Interview Bas Leurs, Head of learning experiences at Nesta

April 28, 2017 - Context of Education / Mistakes in Education

During my visit in London I arranged an interview with Bas Leurs.

Before joining Nesta, Bas spent over a decade as a lecturer, programme leader and researcher for the Multimedia Design course at Rotterdam University. He played a key role in the curriculum development, and also co-authored the course’s national qualification profile.

Areas Bas has taught on include: design research, design theory, service design, interaction design and visual design. His research focused on design education and human-centred design methods and tools.

Prior to his work at Rotterdam University, Bas lectured in interaction design at Avans University (Breda, NL), co-founded a design agency and worked as a freelance interaction designer.

Before you started at Nesta you were working in education for many years. What made you switch to Nesta?

The environment of education in the universities (were I lectured) weren’t enabling innovation the way I would like to see it. Here at Nesta we say performance management is ability + motivation + oppertunity. That requires leadership in education to enable all these things. Teachers should have and create the ability to learn, the motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) to really make things happen and the oppertunity (space and time) to do so. The mandate from management or permission to change is in the most cases missing.

You’re job title says ‘head of learning’..

It is my job to learn design to others. At Nesta we bring great ideas to life in 4 streams:

1. policy, research analysis & data
2. innovation lab
3. communication & skills
4. impact investment

It is my job, together with my team, to distribute generated knowledge to others. It is our goal to build innovation skills to others. We are learning on several levels.

 

People can only learn if every level of the skills development is heading in the same direction. These levels are all influencing each other.

What do you mean by learning?

We believe that there is a connection between learning and innovation. The innovation spiral works for learning (and education) as well.

 

It is a misconception that innovation skills can be thought. These skills are complex skills because solutions are situated, there is a lot of uncertainty in it. It makes it even more difficult that there are some opposites in designing for the complex future. We need to work in an open environment and share our doubts with others but we also need to be determined. We need to design solutions in detail but we also need to see the big picture. All these opposites should be balanced carefully. Education should be focusing on the skills to react and respond to changes and complex situations ahead.

The way you talk about learning is really action based?

In Nesta we say we have a bias towards action. On the one hand we should learn by doing in which reflection should be very important. Our objective is to formulate learning objectives as actionable goals to stimulate people doing things in a new way. These new ways constantly change. Learning can (and maybe should) also happen beyond the classroom, supporting learners to learn while doing innovation in their daily work. And people should learn from several actors. As well from experts as from peers, learning from people who have hands on experience in doing innovation.

Not everything is teachable, some things are learnable.

 

Learning isn’t a linear proces. We should train innovation skills as a mustle. The model explained from top to bottom and from left to right: 1. what do you do unconscious, 2. mentors help you think and talk about what you do, 3. reproduce by learning from sources on the internet or from others and 4. prototyping skills, learning by doing. It is key that learners develop trust in themselves. Kolb’s model makes it clear how the process of learning is mostly practiced.

 

You mentioned that it is important to reflect..

Reflection is maybe the most importnat step in experimental learning. There are two ways to reflect: reflect IN practice and reflect ON practice. It is important to create situated practices in which learners are in a dialogue with the context and the system.

In the way we look at learning reflecting takes an important place.

 

Do you reflect on your work?

Of course! I use two notebooks during my work. One, called TALK & DO, is for all the conversations I have with others. I also take the model book with me to explain my thoughts. Next to that I use a THINK notebook in which I reflect several times a week. When a project isn’t going smoothly I reflect even more. I reserve time in my agenda for reflection. I ask myself questions like:

• What am I doing?
• Am I doing it in the right way?
• What kind of questions do I ask myself?
• Does these questions are giving me useable knowledge?
• What are the questions that I don’t ask?

What is the role of failure or making mistakes in this way of learning?

A lot of companies we work with think that innovation is all about a good idea. But that’s only the first step. It is not hard to come up with an idea, but it is hard to implement an idea. A lot of ideas don’t make it through implementation.

 

As Michael Schrage explained is is important to fail early and fail quickly. But this isn’t easy for most people. I see a lot of innovation fail because there is this big implementation at the end of the process without testing earlier. Making mistakes is important, don’t try to hide or avoid them.

 

What is the value of making in this (learning) process?

Physical objects make it easier to talk about abstract ideas. It helps to create tools & programs to create tools to create deep conversations for reflection. It also helps to gain insights on the comfort of people in innovating. This had to do a lot with cultural interpretations. In a Dubai session I asked people to stand on a line from uncomfortable to comfortable. The place they took on this line caused a good conversation about innovation. In Dubai it was difficult to talk about failure. But facilitating the conversation like this helped discuss the parts which were needed for reflection.

There are no golden rules for innovation. But it can help to start under the radar and make it more public when the first mistakes already helped sharpen the idea. Exposure of the experiment can make it more difficult to make mistakes.

What is the role of prototyping in innovating?

For me prototyping is making the idea physical in an early stage of the process. This is helping to test the idea and learn from that. It also helps discovering mistakes in the idea. But there is good and bad failure. Bad failure is preventable when a procedure is followed.

The good thing about prototyping is that is helps asking the question WHAT IF instead of IF THEN. In this ‘what-if-question’ speculative design and experimentation are methods to MAKE the future.

What is up for the future of learning at Nesta?

We want to move from training sessions to developing learning strategies.

We want to equip people, teams, companies and ecosystems to be innovative. We don’t think we should do that with individuals but with teams.

In september we start the iSchool program. Our learning develop program is as follows:

 

We accelerate learning and stimulate people to make ideas tangible and test (and fail) quickly and early in the process. We see to many ‘big bang implementations’ fail because there was no testing involved.

Can we innovate education?

Of course we can. But we need the permission to do things differently. It is not always needed to request permission at the beginning, start under the radar. There are two different approaches:

1. European style: Travel the ocean with a completely planned trip (bring enough food and other supplies and define the route)
2. Tribe style: Just go and sail and find your route and supplies on the way.

At Nesta we choose to do extensive sessions with clients (for two days) to explore their question. We offer this service for free. This helps us to get to the right and real question where we than can design the right solution for.

A lot of things are about UNLEARNING OLD HABITS, something which is very much needed in education.

We need to ask the question HOW MIGHT.We should use a form of materialized thinking in which we build and talk about the future. Design should be responsive to complex systems. We need to have a trial and error approach for this complex world. And people should learn to handle this approach.

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