Ignoring it, rational rebuttal and name-calling - a framework to understand the stages of opportunity progress and acceptance?

By Andrew

Via a recent podcast with venture capitalist Marc Andressen, I came across former MIT professor Elting Morisons’ Men, Machines, and Modern Times. This book, originally published in 1966, is a series of lectures Morison gave between 1950 and 1966 that explores how individuals and society respond to technologically-driven change. 

Using case studies and anecdotes, covering divergent topics - from firing naval guns at sea to pasteurizing milk - Morison explains in detail how technology comes about, but also how it integrates with people - or doesn’t - and whether and how that integration changes us. In so doing, he concludes that there is a cycle of how society responds to technological innovation: the inventive stage (where society ignores the innovation), the refinement and consolidation phase (where society rationally rebuts the innovation) and the expansion stage (where society actively name-calls). When the name calling phase is reached, the technology in question has made enough progress to threaten the status-quo and thus has the potential for sustained, mass adoption. 

These three phases seem to have direct application to a range of opportunity-related innovations from policy reforms to new models of service delivery across healthcare, education, workforce, and housing. 

Morrison’s technologies - he was focused on machines - can easily be swapped out for the opportunity “technologies” including programs and interventions, policy and regulatory reforms, methods and models. I am making this leap because technology is really no more than the application of scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life or the change and manipulation of the human environment. 

Applying this framework might help us navigate societal integration when introducing opportunity innovations. The progress of public education - yes, think of “public education” as the technology  in this example, defined as primary and secondary schools that educate children without charge - from 1635 when Boston Latin School, the first “grammar” or secondary school in the colonies (note: Boston Latin was funded, in part, by income from a public land sale, making it the first public school in America) to now, broadly looks something like this: 

I am mixing and matching the levers it took to implement the “technology” we call public education - legal, legislative, regulatory, programs, etc.

What’s clear from this over-simplified chart, is that the resistance to the technology of “public education” in America has continued to play out for over 400 years. 

The lesson, I think, is that despite the need for the most seemingly obvious “technologies” there is an overwhelming need to organize around the human dimension - how humans will react to innovation. 

A deeper look at the “sub-technologies” - micro innovations within the public education system - demonstrate this point: the variability of uptake across recent innovations including charter schools, common core, teacher evaluation, and high-stakes testing, can be linked to how prepared society was to accept the change and how the change was conveyed to, and impacted, society. 

Take Common Core. Early in the Obama Admin, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared that the Common Core State Standards “may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown versus Board of Education.” 45 states quickly implemented the standards, but the movement didn’t survive the expansion phase. Tim Loveless wrote about Common Core’s demise in Between the State the School House: Understanding the Failure of Common Core, he argues: 

“But a political backlash emerged—and it, too, was bipartisan. Opponents on the right objected to the federal government’s support of the standards, warned of the dangerous precedent of allowing Washington to meddle in curriculum matters, and derided CCSS as “Obamacore.” Opponents on the left blasted the new assessments associated with the standards, objected to teacher evaluations tied to test scores, and organized opt-out movements that informed parents of how to exclude their kids from state testing programs.”

Hindsight is 20:20, but Brown  makes a compelling argument that Common Core was doomed to fail because the movement undergirding the technology was not prepared for the name-calling phase, when the status quo began to exert its power - implementation was incredibly difficult, there existed dramatic variability in the quality of curriculum built and delivered on top of the standards, there was a long-established history on incrementalism in education reform to overcome, and, of course, there was ideological tensions around how to teach math and English language arts. 

I’m left wondering how designing around the expansion/name-calling stage would change the opportunity innovation process.