Introit

The Pathology of Strategic

The phrase "strategic thinker" always makes me smile. Sample question: "Is [enter name here] a strategic thinker?"

I wonder what it means?

Let me reword that. I wonder what people perceive it to mean?

To me, the act of inserting the adjective "strategic" is a pathology, and it's rather rampant in educational circles. We delude ourselves into believing that the insertion somehow alters the state of being of the noun itself, elevating it to some new plane of existence. Strategic thinker. Strategic plan. Strategic management. Strategic staffing.

Someone who is designated a thinker is someone who has a very well-developed faculty for thinking, i.e. for employing his/her mind objectively and rationally when it comes to evaluating something. Isn't that profound enough in and of itself? What a compliment! So-and-so is a thinker. Bravo!

But strategic thinker? What does that mean, exactly? Does it mean that the person thinks in ways that provide him/her with competitive advantage over another thinker? Or does it mean that the person thinks about strategy, generally speaking? And if so, what kind of strategy -- good strategy or bad strategy? We don't even have a good understanding of what strategy is, yet we are audacious enough to utilize the adjectival form as a moniker of distinction?

Learning Agility

One of the key markers for school leadership (not just the Head, but anyone who is part of a leadership team) ought to be "learning agility," or the ability to learn quickly, apply those lessons, observe and measure the impact of those lessons, and rethink/adapt/adjust strategy, going forward.

What does learning agility require?

It requires emotional intelligence, maturity, and resilience.

How does one acquire those attributes?

They result from experiences that are emotionally-charged and very challenging, often requiring personal sacrifice. That kind of learning "sticks." Not only does it stick, it fundamentally changes people.

Scarf It Down!

We're all faced with the perennial question of how we might motivate others in our schools. In a recent interview with Karen Christensen (Rotman Magazine, Spring 2013), David Rock, founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, shares that "they key is to create an atmosphere that promotes Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. We call this the SCARF model." I find the model worthwhile because so many independent schools are positioned to implement it; some already do, without knowing it.

• Status - "Within the brain, feelings of low status actually provoke the kind of cortisol elevation associated with sleep deprivation and chronic anxiety. [...] One common threat is the custom of offering feedback. The mere phrase 'Can I give you some advice?' puts people on the defensive, because they perceive the person offering advice as claiming superiority. Inside your brain, it is the cortisol equivalent of hearing footsteps in the dark." (30-31)
• Certainty - We crave it. "At work, not knowing what will happen next can be profoundly debilitating, because it requires extra neural energy, which can undermine performance and disengage people from the present. Breaking a complex project down into small steps can help to create a feeling of certainty. Although it's highly unlikely that everything will go as planned, people will function better because the project now seems less ambiguous." (31)
• Autonomy - "As long as people feel they can execute their own decisions without much oversight, stress will remain under control. [...] A perception of reduced autonomy--for example, when someone is being micromanaged--can easily generate a threat response. When an employee experiences a lack of control, his or her perception of uncertainty is aroused, further raising stress levels." (31)
• Relatedness - "In the brain, the ability to feel trust and empathy about others is shaped by whether they are perceived to be part of the same social group. [...] In terms of workplace implications, this means that teams of diverse people cannot simply be thrown together. They must be deliberately assembled in a way that minimizes the potential for threat responses to arise." (31)
• Fairness - "The perception that an even has been 'unfair' generates a strong response in the limbic system, stirring hostility and undermining trust. The cognitive need for fairness is so strong that some people are willing to [...] commit themselves to an organization they recognize as fair." (31) In terms of an example of a threat, "the 'old boys' network provides an egregious example: those who are not a part of it always perceive their organization as fundamentally unfair, no matter how many mentoring programs are put in place." (31)

The reason why I find this SCARF model so interesting is because, when people experience a rewarding SCARF system, they are considered to be deeply engaged.  Engagement is challenging to measure, but, aided by the SCARF model, I am certain that we could devise a way to measure it through a fairly straightforward survey that would provide us with some constructive/useful data points.

