Introit

Teaching Reduced to a Formula

One word: Really?!

[Below: formula for "value added" by teacher in NYC public school system. 2011]

 

What's Your Social Media Communications Strategy?

Call it chance, if you will: I encountered two well-written stories this week, both of which treat the theme of a communications strategy vis-a-vis social media.

The first appeared in the May/June edition of The Trustee's Letter. Rhonda Durham, executive director of the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest (ISAS), writes in "It's Gone Viral" about the notion of "scandal" in a school community, and the associated spread of that scandal through the various channels of a school's constituencies. She refers to gossip and rumor as "electronic missiles," which can "emerge in blogs, community chat rooms, even national media and courtrooms. Thus, perhaps now more than ever, an embarrassing event may spark an urge to manage the content and circulation of the story."

What is not treated overtly, however, is the role of social media as part of what truly makes the issue "viral." In fact, I would submit that the scandal is far more likely to be spread by means of Twitter and Facebook (and other social media in that same vein) than by blogs, email, or community chat rooms. Twitter and Facebook are akin to accelerants placed on an already-burning fire. There ought to be an entirely separate article on the true viral nature of message-spreading. Please understand that Durham's focus is NOT on what kind of media are used to spread the message, but rather on what the school's true role is in dealing with scandal. It is a very insightful piece, and you ought to read it sooner rather than later. I commend it to you.

Enter Andrew Hill, whose weekly column "On management" in the Financial Times (May 15, 2012) touches on this very theme. The opening sentence reads, "Last Thursday I was, briefly, head of communications for a large Canadian widget maker, coping with a wave of Twitter-borne rumours about the arrest of its chief executive." Happily, though, it was a simulation. What a great idea -- a virtual exercise that the PR firm put the company through in order to give it some hands-on experience in handling this kind of crisis. (Schools would benefit from such a thing...) He then highlights the irony that, while this simulation was occurring, a real event was happening between two beverage companies.  It was "amplified through Twitter, Facebook, and other online media."

To make a long story short, Hill draws attention to the nature of the "media relations crisis," showing (rather convincingly) that the tactics and the stand-off itself turned out to be rather traditional, meaning that the social media participation didn't change the actual nature of the crisis. I like his point, and there is instruction in there for schools.

What is remarkable about the beverage stand-off, from my point of view, is that a young upstart beverage company was able to disrupt (rather seriously) a well-ensconced, elder company with a global presence. What's more, that global company has a strong social media presence and savvy, on which they pride themselves quite openly. However, that strong presence was unable to handle the upstart's attempt to start a mini-campaign via social media within the space of mere days.

Social media = speed and agility, when it comes to potential communications issues for a school. There is much that is positive for schools, when it comes to social media, but the potential negatives should be planned for. And so, I return to Hill's tale of the PR simulation.

We ought to be simulating those kinds of events, then share the results of those simulations with fellow schools, so that we all acquire those needed skills.

So I ask: what is your school's social media communications strategy?

Caveat on Establishing Innovative Cultures

As I continue to engage in (and follow fervently) conversations regarding innovation in independent schools, I feel compelled to shine some light on something of tremendous importance, something about which schools haven't thought deeply enough, in my opinion.

That something is a formula: existing school culture + innovation =  ?

Culture is a big deal in schools. We might be talking a lot about innovation right now, but a question schools should be asking is this: "Is our culture ready for innovation?" There are consequences to innovation within your school's culture. Why? Schools have always thrived on rules, predictability, and systems (hierarchies would qualify as a 'system', for example). This triumvirate of "how we do school" makes it difficult to deal with change, generally speaking, let alone the kinds of change that go hand-in-hand with innovation.

