The Overview Effect
// February 21st, 2011 // No Comments » // Leadership Development, World Issues
The overview effect is a euphoric feeling reported by astronauts during spaceflight when they first see the large scale geographic structures of the earth- the outlines of continents and oceans that they know from maps and satellite images now in massive physical relation to one another, and to themselves, in the rarefied reality towering before them.
“For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.”
– Astronaut Donald Williams
All innovation is impossible, and often heretical, before it becomes inevitable and commonplace. Experience of example is often our most transformative teacher as direct experience reaches out to dissolve intellectual preconceptions and plants something far fuller and more profound. Though perhaps analytically speaking nothing new is added to our knowledge, our knowing is now undeniably visceral, emotive, even existential, and rapidly our thoughts reform around this new foundation.
“When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change… it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.”
– Astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweikart.
It is almost equally ineffable, this “sense of possibility” which seems to be at the very heart of our movement. Divorced from experience it rapidly becomes an empty symbol, another strategic chess piece to be incorporated in our administrations and communiqués. Yet born of experience it is a powerful guide for the movement, leading the inquiry between awareness of the deep injustice we are called to address and the profound solutions which must inform our actions.
Ten days ago I stood in a room with eleven thousand others deeply engaged in a bold and ambitious struggle over what they see as the civil rights issue of our generation- a real, profound and systemic education revolution towards access, equity and opportunity for all. On stage were leaders who had broken through and created a small part of the world where poverty wasn’t destiny; it was a classroom, or a school, or even part of a system, where the fact your parents were poor, or uneducated, or missing, this fact didn’t decide whether you would love to learn, whether you would dream of futures to be realised, whether you would go to college and access economic, political and cultural influence in shaping your life and your society.
In this room of eleven thousand core members, alumni and partners, and while at a charter school at southernmost limits of Baltimore, and in conversation with a truly impassioned Associate working with children in the slums of Mumbai, and before many of the rousing and informative speeches and reflections and performances that you can see for yourself online, in these and a thousand other moments a sense of possibility arose in my view. A sense that there is an answer to the most intractable problem in our society and that we, individually and collectively, are critical to providing it.
But we don’t need to believe anything. We don’t need to believe that the classrooms with or without charts on the walls, or uniforms, or cheers, or with or without signs on the doors that say Oxford or Yale, we don’t to need to believe that they are better. We don’t need to believe that schools systems that reward teacher performance with pay or with tenure are better, or that those who publicise or privilege test results are better. We don’t need to believe in a program or a movement, a pedagogy or a practice… We just need to look at the impact, the outcomes, look at what it does to address an injustice for which we would be right to be outraged.
We need to peer beyond the layer of noise, beyond the obligatory response of denial or delay or distraction and inquire into the very facts. Because there are some amazing things in the world out there. It is too different, too beautiful and too cruel to be all the same. Somewhere there are pearls of wisdom, somewhere there are moments of genius. One corner contains a piece of this precious puzzle, in an unlikely neighbourhood another. They are out there and they are being put together right now. How many exist, even within this room, and how many will be created within the classrooms of our Associates or their students?
“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand”.
-Astronaut Neil Armstrong
