Introit

Networking and Innovation

I've been thinking recently about idea networks and knowledge networks.

An idea network is not the same as a knowledge network. A knowledge network is more akin to a knowledge center, a repository of items that folks wish to search with the intent of finding hard data/info that can be used. It be social, also, because that approach may be useful in locating or identifying existing knowledge. By contrast, an idea network is more of a community consultation space that facilitates/encourages connection and dialogue among people of diverse backgrounds and experiences who are looking to test an idea that they might have or to listen for weak signals to determine what ideas are beginning to take shape. There is a place for both networks, but they really serve different purposes.

I'm interested in idea networks because I'm interested in school cultures, especially schools that are trying to align their cultures for innovation. That's really the hard part, isn't it? Talking about innovation and intentionally aligning one's school culture for innovation are different things altogether.

If they're serious about innovation, one of the first questions that TTAFI (pronounced "taffy", trying-to-align-for-innovation) schools ought to wrestle with is where they will source their ideas.

You may be thinking that the raison d'être of innovative schools is to produce ideas in-house. Not really. There's a difference between being an inventive school and an innovative school. An inventive school is one that first discovers or happens upon an idea (process, product, etc.) while an innovative school first brings that invention into practice in a way that has societal impact.

So, if you're a TTAFI school, you could produce ideas in-house...and be limited by it because you're not engaged in the work of innovation, but invention. What you do with it--the action stage--is what defines an innovative school. And it's easier to get to the action stage if your school espouses idea networking.

For example, if you're a TTAFI school, have you considered what percentage of your innovative ideas (as opposed to inventions) you'd like to see come from internal sources and/or external sources? If you're truly interested in being innovative, it would make sense to allow the external sourcing of many of these ideas, in the spirit of "open innovation." After all, do you want to spend the time inventing something or putting it into action, creating impact that is societal (whether within your own community or in an even greater context)? Again, that's the difference between an inventive school and an innovative school: impact.

All of that brings me to this question: if you're a TTAFI school or a self-professed "innovative school," is your professional development program reflective of an idea network? Or is it more of a closed-circuit knowledge center? Consider the cultural difference(s).

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?

Abductive Reasoning Regarding Online Competition

Abductive reasoning, i.e., imagining what might be, is something that most schools have never been good at, for years and years. We tend to operate in the camp of deductive and inductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning is anathema to us. And so, even as online learning continues to gain traction in the larger K-12 market place, we continue to espouse our traditional business model of ever-increasing tuition for a product ("education") that is delivered (no, I don't like that term, either...) in the same way.

As Vasant Dhar, a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, writes in the January 7 (2013) 'soapbox' column of the FInancial Times, "Top-branded universities may soon find themselves competing on price with lower-tier brands and potentially losing the battle. Their edge has been solid reputations and knowledge, honed over decades, which until now has been paid for. IT has changed that forever. Information is fluid and once separated from its source can be easily copied, modified and even improved. Top-branded universities have reason to worry over the long term." (11)

Substitute "top-branded independent schools" for 'universities,' and you can begin to see what I'm driving at.

I'm not about curtailing school as we know it. I'm not about tearing down buildings or retro-fitting them to be cyber-cafés. I tend to disagree with Prof Dhar about how easy it is to copy, modify, and improve information, primarily because I believe that how we learn is not in synch with how our society wants to test kids (standardized tests); in other words, testing/assessment is its own issue that is hurting real learning.

Having said that, I think that schools do have to worry if our instructional models continue to be command-and-control, wherein we do straightforward lectures and one-way delivery of content, expecting it to be regurgitated on exams (assessments). If we continue down that path, we will be in trouble.

We do need to consider the value of abductive reasoning, a type of thinking that allows us to say, "Hey, wait a minute. If online learning continues to be this disruptive, how might we alter our learning environments so that we cannot be replicated, so that we can increase our value proposition?"

Some schools are doing that, but too few. We need to embrace abductive reasoning that encourages us to use the phrase "how might we" as a means of imagining the next steps of our own evolution. In other words, imagining how we might transform our business models.

If we choose not to innovate (business models) when we are capable (i.e., now), what will we do when we are forced to innovate, but cannot (diminishing resources and enrollment)?

Innovator's Paradox and Schools

Scott Anthony's work in innovation interests me very much. Recently, I've been pondering the notion of "the innovator's paradox," which goes something like this: when they are in a position to innovate, most organizations don't; then, when they find themselves needing to innovate, they cannot do it.