In this climate, not only do we want to see students who are deeply engaged, we want/need to see faculty, staff, and leaders who are deeply engaged. Success in this realm will beget success.

Are you deeply engaged?

Making the Case for Investing in a Learning Culture

Poignant piece in Chief Learning Officer magazine (online version) today. The topic is talent development + learning, and the excerpt is below (it's "business-y" in terms of feel, but the principles apply to schools). Of particular interest to me is the second paragraph. In order to be impactful vis-à-vis strategy, though, schools would benefit from a greater number of folks with broad experience rather than siloed experience. Otherwise, how does a school anticipate needs in the various areas? Professional development shouldn't be just about faculty, it should be about all adult learners in the community...and that would look fairly different from most models today.

One of the most important factors in building the workforce of the future is how organizations develop and train the skills needed in the workplace. This goes beyond formal training and learning; it extends to how to build a learning culture, learning on the job and using technology to deliver embedded learning experiences. In this context, the critical role of learning and development professionals in driving impactful learning strategies becomes clearer.

To increase impact, learning leaders need to understand future business strategy and skills needs. Learning leaders need to up their game in understanding and measuring the impact of learning on performance outcomes, so that they can make the strategic business case for investment in learning programs, tools and capabilities.

 

The Hardest Innovation

I'm a fan of Andrew Hill's "On Management" weekly column in the Financial Times. This morning, I was delighted to come across his piece on "the hardest innovation."

Q: What is the hardest innovation?

A: Killing off projects.

As anyone in schools knows, it is tremendoulsy challenging to sunset projects that really ought to fade away. Hill states that the struggle involved in persuading any company [school] to stop doing certain things is downright painful. We tend to use nice terms, such as "concentrate our focus" to refer to the notion of stopping a project. His point, quite simply, is that we cannot become more strategic by focusing more on something; an increased focus in one area means cleaning up another area and moving it off the radar screen entirely. Focus demands it.

I like one paragraph immensely:

"Why is it so hard for companies to kill off projects? Many leaders think it is more courageous to advance, expand and aquire than to retreat, shrink and divest. At a recent strategy meeting I attended, executives' warm enthusiasm for new ventures was inversely proportional to the chill and doublespeak that filled the room when they were challenged to take the axe to longstanding initiatives. [...] Yet when organizations stop to scrutinize themselves, the accretion of unheeded strategy visions they find hanging around them is extraordinary." [emphasis mine]

Strategy is very much about choice, in other words.

Does your school avoid the hard work of choice?

Outdated Thinking: The Resume

Does the chronological résumé hold the same value it once did? I am not convinced. Personally, I think that the traditional résumé serves to obfuscate useful information due to being held hostage by chronological linearity. In other words, potentially useful information is passed over easily because we are trained to look at a resume in a linear fashion. From a left-brained perspective, if you will.

So, as a resolution for the New Year, who is willing to craft a contemporary résumé whose sections highlight experience according to skill set(s) rather than chronology? There has to be an aesthetically pleasing way to incorporate some chronology (pure dates) into a skill-focused resume.

I propose that we float around a few prototypes and see which ones stick.

I just don't see how we can expect ourselves to hone skill sets in new or inventive ways, yet remain beholden to an instrument that is not structured to portray them adequately.

Please tell me I'm not the only one befuddled by the state of the resume.

Tom Peters wrote a great piece in yesterday's (August 27, 2012) edition of the Financial Times, "Manifesto for the new rules on human capital." Many of his points would resound with independent schools. Permit me to highlight several below.

