Should schools get better at what they do or find better ways of doing what they do?

Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, James March believes that organizations may engage primarily in two types of activities, exploration, the search for new knowledge, or exploitation, the maximization of payoff from existing knowledge.

In public education terms, schools can look for new strategies, methods, and models for delivering education, or they can refine, hone, manage, and systematize the delivery of their current models of education.

In his new book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage, Roger Martin explains that while both are valuable and both are critical, it is hard to do. “…they are hard to engage in simultaneously; most often, organizations choose to focus on one activity, either exploration or exploitation, to the exclusion of the other and to their own detriment.”

In other words, education focuses on either the exploration of new models and methods, or focuses mainly on managing and administering their current model and methods.

Roger explains that there dangers of an organization that focuses only on exploration.
“An organization exclusively dedicated to exploration will expire relatively short order. Typically, exploration alone will not generate the returns needed to fund further exploration.”

If education is always looking for the next best thing, the next model, method, or strategy, they will fail to produce the student achievement results demanded of them. They will not capitalize or leverage the good models, methods, strategies, and ideas that have been developed.

But there are dangers too for the organization that focuses solely on exploitation.

“ On the other hand, many organizations flip quickly from an early exploration phase—the generation of the founding idea behind the business—to the steady exploitation of that idea, never returning to exploration. These organizations, solely dedicated to exploitation, might last somewhat longer than exploration-only businesses, but the business that creates value only through exploitation will exhaust itself in due course. It can’t keep exploiting the same piece of knowledge forever. If it tries to do so, the cost of the business can be devastating.”

If education is never looking for new models, methods,strategies, or ideas for delivering education to it’s students, it is inevitable that the model they exploit will eventually cease to produce the results desired of it.

Roger provides the following table for reference. I have added the education references.

Roger Martin argues that what is needed is balance between exploration and exploitation found in Design Thinking. “The design thinker therefore, enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, and originality and mastery.”

The education design thinker enable a school to balance finding new and better ways increasing student achievement and delivering effective instruction, while mastering, embedding, and refining the effective methods that are in use. Schools that get better at what they do while finding better ways to do it. That is educational design thinking.