Serendipity35

I attended the Fourth Annual Northeast Connect Conference last month. The theme of the conference was "inspiring change." The conference keynote was Curt Garbett who based his talk on the business book best-seller Who Moved My Cheese? which is about change. The book is subtitled "An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life." The book was written by Spencer Johnson (he also co-wrote The One Minute Manager) and according to Garbett (who works for Spencer Johnson Associates), it's the best-selling book on change of all time (21 million+ copies).

I posted here earlier that I am not a big fan of business creeping into education - students as customers, return on investment, economies of scale and all that.

Still, I read a few business books a year that hit the best-seller lists like The Long Tail and The Paradox of Choice. I listened to Who Moved My Cheese? when it came out on audible.com (yes, that counts), and I had hoped that the keynoter would address an educational take on change.

The book/movie is an allegory with four characters. There are two mice, "Sniff" and "Scurry", and two people, "Hem" and "Haw", who all live in a maze. They spend their days looking for cheese, which represents happiness and success. They find a great cheese-filled Cheese Station C and return to it day after day. One day they discover that that Station C is out of cheese, and the rest of the story is about how they deal (or don't deal) with this change.

The short version of the book's message is that:

1. Change happens


2. You need to anticipate change


3. You need to monitor change


4. Then adapt to change


5. Of course, you eventually need to actually change. (And we know in many cases we don't make it to this step.)


6. He suggests that you need to enjoy change. (Hmmm...)


7. Finally, you need to be ready to quickly change again and again.

The presentation didn't work for me. I didn't hear any connections to education. It felt too corporate boardroom. Unfortunately, he chose to show a short animated film version of the book's story. Animation + Allegory = children's literature to many people. The book is not aimed at kids at all (though I could imagine using it or the film with older students), but I think the film turned the audience the wrong way. Additionally,the excerpt of the film based on the book that was shown doesn't really cover the more serious aspects of the book. I understand the speaker using it though because it was a way to give an overview to a group that has not read the book.

I realize that we all have commonalities when it comes to change, but change does come to education in different ways. For one thing, change both occurs much slower in K-20 education (buying new technologies, being able to adopt new tools even if they are free, the approval process, training of users, student privacy issues) and sometimes faster (when it comes to our clients/students who are changing all the time).

By the way, there are also lots of variations and parodies of the book that might interest you if you want to explore a bit further in another direction.