1. 1 NEW SHOES TODAY • ROAD TO CREATION, INNOVATION AND CHANGE
FRACTALS AND FLAVOURS
WELLANTCOLLEGE WESTVLIET
Variety for Successful Education
Society is changing rapidly. Until recently the school system educated students
to find their way in an industrial or service oriented, efficient and demanding
society. Knowledge transfer and the development of skills were mainly focussed
on preparing them to work in small and large organisations.
These days many young people have new challenges to tackle. On the one
hand they are confronted with a complex society with many social and eco-
nomic structures, rules and regulations. But as the world is changing rapidly
they also have to learn how to create their own lives in a world of endless pos-
sibilities. Both requirements should be part of the new educational concepts
and content.
This story tells about teachers and managers of a technical and vocational
school in The Hague who deeply recognise these new challenges and want to
fundamentally change their educational methods. They strongly believe this is
necessary in order to enable their students to really create a meaningful role
for themselves in future society, fully based on their own talents and drives.
Such a person will be able to find or create a genuine place, organisation or
position that suits him/her best and where her/his added value is highest. It is
a story of inspiration, co-creation and many, many experiments.
Dancing with Rogie & Co
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2. 2 NEW SHOES TODAY • ROAD TO CREATION, INNOVATION AND CHANGE
Wellantcollege’s general manager Peter Kranendonk and education manager
Jos van Meegen initiated this project. They invited Rogie & Company, a dance
group lead by Piet Rogie, to start up this innovation and change process. He
is known in the world of dance for being a choreographer who organically
creates new performances together with his dancers.
Piet and his dancers were invited to the school to show how they create a new
choreography and how every dancer has her own role in it, all equally impor-
tant, but very different at the same time. Teachers were invited to take part in
this co-creation, to talk with the dancers, to deeply feel how this process works.
This experience inspired them to experiment with openness for variety as
the main theme in their new educational concept. For six months, small
groups of teachers and students started working and experimenting with
different kind of learning methods and different combinations of content.
Finally they found out that they required a variety of methods to be able to
teach all of the skills needed for the new world. They started experimenting
on a broader scale. They had the students learn individually, in small groups
and in big groups, inside the school and outside. Together with the students
they decided what worked well and what didn’t. Step by step they experi-
mented, creating a wide variety of tools, lessons and so on.
Jos van Meegen explains: ‘These experiments eventually led to an educational
method that appeals to all different learning abilities, as is clarified in the
following box. One can develop knowledge along different lines. On the
one hand, we can look at the world as being objective, tangible, and discov-
erable through the senses. We can also look at the world as being subjective,
designed from within, developed through one’s own approach, from ‘the
meaning I give to my world.’ On the other axis you will find the student as the
consumer of this knowledge or as the producer of the learning process.’
This then gives four boxes with different content, styles, environments and
tools of learning.
Teach: Traditional knowledge transfer, teacher to student
Search: Student explores and experiments to gain objective knowledge
Reflect: The teacher gives feedback on student’s talents and skills
Quest: Student (co-)creates own knowledge and meaning
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3. 3 NEW SHOES TODAY • ROAD TO CREATION, INNOVATION AND CHANGE
The Fractal Organisation
To make it possible for this educational concept to work on a larger scale,
Wellantcollege had to achieve two other things. The teachers had to trans-
form themselves, by developing totally new skills, by finding out what their
hidden talents were and how to apply them, and by unlearning old and
learning new teaching habits. Secondly, the school needed a new organisa-
tional structure that would fit this new educational method. Inspiration came
through the study of fractals.
A fractal is a geometrical shape that is irregular at each scale of magnification.
Hence it is always different in an infinite variation. At the same time, the
whole consists of parts that repeat themselves at increasingly smaller scales.
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4. 4 NEW SHOES TODAY • ROAD TO CREATION, INNOVATION AND CHANGE
The particularity of fractals in geometry is that the shape of the parts is the same
as that of the whole. The parts only distinguish themselves in size and colour.
Hence, the shape of the whole can be recognised in each of the parts and
vice versa. New and other similar shapes are created in the whole. In nature,
fractals are an organising phenomenon through which order and chaos can
go hand in hand.
The similarities between this school and fractals are the qualities of uniform-
ity and maximum variety at the same time. Building a ‘fractalized’ institution
could generate a fundamentally new dynamic, a new way of interacting with
each other and shaping the services offered.
Peter Kranendonk and his management team decided to co-create everything
around one basic form, with a fixed part and a varied part based on meaning.
The organisation would then be shaped by interaction. Interaction around
this basic form would ‘define’ the way in which things were developed and
evaluated, the content of the tasks and roles, internal and external commu-
nication, the structure, the workplaces and the leadership style.
These figures display the basic shape: a fixed base and a meaning-based vari-
ation, which is in each part of the organisation and the dynamics of the whole.
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5. 5 NEW SHOES TODAY • ROAD TO CREATION, INNOVATION AND CHANGE
Freedom to Experiment, Freedom to Build
The Wellantcollege wanted each of its employees to act as freely as possi-
ble. They defined a number of interconnecting values, not to control each
individual’s activities but more as a kind of implicit frame of reference.
The institution’s interconnecting values are:
• Variety in every organisational aspect is a vital condition for this
educational concept
• Everyone fits in the whole in his/her own way
• We create a culture of giving and sharing
• Through dialogue we give meaning to our goals
• We grow in consciousness by elucidating the choices we make in our work
Peter and Jos decided to apply only a control-based management approach
to the established minimum frameworks (the fixed base). For the rest, they
trust in the autonomous self order that will arise from groups of employees
with the most varied talents, interests and motivation.
Dialogues
To make the variable part – the subjective, often implicit part – effective, the
variety of activities carried out by each individual has to be made explicit.
This gives each activity meaning in the whole and creates cohesion. One can
only achieve this by analysing each other’s activities, putting them into words
or images and holding onto them for a while. Hence, dialogues and interac-
tion are needed so that people can state the intention behind their actions
and explain why they chose to do things one way and not another. So there’s
a need for continuous dialogue about the deeper reasons for activities, the
motives and their results.
These dialogues do not aim at the predictability of activities. They help to
gain insight into the meaning of different activities, facilitating the creation
of new forms, new talents, new variations.
The following figure gives a framework for dialogue about subjective
(unique) actions.
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6. 6 NEW SHOES TODAY • ROAD TO CREATION, INNOVATION AND CHANGE
Everything concerning meaning is situational and hence flexible and change-
able. Meaning is always created in co-creation. In co-creation a natural order
unfolds that is in harmony with the whole. Trusting this process is crucial for
the success of the dialogues.
Through dialogues about concrete choices, teachers and students are devel-
oping content and methods for a variety of means of knowledge transfer.
This process doesn’t take place overnight, but step by step, by talking, trying
out, giving each other feedback and having the courage to make errors,
looking at the same topics in new ways over and over again in order to dis-
cover new and different approaches, respond to them and try them out.
Situation Now
By putting these new organisational and educational models and methods
into practise, the interactions between teachers, students, educational con-
cepts are aligning more and more. Students indicate that they enjoy school
much more than before.
And measurable results speak for themselves. Students in the new
system score 1.5 points (out of 10) better than students in the traditional
system, both on traditional knowledge tests and skills tests. And parents
remark that their children have become more independent in taking initia-
tives outside school.
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