• "Development of 'human capital' should always be the top priority [...]. [T]his is an inescapable imperative in an age in which imaginative brain-work is de facto the only plausible survival strategy for individual enterprises of consequence [I'd suggest "schools"]... Generic 'brain-work', the traditional and dominant white-collar activities that now employ the bulk of us, is increasingly undertaken by exponentially enhanced artificial intelligence applied at ever increasing speed."
• "Generals and admirals (and symphony conductors and sports coaches and police) obsess about continuous training [I'd suggest "learning"]. Why is it an almost dead certainty that in a random 30-minute interview with a CEO [Head of School? Board chair?] you are unlikely to hear a word on this?"
• "Proposition: the chief 'training' officer becomes the top staff job in a business [school], with a charge equivalent in gravity to that of the chief financial officer or chief information officer."
• "The educational infrastructure must be upended to underpin support for the creative jobs that will be more or less the sole basis for employment, economic growth and wealth creation. Central to this would be a dramatically enhanced, appreciated, compensated and accountable role for teachers; teaching should be a career of choice for a nation's best and brightest."
• "Many small businesses [schools] [...] are typically unprepared to take the steps necessary to engage their employees [faculty] in seeking improvements in productivity and creative work."

I especially like how Peters ends his article, citing something that independent schools espouse:

"To deal with the most probable future employment scenarios, leaders will need to be masters of the liberal arts -- a clear-cut determinant of responding to the universal need to pursue creative work."

I recall pundits saying that there would be a seven- to ten-year period when independent schools would see the retirement of Baby Boomer heads of school. That was probably five years ago. Then the financial crisis hit and the putative retirements did not occur. There were two principal reasons: 1) Boomers' portfolios took the hit head-on, forcing would-be retirees to rebuild their portfolios; and 2) boards needed those experienced heads to remain in place in order to help weather the storm.

Now, however, we are experiencing what might be termed a velocity of retirements, meaning that the bubble of about-to-retire heads, which had expanded significantly since 2008, is popping. Heads are retiring at a remarkable rate--just look at The Blue Sheet (or several other sources) to see the sheer number of head searches announced for July 2013, with many of them having been announced this past spring. Oh, and get ready for yet another round, when any sitting heads (not of retirement age) make lateral moves to some of the big-name schools; that will produce another bubble (albeit somewhat smaller).

As Boomers transition to retirement now, I'm wondering a few things (aloud):

1. By what percentage will the pool of HOS candidates shrink? Think about it: there will be remarkably fewer sitting heads to choose from, if you're heading a search committee.
2. How will the demographic composition of sitting heads change? For consideration is what percentage of heads will be Gen Xers and/or Millenials.
3. Have we (as schools, generally) been able to prepare the Xers and Millenials for headship? Mark Crotty's post yesterday (Aug. 1) on crisis leadership prompted me to return to this question, which I've been pondering for some time.
4. Will the about-to-become Heads engage in leadership development immediately, in terms of identifying internal leaders and helping them grow? I offer what I've heard anecdotally: many independent school faculty look at school leadership and think, "That's not for me. I don't want to deal with the hassle." To some extent, such observations have been the case for decades, but it does beg the question, "Is heading a school today fundamentally different from heading a school 20 years ago?"

I hope that readers will comment on these questions, as this is an important time for independent schools. With all the uncertainties that exist today, leadership transition is something that demands our attention.

As I mentioned a week or so ago, I'm reading Cathy Davidson's tome, Now You See It, which is a study in attention, brain science, and related issues, all within the realm of education.

Though much of what Davidson covers in this book is covered in other publications--and specifically in many blogs, her chapter on measurement has forced me to revisit (philosophically) my beliefs pertaining to assessment and measurement. The historical perspective was very helpful, in terms of highlighting the rise of the multiple-choice assessment as a response to the standardization and uniformity prevalent in industrial society. I won't go any further, lest you are reading the book currently.

Suffice it to say that I'm now very focused on assessment and measurement. In fact, I feel so passionately about it that I am ready to identify it as the issue in education right now. It touches all systems: public, parochial, independent.

There is much to be done here, if one is to move the needle and end up with assessments that speak to a student's ability to handle complex, multi-layered tasks over time rather than a "yes, this is right, and that is wrong" approach to measurement/assessment.

Perhaps the greatest challenge we face in rethinking assessment is rethinking measurement. How do we measure a student's ability to handle complex, multi-layered tasks over time? There are many options here, but how many schools are bold enough to begin moving in this direction, away from the "standardization machine" that drives so much of the testing world in the US?

