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It is good to be where the ball is but, it is a whole lot better to know and be, where the ball is going to be.

Spoiler alert: I don’t exactly know where the ball is going to be but I have a few ideas as to where to look!

The future of learning has to look beyond traditional universities. Content transfer is, and will always be, the biggest part of what takes place at these institutions. Their escalating costs, increasing societal indifference to/from the public, and extremely rigid structures will hinder their innovative capabilities. Technological changes are further accelerating this trend. 

Human learning will take place in all sorts of spaces and throughout the lifetime of individuals. Many of our universities have already taken on this trend and have dramatically increased their continuing education divisions and online offerings. These efforts should be applauded, but they are linear changes, relatively speaking; teaching the same content in new fancy applications. They are, unfortunately, still one dimensional, whereas, tomorrow’s learners strive for  multidimensional experiential learning with the content, their teachers, and their peers. 

From what we know today, it is hard to imagine a future without AI. In one form or another,  there will be a future which will involve human/machine partnerships. This will require a different kind of learning on the part of the human; the machine is learning continuously and at an exponential rate. Human empathy, creativity, ethical mindset, ability to function in ambiguity, volatility, and uncertainty, will be the essential elements which when coupled with the “machine’s” inherent abilities in analysis and assimilation of data, can be powerful and impactful.

Another aspect impacting where the ball might be is a trend we are already experiencing today; the movement from the Complicated to Complex. The MBA fueled focus on perfecting the parts, the rise of the Experts, and our solutions-oriented culture,  have focused us on looking at each problem as a series of complicated questions which can be solved by known or knowable solutions. This is valuable but it is not sufficient. The big questions facing humanity today, climate change, swing back to nationalism, severe income inequality, opportunities & and perils of AI, and many others, are complex intractable problems. These problems have no ready-made solutions nor are really solvable in and of themselves. In the taxonomy of problems, these are complex problems on the edge of chaos, they are impacted by numerous independent factors, most of which are not fully controllable even if fully understood. The paradigm to positively impact such intractable problems sits with building and nurturing Complex Adaptive Systems. 

Effective leaders will be those that will help institutions and individuals overcome their reluctance to face complexity. 

Technological advances are creating a catalyst of unprecedented force; Exponential rate of change. As Ray Kurzweil has noted, we should expect to see the equivalent of 21,000 years of change in the 21st century.

So how do we prepare ourselves knowing the ball will be someplace near the intersection of these trends and the accelerating force of change? 

How will we transform our educational paradigms away from the seeming “linearity” of the industrial age to new models of learning and innovative solutions, to help humans of all ages learn quickly, efficiently, flexible, and deeply?

These and many other similar questions await us in this future space. Our institutions with their enormous intellectual capital will be critical but they must stretch, innovate, and figure out how to disrupt themselves. Our entrepreneurs will be essential if they can continue to experiment, evolve, and focus on integrating themselves as partners and not simply as disrupters. The combination of the two will provide humanity a powerful ability to put the ball into play.  

Last but not least, our learners will need to consider the future will require a deeper engagement with knowledge; one predicated on the understanding of the content but also in equal measure, the ability to be contemplative, to be integrative, and to be thoughtful.