The weekend of January 25-27 proved to be a strange and sad one. Obviously, much of the world mourned the loss of Kobe Bryant. Kobe was truly one of the greatest basketball players of all time who was loved by the city of Los Angeles while being the player every other NBA team’s fans “loved to hate.” If the Nuggets (my team) could stop Kobe, they could beat the Lakers. Unfortunately, they often did not stop him. But beyond the famed hoopster, there was another loss last weekend. It was a loss felt by educators, innovators, and thinkers. Clayton Christensen, author of many books including a few of my personal favorites like “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “Disrupting Class,” passed away. He was a man I heard speak a few times and someone who actually gave me advice that impacted my career trajectory.
There has already been an outpouring of tweets, posts, and stories about the Harvard professor. Co-author Michael Horn’s piece in Forbes provides some very nice insight into Christensen’s life, frame(s) of reference, points of view, and more. And unfortunately, much like Kobe Bryant, there have already been a few “haters” posting some negative positions about his thinking. After all, Christensen not only tried to illuminate what innovation could (and should) look like, he also explained how lacking higher education is in terms of innovative thinking. In fact, he used the innovative measures and rubrics easily applied in most other contexts of business and organizational behavior to higher education, predicting a future for the sector that was not exactly rosy.
As a result, some in higher ed were not fans of Christensen’s work. It’s always harder to look one’s self in the in the mirror with a critical eye than to just assume everything is fine, and so Christensen’s words hit a nerve on occasion. I’ve already seen some leaders express frustration at Christensen’s “pessimistic” predictions, pointing out that higher education is still going strong. From my vantage point, this could not illustrate much better Christensen’s own warnings as those leaders are significantly missing the forest for the trees. (“The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established organizations are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.” —The Innovator’s Dilemma) But to each their own. Ironically, I suspect Dr. Christensen would welcome that kind of debate as he was always interested in finding new factors and variables to plug into existing frameworks and algorithms, trying to create the best possible predictors, measures, and more. If you read Horn’s memorial above, I think you will see what I mean about this very humble, constantly exploring leader.
But whether you feel Chistensen was on the mark most of the time or even just a lot of the time (it would be very difficult to reasonably argue much less than that), the man had a tremendous acuity for systems thinking and how innovation does or does not play a role inside of those systems. I know this, not only because of his books, but because of a conversation I once had with him. And that leads me to the crux of this blog.
After Pearson acquired eCollege (the LMS which became Learning Studio before being sunsetted), my role changed dramatically. The ‘world’s largest education company’ (as they used to call themselves) sent me all over the globe talking about the most effective ways by which to transform learning, strategic planning for digital initiatives, and a bunch of work specific to learning analytics / data as they impacted student success. It was during that time I started to see hundreds of initiatives each year put forth by academic leaders, staff, professors, executives, and beyond. I personally worked on many of those projects while consulting in and around even more of the initiatives, seeing the good, the bad, and the ugly of higher education globally. I saw great ideas fail due to bureaucracy while I saw bad initiatives get bull-dogged into existence, only to fail later. (Etc.) It was also at this time I started to be known as “the Innovation guy” around the company. It started showing up in my promotions and titles. It seemed that I had started as the “work-around king” at eCollege, helping faculty see how to use our system to accomplish things it was not specifically designed to do, but soon morphed into a much larger, innovative, systems-thinking leader on a global stage.
That same context afforded me opportunities to meet some truly amazing leaders in (and around) higher ed. I remember fondly my meetings with Chris Dede, the US Subcommittee on Education, Carol Dweck, the Aspen Institute, Clay Shirkey, Governor Hickenlooper, Sir Ken Robinson, Dan Pink, and yes, Clayton Christensen. (I even got to introduce Ben Stein as a keynote speaker to a room full of educators once. Wild!)
When I met the 6’8” Harvard professor, I had been sent to M.I.T. for a cross-institutional / multi-provider, research-based workshop regarding Carol Dweck’s Mindset. A large group of academics gathered to discuss what it could / should look like to include Mindset training and strategies across institutions and curricula. But part of the multi-day workshop was specific to innovation and Dr. Christensen was the featured speaker. I enjoyed the talk very, very much and I still look back at the notes I took on that day from time to time. However, far more memorable to me was the lunch we had that day because, as fate would have it, I was seated next to this giant of innovation.
I would not have guessed prior to that meal, but Dr. Christensen seemed a fairly private, shy person. Ironically so am I. (I know that surprises people because I look fairly poised and confident when on a stage, but please believe me when I say that I would always rather be alone on a stage than surrounded by people at a bar or restaurant. The latter is my personal hell most of the time…) But as such, after the initial barrage of questions came from others at the table and we started to eat, I struck up a much more private conversation with Clayton Christensen. I asked him about his life and he asked about mine. I found out that he was sincerely religious and we connected when I told him of my father’s role as a minister and growing up in the church. But soon, our conversation turned to education and to innovation. He seemed to find it fascinating that I was working so closely with Provosts and Presidents on highly-strategic, innovative initiatives while not being in a formal role personally. We knew some of the same people…people he respected. And he seemed to get even more excited when I described the kinds of experiments and initiatives that I worked on, witnessed, and otherwise had exposure to, all while remaining a faculty member. He was just as interested in the hundreds of failed initiatives as the dozens of successful ones, relating them to theories about implementation and efficacy consistently.
At the end of the meal, just before departing, he said something that impacted me greatly. I’m paraphrasing, but Dr. Christensen told me that I was exactly the kind of person who could change the trajectory of higher education and he hoped that I would take a position of formal, executive leadership soon, making use of all the things I had seen and experienced. I had not yet read Dyer’s work (Innovator’s DNA) to put language around the notion of associative thinking, but that is exactly what Dr. Christensen was telling me. He believed, as I now believe, that my ability to come at higher education from a multitude of perspectives, both formal and informal, inside and outside, would only benefit an institution. He actually called me “innovative.” He also warned me, quite prophetically in retrospect, that moving into such a formal position would not be easy, seeing a lot of “conditioned” long-timers suspicious of my ideas and even warning of intentional sabotage by other formal, academic leaders, should I be given the opportunity. (Although also of importance is to know that he stated it would take an institution with real vision and bravery to hire outside of the typical context…)
That conversation stuck with me and still does to this day. While a lot has happened in the past decade since, I am grateful to Clayton Christensen for bolstering my confidence and encouraging me. My goal is absolutely to do the kind of work he recommended. Everything I do is to move toward just such a context. And while he likely forgot our conversation by the time he got home, to me it was very much life affirming.
And so, while I know that Clayton Christensen was suffering for much of the past decade and I do not wish that on anyone, I am still sad for our planet, for innovation, and for higher education that he is gone. I so enjoyed reading his contextualization of so many things I hold dear…he will be missed.
If you have not read Christensen’s work, you really should. If I might be so bold, start with the Innovator’s Dilemma and if you are in higher education, move on to the Innovative University. But you will likely spread out to his other works from there. Rest in peace Clayton Christensen.
Good luck and good learning.