26 April

Towards the end of my time at CSU, it took on a visionary project called Smart Learning (SL). I mention it because the ideas behind Smart Learning were more or less identical to the ideas that run Tesla, as a company. It’s a major reason for my fascination with Tesla, it has nothing to do with being a ‘fan’. Kidults assume you’re a fan of something, if you like it, it’s all team sports for them. What both SL and Tesla propose is to weave together in mutually reinforcing ways: - the research and theory behind the things you do - the design of how your organisation runs, and - the way your organisation operates day to day. Not just as separate factors to take into account. All of the above have to be mutually co-dependent, feeding into each other in real time, with ‘emergent’ data. Instead of ‘drilling down’ into endless reports and data, and trying to figure out how to apply it to what your organisation does, the data emerges from the interactions between all of the aspects of what your organisation does. That emergence is designed, you design the organisation so that the data doesn’t need interpreting. It’s feedback for the designed relationships. Smart Learning failed at CSU. It ran aground on the human baseline - status. It threatened existing status hierarchies, who then mobilised to kill it. It could have incorporated status into the design, and that’s why Tesla fascinates me. Because it’s done that. I will keep posting about them, because they’ve cracked the code civilisation thought was impossible. It’s that important. It’s not even about their cars or other products, they’re just components of what it’s doing. CSU could have been a global player, the dominant player in all global education. Instead it’s now reverted to what it had become pre-SL. An endless meeting that decides nothing and produces no meaningful action. Just a daily venue for the various staff to perform their status inside.