One of my favourite frameworks for helping to understand and navigate technological change is the acronym SAMR, which stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. SAMR originates from the education sector, and was created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura as a way for instructors to understand how they could best integrate new technology and tools into their work. It has four levels which relate to the potential for how technology can be applied to enhance learning:
- Substitution: here the technology can act as a direct substitute to other ways of completing the outcomes. You may be introducing new tools or technology to an existing process or workflow for example, but you’re not changing the fundamental method or approach
- Augmentation: here the introduction of new technology may enable the optimisation of a process or way of working. It enhances it but you’re still not fundamentally changing the approach.
- Modification: this involves a much bigger evolution whereby the technology or tools can enable a more fundamental redesign of the process or methods.
- Redefinition: this is the most fundamental level of change since the technology is enabling entirely new tasks, processes or models to be created. This may be transformative but it also may be disruptive to existing models or ways of thinking.
In this model augmentation and substitution are both examples of enhancement. Modification and redefinition are both more transformative. So this is really about understanding the potential for technology in driving both optimisation and/or transformation.
The SAMR model is designed to enable educators to make smart decisions about how to integrate and apply technology to learning design and processes. But its also very useful at a macro level in helping us to understand the potential for new technologies in a business. Where might a new technology or tool enable enhanced processes and workflows? Where might it facilitate radically redesigned processes or entirely new ways of working and models?
Questions like this are critical in navigating technological change since we need to understand where our assumptions or current thinking are still valid and where we need to break open those assumptions to drive a more fundamental change in thinking. To capitalise on optimisation or enhancement opportunities our focus should be on how we can evolve actions (so called ‘single loop’ learning). But to derive real advantage from transformative opportunities our focus should be on challenging existing thinking (‘second loop’ learning).
Something like AI gives us opportunities to both enhance and transform so this can be a useful approach for understanding how we use it to optimise existing ways of working and where we need to break out of optimisation to reinvent something new.
If we’re to capitalise on the true opportunity from new technology and tools this kind of nuance is essential to understand, and SAMR gives us an excellent framework for doing this.
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Image: Lefflerd, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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