Introit

Context is Everything

Two articles in the current issue of Korn/Ferry Briefings on Talent & Leadership really hit home. Each delves into the value of a liberal arts education as the ideal formative background for leadership. The authors (leaders themselves) and other leaders highlighted/cited have liberal arts backgrounds to which they return constantly as they contemplate strategy, vision, and the development of talent in their organizations. For them, the liberal arts trained them to look at context. Context is everything.

Speaking of context, what resonated all the more strongly with me was the context within which these articles were placed. This issue of Briefings centers on education, with a notable focus on STEM jobs, programs, initiatives, etc.

For all the talk about STEM in this issue, these heavy-hitting articles extoled the virtues of a liberal arts background. These leaders (including a military leader and a Fortune 100 leader) were adamant about honing one's mind across disciplines, analyzing, synthesizing...tying together ideas, peoples, themes, movements. So much aligns with what we value in independent schools. 

The STEM jobs are very real, yet I was moved by these leaders' arguments in favor of a full-blown liberal arts background for those who aspire to leadership. The liberal arts allow a person to contextualize what is happening (or needs to happen) in an organization by considering similarly-structured events, whether from history or literature. There is strength to be drawn from historical or literary figures as well, strength that impacts a leader's character and helps to inform his/her decisions. Nowhere was this more evident than in some coursework I completed this summer: the group was predominantly engineers (STEM folks, to be sure), and yet we worked through a decision-making problem by considering the context of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It was, in a word, powerful.

What worries me about the preponderance of STEM initiatives (buildings, programs, etc.) in independent schools is that, without meaning to, yet by not paying close enough attention, our schools may downplay (or, even worse, dismiss and then lose) the contextual value that liberal arts provide, all in an effort to appear competitive on the STEM front.

And for what gain?

What If the Plan is Bad?

The lead article in the most recent issue of The Trustee's Letter (May/June 2013), "Many Views Lead to One Voice," identifies what any board candidate should share in common with the school: "each candidate has to be committed to the school's mission, vision, and strategic plan."

What if the strategic plan is bad?

Mission Does Not Equal Strategy

MIssion does not equal strategy.

Your school will want to make certain that its strategy is informed by its mission, i.e. that it passes through some kind of filter that ensures alignment with mission, but the two terms are not synonymous. For some reason, though, many folks are using the terms as if they were interchangeable.

Mission is what you do; strategy is how you accomplish it, relative to your competitors.

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?

Going Bold

As the end of the calendar year looms in front of us, I've been reflecting on Will Richardson's inquiry regarding "bold schools" back in January on his blog (Jan. 7, 2012). Will wrote,

"We need schools that are bold in their practice right now. And by “bold” I mean schools that make sure their kids pass the test and get “college ready” because, unfortunately, that’s about the only definition of “success” that people want to talk about right now, but also schools that prepare their kids for a world that the tests and the definitions of “readiness” or “achievement” haven’t caught up to yet."

I corresponded with Will on this matter, so I feel a rather strong personal connection to it. In particular, I feel the personal connection because I believe that assessment is the issue of our time. As Will mentions, "the tests and the definitions of 'readiness' and 'achievement'" haven't caught up with what the world demands of our graduates. For example, the overwhelming majority of current assessments continue to be structured in such a way that there is only one correct answer; moreover, the kinds of problems presented in these assessments tend to be lower-level tasks. They're not about high-level cognitive tasks, the kind the world demands of our students. They're not about creative problem-solving. They tend to be assessments that can be graded via scantron (you know, bubble sheets that are read by a computer). Although that method of "grading" is efficient (if nothing else), by design it eliminates complexity and creativity in thought.

So, how might "going bold" look? Following are some thoughts:

• schools that are looking to norm their students against the world, not just against other American students. After all, our kids will be competing for jobs against an international and more transient population, not so much "the kid down the block."
• schools that are looking to own their assessment structure. In other words, schools that are willing to create assessments that reflect a measurement of what they value. In all likelihood, that means a blend of some efficiently-graded instruments (on a MUCH reduced scale) and new ways to collect and measure "soft" data such as engagement and cultural competencies.
• schools that are educating parents on the lack of meaning (or any relevance at all) in the SAT. We continue to look at SAT scores as some marker of distinction, but the truth is that they don't correlate to anything that holds true meaning insofar as learning is concerned. Visit fairtest.org and dig around...you won't have to dig deeply.
• schools that are network-minded: schools that are purposeful about creating learning networks with other schools...and not just schools, but with like-minded organizations and individuals, all of whom/which are concerned about learning.
• schools that focus relentlessly on the formation of character, with an eye to having graduates be young men and women of competence whose judgment is keen: when faced with a decision in their lives, they will make a values-based decision.

Managing Uncontrollable Risks in Schools

Robert S. Kaplan, the co-creator of the Balanced Scorecard management system and a professor at Harvard Business School, and Anette Mikes, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, have published some research on how companies might reconsider how they manage threats. There is much here for schools to learn from, and, I would argue, to adapt to school environments. I say that because I believe that we haven't learned as much from the financial crisis as we should have.

Yes, we responded (well, adequately, or poorly), but my question is this: have schools learned to put into place some form of risk management system that draws on the strength and talents of all groups across the school (boards, school leadership, faculty, and staff)?