I still believe, though, that content is important -- students need to have some base of knowledge from which and with which to work. Having said that, I think we can devise ways for students to acquire the content WHILE working on those skills that will prepare them for the complexities of life and work.

Risk management has been on my mind all week, irrespective of whether I wanted it to be! Apart from the drama with Greece and the larger questions being posed vis-a-vis the global financial system (the potential fallout from which we should be considering), the FInancial Times ran a fascinating story on Wednesday (June 13, 2012) regarding the recent disclosure by JPMorgan that it had a trading loss of some $2 billion in April.

The article would be useful reading for school leaders and trustees, in terms of seeing through the lens of risk management. I have heard the assertions that being "mission-focused" and "on message" all the time is the best form of risk management. Vital though those pieces are, external risk events--the ones that we simply cannot control through our mission-focused discourse--are things we need to consider, and this article provides us with a no-nonsense approach (financial modeling).

"In March, Gregory Baer, deputy general counsel, presented a plan to policy makers and bankers illustrating the results of a hypothetical $50bn loss. It showed the bank would fail, shareholders would be wiped out and Jamie Dimon, chief executive, would be fired" (16, emphasis mine).

Tom Braithwaite, the author of the article, goes on to say that "the presentation, given at a Harvard Law School event, is also an unusually frank acknowledgement that there are limits to the capital buffers of even healthy banks. In the doomsday scenario [...], a $50bn loss would trigger 'a run on the bank,' with $375bn of funding, including bank deposits draining away. The government would then step in and mark down the bank's assets, leading to an additional $150bn loss. Shareholders would be wiped out but senior creditors would be transferred to a new bridge company that allows 'critical activities to continue to operate smoothly.' Their debt would be restructured into equity."

Let's consider how such a scenario might look in terms relevant to independent schools:

1. A significant event occurs, and a large percentage of parents immediately stop paying their tuition payments; what's more, pledge payments from major donors cease, and the remainder must be written off. The endowment corpus shrinks substantially, more than 25%, and perhaps as great as 50% to 75%.
2. The school undertakes yeoman efforts to collect tuitions due, stating that the funds are needed to continue to operate the school through the remainder of the school year.
3. Other parents panic, thinking that the school will be unable to keep its doors open, and they begin to contact other schools for immediate transfer; or, if they're generous, they look for admission elsewhere for the next fall. This is the equivalent of the 'run on the bank.'
4. A strong percentage of parents accept offers of admission to other institutions, whether mid-year or for the following year, and the school can no longer count on those tuition dollars.
5. The trustees step in, and, based on reduced enrollment projections, outline faculty and staff cuts. Unless the Head has been doing something egregious, it is unlikely that the board will fire the Head, as s/he will need to implement the massive reduction plan.
6. Any debt that the school has been carrying will now be revisited by the lending authority. It is likely that this scenario is causing debt covenants to be breached, and the lending authority may alter its terms altogether, if the school is unable to meet debt service, up to and/or including seizing the school's facilities as collateral assets, to meet the debt.
7. During all this turmoil, what happens to the school, as a corporation, let alone to all the students, families, faculty, and staff?

In the JPMorgan illustration, or as we saw during the 2008 crisis, the government stepped in and loaned money to recapitalize the banks, restore confidence, etc. However, in the case of independent schools, what happens? Do you have donors who would step in, capitalize the running of the school for the remainder of the year, pay off all debts, and fund a major marketing campaign for the next 2-3 years?

My point with this post is not to scare anyone; rather, it is meant to serve two larger purposes:

1. to illustrate bluntly what is indeed possible, should a major risk event occur
2. to suggest strongly that schools should be engaged in risk management--modeling for external risks in particular

Manifesto on Learning

Tom Peters wrote a great piece in yesterday's (August 27, 2012) edition of the Financial Times, "Manifesto for the new rules on human capital." Many of his points would resound with independent schools. Permit me to highlight several below.

