Frontiers Insight

Complexity is a rising challenge in economies, workplaces and communities.

It seems everyone needs to be able to handle more – whatever their work role. Employers as much as employees. While the self-employed and small businesses are long-tested at multi-skilling, these pressures are now real in all workplaces – offices, factories, shops, even outdoors (what about your ecological footprint?) .

Complexity is increased by technical advances, regulatory systems, demographics, global marketplaces, outsourcing to a range of suppliers, consultants and office service entities, all needing coordination. Then there are wider and deeper customer expectations.

Most roles require some operation of technology, and in many, computer skills are now basic to effectiveness.All workers need to know and apply regulations, including health and safety, food rules, chemical use, privacy, EEO and green systems. Almost all trade has global dimensions.

These factors, added together, influence the ‘thinking’ and levels of responsibility and integration required of workers and managers. At the same time, demographics are reshaping workers and customers. Workplaces are and must be more diverse in age, gender and background.

While most people can ‘see’ a skills gaps if they cannot work a computer or easily email (and how many, notably men, with decades yet to work, don’t have these skills), many of the challenges are more subtle.

For instance, the daily capacity to handle intricate customer expectations (reflecting diversity, age, education and choice) with a close eye to efficiency and safety. For some public institutions and their members, finding they actually have ‘customers’ is a whole new layer of complication.

From global recovery in a few years, will come a return to trends so stark this decade especially the ageing and retiring population (in 2006, 20% of Australia’s workforce was over 55 – compare Vietnam). For many years, employment has been at record highs even with immigration. Well into 2008, employers have been hiring people with capacities ‘inadequate’ ten years ago.**

So. amid all these signals and pressures, it is fascinating that in 2009, Australian business and employer groups are still loudly calling for education oriented to complex worldly realities  – they want technical skills plus equal problem solving, communication, and teamwork.

“Universities and vocational providers must turn out graduates able to cope with rapid structural adjustment and thrive in the services economy, peak employer bodies have urged. … there are too many people without the levels of skills and capabilities needed for the new occupations and opportunities in the economy in the higher-level services areas of health and education, IT and engineering.” The Australian, 18.3.09

There are signs of some educators adapting to calls. ‘Work-integrated learning’ (WIL) is a mission in particular universities and it is a key to VET.

All say that ‘generic graduate skills’ must be built through courses, but the multiple facets of work go against the grain of discipline based education structures. And in universities, against embedded (see Australian Research Council machinations) reward systems that pivot on ‘research’ often micro-focussed, locked in journals outpaced by the internet, and, except in science, little read or applied.Across Australia’s public tertiary providers, there are signs of educators themselves struggling to deal with complexities of now and future worlds.

Knowledge boundaries are reinforced in many ways, and the integration that parallels work-life is mainly left to young students.

Short stints of WIL help, but workplaces are more often pragmatic than state-of-the art (and that of course is part of the WIL point).

Australian citizens, governments, students and employers should not allow educators to resile from their thinking and practice leadership responsibilities.

It is 15 years since Gibbons and colleagues presciently started a debate about in styles of thinking and knowledge generation in universities and institutes.

• The focussed, but constrained and comfortable, mode 1, where many academic educators still sit, is ‘pure, disciplinary, homogeneous, expert-led, supply-driven, hierarchical, peer- reviewed and almost exclusively university-based’.

• Mode 2 (seen all around in 2009), is ‘applied, problem-centred, heterogeneous, demand-driven, entrepreneurial, network-embedded’, produced to be used, ‘increasingly transdisciplinary’, drawing on and integrating many fields, is generated in universities and beyond, in industry, businesses, research centres, consultancies, think-tanks by new types of researchers whose work eschews traditional forms of scholarly publication.

As we are also seeing strongly in 2009, made more colourful by global recession, market factors (students, employers, competition) will be the main drivers of change.

Australia’s educators, from schools to universities, need to prepare clients for even greater challenge and uncertainty. Even as mode 1 simplicity fades, life spills beyond mode 2, and into a more demanding Mode 3.

It looks like we are on the cusp of even higher levels of complexity and uncertainty, and we will all need to be able to cope.

“A Mode 3 knowledge… surely beckons … a knowing-in-and-with-uncertainty. … The educational task … enabling individuals to prosper amid supercomplexity, amid a situation in which there are no stable descriptions of the world, no concepts that can be seized upon with any assuredness … .” Barnett 2004

Sandra J Welsman, April 2009