On track for my endgame

Over the weekend I was rereading a 2003 book that applies game theory to business models: The Slow Pace of Fast Change / Bhaskar Chakravorti. The book suggests that we formulate an endgame that appears plausible to us when we consider the choices of those who will make the change to our value proposition. Chakravorti's expertise in game theory enables him to frame the challenge of a start-up in terms of disrupting a self-reinforcing equilibrium and creating a middle game to move to a new equilibrium. As I shared these ideas with an entrepreneur yesterday, I reframed the challenge this way:

The status quo is a large crowd of people who have gotten on a bandwagon. No one wants to be the first to get off the bandwagon or be the only one who is no longer on the bandwagon. It's human nature to stick together on the bandwagon even when it no longer serves our personal interests. Yet as soon as enough people have jumped off the wagon, that same human nature will follow the herd to the next equilibrium/ bandwagon.

This book gave me a way to revisit the big picture of all I've been exploring on this blog for the last six months. Here are the main components of the endgame I'm successfully pursuing:

• There will be a next economy to replace the industrialized, oil-dependent, market-driven mess that is currently being resuscitated by the G20, World Bank, and economic stimulus programs around the globe. The next economy is misperceived by the governments, corporations and investors as a failure of leadership, reversion to medieval practices and loss of wealth. The sustainable, resilient, natural, small, networked, collaborative, altruistic economy does not make sense to incumbents players.
• There will be a disruptive innovation to higher ed that will prepare it's "customers" for that next economy. Traditional colleges cannot do better than new course offerings in social entrepreneurship, green technologies and network science because their structures, strategies and policies are predicated on the legacy economy. The life long, self-taught, social and informal learning appears undisciplined, impossible to grade, unrelated to authoritative knowledge and unworthy of diplomas.
• The migration into this disruptive innovation calls for a disruptive approach to college advising. The current practitioners guide applicants into the current offerings that prepare students for the previous economy. This new approach to advising will provide a preview of the next economy and the educational experiences that prepare for it. The departure from authoritative guidance and repression of self expression will make it clear what lies ahead. The parallels with social networking spaces, user content generation and collaborative projects will become obvious to the applicants.
• Success in the replacement college system requires self starters who can self-structure their own learning and responding to other learners. This capability get impaired by emotional baggage. The practice of innovative college advising needs "baggage handling" as a core competency to transition its clients out of the damage they experienced in their toxic family systems, dysfunctional classroom schooling and mismanaged employment experiences.

The innovative advising will initially upgrade the college choices of a few applicants and their parents who are currently framed as misfits and likely dropouts of higher ed in its present form. Their successful experiences with learning on their own and together will generate stories that get shared with others. As conventional colleges devolve and the next economy shows signs of emergence, a mass migration off the old bandwagon is likely. This end game appears plausible to me.