• "Development of 'human capital' should always be the top priority [...]. [T]his is an inescapable imperative in an age in which imaginative brain-work is de facto the only plausible survival strategy for individual enterprises of consequence [I'd suggest "schools"]... Generic 'brain-work', the traditional and dominant white-collar activities that now employ the bulk of us, is increasingly undertaken by exponentially enhanced artificial intelligence applied at ever increasing speed."
• "Generals and admirals (and symphony conductors and sports coaches and police) obsess about continuous training [I'd suggest "learning"]. Why is it an almost dead certainty that in a random 30-minute interview with a CEO [Head of School? Board chair?] you are unlikely to hear a word on this?"
• "Proposition: the chief 'training' officer becomes the top staff job in a business [school], with a charge equivalent in gravity to that of the chief financial officer or chief information officer."
• "The educational infrastructure must be upended to underpin support for the creative jobs that will be more or less the sole basis for employment, economic growth and wealth creation. Central to this would be a dramatically enhanced, appreciated, compensated and accountable role for teachers; teaching should be a career of choice for a nation's best and brightest."
• "Many small businesses [schools] [...] are typically unprepared to take the steps necessary to engage their employees [faculty] in seeking improvements in productivity and creative work."

I especially like how Peters ends his article, citing something that independent schools espouse:

"To deal with the most probable future employment scenarios, leaders will need to be masters of the liberal arts -- a clear-cut determinant of responding to the universal need to pursue creative work."

The Transition Begins in Earnest

I recall pundits saying that there would be a seven- to ten-year period when independent schools would see the retirement of Baby Boomer heads of school. That was probably five years ago. Then the financial crisis hit and the putative retirements did not occur. There were two principal reasons: 1) Boomers' portfolios took the hit head-on, forcing would-be retirees to rebuild their portfolios; and 2) boards needed those experienced heads to remain in place in order to help weather the storm.

Now, however, we are experiencing what might be termed a velocity of retirements, meaning that the bubble of about-to-retire heads, which had expanded significantly since 2008, is popping. Heads are retiring at a remarkable rate--just look at The Blue Sheet (or several other sources) to see the sheer number of head searches announced for July 2013, with many of them having been announced this past spring. Oh, and get ready for yet another round, when any sitting heads (not of retirement age) make lateral moves to some of the big-name schools; that will produce another bubble (albeit somewhat smaller).

As Boomers transition to retirement now, I'm wondering a few things (aloud):

1. By what percentage will the pool of HOS candidates shrink? Think about it: there will be remarkably fewer sitting heads to choose from, if you're heading a search committee.
2. How will the demographic composition of sitting heads change? For consideration is what percentage of heads will be Gen Xers and/or Millenials.
3. Have we (as schools, generally) been able to prepare the Xers and Millenials for headship? Mark Crotty's post yesterday (Aug. 1) on crisis leadership prompted me to return to this question, which I've been pondering for some time.
4. Will the about-to-become Heads engage in leadership development immediately, in terms of identifying internal leaders and helping them grow? I offer what I've heard anecdotally: many independent school faculty look at school leadership and think, "That's not for me. I don't want to deal with the hassle." To some extent, such observations have been the case for decades, but it does beg the question, "Is heading a school today fundamentally different from heading a school 20 years ago?"

I hope that readers will comment on these questions, as this is an important time for independent schools. With all the uncertainties that exist today, leadership transition is something that demands our attention.

Rethinking Assessment

As I mentioned a week or so ago, I'm reading Cathy Davidson's tome, Now You See It, which is a study in attention, brain science, and related issues, all within the realm of education.

Though much of what Davidson covers in this book is covered in other publications--and specifically in many blogs, her chapter on measurement has forced me to revisit (philosophically) my beliefs pertaining to assessment and measurement. The historical perspective was very helpful, in terms of highlighting the rise of the multiple-choice assessment as a response to the standardization and uniformity prevalent in industrial society. I won't go any further, lest you are reading the book currently.

Suffice it to say that I'm now very focused on assessment and measurement. In fact, I feel so passionately about it that I am ready to identify it as the issue in education right now. It touches all systems: public, parochial, independent.

There is much to be done here, if one is to move the needle and end up with assessments that speak to a student's ability to handle complex, multi-layered tasks over time rather than a "yes, this is right, and that is wrong" approach to measurement/assessment.