Some schools got slammed by the financial crisis | economic downturn; others have continued to muddle along, with a slight decline in enrollment. There is a third group, as well: those schools that have either maintained their enrollment or grown it during the last few years (call it a flight to quality).

A few schools in the latter group have begun to talk about innovation, but are trying to figure out how to do it. Others in the same group are eschewing innovation altogther; why bother if we're doing just fine?

I'm wondering how many schools in this group might find themselves stuck in the innovator's paradox in the next two to four years: "We had a chance to innovate, and didn't. Now that we have to (i.e. enrollment is on the cusp of slipping), we're finding it terribly difficult to do."

I like Anthony's idea of writing a Pre-Mortem: a letter to yourself (i.e. the school), highlighting how things have unfolded over the next five years. Then, use that as a way of defining a strategy for what you might undertake within the school in order to avoid that scenario (i.e. the result of having done nothing when you could have...).

With the continued explosion of "free" educational options, how do schools NOT engage in wondering "how might we....?"

Innovation is a Behavior, Not a Committee

Many schools are trying to innovate right now, some for good reasons, others for the wrong reasons (e.g., keeping up with the Joneses).

In a good-faith effort to show attention to innovation, some schools are creating innovation committees.

The problem? Innovation, like good design, is a behavior, not a committee/department.

Is one committee going to change behavioral and cultural norms?

Role of Cognitive Science in Shaping Curriculum

Roger Schank recently released a tome that is very worthwhile: Teaching Minds - How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools. Schank is admittedly provocative, yet in a very good way. From the jacket: "Schank argues that class size, lack of parental involvement, and other commonly-cited factors have nothing to do with why students are not learning. The culprit is a system of subject-based instruction, and the solution is cognitive-based learning. This groundbreaking book defines what it would mean to teach thinking."

Schank outlines 12 cognitive process that, in his estimation, underlie learning: it's hard to see how it could be otherwise. They are:

Conceptual Processes

1. Prediction
2. Judgment
3. Experimentation
4. Evaluation

Analytic Processes

1. Diagnosis
2. Planning
3. Causation
4. Judgment

Social Processes

1. Influence
2. Teamwork
3. Negotiation
4. Describing

A key driver for Schank is that we are subject-bound when it comes to education. He states that, "If we wish to teach people, it is important to ask what cognitive capabilities we want them to have when we are done, not what we want them to know. In other words, we want to understand what we have to do in order to make them better able to think" (46).

I won't go into great detail here, but suffice it to say that much of what Schank offers would resonate with independent educators. He avows openly that he has problems with "knowledge" and "to know," as he sees them as inherently biased words -- biased toward how the system works currently.

He is compelling. I recommend this book to you because, if nothing else, it will provide for deep discussions in our schools. As a matter of fact, perhaps I'll recommend it as our next faculty reading project...

Innovation: Horror and Irony

I've been doing much research on innovation lately, which is the reason behind my sporadic posts. Today, an event of such ironic proportions occurred, that I feel that I must share it with readers.

There are two US cities with chief innovation officers: San Francisco and Philadelphia. Since I'll be presenting this fall and next spring on innovation, I thought it would make good sense to reach out to these CIOs in order to learn about their roles and responsibilities, etc., so that I might share that information with school leaders.

Scene One

I perform a search for the Philly CIO. I find the website for Office of Innovation and Technology for the City of Philadelphia. I click on Contact Us, and below is what I see:

Ironic, isn't it? (Please tell me that you see the irony here...). That's it, the entire Contact Us page.

Scene Two

After searching frantically for some possible way to contact the office by email, I break down and pick up my phone. I connect with a wonderful receptionist--really pleasant, helpful, etc. I explain to her that I'm with a K-12 school not far from Philadelphia and that I'm researching the concept of innovation in schools; specifically, I say, I'm collecting data from chief innovation officers and that I've created a Google Form for that purpose. I ask, "Is is possible that the CIO might participate in this research project by filling out the form?"

Answer: "Sure. Why don't you fax it to...(number)."

Afterword

Finally, I obtained the email address of the executive assistant to the chief innovation officer, and I have sent her the link to the Google Form.

Here's hoping they figure out how to click the link and fill out the form...

