Crossover Day
Every now and then a conference day flips a switch. Sessions stop behaving like standalone presentations and start behaving like interconnecting interventions. A plethora of slides still advance, microphones still cooperate, everyone keeps checking the schedule like obedient plastic badged conference pilgrims, but the ideas begin to land very differently. Today was one of those days. My kind of day. The kind where talks from people who have absolutely nothing to do with each other start connecting and interplaying until a larger pattern appears and suddenly everything begins to make far too much sense.
Officially it’s called Crossover Day, the final day of SXSW EDU deliberately programmed alongside the opening of the SXSW Innovation Conference. Two worlds that normally orbit each other at a safe distance suddenly share the same stages. Educators and innovators sit side by side. Researchers and tech builders wrestle with the same questions, often discovering they have been approaching the same problem from completely different directions. The result is a slightly volatile mixture of ideas with no polite warning labels attached. These ideas collide in my poor aging head, and patterns start to emerge.
One neon sign by Alicia Eggert read: “This present moment used to be the unimaginable future.”
It may be the best caption for the entire day.
Moonshots without the mumbo-jumbo
My morning kicked off with a hefty session “Moonshots that move the needle.” On stage: Arati Prabhakar -former DARPA director and former U.S. presidential science and technology advisor- alongside Eden Xenakis from the Bezos Family Foundation and Steve Ritter of Carnegie Learning, with policy strategist Kumar Garg moderating. The word moonshot has been stretched so far in the innovation ecosystem that it now often translates in my grey head to “expensive, mostly useless idea accompanied by an optimistic keynote.” The panel acknowledged this almost immediately and then, to their credit, proceeded to reclaim the word.
Prabhakar told the story behind mRNA vaccines in a way that shifts the timeline most people remember. The breakthrough moment during COVID-19 only makes sense if you rewind the clock. Years before the pandemic, DARPA had already invested in the foundational platform research. That early investment meant that when the virus appeared, scientists were not starting from scratch. They were building on infrastructure that already existed. The result was a scientific sprint that still sounds improbable: from identifying the genetic sequence to producing clinical trial doses in forty-two days. Douglas Adams knew it all along 😊.
That, as Prabhakar pointed out, is what moonshot execution actually looks like. It is not a vision board. It is a platform bet made before urgency exists, when the payoff still looks speculative.
The comparison to education landed with a certain discomfort, even alarm. Education research and development in the States receives less than 0.1 percent of government spending, a fraction of what goes into defense, health, energy or space research. And yet we routinely express surprise when large-scale transformation in education moves slowly… it simply does not have a lot of cash to burn.
The example of Mississippi illustrates the opposite dynamic. The state moved from 49th to 9th nationally in reading scores through systematic, research-backed intervention implemented patiently and scaled over time.
Another point from the panel lingered throughout the day. The current AI moment is not a single wave but (of course, what were we thinking) an S-curve. Token costs in AI are collapsing at extraordinary speed, roughly 100× every eighteen months. Experiments that currently cost $4,000 per student are trending toward $1,000 or less. Meanwhile the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute is already running teams trying to double middle-school math learning rates at scale. The implication is clear: the capability is emerging rapidly. The real constraint is institutional willingness to invest and experiment… the real constraint is institutional courage.
Imagining futures that might already be here
By mid-morning, and after a fresh shot of caffeine, the Institute for the Future stepped in with a properly brain-bending session titled Strategy in the times of chaos: Imagining Futures of Education, led by futurist Marina Gorbis alongside education scholar Maisha T. Winn.
Their framework offered something surprisingly rare in conference culture: a thinking tool that feels genuinely usable when the environment around you is messy.
The process begins by looking backward, examining the past carefully enough to identify patterns that repeat. From there it moves to interrogating the present, identifying assumptions that remain embedded in institutions even after evidence has disproven them. Only then does it shift to imagining the future, searching for signals of change appearing at the edges.
The most memorable concept from that session was the idea of zombie ideas. These are beliefs that have been empirically disproven yet continue to shape decisions because entire institutional structures depend on them. In education, one example is the assumption that a degree automatically guarantees economic mobility (it does not). In corporate life the equivalents are oh so familiar: more process equals more quality, busy-ness equals importance. Zombie ideas quietly consume resources and prevent institutions from adapting. Zombie ideas. I do love the concept, and I do love the brainworm name.
The Institute illustrated this tension through four hypothetical universities in 2036: Stonebridge University, deliberately analog and human-first; Nova Co-Learning University, where AI acts as a teaching partner; PathForge University, where AI orchestrates the curriculum logic; and Arcadia University, where humans and AI coexist without a strict hierarchy. All four are already beginning to appear in different forms in the real world, a split of the didactical take on AI: scary.
Jennifer Wallace and the word that changed the day
By the time the 1pm keynote arrived, I was already slightly overloaded with ideas. The session title –Mattering: human connection, recognition, and resilience– triggered a small but very loud internal warning. Keynotes have a long history of packaging complex human insights into overly tidy motivational frameworks and evident pseudo psychology that makes me nauseous.
Still, curiosity won. Boy, was I in for a surprise.