Schools should not tread lightly into the territory of "innovation." This is not how we "do school" or "do business," if you like. As Luke Johnson wrote in his Financial Times column, "The Entrepreneur" the other day (May 9, 2012), "The essence [...] is a willingness to do what it takes to get things moving. That means foregoing the joys of clarity for the messy truth that comprises any new venture -- imperfect products, clients who don't pay, the wrong staff, insufficient capital and so on. Such projects prosper thanks to many incremental wins and plenty of errors, rather than a few clean victories."

Schools would do well to heed his cautionary note. Foregoing the joys of clarity? Good luck. Plenty of errors? Not something with which we've been comfortable We need to think about how to realign school culture in order to allow for messiness, to embrace it. Engineering culture is not easily accomplished. I commend to you Gideon Kunda's work in this regard.

Many entrepreneurs, as Johnson highlights, "hate to give a definite 'yes' or 'no' to difficult questions. They prefer to say 'perhaps', and delay to see if more information emerges or their bargaining position improves. Most of us are impatient to know the detailed price and exact terms of a transaction; but actually tolerating vagueness for a while can be the more profitable path in the long term."

Furthermore, "This approach does not reflect a lack of decisiveness. Rather, it demonstrates realism about the future: our ability to predict is weaker than most of us would like to admit."

Are we, as schools, prepared to "muddle through" in such circumstances? Are we prepared to realign cultures? Are we prepared for the time and effort it will take in order to make that happen?

We should be purposeful and intentional about innovation, not simply talking about it because "it's cool" or "the in-thing" to discuss.

In the end, it's all about culture. 

Strategy of Muddling Through

Luke Johnson has a fun piece in today's Financial Times -- "Muddling through is a strategy that works." As he points out, "our instinct is to look for the black and white solution to a problem. But that approach applies rather better in theory than in practice."

Johnson is a serial entrepreneur, and, given how much we're now talking about entrepreneurship (as a concept) in independent education, there is much to glean from his insights.

For instance, he writes that "one needs to be adaptable and opportunistic to make progress. Unfortunately, [...] schools [and other entities, consultancies, etc.] can't offer guides to 'muddling through' - so it is rarely promoted as a wise philosophy [...]."

Isn't that the very issue with which we are grappling right now in schools, as we transition from an industrial economy/culture to a creative economy/culture? We are struggling with how to transition our curricula and programs from discipline-specific approaches with a "this is how we do it, always" mentality into approaches that promote adaptability and resilience? As Johnson says, "entrepreneurs tend to be experts at muddling through. They can cope with significant uncertainties in their work, while retaining a sense of confidence and a feel for priorities."

He cites able founders of start-ups who have learned what he calls "the art of the pivot," meaning that they've been able to change their business model(s) completely because their initial concept didn't succeed. Resilience, n'est-ce pas? Or, to use another word, muddling.

Instead of the 'strategy' of muddling through, we ought to consider it the art of muddling through. An aspirational goal, perhaps?

 

Secrets of the Educational Soil

I happen to be an amateur de vins (literally: one who loves wines). I often see relationships between wine and people, meaning that wine is like people.

Imagine my delight when, in the weekend edition of the Financial Times, I read an article called "Secrets of the Soil," in which the author delves into the importance of soil to winemaking. He spent some time with a couple, Claude and Lydia Bourguignon, who perform biological analysis of soils in winemaking regions.

Lydia states that "we [the winemaking industry] are in the middle of homogenizing everything, and that's not what wine is about." Claude adds, "I want to understand the fields and the vineyards, not impose my law on them. We are dealing with something incredibly complex. [...] When you work with a soil, you become its co-creator."

Substitute "education" and "students" (or "families") for "fields" and "vineyards," and it sounds like the independent school perspective on education!

Manage for Innovation

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, co-authors of The Progress Principle (look under my book reviews, in the category list to the right), recently published a useful blog post on innovation and creativity for the Harvard Business Review blog.

I've been writing a bit about innovation recently--if not directly, then indirectly. Innovation in schools is challenging, there's no doubt about it. Everyone has to be involved, and impediments (i.e. too many parameters and rules) have to be removed, if it is to flourish.

