BBWorld09 Opening Keynote – Seth Godin

Blackboard World 2009 opened with a keynote speech from Seth Godin, author of Tribes (among other things). He pointed out that, if Ben Franklin were to come back to life today, one of the only things he would recognize would be our educational system. (Personally, I think if Ben Franklin were to come back to life today, he’d be clawing frantically at the lid of his coffin, but that’s just me ).

Anyway, Seth was trying to say that our educational system hasn’t changed much. He postulated that our public education system was created in response to a perceived crisis that we would run out of factory workers and consumers for all the goods that were created in the factories. He attributed this belief to Andrew Carnegie and Woodrow Wilson and declared that it was time to change it. He didn’t actually offer any suggestions for how to change it; I suppose that’s our job. What he did offer is the concept that the best way to foster change was through tribes.

A tribe is a group of people aligned with a common goal and/or culture. He demonstrated that human beings need to feel that they’re part of something with an interesting demonstration.  He put up a slide that said to clap our hands, slowly and rhythmically.  It took four seconds for the entire audience (1500 people?) to sync up our claps with one another. It was actually fairly impressive.

Now I completely understand that humans have a need to “tribe up”. I think everyone is a member of several tribes. You could say that all of us at the conference are members of the Blackboard tribe, and that some of us are members of the WebCT tribe, while others are members of the Angel tribe. What I’m not clear on is whether or not it’s the tribe that is the agent of change, or does it just happen that tribes are so ubiquitous that they are always present when change happens? It certainly seems that some tribes are more about being agents of change (VistaSWAT) and others are less so (California State Legislature?).

In any case, here’s some other random things he said that struck a chord with me:

• Compliance doesn’t work to create value. Compliant work will always go to the lowest bidder. We can always find someone cheaper to follow the manual. Value is created by doing something different.
• To start a change, you need to be a “positive deviant”… someone who figures out how to “go to the edges” and do those things that are outside the norm. It’s tempting to stay in the center of the bell curve where there’s lots of company and it’s safe, but to foster change you need to take it to the thin area at the leading edge.

Oh, and he showed us a picture of the coolest corporate headquarters building ever: Longaberger Baskets

Longaberger headquarters