Innovating in Career and Technical Education
One of the most daunting challenges we face involves redesigning our career and technical education system (CTE).
We have a gaping hole in our talent development system when it comes to training people for "middle skill" jobs: positions that require post-secondary training but less than a four year college degree. (For more, check out the National Skills Coalition.)
My colleague at Strategy-Nets, Laz Kozmon, has been discussion the challenges of innovating with the leadership of the CTE system in Alaska. Today, we are having a conference call, and Laz prepared the enclosed discussion document.
Getting people to embrace open innovation in the "civic space" is both difficult and simple. Many bureaucratic organizations operate with a cardinal rule, "Cover thyself". Don't make mistakes. Don't take chances.
Of course, this tendency runs to the exact opposite direction of where we need to head. To innovate and adapt to new economic realities, we need more experiments. A good book on this subject is Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.
Moving people with entrenched habits is difficult.
But innovation starts in the small space between our ears. Seeing the world in a new way is, actually, quite simple. We've all had the experience.
One of the ways to get people to see new possibilities involves drawing maps. Here, Laz uses a few visual tools to describe how to see Alaska's CTE system and the challenge of innovation in a new light.
Laz, who has a background in bio-medical engineering and corporate strategy consulting, is doing some interesting work developing and extending the Strategic Doing model.
