Teaching for innovation, creativity and enterprise… a good idea, right! The ICE project aims to get this running throughout courses offered by the University of Plymouth. Ambitious. And essential.
I’m ‘critical friend’ for the project and was a keynote speaker at the first ICE conference last week. I asked the delegates – academics, researchers, and educators – for their experience of barriers that get in the way of ambitious projects, like ICE.
Here are some of the Backward Focus barriers they’ve encountered:
- Thinking ’new’ means hard work
- Everyone getting trained in the same way…standardization
- Insecurity of the future
- “The old way works”
- The bureaucratic process
- An assumption that students can’t take responsibility
- Lack of vision from those at the top
- “We have always done it this way – no other way works”
- Lack of negotiation with hierarchy
- Inability to make decisions and stand by them
- “Don’t have the technology to do that”
- Not enough belief to realise dreams
- You’re meant to know your place
- “It was always fine until you arrived”
- Inertia of management
Watch and listen out for these if you’re proposing a new idea…it means Backward Focus is lurking!
Over the next few days I’ll feedback the ICE delegates’ thoughts on the other barriers…Inward Focus barriers next time.
And remember…these are the kind of barriers that BBM loves to get its hands on… and to get rid of.