The Territory of the Little People - Storm Clouds Approaching The atmosphere over Pine Creek churns before it breaks. The sky stops being a distant ceiling, and tears open into a fevered, gestural vortex, churning in fierce ribbons of cadmium gold, raw ember, and bruised ink. Here, in the suffocating stillness of the build-up, the heat plays violent tricks on my inner eye. As the squall gathers, the twisting ironwoods and fractured ridges don't feel empty; they crawl with the uncanny belief of the Little People, low-slung, watchful phantoms spun from wire, red dust, and dry static, waiting out the road's fragility. Every jagged branch and swirling filament of cloud becomes a face, an arm, a sinister presence breathing inside the rising storm, drawing the traveller deeper into the delirium of the interior. Be Creative and Innovative with Knowledge John Bennett - AKA JJFBbennett , is an independent artist. You can view and subscribe to my work via Blogger , YouTube , Fl...
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Culture vs Strategy
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“In the agricultural era, schools mirrored a garden. In the industrial era, classes mirrored the factory, with an assembly line of learners. In the digital-information era, how will learning look?”
Lucy Dinwiddie
Global Learning & Executive
Development Leader, General Electric
The urgency to develop relevant forms of 21st century leadership exists, as continued application of 20th century management practices will eventually incapacitate society. Positional leaders must transform schools from the assembly-line-of-learners era to the digital-information era.
The future of societal progression is dependent on school leaders being able to directly shift their learning goals towards the era. If societal progression is to occur, schooling must not be maimed by yester-century retro-like industrialised management practices. Within this era industrialised management practices will manufacture diminished potential. Diminish human potential in schools and society will stride towards a diminished future. ‘If you want to maim the future of any society, you simply maim the children’ (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1993, p76).
Australia’s future prosperity is hardwired to the education sector. ‘Education is an enabler of productivity and growth for virtually every part of the Australian economy’ (Brown, D’Souza, Ergas, Harding & Harper 2014, p37).
The overriding theme is that, a contextually relevant 21st century school requires leaders who are future focussed and can operate within exponential technological and social change. Schools require leaders who have the capacity to make sense of exponential change and be able to strategically implement across broad tacit domains such as teaching and learning relationships and organisational behaviours.
Why are Australian schools still are locked in the cultures of the 20th Century?
I would like to contend, that up to now the integration of technology has been approached through standardised management engineering, and this approach is now falling short of the actual need. It was implemented to integrate technology with past well-known well-established teaching practices. It did not instigate and or contribute to the development of a learning organisation. Despite the money spent and the opportunity to instigate adaptive practices school structures remained more or less much the same.
Strong management practices were employed to bring about technological integration. A failure was that we as a Department did not look at positional leadership in itself as a process of technology implementation. Alan Reid in his overview of the Australian Digital Education Revolution emphasises the missed opportunity to instigate future focussed leadership activity over optimised management integration. ‘A genuine education revolution will look to the future not the certainties of the past’ (Reid 2009, p23). Soren Kaplan describes failed management when it is bogged down with a 20th century incremental-based improvement mindset, fastened on refinement-based practices and implementing certainty based priorities such as SWOT analysis, financial analysis, impact scenario, business modeling, strategic planning and reverse engineering. Kaplan’s reasoning is that, on the whole, leaders by reverting to control of process methods do not seize the opportunities within uncertainty, ambiguity and the fog which is the future (Kaplan 2014).
Clay Christensen, in his description of leadership that is welded on data-driven analysis but employed within the scope to move forward, is actually operating within past parameters. Managers cannot step forward in times of uncertainty by employing past data and methods of implementation. Reversion to past data locks progress to past versions of success and or failure. From my experience, controller managers with skill sets limited to industrial productivity methods were unable to gain transformational opportunities within the rollout of the Digital Education Revolution and will not be equipped to effectively employ second wave 21st century intelligent technologies within a schooling structure. Culture Eats Strategy Drucker
Culture eats strategy unless leadership has vision and is determined to be strong to that vision.
The Highway and the Lost Soldier The midday sun around Adelaide River does something violent to the bitumen. At forty-five degrees, the Stuart Highway softens like melting fat; it turns into a black mirror, rippling with an unnatural, liquid glare that pools over every low rise. That is where it waits. He is always trudging south, away from life and deeper into the blistering furnace, his boots making no sound against the tar. The Highway and Lost Soldier Standing From two hundred yards out, he resembles a stranded traveler you’d pull over to save. He wears sun-bleached, disintegrating drill cotton that matches the bone-white dust of the termite country, his head angled down at an impossible, broken angle against the glare. No broad-brim hat. No swag. No water bottle. Just stiff, unnatural limbs jerking with every stride. “Driver... look at his face. We need to stop—why won't he turn around?” He is no lost tourist. Could he be the linesman from the Overland Telegraph days who tore ...
The Terminal Horizon Highway The Terminal Horizon Tourist Bus Would you catch the Terminal Horizon bus? Travel sketches by metamodernist artist JJFBbennett The Long Highway Out here, the world ends not in silence, but in fire. The asphalt bleeds into cracked red earth, stretching toward a bruised horizon where the sky refuses to cool. Behind the glass, you drive chasing ghosts through a desert that forgot rain a lifetime ago. Beneath the Scorch Every road leads deeper into the furnace. Even below the surface, the rock fissures and weeps, hot steam rising through subterranean fractures where molten veins pulse in the dark, feeding an ancient, unforgiving heat. Broken Arteries What we built couldn’t hold. Rails twist into the dunes, swallowed by iron sand and wind. Bridges split down the seam, concrete splintered into raw bone, tangled rebar, and dying wires crackling into the smoke. The machines stopped; the wasteland stayed. The Last Horizon And when the road finally runs out, the...
Incandescent - Ode to the Endless Scrub Beneath the vault of fallen light Where red dirt cools to iron stone The ancient country meets the night Unyielding, patient, and alone Cracked earth yields to twisted root To hardy bark and spinifex Where time leaves neither mark nor foot Nor petty boundaries to perplex Rank upon rank the pale trunks rise A silent host that drinks the dry Repetition stretching past the eyes To where the flat horizon lies Trees behind trees in quiet grace A labyrinth of slender wood Carving the stillness out of space Where centuries have stood Above, the sky ignites its coal A canopy of smoke and ember Holding the continent’s deep soul In dark and fiery surrender No hurried end, no measured shore Just red loam, shadow, branch, and tree The scrub that breathes forevermore Into the quiet of infinity. Be Creative and Innovative with Knowledge John Bennett - AKA JJFBbennett , is an independent artist. You can view and subscribe to my work via Blogge...