In their HBR article, "Managing Risks: A New Framework," Kaplan and Mikes provide a helpful chart on the Three Categories of Risk: preventable risks, strategy risks, and external risks. Preventable risks, arising from within a school (I'm going to use "school" instead of "organization" or "company"), are monitored and controlled through mission statemetns, values, rules and boundaries. Strategy risks and external risks, to the contrary, "require distinct processes that encourage [school leaders] to openly discuss risks and find ways to reduce the likelihood of risk events or mitigate their consequences" (55).

For purposes of this post, I'd like to focus on the third category, external risks, or what we might term "uncontrollable risks." These risks "lie outside the [school's] control; [schools] should focus on identifying them, assessing their potential impact, and figuring out how to best mitigate their effects should they occur" (56).

Most of these risks require approaches that we're not used to dealing with, "either because their probability of occurrence is very low or because [school administrative leaders] find it difficult to envision them during their normal strategy processes." Kaplan and Mikes identify several sources of uncontrollable risks:

(1) Natural and economic disasters with immediate impact. "These risks are predicatable in a general way, although their timing is usually not (i.e., a large earthquake will hit someday in California, but there is no telling exactly where or when). [...] Examples include natural disasters such as the 2010 Icelandic volcano eruption that closed European airspace for a week and economic disasters such as the bursting of a major asset price bubble. When these risks occur, their effects are typically drastic and immediate [...]."

(2) Geopolitical and environmental changes with long-term impact. "These include political shifts such as major policy changes [...]; long-term environmental changes such as global warming; and depletion of critical natural resources such as fresh water."

(3) Competitive risks with medium-term impact. "These include the emergence of disruptive technologies (such as the internet, smartphones, and bar codes) and radical strategic moves by industry players (such as the entry of Amazon into book retailing and Apple into the mobile phone and consumer electronics industries)."

You may be thinking that these sources don't really apply to schools, but they do impact us because they tend to impact our tuition-paying families--specifically, they may impact whether our families will be able to (or want to) continue paying tuition. Knowing that we are reliant on tuition dollars to run our schools, shouldn't we be concerned about uncontrollable risks and give some thought to how we might react, should such a risk event occur?

It might be easy for most readers to say, "Well, that's really the purview of the board, not the administration." On the one hand, yes, I do agree that it is the board's business, but I submit that it's equally the business of school leadership (HOS + senior administrative team). What's more, I would consider involving key faculty linchpins (probably not the full faculty) in some form of risk management framework, as their "weight" is important in the faculty world. Often, these linchpins can be better conduits to full faculties than can administrators; at least, they may have excellent ideas on how to communicate certain information, etc. What's more, they tend to have long tenure at a given school, meaning that they bring the additional benefit of institutional memory; such memory can be applied to a risk management scenario. This perspective is especially helpful if an administrative team (and/or Head) has a comparatively shorter tenure at the school.

As you can see, risk management is a somewhat complex issue in independent schools. This concept also represents one of those "uncomfortable intersections" of "are we a school or are we a business?" In this case, the answer is clearly "both." As a term, "risk management" sounds exclusively corporate, but, in reality, educators deal in risk management all the time--we just don't label it as such. We have elaborate systems of progress reports, interim reports, grade-level meetings, and so forth. Why? To mitigate the risk of student failure. One could argue, I think, that schools are in the business of risk mitigation.

I would welcome comments from readers regarding the major external risks you see for independent schools. They may correspond to the three points mentioned above, or they may be different altogether. Additionally, how might schools better mitigate such risks?

I will publish all comments, so please check back to see what has been written!

Strategies on Increasing Diversity

John Rice, a person of color and founder of MLT, a company that helps high-potential folks from underrepresented groups develop into senior leaders, writes a great article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review (June 2012).

He notes that most companies have been working "for years" to add diversity to the leadership ranks. Of course, too often, companies (schools too, I would add) don't have more to show for their efforts.

Why not?

Rice believes that companies (schools) are tripping themselves up in four ways:

(1) You've distributed the responsibility for increasing diversity. "If no one person or group is responsible for building a diverse senior management pipeline, it's hard to develop an integrated, game-changing strategy." For example, recruitment teams and diversity departments should work together on this effort, not separately.

(2) You're managing activities, not outcomes. Instead of focusing on 'inputs' such as "the number of mentoring programs, event sponsorships, or résumés collected, [...] you should think about performance as strategically as you do in your core operating businesses: Be very clear about what success will look like in five years. Define metrics to track progress toward that vision."

(3) Your focus is on fixing the culture. "Culture change happens very slowly--and usually not at all until new faces have appeared in your company's leadership ranks and new perspectives have begun to reshape its strategies. Your first priority should be to improve performance and promotion rates in underrepresented groups. You'll find that culture change comes more readily from a critical mass of diverse executives than from a series of diversity and inclusion seminars or one high-profile minority hire."

(4) You prioritize minority candidates for diversity department roles. Rice points out that folks who manage diversity departments, especially if from underrepresented groups themselves (a ubiquitous practice), "may be risk-averse," when it comes to "solving" the issue of not enough employees from underrepresented groups. Why risk-averse? They "are usually struggling themselves with the issues their companies want them to solve," especially since their own strategies are highly visible. "A company that wants its diversity executives to advocate for bold new approaches should think about rotating high-performing line executives (whether minority or nonminority) into diversity roles. Having already established their reputations internally as revenue producers, they can navigate any setbacks that come from new approaches."

How does your school promote hiring and advancement of underrepresented groups within the teaching ranks as well as the administrative ranks?

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?

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?