2nd Road Sydney experience – Wednesday 8th

Yesterday was the flight from Auckland to Sydney. Great flight. Fly Emirates. Their slogan is apt.

I’ve been sent across (something apostolic about that!) to attend a “Meeting 2 Making” seminar hosted by 2nd Road. It’s a three-day workshop encouraging a particular thinking style and structured approach to ‘wicked problems’.

One nice thing about waking up in Sydney; you’re two hours ahead so you can get up at 6am and still feel wonderfully relaxed. It is a simply gorgeous day. It’s cool, and there is not a cloud in the optimistically blue sky. Clearness has triumphed.

Given the early start and clear day I opted to walk to the seminar venue. It was a good 45 minute stroll, past countless condominiums, high-storey rentals and single-storey retail. Even in the upper-market areas of Rushcutters Bay, Darling Point and Piper Point (where I hear that a house recently sold for $30million up from about $8 million just a few years ago, and where one of the most expensive houses in all Australia is currently being built), old and new blend together to make a complementary contrast of traditional and contemporary, heritage and progress.

Sydney seems so well designed. The traffic flows well and there is plenty of green for such a built-up city. King parrots do not seem out of place as they screech over the latest BMWs and Audis. The tranquility of the harbour and the distant cluster of the central city are not spoiled by the rushing sound of a 777 taking off overhead. Ah, big cities.


As I type this I am relaxing on the balcony of the Royal Yacht Club before today’s session starts. I’m a half hour early, thanks to the fact that every centimetre on the Google Map I especially printed off equates to one and a half minutes rather than two! I had time to stop off on the way and read some Scripture with a wonderful vista of the city in the distance. The view from the Yacht Club itself is what you’d expect, and I will not repeat the adjectives already invested. It’s great to be here.


The seminar is a course devoted to facilitating strategic conversations based on the ACBD model, and is really great stuff. I can’t help thinking that if I was to repeat my management degree (earned, err, last Millenium sometime) it would include such material, though I am assured by my travelling colleague (currently doing some PG study in the area) that managerial education is not quite open to these sorts of ideas yet.

As I update this entry from my hotel room, I am thinking again about the highlights of the day. Appreciating Tony’s sharpness. Seeing the perspective built up with reference to philosophy, insight and great thinkers of the past. Reflecting on the wisdom. Recording those insightful pithy statements by the presenters that the heat of the moment brings to mind. Meeting other delegates. Considering how the tools can be applied in my own situation (the course is actually perfectly timed in many respects; I have notes galore). Dinner with Tony, his daughter and son-in-law.

Some of the ‘pithy wisdom’ from the day:

• PowerPoint slides break the rules of working memory.
• The goal is to move.
• Designers don’t believe groups exist; the problem forms the group.
• We know so much about specialized things, we lose our appreciation of everything.
• Planning is ‘mess management’.
• When “things cannot be other than what they are” you engage in analytics; when “things can be other than what they are” you engage in rhetoric. (Aristotlean).
• Solutions come from an understanding of the deep structures of a problem.

If some of these look less than inspirational, it is simply because they are recorded out of the context of what has been an inspirational workshop. Still, I hope you are able to capture something of the power of what I am experiencing. The seminar itself is very well polished, and it is not my aim to repeat or summarise it here.

The dinner was excellent – great hosts, delicious meal, stimulating company. We conversed over a great many topics. If it’s not too vain, I’d like to record two outcomes for me for posterity’s sake.

1. It’s great to embrace post-modernism and to engage in ‘free-field’ thinking. But we must remember that those participating in such discussion must first have a reliable framework and point of reference. Particularly in theological education, we need to take careful steps to create boundaries for participants. There are some things in evangelical Christianity that we simply must take for granted in a modernistic sense. The resurrection and Lordship of Jesus. The authority of Scripture. Salvation by faith, expressed through works. There is a core cluster of landmarks that we must have in place before embarking on theological dialogue. Novices can drown in an open sea of conversation.
   
2. From a firm foundation, once boundaries are in place, we can and should leverage design thinking. We teach what theologians know; it is better for students to learn how theologians think. We teach the outcomes of the historical debates in theology, at the expense of immersing students in the theological process that led to those outcomes. This is, of course, to be very general – but there is a valuable kernel here. Our role as theological educators is not to fill minds, but rather to train them. Of course, everyone in theological education knows this. I am even now reading Richards’ A theology of Christian education. The trick is to bring it about.

Of course, I have some thoughts around 2. that could also fit in with a move toward having lead academics supported by adjuncts on a nationwide basis. These immediately spring to mind:

• Clearly defined student outcomes that focus on the development of the learner rather than content coverage (already a standard feature of instructional design).
• Assessment tasks that encourage process rather than outcome, and that are flexible enough to permit reference to a variety of real world contexts. Linking students in with their real worlds as the context for theological and exegetical engagement (yes, already an established theme in general educational literature).
• Shifting the classroom and meeting experience from didactic teaching first, conversation and dialogue supplemental to conversation and dialogue first, didactic teaching supplemental (this could be achieved with a national resource-based approach).
• Viewing church history and established dogma as a resource, not as the subject. The subject is now, the student context, the today world. We do not need to reinvent; rather, we need to discover how we can make relevant. We must enter the future looking forwards, but still with a sense of continuing the Christian story and writing its current chapters in the context of what has been written before. To ignore theological tradition makes us ignorant and impoverished. To focus solely on it without reference to the current context makes us irrelevant and impotent.
• We must design with an appreciation of the gradual development of the learner. Yes, level 5 study ought to be more structured and foundational. Yes, levels 6 and 7 should be far more open-ended and conversational. Wisdom must guide our pedagogies. Faith in the Spirit’s work in developing the learner must be apparent.

My mind is racing. I’m really excited about the potential for these ideas, and I anticipate some lengthy conversations about them. Such conversations will challenge, change and enrich these raw thoughts, well-grounded though they might be.

Nuts. It’s 5:51 in the morning (Thursday, local time) as I complete this entry. So much for the benefits of jet lag!