Amabile and Kramer focus on the issue of innovation through the lens of management, which is a structure we usually identify as anathema to innovation--or, at the very least, some sort of impediment to it. As the authors say, however, "You really can manage for innovation, but it starts by knowing what drives creativity in people who generate and develop the new ideas that, when implemented, will become tomorrow's innovations." This phrase should garner the attention of school leaders.

They identify four factors that savvy managers can balance in order to motivate creativity and innovation:

1. Goals -- strategic direction toward a worthy purpose, neither too loose nor too constrained. "Intrinsic motivation and creativity wither when people are told exactly what to do and how to do it; they need the autonomy to apply their own specific skills and talents."
2. Evaluation -- the crucial balance here involves "a great deal of frequent, work-focused evaluation and feedback that is truly informative and constructive. Ideally, these evaluations involve peers (as well as supervisors) openly discussing the work. To perform at their creative peak, people need to know that every idea will be respected enough to merit thoughtful consideration." In other words, strong evaluation pressure doesn't work, and neither does loose evaluation. "The best managers [...] accepted [...] failures as a necessary part of doing creative work and helped employees search for lessons and opportunities in those failures."
3. Reward -- "Creativity flourishes when employees know that rewards and recognition will follow from good, creative efforts--without being told constantly about exactly which rewards will follow from which actions. [...] Some of the most positive rewards are not monetary." One person they interviewed stated that, "part of the reward is having your managers listen to what you have done. Having access to your supervisors increases internal motivation, so managers should be available on an informal basis."
4. Pressure -- "Having the positive pressure of an optimally challenging assignment--being given an important problem to solve that no one else has been able to crack--can supercharge intrinsic motivation and creativity." Conversely, being told to do a particular job "in a particular way, with no tolerance of failure, little expectation of recognition for success, and extreme, arbitrary time pressure, can kill anyone's creativity motivation."

Of course, this is all lovely, in theory. In practice, how does it work in the real world, boots-on-the-ground in schools? This approach would work well in a number of schools I'm familiar with, but I also know of schools where the management culture would never be open to this kind of management (and the teachers know it).

Another important question: for the Head of School to manage in this way, how would the relationship between Head and Board Chair (+ entire board) need to look? Is there spill-over into governance, inasmuch as this is an internal management issue? For a Board that is not accustomed to having a Head exercise this kind of management approach inside the school, how might the Head educate the Board on its worth?

Goading the Stodgy Middle

Excellent article on talent in the April 17 (2012) edition of the Financial Times. Philip Delves Broughton is brave enough to call out what so many managers are afraid to admit in public: "managers spend more time managing mediocrity than they do searching for excellence" (10).

In independent schools, we are obsessed (rightly so) with the notion of excellence, but as Broughton points out, "it is a mathematical fact that most of us are average. [...] Our managers, who are mostly thoroughly average themselves, know it. And those below us in the pecking order certainly know it." Doubtless these are inlammatory words to some, yet I submit that it is worth forcing one's self to read the remainder of his column. At the very least, it can serve as a "check" for our thinking.

Regardless of the independent school gathering/conference, we tend to hear the same message: it is important to attract, develop, and manage top talent. We prattle on about how everyone can be innovative and creative, dull or brilliant, and still be an A-player, to use a known mantra of excellence (10). However, Broughton proffers, "most management involves goading the stodgy middle."

Can everyone be innovative and/or creative, however? Broughton cites none other than Clayton Christensen, the guru of innovation at Harvard, who, in a recent issue of Harvard's alumni magazine, states, "I think about 40 per cent of people just are not going to be good at innovating regardless of what they do." Furthermore, he adds that [only] "5 per cent are born with the instinct," which leaves some 55% who comprise the stodgy middle, i.e. who could learn to be innovative, if led properly.

