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The last thing I want to leave you with is just, and I won't go into this, because it's taken me about two years to understand it, so I can't really do it justice. Some of the work that I'm doing in an ongoing Ph.D. in the Netherlands is looking at the concept of systems thinking around application of knowledge. So all this to say, where I started the conversation talking about school planning, closure decisions, and so on; the basic point here is to say that those types of micro level decisions are really nested within a much broader context that have as much to do with education and knowledge about how to provide education well, as they do with urban planning, as they have to do with what's happening in finance and the stock markets, as they have to do with the state of the economy, as they have to do with money being available for other things, as they have to do with other priorities of government, or industry, and so on... So all that to say, why I'm happy that there are events like this, that bring some of us from across these silos, and we get to learn from each other, is to say that these are decisions that are really nested within very, very complex systems. And I guess I would support any time that we start to look at how we engage in a longer term view, how when we support micro-level experiments in providing education or healthcare, or any other service better, we look at not only doing one-off projects, pilot projects and everything else that we know are the scourge of our lives, but how we look at deepening and broadening those projects, how we look at sharing those learnings more broadly, how we look at doing those things incrementally rather than repeating the same pilot project every five or ten years, and not learning from it, and that's my challenge to you today.
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