Serendipity35

I was reading some of The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom over my Barnes & Noble coffee recently. It led me to get thinking about what kind of classroom environment we create, and the damage or protection it offers students.

The book's title plays with a comparison of the two creatures. Chop off a spider’s leg and it is crippled. Cut off its head and it will die. Cut off a starfish’s leg it grows a new one. More amazingly, the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish.

When I was in high school AP biology and we had to select a research project, I chose to work with planaria. I think they are pretty commonly used in high school and undergrad labs. I wanted to do a regeneration experiment. Those little brown Dugesia tigrina have the amazing ability to regenerate missing parts and reproduce by pulling in two. Perhaps, I thought that somehow I might stumble upon some secret for humans.

I was going to try to answer questions that probably lots of other students had already answered. Such is the way, unfortunately, of much student REsearch. What's the smallest size piece of the flatworm that can still regenerate into a complete new individual? Is there any kind of front/back dominance? I was also going to irradiate some of them too (the Cold War was firmly in place then) and see what that changed.

I immobilized them on ice, took up my scalpel, cut them up and put them in my petri dishes with pond water) and observed for a few weeks.

Back to my reading in The Starfish and the Spider. The book has lots of unexpected connections, but the one I latched onto has to do with organizations that fall into their two categories. There are the more traditional “spiders” of rigid hierarchy and top-down leadership. There are the more revolutionary “starfish” which can be seen as using peer relationships for leadership. I wouldn't call the starfish organizations "leaderless" as the book's title suggests, though I agree with them that their leadership differs from the traditional form.

Are schools generally spiders or starfish? If you want your classroom to be a more like the starfish (and I don't think all teachers or administrators would want that), what do you need to do?

The authors have a wiki for their book ideas (that's a good sign) and you can find out more about what happens when starfish like Napster, Kazaa and Limewire take on spiders like the music industry.

The authors talk about their impetus for writing the book.

"After the events of 9/11, we co-founded Global Peace Networks, a non-profit that engaged CEOs from around the world in conflict resolution and economic development projects. Small circles of CEOs worked in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. There was no hierarchy or rigid structure. Rather, the circles worked independently on their own projects. Over time, we began seeing connections between this decentralized network and what was happening in virtually every industry.

The connections all around us were just too strong to ignore.

What did craigslist have in common with al Qaeda? How were Skype and the Apache Nation linked? What did Toyota, GE, and eBay have in common?

In May of 2004, we presented our ideas to a a group of 60 CEOs at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The group loved the presentation and asked for more. They told us we had to write the book."

So how did my planaria fare? I ended up with some interesting mutations - 2 heads and such - and, of course, at some point my radiation levels made mutants that couldn't survive or killed them right off.

During senior year, I read Paul Zindel's play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I really identified with the protagonist, Tillie, who worked on her similar experiment using marigolds. She lives in a home that was "irradiated" by her damaged and damaging mother. Tillie is an intelligent, lonely girl with a pet rabbit. We would have sat together in study hall.

Tillie wins the science fair and her project reveals much about her own life. Like her gamma-ray mutated plants, she was changed forever, and yet beautiful in a different way.

There are still lots of students like Tillie in your classroom. I think we want them to be starfish able to regenerate, and it's important to help them do that. But we can't block all the damaging influences on them outside our classroom, just as you can't block all the gamma rays hitting us on a walk outside.

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