Renown design firm IDEO was featured in a NYT article describing how an eclectic design team of “architects, mechanical engineers, ethnographers, communication designers and education specialists” were hired by a Peruvian businessman to design a network of low-cost private schools from scratch to address Peru’s near bottom global standing regarding education performance.

Much has been written about how design thinking is making traditional approaches to strategy and strategic planning obsolete.  Design thinking embraces an ethos of rapid prototyping, failing forward, and capturing and testing user needs throughout the development cycle.  The “blue sky” euphoria of a blank canvas from which to design a new kind of school is bounded by the fact that schools are in fact quite complex systems with many interdependent parts. 

What I love about this article is the spirit of trying something completely new because something is completely broken but doing so in both a comprehensive and yet innovative way.  Usually innovation is relegated to re-designing part of a system and not the entire whole.  However, when that part of a system is tied to other interdependent parts, which are tethered together in an entire complex system, the innovation’s impact becomes lost. 

A friend of mine, Dan Varner of Excellent Schools Detroit recently remarked to me how our country views our founding documents (i.e. Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc.) as sacred.  This is not itself a bad thing.  However, Dan stated persuasively that our deep reverence for these documents means we as a nation tend to innovate very little on the means of our democracy including those public institutions that support and serve our democracy like public education.  We innovate very little on the core institutions that underpin our democracy when in fact while the ideals we uphold and believe to be self-evident should not change or wane, the means by which they are built and achieved over time can and should. 

Countries like Peru whose founding and historical documents related thereon may not be held as tightly and with such sacred reverence as America’s, and as such they are more willing to prototype, iterate and reconfigure its public institutions which are broken.