Learning together, one bite at a time
When it comes to changing mindsets and behaviours around things like the circular economy, snackable knowledge could be the way to go.
Writing the Green Edge often feels like a big game of join-the-dots. As we described in this recent post, the plethora of reports and initiatives by government departments like BEIS, DfE, Levelling-Up and others take a fair bit of dot-joining. Again, we thank the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Skills, Alex Burghart, for having a fair go at it in his recent letter to us, although we did note that a lot of faith seems to be going in to the new Green Jobs Delivery Unit of which, as yet, little has been seen.
It feels like we’re playing join-the-dots in lots of other areas too. For example, we’d love someone at some stage to help us understand how the Decarbonising Heat in Homes strategy will play out. Surely heat pumps is the answer, right? Well, not necessarily. This 2020 briefing report for MPs says that heat networks could technically deliver around 20% of UK heat by 2050. So, depending on where I’m living, should I jump to install a heat pump now, or wait for the possibility of a heat network to come along in my area? And that’s before we even start to consider hydrogen.
We see much evidence of others joining the dots too. We had a brief but informative conversation last week with the good folks of the Edinburgh Earth Initiative and heard how they are planning to join the sustainability dots across The University of Edinburgh’s curriculum. And we think this recent report from Balfour Beatty is a fine example of how net zero roadmapping is going on at corporate levels, even if it does seem to be somewhat lacking by the Government.
Source: Balfour Beattie, Carbon Reduction Plan, Oct 2021
But certain themes appear consistently, no more so than the need to change mindsets and behaviours. That may seem an obvious statement to make - of course mindsets need to change. We all need to embrace the circular economy, for example, as we will be examining in more detail in our upcoming series on B Corps. But while much big thinking is being done at academic levels, such as was illustrated in our recent article on the London Interdisciplinary School, what about changing mindsets across populations, the domain of the somewhat controversial Nudge Unit? Here we see the potential for some uncomfortable mindshifts. Circular economy? Oh, that’s all about recycling isn’t it? Well, yes, but that’s really the last resort. The Sharing Economy is a much bigger step. What would you share? A car? A power drill? The wardrobe for your kids?
Education, of course, has a huge part to play. As we’ve said before, perhaps the DfE’s draft Sustainability & Climate Change Strategy will address all this. But we do note that some of the key handbooks on the Circular Economy tend to come it at around 30 quid on Amazon and – even given Green Edge’s thirst for information – we find them to be pretty weighty tomes. How many people – especially young people, who learn in a much less linear fashion than previous generations – are going to wade through these?
Snacking on knowledge
An alternative might be found in learning platforms like Australia’s Cahoot. Its tagline – “Transform learners’ experiences through peer-to-peer collaboration that drives deep engagement to build capability and shift mindsets” – might not be immediately obvious as to how it works, but the idea is actually quite straightforward. Organise groups (cohorts), break the learning up into ‘snackable content’ – a four minute video would be typical – and then let each cohort talk about it and immerse itself in it using social media embedded in the platform. As Cahoot’s CEO, Craig Crowther, described it for us in our recent conversation, “Less is more. Four minutes that impacts somebody behaviour is more effective than a 2 hour read that does not.”
Green Edge knows Craig quite well. We worked with him a few years ago in a major education and labour market intelligence program for a Middle East client, and we know his enthusiasm and energy for all things educational. Cahoot seems to us to be a good fit for Craig’s thinking and, while the platform has been around for 12 years or so, it seems to us to be a realistic alternative to the asynchronous approach offered by the more traditional learning management systems.
Craig tells us that the Cahoot approach grew out of solving problems with existing systems that engage well initially but don’t retain students and don’t reflect the best ways they can learn, especially when they are also busy with work. He explains: “The normal e-learning experience is: watch a video, answer a few questions, move on. But if you’re part of a cohort, you'll always be part of a group, and that group travels together through the programme. You make it engaging and you moderate it, and there's a human element to the digital part, so you have some live touchpoints, and you also have one or more human facilitators who are encouraging people, giving feedback, giving responses, and generally managing the cohort through the journey.
“The second part of that is that you learn from other people. You learn from subject matter experts, then you go away and apply the learning and then come back and share your experiences”.
Cahoot’s business to date has been predominantly with corporations and industry groups, with educational content built for (mainly Australian) clients like Austrade and the Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. The platform lends itself well to problem-focused communities. “We bring together the ‘five wicked problems’ and the 96 experts across the business who then self-form in to groups of different disciplines [to tackle each problem]”.
The next big step is to deploy Cahoot to educational communities, and the green agenda is an obvious target. Craig tells us that Cahoot is already doing this with an initiative for young and mid-career professionals called the Network IQ Academy, built by Dr Daria Tataj and focused on digital networking and communication skills. He says: “It applies just the same throughout the education system. You're getting people to apply their thinking around the content and delivering the content in a way that captures every generation. We all watch videos these days, it’s not a unique thing for kids, but for sure if you ask anyone to go and read a 20 page academic paper and then tell you what they think about it, it’s not going to get the same level of resonance. We don't make videos that cover more than five minutes. We might have ten of them, but five minutes is the maximum you're going to get people to focus on”.
Could this work? The Green Edge thinks it could. Take, for example, this excellent Ellen MacArthur Foundation video with Dame Ellen herself explaining the Circular Economy. It’s less than ten minutes long and it’s been out for over two years, but at the time of writing viewing numbers remain south of 10,500. Not a lot for such an important topic. How many more might it get if it were to be broken down into smaller chunks, each dealing with one of the circular economy loops, and then made available to cohorts to watch, socialise and build into their lives? Perhaps we’ll get to see.
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