Jennifer B. Wallace began with nostalgia: landline phones are making a comeback, disposable cameras are back. Families drive hours to eat at Pizza Hut locations redesigned to look exactly like they did in the 1990s. The pizza has not improved, she noted. What people are searching for is not the product but the feeling , the sense of being known, valued and needed. Heck, with that nostalgia, I’ll be trending before I know it.
That observation leads to her central argument. Mattering cannot be reduced to a sentimental concept. It is a measurable psychological need grounded in evolutionary biology and neuroscience. For most of human history, being valued by the group meant survival. Being excluded meant death. The neurological wiring associated with that reality remains (very) active.
When people feel that they do not matter, the effects are immediate: anxiety rises and people withdraw. In more extreme cases the feeling turns inward. Wallace noted that in her research the words suicidal men most frequently used to describe their experience were stark: useless and worthless.
The SAID Framework
Wallace organizes the research around four components she calls SAID: feeling Significant, being Appreciated, knowing someone is Invested in your future, and being Depended on by others.
To measure this experience she uses five deceptively simple questions. How important are you to others? How much attention do others pay to you? How much would you be missed if you went away? How much do people depend on you? How much do they show that they care?
A high score indicates a strong sense of mattering. A much lower score suggests something deeper may be missing. Perhaps the most revealing finding in her work is the nature of the memories people associate with mattering. When participants were asked to recall moments when they felt they truly mattered, they did not mention promotions, raises or awards. Instead they described small gestures: a neighbor bringing soup when they were sick, a colleague remembering a strangely specific afternoon snack: recognition, not ceremony.
This is a business problem, too
The implications extend well beyond schools. According to Gallup, roughly 70 percent of employees report feeling disengaged at work. Wallace’s interpretation reframes the statistic. Disengagement is not simply laziness, it is often a form of self-protection. When people feel invisible inside an organization, emotional withdrawal becomes a rational response. Burn-out is just around the corner.
Employees who receive meaningful recognition are 48 percent less likely to be looking for another job and can be up to five times more engaged. A culture where people feel they matter is not merely humane, it is economically sensible. It is good business.
The effects extend beyond the workplace. Feeling undervalued at work does not stay confined to the office. It travels home, shaping relationships, conversations at the dinner table and the way people interact with their children. Meaningful work travels home as well.
The ultimate AI threat? Insignificance and boredom
Near the end of her talk Wallace said something that lingered long after the session ended. Many technology leaders believe that within the next decade humans may no longer be required for a large portion of existing tasks. The real challenge is not simply keeping pace with machines. It is protecting the human need to matter in a world increasingly organized around automation.
That question echoed throughout the day, in the conversations, and in my brain. Forget the familiar debate about whether AI will replace jobs… a deeper concern is about what happens to the need for significance, appreciation, investment and dependency when machines perform most tasks more efficiently.
Another session (I know) led by Rebecca Winthrop, the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, introduced a statistic from Common Sense Media that drew a quiet reaction from the audience: one in three U.S. teenagers say they prefer talking to an AI companion as much as or more than speaking with another human being.
The broader context is complex. Screens exist simultaneously at the intersection of learning, entertainment and communication. A child interacting with a device may be doing all three at once. This makes the technology difficult to regulate and equally difficult to replace.
Winthrop referenced the instructional core model developed with Amanda Vegas, which describes effective learning as occurring at the intersection of content, educators and learners. Introducing AI into that triangle can reduce trust if the human relationships are not actively maintained… and… there are not.
What this has to do with us
Here’s what I kept thinking, walking from session to session on Crossover Day:
Every framework introduced: the SAID mattering model, the moonshot thinking methodology, the zombie ideas concept, the IFTF future scenarios, … is as relevant to a product team in a tech company, a strategy team in a media company or a leadership team in a manufacturing firm as it is to an educator.
Mattering is an organizational design problem, not a school problem
The 70% employee disengagement figure doesn’t come from schools. It comes from Gallup’s global workplace survey. The erosion of belonging, the experience of being invisible in institutions that are supposed to value you: this is a corporate crisis wearing an emergency badge.
Zombie ideas are a strategy problem, not a curriculum problem
Every industry has zombie ideas (two pages in, and I still like the word): assumptions that persist because challenging them would require uncomfortable restructuring. The belief that the degree-to-job pipeline is the relevant metric. The belief that AI is a tool you can safely pilot in one department. The belief that culture is what’s written on the wall rather than what happens in your (hopefully hybrid) workspace.
Lifelong learning is an accelerating demand, not a gentle aspiration
Dr. Trow’s model ends at “universal”: education as an obligation for social and technological adaptation. We are past that point. The half-life of a skill set is collapsing. The question isn’t whether you should continue learning; it’s whether your institution – school, employer, self- is designed to support that or merely assumes it.
Across dozens of conferences in technology, innovation and education, only a handful of sessions leave behind a single word that keeps returning later.
The word from this thursday was mattering.
Mattering as a diagnostic. Do the people inside your organization feel significant, appreciated, invested in and depended on? Do they feel known rather than merely evaluated? Can they trace a clear line between who they are and the difference they make?
If the answer is uncertain, that is not a wellness, nor happiness, nor wellbeing problem… t is a design problem that will rattle your organization to its deepest foundations.
Wallace ended her talk with a simple nightly exercise. Before going to sleep, ask two questions: When did I feel valued today? Where did I add value today?
Want to change the world? Start there.