Perhaps the greatest challenge we face in rethinking assessment is rethinking measurement. How do we measure a student's ability to handle complex, multi-layered tasks over time? There are many options here, but how many schools are bold enough to begin moving in this direction, away from the "standardization machine" that drives so much of the testing world in the US?

I still believe, though, that content is important -- students need to have some base of knowledge from which and with which to work. Having said that, I think we can devise ways for students to acquire the content WHILE working on those skills that will prepare them for the complexities of life and work.

External Risks to Schools and Doomsday Scenario

Risk management has been on my mind all week, irrespective of whether I wanted it to be! Apart from the drama with Greece and the larger questions being posed vis-a-vis the global financial system (the potential fallout from which we should be considering), the FInancial Times ran a fascinating story on Wednesday (June 13, 2012) regarding the recent disclosure by JPMorgan that it had a trading loss of some $2 billion in April.

The article would be useful reading for school leaders and trustees, in terms of seeing through the lens of risk management. I have heard the assertions that being "mission-focused" and "on message" all the time is the best form of risk management. Vital though those pieces are, external risk events--the ones that we simply cannot control through our mission-focused discourse--are things we need to consider, and this article provides us with a no-nonsense approach (financial modeling).

"In March, Gregory Baer, deputy general counsel, presented a plan to policy makers and bankers illustrating the results of a hypothetical $50bn loss. It showed the bank would fail, shareholders would be wiped out and Jamie Dimon, chief executive, would be fired" (16, emphasis mine).

Tom Braithwaite, the author of the article, goes on to say that "the presentation, given at a Harvard Law School event, is also an unusually frank acknowledgement that there are limits to the capital buffers of even healthy banks. In the doomsday scenario [...], a $50bn loss would trigger 'a run on the bank,' with $375bn of funding, including bank deposits draining away. The government would then step in and mark down the bank's assets, leading to an additional $150bn loss. Shareholders would be wiped out but senior creditors would be transferred to a new bridge company that allows 'critical activities to continue to operate smoothly.' Their debt would be restructured into equity."

Let's consider how such a scenario might look in terms relevant to independent schools:

1. A significant event occurs, and a large percentage of parents immediately stop paying their tuition payments; what's more, pledge payments from major donors cease, and the remainder must be written off. The endowment corpus shrinks substantially, more than 25%, and perhaps as great as 50% to 75%.
2. The school undertakes yeoman efforts to collect tuitions due, stating that the funds are needed to continue to operate the school through the remainder of the school year.
3. Other parents panic, thinking that the school will be unable to keep its doors open, and they begin to contact other schools for immediate transfer; or, if they're generous, they look for admission elsewhere for the next fall. This is the equivalent of the 'run on the bank.'
4. A strong percentage of parents accept offers of admission to other institutions, whether mid-year or for the following year, and the school can no longer count on those tuition dollars.
5. The trustees step in, and, based on reduced enrollment projections, outline faculty and staff cuts. Unless the Head has been doing something egregious, it is unlikely that the board will fire the Head, as s/he will need to implement the massive reduction plan.
6. Any debt that the school has been carrying will now be revisited by the lending authority. It is likely that this scenario is causing debt covenants to be breached, and the lending authority may alter its terms altogether, if the school is unable to meet debt service, up to and/or including seizing the school's facilities as collateral assets, to meet the debt.
7. During all this turmoil, what happens to the school, as a corporation, let alone to all the students, families, faculty, and staff?

In the JPMorgan illustration, or as we saw during the 2008 crisis, the government stepped in and loaned money to recapitalize the banks, restore confidence, etc. However, in the case of independent schools, what happens? Do you have donors who would step in, capitalize the running of the school for the remainder of the year, pay off all debts, and fund a major marketing campaign for the next 2-3 years?

My point with this post is not to scare anyone; rather, it is meant to serve two larger purposes:

1. to illustrate bluntly what is indeed possible, should a major risk event occur
2. to suggest strongly that schools should be engaged in risk management--modeling for external risks in particular