The Knowing-Doing Gap and How Not to Sink In It
Knowledge is what educators do, and knowledge is important.
What we are facing in our time of global disruption, though, is not a lack of knowledge, but the incapability of turning that knowledge into the change we need to see in the world.
In his rousing presentation at the Aalto University Green Minds, Healthy Hearts – Social Sustainability Symposium held in May 2023, Dr. Otto Scharmer (MIT)suggested to all educators a radical change of focus from knowledge to deeper sensing capacities.
In his Theory U, developed for facilitating systemic transformations, Scharmer suggests that change requires presenscing, pausing in order to reach an ability to sense the emerging future with very little by way of knowledge. Instead of knowledge, we need to cultivate our deep listening and self-reflection skills, which allow us to connect with the emerging future and welcome a shift in ourselves and our identities. The shift calls for honing our interior conditions, which, in other contexts, have been called , or IDG’s, also explored at the Social Sustainability Symposium.
This transformational learning is crucial for generating change on both individual and systemic levels, but, as Scharmer points out, it doesn’t happen by itself. What higher education needs to offer students is infrastructure to support cultivating the skills needed to achieve it. This means leaving behind authority-centric, efficiency-centric and user-centric operating systems and striving for an eco-system-centric model where education is seen as a means to co-creating the future.
The knowing-doing gap cannot be filled with knowledge. We don’t need professionals who can just generate data and deal with what’s here and now. We need professionals who can harness their intuition and embodied knowing in order to reach for the future unknown with open hearts, open minds and open will.
As educators and future professionals, we hold the key.
To learn more about eco-system awareness, deep listening and how to change the behavior of those you can’t control, watch the full recording of Dr. Scharmer’s presentation Leading from the Emerging Future by Aalto University Green Minds, Healthy Hearts – Social Sustainability Symposium 30th of May 2023 (Open É«É«À² community only).