Broughton goes on to draw a parallel between the 40% who won't be good at innovating and the stodgy middle of any group that is faced with change: "you are never going to change them." Yes, you might choose to invest plenty of resources in these folks (think: professional development), but it becomes a manager's job to find a place where these folks can be useful within the organization. Broughton says that "managing the middle is best done with what might be called the Serenity approach, after the prayer [...] "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change / Courage to change the things and I can / and wisdom to know the difference."

He does underscore, though that the 55% of folks, the middle, is indispensable. Organizations need them.

So, I pose a question to readers: in regards to the "middlers," do they benefit from better management or from better leadership? Should Broughton have explored the notion of leadership in addition to management? Other thoughts? I will publish your remarks in the "comments" section.

Likeliest Organizational Changes in Education in Next 3-5 years

One of the things I love to do is to read what industries other than education are doing to advance themselves, as industries. The November 2011 issue of McKinsey Quarterly features an article entitled, "How social technologies are extending the organization." In that article, the authors undertake a deep dive into their data, gathered by over 4,000 respondents; their findings are meant to correlate with the degree of social media usage within the industry.

One of the most interesting data pieces deals with "likeliest organizational changes in next 3-5 years, without constraints." This post is not about prognosticating what technological developments will occur; rather, it's meant to be more holistic, in the sense of looking at an entire organizational system.

Here are top five (i.e., most likely), in descending order of likelihood:

1. The boundaries between employees, vendors, and customers will blur
2. Teams will self-organize
3. Decisions will be based primarily on data rather than opinion/experience
4. The organization's formal hierarchy will become much flatter or disappear altogether
5. Data used for decision-making will mostly be collected through experiments

Here are the bottom five (i.e., least likely), in descending order of likehlihood:

1. Individual performance will be evaluated by peers rather than by managers
2. Employees will have much more discretion in choosing which tasks to work on
3. Employees will play a much greater role in selecting leaders
4. Large companies and/or business units will disaggregate
5. Compensation decisions will be made by peers rather than by managers

Do these likelihoods have any corollation in schools? I think the answer is "partially." Following are some thoughts:

1. Teams will self-organize, if teachers and administrators become more savvy with social media
2. Decisions will be made on the examination of data, if we learn which data to collect and how to analyze them
3. The formal hierarchy of schools will become much flatter...highly unlikely. Perhaps they will become more complex first, then flex to a flatter model.
4. Data used for decision-making will mostly be collected through experiments...only if "bold schools" (as Will Richardson calls them) are willing to be intentionally experimental.
5. Individual performance will be evaluated by peers rather than managers...no, managers will continue to have a place, but more peers may be incorporated by those "bold schools".
6. Large business units (think: divisions) will disaggregate...highly unlikely, although there may be a "bold school" that is willing to experiment with boundary-less divisions. 

What do readers think about these data points from McKinsey? Please post a comment with your thoughts.

Saying Goodbye to the Old Way

An article in today's Financial Times, "Chief needs to say goodbye to old BlackBerry way," got me thinking about schools, in the face of all the developments we've seen in technology these past four or five years. Not just the developments, but the attitudes of a surprising number of schools who are just "going to wait and see" what becomes of it all.

The decline of the BlackBerry seems a little too akin to the enrollment declines faced by many independent schools. "BlackBerry sales were likely to continue to decline ahead of the launch of its next-generation of smartphones built around a new operating system and new silicon chips [...]" (19).

"That collapse [of share price] underscores senior management and boardroom missteps over the past five years, although arguably the seeds of RIM's decline were sown years ago, and go to the root of its corporate culture and business model."

"RIM [...] had firmly established itself as the premier smartphone maker. [...] But the mobile world was about to change and RIM, like others including Nokia and Motorola, was caught offguard."

"In 2007, Apple launched the iPhone and 18 months later came the first Google Android smartphone. With the online application stores that these companies launched, the new touch-screen based handsets altered the dynamics of the smartphone market."

