Do you remember the actor/director John Cusack? He of ‘High Fidelity’ and ‘Being John Malkovich’ fame?  I recently heard about ‘The John Cusack Rule’. When asked in an interview about how he saw his role as film producer, he said his main job was, ”To keep the set free from fear.”

This ‘rule’ was offered to me as a guiding principle for working in large-scale volunteering spaces — and it feels equally useful for anyone working with others through challenge and change. I have blogged twice this year about transformative change (‘Transforming learning’ and ‘Can we create conditions for transformation?’) — and this post continues this theme.

The John Cusack story was shared by Joe McCannon and Becky Kanis Margiotta, the two founders of the Billions Institute, and I was lucky enough to spend a day working with them as part of the Carnegie Summit on Improvement Science that I attended last month. Both Joe and Becky have notched up years in health and social impact fields, rehousing thousands of homeless and scaling the rollout of vital health services. Not in education — and all the more refreshing for it! Looking to other sectors can help us make new connections that can fuel innovative thinking back at base.

The following ideas were shared by them on the day and I offer them as useful nuggets to help us support and scale innovation in our own contexts.

I wonder if you’ve felt in recent years that life is constantly overwhelming — that there’s so much more to deal with than you have time for, and that you are always in ‘catch-up’ mode?

Welcome to my world. In fact, welcome to our world: an increasingly-digital world of multiple demands and stimulations, full of so many challenging, exciting and diverse opportunities that it becomes difficult to decide what to do. Perhaps we feel a little like the proverbial children in a sweetshop, but faced with much more complex situations. And as educators, we are tasked with the additional responsibility of helping the next generation to navigate this world.

Does it make your head whirl? Do you sometimes find yourself so busy being connected and available, that you fall into the trap of thinking of ubiquity as:

‘everywhere, all the time’

rather than:

‘anywhere, any time’?

Does the mental fog sometimes descend and paralyse you temporarily? Do you feel the slight panic and fear of missing out, if you don’t feel up-to-date or on top of everything? I know that I do!

Recently I found myself discussing this very issue with members of my book discussion group. Among our number are several educators, businesswomen, and psychologists, so the conversation ran deep and drew on wide bases of knowledge and experience. This powerful social context for learning led us to discovery of a taonga – which, if you did not already know of it, I now pass on to you.

Introducing…