As Dave Perkins shared prior to his synthesis, this is not an attempt to summarize everything that the LILA community explored during the October 2016 gathering, rather it is a way a 64,000 view that might help advance our thinking on the topic.

Defining Adaptive Cultures

• Individual cultural knowledge is largely tacit – we don’t know what we know (we just behave)
• Iceberg: like the being roughly 90% under water, not knowing like this is not just limited to culture, but to all fluent knowledge (example of grammar, used implicitly)
  • The 10% of explicit knowledge is very important to the human condition

Understanding Adaptive Cultures

• The tacit character of knowledge must be emphasized to understand how we function within a cultural context we’re familiar with
• We don’t know it by remember the knowledge and deploying it
  • Performance is reflective and intuitive
  • The moves we make (imitation), we often do them without understanding why
• Not all reflexive → we also Systematize Culture:
  • Inheritance of knowledge: Education / Mentoring
  • Selection: identifying critical variables and testing their differential influence
  • Variation: rapid proto-typing
• We therefore get the benefit of these cultural toolkits, which are 90% tacit, but we can begin to grasp it better by surfacing more

Valuing Adaptive Cultures

• We encapsulate routines and hugely amplify our effective bandwidth, by submerging certain aspects of our awareness (–> leads to tacit knowledge)
• Copying, variation, and selection are automatic and intuitive, which make them something we can rely on
• The 10% of knowledge that we surface allows us to understand and re-direct
• Caution: Losing track of the place of the tacit and how we function in any area of our lives

Fostering Adaptive Cultures

• We have certain structures in place: formal education, the scientific method, rapid proto-typing, ideas, protocols, procedures, etc but these process only have an isolated role unless they’re supported by something broader
• They must be supported by a culture
• It’s not enough to just have research strategies and systems, the tacit knowledge is important, and they must be supported by the culture
• We must remember there are only a couple ways that knowledge becomes tacit:
  • Internalization of self
  • Tacit learning (like how we learn our Mother Tongue)
  • If we want to be inclusive, adaptive cultures, we need to foster internalization f the explicit practices
  • It isn’t enough to articulate principles – we must repeat, persist, developing processes
  • As we design learning occasions, we must incorporate explicit learning and tacit learning from the get-go (combining the formal and informal learning)
  • Remember that we must
    • (1) take tacit knowledge seriously
    • (2) have gateways to the tacit knowledge
    • (3) foster internalization
    • (4) foster tacit learning

To listen to Dave’s presentation click the follow link:  Understanding Culture – the 64,000 foot view.