"RIM's senior management underestimated the impact of the iPhone. 'They [...] dismissed it,' said Ron Adner, professor of strategy at Tuck School of Business and an expert on innovation. Adner believes "that many of RIM's problems stem from this error."

What error is that, again? Dismissal of an idea as a non-winner. As something silly. As something fleeting.

Whether it's online learning or some other idea that's being tried out, it would be dangerous for schools to dismiss these things entirely. Innovation is difficult for schools, as we're not accustomed to it. For so many years, it was easy to "do school" because the formula was known and it was tangible. No longer.

The BlackBerry story rings true, on a number of levels. Can you think of other ways in which it rings true in schools?

For me, the biggest take-away from this article is the following: if an invention proves to be a ubiquitous preference, will schools bury their heads in the sand and ignore it, thinking to themselves that they'll re-ensconce themselves in that which has always worked, and that, somehow, by re-ensconcing themselves, they'll come out ahead? 

Informed Skeptics

The current issue of Harvard Business Review contains an article by Shvetank Shah, Andrew Horne, and Jaime Capella, entitled, "Good Data Won't Guarantee Good Decisions" (23-25). The authors argue that the era of Big Data is leading to a false sense of confidence in decision-making. "Investments in analytics can be useless, even harmful, unless employees can incorporate that data into complex decision making. Our research offers a succinct warning to managers. At this very moment, there's an odds-on chance that someone in your organization is making a poor decision on the basis of information that was enormously expensive to collect" (23).

So, who is making decisions in a given organization, and what is their ability "to find and analyze relevant information"? The authors evaluted 5,000 employees at 22 global companies and sorted them into three groups:

• unquestioning empiricists -- those who trust analysis over judgment
• visceral decision makers -- those who go with their gut, exclusively
• informed skeptics -- those who balance judgment and analysis, possess strong analytic skills, and listen to others' opinions but are willing to dissent

As they point out, the informed skeptics are the folks that companies (schools??!!) should be cultivating. However, as they discovered in their evaluation, only 38% of employees and 50% of senior managers fall into this group.

Interesting (to me, at any rate) also are the four problems they identify that "prevent organizations from realizing better returns on their investment in Big Data":

1. Analytic skills are concentrated in too few employees -- in other words, "too many companies [schools??!!] are stuck in the 'expert phase'; they have a handful of highly skilled analtyics professionals but have not begun to train everyone else to make use [of analytics].
2. IT needs to spend more time on the "I" and less time on the "T" -- so many departments have "diverse data demands or may need to use data in ways they can't clearly articulate. Meeting these challenges requires anthropological skills and behavioral understanding--traits that are often in short supply in IT departments."
3. Reliable information exists, but it's hard to locate. The analogy: a library with no card catalog (print or digital), or perhaps with books that lack covers. What is more, "the rise in social media [...] has made it even harder to manage analytic content. Fewer than 44% of employees say they know where to find the information they need for their day-to-day work."
4. Business executives don't manage information as well as they manage talent, capital, and brand. In short, they "consider themselves too inexpert to get deeply involved in how data is shared across the organization. Managers need to wake up to the fact that their data investments are providing limited returns because their organization is under-invested in understanding the information."

The obvious solution, of course, is to develop more informed skeptics. How might one do that, especially in independent schools? First, though, I would ask this: what data are we using? What data ought we to be using? Then we can deal with the question of how to develop informed skeptics. Regardless of the answer(s), though, we can move forward with one certainty: we do need to train our faculties and administrators to increase their data literacy, with school leadership showing the way. That data then needs to be brought into decision making, so that folks can see how data can inform decisions.

We all need to understand the factors and calculations behind the numbers, and we must learn to think critically about their accuracy, sample sizes, biases, and, of course, quality. (Statistics, anyone??) Coaching could play an important role here, as could project-based learning; we say that we want to see our students do these things, but why shouldn't we model it for them?