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In this volume of Advances in Learning and Behavioral Disabilities, we explore the next big things that will shape the field. We asked chapter authors to predict what they believe will be influential ideas and reforms in the near future and to describe how to implement them to generate positive effects. Although change is constant, it comes in many forms and does not always result in progress or bring about desired outcomes. Thus, carefully considering and planning for the next big things that will shape the field is critical. In this introductory chapter, we provide an overview of change and big ideas in the field of learning and behavioral disabilities and preview the 11 subsequent chapters in the volume.

This chapter looks critically at the changed language of education due to the adoption in the last two or three decades of a ‘business model’ for improving education. It briefly traces the history of these changes which have rarely been brought to the attention of the public.

This chapter delves more deeply beneath this language in order to explore the unacknowledged philosophical assumptions – referring to Wittgenstein’s aim which was to help people to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to the recognition of it being patent nonsense.

This points out how, given the managerial language, this distorts our understanding of what it means to educate – there is an inappropriate ‘logic of action’.

The ethical dimension to educational leadership gets distorted or ignored. There is a need therefore to examine more carefully what is meant by an ‘educational practice’ – otherwise leadership coursed might be good at teaching ‘effectiveness’ in teaching to the test, but have little to do with education.

Whilst there is a growing evidence base for the use of cognitive behavioural therapies (CBT) for people with intellectual disabilities, there may be challenges to using an approach that locates problems within people rather than as being generated and maintained through social relations and social discourses. The purpose of this paper is to present a cautionary case that demonstrates some of the potential dilemmas and challenges that can be experienced in therapy when applying this way of working to a client with intellectual disabilities.

The authors present a case example of work with Mark, a young man with intellectual disabilities who accessed services for support with his low mood and outline the challenges faced when using CBT in understanding his presenting problem.

There is evidence from the case example that there is the potential for therapeutic techniques used in CBT to promote questions that invite, generate and reinforce feelings of incompetence and inability in people with intellectual disabilities.

The use of narrative techniques is discussed as a means of avoiding locating the problem as being within clients with intellectual disabilities; the implications that this has for the use of CBT with this client group are considered.

The purpose of this article is to describe multi‐tasking behaviour in the workplace; to link its cause to the increasing prevalence of low‐cost information and communications technologies and to the changing organizational structures that have evolved to meet the demands and opportunities of these technologies.

This article is a presentation of the current literature on multi‐tasking behaviour among knowledge workers with a selective bibliography addressing empirical research into the behavioural, managerial and technological aspects of this phenomenon. It then expands to comprehensive coverage of the literature on past and current thinking about task structuring, strategies for coping in a multi‐tasking environment and the changing nature of work and organizations, which fuels the need to multi‐task in response to these changes.

Among knowledge workers, multi‐tasking behaviour appears to be an inevitable consequence of the presence of increasingly easy access to information. Despite the detrimental effect that multi‐tasking has on specific task completion, the paradox is that this does not seem to have an effect on overall organizational productivity. For the USA at least, an average 4 per cent growth rate over the past several years of the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries shows that productivity has increased in tandem with an increase in multi‐tasking behaviour and information technologies.

Multi‐tasking behaviour needs to be understood in the context of its manifestation as a variable that is at least partially dependent on the existence of relatively “cheap” information. In essence, in an information economy, task completion by knowledge workers to a set deadline may be counterproductive to the interests of the organization as a whole. This article describes certain strategies that can be used to minimize the harmful aspects of continuous task switching and to maximize the returns to experience that multi‐tasking can bring to an organization.

Multi‐tasking behaviour and its link to complexity theory may lead to a new understanding of organizations as highly fluid and variable entities that are impossible to design or maintain centrally and yet whose goals lead to the moment by moment creation of micro‐organizational structures that accomplish tasks in a manner that engages the full resources of knowledge workers.