Connections/Reflections

1. Film "Apocalypse Now." Enter Kurtz, at the end with the voiceover, "The horror...the horror."

2. Perhaps I'm simply pedantic in this regard, but I assumed that this office could be contacted by electronic means, given that its title is the Office of Innovation and Technology.

3. It must rank up there in the record books of "things ironic."

Good grief, Charlie Brown...

 

Want Innovation in Your School?

Reward behaviors, not outcomes.

Think about it.

Fostering Invention

As independent schools, it is unlikely that we're going to pursue patents for innovative processes, products, and the like. For-profit companies tend to use patent filings as a measure of how innovative they are, but as Steve Jobs once said, "Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. [...] It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led and how much you get it." (quoted in Financial Times, June 15, 2012, p 3)

Risk-Taking

The willingness to take risks is an inherent part of an innovative culture. For all the talk that we're producing in schools about being innovative, have we truly reached the point where we are a community of risk-takers? In some schools (very few, I would posit), yes, but I would argue that most schools aren't there yet. That's not a criticism; it's meant to be a gut-check. How ready is your school for innovation? For risk? For frequent failure? For amazing success when an innovation works out? It's emotional!

Planning

The strategy head of corporate technology at Siemens says that "[Innovation] is not as easily calculated as planning things in other parts of your business. You cannot be sure how things are going to work out" (3). Given that schools plan around--and reward--a culture of reliability, how ready are we to engage something that we can't plan for all that well?

Money and Resources

Schools must be willing to commit money and resources to research and projects, without knowing whether they will pan out. Where will those dollars come from? The operating budget? Fundraising? Grants? Is there a process in place for this? (See Planning, above). What if the project couldn't "produce" something for up to five years? Would the school still invest time, money, and other resources in it? An even bigger question: how many schools have access to dollars that can be seen as expendable, in this economy?

Gut Check

I'm all for innovation in schools; I support it; I applaud it; I wish to see more of it. I'm simply providing a gut check, given the relentless rhetoric out there of "Innovation, Innovation, Innovation!" (Imagine it as a chant at a rock concert). There is much here to be lauded, but, from a cultural and organizational design perspective, how equipped/aligned are we, as schools, to handle innovation?

To my mind, this represents the discussion we should be having right now, in board rooms and in faculty lounges, but also together.

Alive to the Possibilities

Readers know that I'm an adherent of Luke Johnson's column, "The Entrepreneur," in the Financial Times. Johnson has served admirably as chairman of the Royal Society of Arts (many of us are familiar with the RSAnimate videos on the internet).

This morning, as I was working my through a large pile of FTs from the past six weeks or so (not enough time to read them during the waning weeks of school, so they piled up on my desk!), I came across an article of Johnson's that I had quoted before on this blog; now, however, it makes sense to provide some of the highlights from the article in an effort to get us thinking about what entrepreneurship means and whether we truly value it within independent schools. Please read through the following selection of quotations, and, where the words "university" or "college" are used, substitute "independent schools," and you'll see why I feel compelled to share these words on Introit.

"Leave the ivory tower for a life of entreprise" (Financial Times, Wednesday, May 23, 2012)

• "A formal education for so many professions means an ordered sequence of steps. I accept that this is entirely necessary for many walks of life. But for entrepreneurship there is no syllabus, no degree. It is a journey in self-education."
• "The reason academics understand entrepreneurs so poorly is that they lead lives so removed from those of most professors. There is an amost complete disconnect between the intellectual class and business founders."
• "We don't know enough about the psychology and character of wealth creators, which makes it harder to frame policy so as to foster more of them."
• "Entrepreneurial instincts can be cultivated even in scholarly surroundings--the two should not be mutually exclusive."
• "But my sense is that too many of our higher educational establishments often fail to spot entrepreneurial talent. And if they do notice them, they have almost nothing to offer. Perhaps colleges are simply unsuited to guide such independent, unconventional minds."
• "Education and healthcare will be transformed in the coming years. Traditional classrooms and hospitals are not productive enough, and private sector technology and input can help this process. We need more entrepreneurs in medicine and learning."
• "All universities should be persuading entrepreneur alumni to mentor undergraduates. They should seek angel investors among their donors to back student ideas. Tutors should be encouraged to create spinout companies. And why not found incubators to nurture early-stage businesses?"
• "Educationalists should be alive to the possibilities."