated in my second response (specifically, high levels of training with certification, fulfilling expectations associated with the role, offering services in a disinterested way, making complex individual decisions, etc.). But I’d add that in the current era—with so many possible routes to certification, many online—identifying a “true” or “genuine” profession is becoming increasingly difficult.

One possible distinction emanates from the essential characteristics once associated with the role of the professional: wisdom, disinterestedness, service.  In earlier times, many professionals stressed these features even as they minimized their  concern with market forces and rewards; nowadays, valorizing these ethical and social qualities may seem quaint, if not anachronistic.  Expertise trumps service. Nonetheless, these attributes remain as ideals—and legitimize the use of the describer “professional”—as in the phrase, “She behaved very professionally.”

My colleague Jal Mehta has kindly allowed me to link this blog to his insightful essay. Mehta delineates four separate challenges to the professions as currently constituted: briefly, Hegel (inner contradictions); Krauss (market determination of nearly every facet of economic and social life); Jackson (deference to the “common man”); and Sennett (craft as opposed to scientific knowledge). Taken together, this quartet of factors constitutes a formidable challenge to anyone who asserts that, for the professions, “business as usual” will suffice.

And what of the relation between academic disciplines, on the one hand, and professions, on the other? While one commentator on my original post deplored the narrowness of the academy and hailed the public mindedness of the professions, this distinction does not always hold. Some scholars have quite broad conceptions of their disciplines and welcome interdisciplinary work. Analogously, some professionals—as strict constructionists—do not see themselves as agents of broad public needs and concerns.

Thanks to commentators Steven Brint, Henry Jenkins, Jal Mehta, Norman Ornstein, Carol Thompson, and Dennis Thompson.

This is the third in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.”

Q&A with Kiran Bir Sethi, Founder of Design for Change (Part 2)

By Daniel Mucinskas

Design for Change is an international movement dedicated to providing students with the tools and knowledge to shape the world for a better and more sustainable future. Over the past several years, the Good Project and Design for Change have partnered to mutually support one another and perform assessment of the impact of the Design for Change curriculum. We recently spoke with founder Kiran Bir Sethi about the organization’s curriculum and the importance of character education that encourages ethical thinking. Part 2 of an edited version of the conversation is below.

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Q: What is up next for Design for Change’s 8th grade curriculum?

A: We have schools in several countries that are using the curriculum, including the United States. Colombia, Chile, and Taiwan are working on translating the materials and adopting them within the next year. This year we updated the curriculum and added further reflective elements due to previous feedback, and our current plan is to eventually reach grades 1-8. In India, schools are more likely to adopt a curriculum if it serves all grades. Since there has been an enormous interest, we are spending the year trying to build the curricula to include more stories and prompts.

We envision that our curricula will fit in with classroom instruction on topics like values, character building, and 21st century skills—subjects which often skipped completely. Most schools set aside a certain number of hours a year for this type of education because they have to; for instance, in most Indian schools, 40-50 hours a year are spent on developing character or values. We’re saying, “Give us those hours, and we’ll give you this curriculum.” Right now, most of the curricula in India that serve that purpose draw from mythological or historical sources. However, Design for Change is demonstrating that we have real live humans and other children who can actually be real models. We are dedicated to keeping these students at the center of our mission, focusing on kids who are making the world a better place. In expanding beyond India, we want children from each country to add their own stories.

Q: What do you think are the biggest challenges schools face when promoting the nexus of creative and ethical thinking in schools?

A: It’s always going to be a fact that creativity and ethics are not as tangible as other information taught in schools. That’s where the struggle is. But inherently or intellectually, character education is a very big piece of what schools should do for kids. I think when housekeeping and assessment pressures begin to factor in, teachers realize, “Oh, I can’t measure ethics or creativity. I don’t have the tools to say that the time I’ve spent has created effective results, so let me put more hours back into math and English, which I can more easily evaluate.” I think there will constantly be that struggle, but we need to recognize that it’s not an either/or situation for this program model. Interesting research is coming out showing that children benefit from learning to be kind and capable decision-makers. Design for Change is one way to realize this. One of my concerns is that the pace at which this type of education has been implemented has been slower than would be ideal, at least in India.

Q: What are your thoughts on how we can best measure changes in ethical decision-making or measure values education for young people?

A: We have an interesting collaboration with Ashoka, and they are interested in how you measure empathy in Changemaker Schools. They have identified four characteristics of changemakers: teamwork, creativity, empathy, and leadership. These are the four changemaking skills that every child needs to succeed. We’ve been collaborating to try and develop some measures for these skills. The crucial part of assessing these values is to go back to the kids and ask for their input. We had students help us to see if we were actually measuring what we set out to measure, and it was fantastic to hear about the ways that students felt they would like to be asked or questioned about their reasoning in a certain situation. Instead of asking, “Where/when have you seen yourself do XYZ?”, they independently discussed behaviors they exhibit themselves (for example, “I take over conversations when I feel my ideas are not being valued.”). The young people we met with know which behaviors do and do not allow for good teamwork to happen; they’ve seen it and have been a part of it. It’s very interesting to get their perspective on framing the question.

We were at a conference when the Changemaker Schools were launched, and the kids found the frameworks very useful, while the teachers also noted how simply they could incorporate certain ideas into their day-to-day practice. For instance, in any school day, there are multiple ways to provide a surplus or a deficit of values, and the students came up with a “scenario curriculum” through which they asked, “In the hallway, on the school bus, or the cafeteria, how do you leave these places with a surplus of positive values?” When we’re talking about ethical behavior or decisions, once the standard for ethical behavior is visible, it becomes easy for the kids to replicate. Young people see that they can create surplus positive value in an enriching way by understanding how different actors, such as bus drivers and parents, feel and how the ripple effect of everything we do influences others.

Children examining their own actions becomes a natural extension of ethical decision-making, and students learn to develop a strong natural voice that allows them to become involved with decisions made at their schools. I know that it can be a struggle to listen to all voices and to ask students for their input; I know it’s a difficult space to give that much voice to a child. But I also know it has enormous value to empower children that way.

You can find our more about Design for Change at their website by clicking here.

Read Part 1 of our conversation in which Kiran discusses the 2015 Be the Change conference, aspirations for the future, and the role of teachers in spreading Design for Change’s messages.