Personal/Professional Context
I have been involved at Gaia U now for over 3 years — as an associate in both the permaculture diploma and master of science programs as well as almost 2 years working on the Core Team in a range of roles. This is my 15th Output Packet I have submitted and my 8th project OP.
I am approaching 2 years since I resigned from my full-time position teaching at a local university to pursue my independent project work and Gaia U degree. It has been both an exciting and at times stressful period as my wife and I have a young daughter to support (who is growing up fast!).
My Gaia U experience so far has yielded a large amount of experiential, intellectual and social capital. This project is designed to both increase and leverage those yields to create financial and material capital — specifically, in the form of a marketable eLearning module to be hosted on my Wired Roots website and a polished portfolio for freelance learning design work.
I am looking to finish up my MSc program by using the remaining OPs to help me complete this transition to creating regenerative livelihood. My goal is to is to provide for my family by doing meaningful work that helps the individuals, teams, organizations and communities I am (and will become) involved with adapt and thrive in the face of complex challenges.
There is an interview with one of my favorite comedians, George Carlin, in which he talks about how he got his start. He advises us to have a phased plan to get to where we want to go. For him, early on he had the vision that he would start as a radio DJ, then transition into standup comedy, and then into acting in movies. The fact that things went more or less according to plan — in an industry wildly unpredictable — makes his advice worth considering.
Field/Global Context
We are coming up against the limits of the way we’ve done things for a long time. These are the limits of the ways in which we think, learn, design our organizations and communities, and relate to one another and the world around us. What worked somewhat well for us in simpler times is now failing us as the world becomes more and more complex.
We can see all around us old systems struggling to adapt to the complex challenges they are facing: economic systems based on infinite growth as mismanaged resources become scarce, industrial agricultural systems as we face droughts and degraded soils from decades of degenerative practices, community and organizational systems with rigid hierarchies struggling to keep up with the changing environment, and educational systems designed to prepare students to function in an industrial economy that demanded skills which are becoming ever-more obsolete.
Of primary interest for this Output Packet are the fields of education and organization development. On the one hand, technology has completely transformed our relationship with information and in doing so, is straining our relationships with the institutions that until only very recently provided access to that information. Now we have almost limitless opportunities to learn what we want to learn without having to attend a physical school or university.
On the other hand, this increased complexity and rate of change is requiring that we continue learning throughout our lives and careers. Learning is no longer seen as something that precedes or compliments work — one must be continuously learning through work in the real world.
My own phased plan is coming more and more into focus as I progress along my pathway. It includes earning a living as a freelance learning designer (or instructional designer), then shifting into predominately developing my own online business offering blended learning experiences and coaching/consulting, then finally transitioning into developing the farm as a retreat center where we host team-building type events and other live learning experiences like internships, workshops and courses.
I see these roles as stacking on top of rather than replacing one another as time goes on. They are strategically aligned to allow me to build the skills and knowledge I will need to scale my practice and grow my sphere of influence.
Working as a freelance learning designer is something I’ve been doing for a while now with my primary client being Gaia U, though I plan to use this OP to polish my portfolio in order to add other clients and other types of projects. This role includes a sizable number of skills related to using different tech tools, a solid theoretical knowledge base related to learning/instruction/communication/behavior/psychology/media/etc., and techniques for visual design and presentation. These are all skills I’ve been working at for some time and have focused on putting a lot of theory into practice for this project.
What is emerging is an unprecedented need for skilled, self-directed learners. In the field of organizational development, we are witnessing a shift away from dependence on intensive training programs toward more asynchronous, just-in-time learning, micro learning, social learning, and informal learning. These strategies look to take advantage of the abundance of resources already available, and create more agile organizations that can adapt better to rapid changes in the environment.
The challenge is that the vast majority of us who came up through traditional education systems have underdeveloped self-directed learning skills. We are accustomed to participating in learning experiences largely as passive consumers, dependent on direction from an authoritarian teacher or instructor. While technology has begun to break that pattern for many of us (most of us have taught ourselves something with youtube, etc.), there is a lot of room for improving our abilities to be our own learning experience designers.
Organizational leaders will increasingly be looking to empower their team members to be more autonomous in their personal and professional development, while creating structures that support, guide and track this development to meet specific organizational aims. Learning is becoming less and less about consuming information, but rather accessing the information that is needed, when it is needed, applying it skillfully to real-world projects, generating feedback, and learning through work as opposed to around it.