Introit

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?

Is it Really Learning?

The New York Daily News today ran an editorial praising the work of state legislators and teacher union groups to come up with a new way of assessing teachers with an eye more than anything else on getting rid of those who are performing below expectations. As always, exactly how to figure out which teachers are “underperforming” is the problem, and the state’s attempt to win some of the Race to the Top money that’s being dangled in front of everyone’s face is driving the conversation. That means, of course, that students’ scores on standardized tests will play a big part in determining whether a teacher is “highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective.”

via weblogg-ed.com

Will Richardson's post this evening reminds me very much of Leonard Sax's book, Boys Adrift. Sax discusses how our educational system has moved from Kenntnis to Wissenschaft. Both terms (German) mean "knowledge," but the latter is factual knowledge instead of experiential knowledge. That is exactly what Richardson is talking about. The point is that exclusive focus on factual knowledge does not produce life-long learners; it produces folks who can take standardized tests well. Where' s the ability to apply knowledge? That comes with Kenntnis. Dan Pink would argue the same.

Admirable Faculties: The Playing Fields of Eton--and 21st-century Waterloos

Of necessity I have been thinking quite a lot about branding and independent schools lately, and I am hereby decreeing that the most enduring tagline ever created about our schools is that attributed to the Duke of Wellington: “The Battle of Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton.”The line has a suspect provenance, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is the way in which the sentence encapsulates by implication all the virtues that elite British manhood required to defeat Napoleon and, in time, ensure that the sun would never set upon the Union Jack: courage, stoicism, resourcefulness—all the qualities of the student-athlete.Which has me wondering, at the end of a globally discouraging winter, what the battles of our century will be. Right now all the forward-thinking educators I hear and read seem awfully fixated on the vocational skills and workplace attributes enumerated as “21st-century skills” by various employers and business councils, and I am assured that subtle technological proficiencies in social media and other Web 2.0 skills will guarantee success to our students in the world of the future. They will need these skills to conquer global warming and spread health care, peace, and prosperity around the flattened globe. Some of them will be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, changing lives with beautifully designed products that are solutions to problems we never knew we had.It’s a lovely picture, progressive in its optimism and focused on the things that education is supposed to be preparing kids for: college, jobs, and responsible citizenship. This is all good, and I’m all for it.But maybe it’s time to take a cue from the past and ponder the kinds of real experiences our students are having in our 21st-century schools and whether we are serving our students well with either our programs or our platitudes. Will our schools prepare students for the battles—and I use the term here in all its meanings—they will face in our century? The hundred years that followed the famous victory of Wellington and his schoolmates saw the expansion of European empires and European democracy, but hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of people died in the wars of conquest and the revolutions that brought the Industrial, Imperial Age into being. While sun-kissed heroes of Western Civilization like Wellington, George Armstrong Custer, and Kipling’s Stalky pulled on their boots and primed their guns to spread Victorian blessings, European families as well as indigenous communities from Alaska to Arabia to Afghanistan to Australia saw their lives and worlds shattered. The dawn of the 20th century saw a new version of the elitist avatar, and prep schools worked to embody “muscular Christianity” in their missions and practices. The new heroes were Dink Stover and the Rover Boys, privately educated in the glories of the Strenuous Life, somehow combining the best qualities of Jesus and Theodore Roosevelt. (This version of the prep school hero managed neatly and ironically to ignore the authentically strenuous lives of the majority of teenagers who left school at age 12 or 14 and worked in agriculture, resource extraction, industry, or urban commerce.) The poets of the British trenches and the novelists of the Lost Generation provide us with all too many autopsies on the body of values and beliefs drummed into schoolchildren a century after Waterloo.Those who survived the trenches and could sublimate their bitterness and cynicism soldiered on into the Great Depression. Their children, of the generation of Phineas (in A Separate Peace) and Holden Caulfield, either missed World War II or they became Mr. Roberts or (a bit later) the self-righteous, over-bred crew of the U.S.S. Caine, deeply affected by but eluding the worst consequences of the war that killed 417,000 American soldiers but as many as 70 million people worldwide.Ahead of us in 2010 we have global climate change, an exploding population demanding access to shrinking stocks of global resources, and a backdrop of terrorism and war with a daily death toll that would appall us if we paid attention. Political civility even in old and established democracies is seriously on the wane; crazies who fly their airplanes into tax offices are cheered as martyrs, just like Islamic fundamentalists who blow up marketplaces. The rest of this century could shape up into something distinctly unpleasant, and we need to be educating people who can help pull the world out a real nosedive, not just earn a living by their cleverness and sophistication.On one level, and I’m not ready to linger here, screeds on the irrelevance of the lectures at TEDxNYED are pretty much beside the point. What schools need to be focusing on, along with the effective use of social media in the classroom, is how to provide experiences that are like the playing fields of Eton—experiences that will bring forth (or instill, if you are Old School) the best qualities of resourcefulness, critical analysis, courage, and committed engagement that will prepare students for a world that could look more like that of Mad Max or Blade Runner than The Jetsons.I’d actually look well beyond curriculum and pedagogy here. Wellington (or whoever) didn’t cite the classrooms of Eton, and I suspect that character—real character: values, courage, optimism, even faith—is still largely a product of advisories, of discussions of school and social values in dormitory common rooms and club and activity meetings, of chapel talks and school meetings, and—yes—of athletics.Society’s needs, though, have moved beyond a stiff upper lip or muscular Christianity. We’re going to need innovative thinking and the ability to face large-scale, immediate, and even horrific problems—to improvise, lead, and endure when cyberwarriors bring down the Internet, when resource wars threaten to engulf both developing and developed worlds, or when violence becomes a regular aspect of political disagreement even in our own communities. Where are we teaching our children how to confront challenges on this scale? Where are we even admitting to ourselves and our children what the future might look like if things go wrong?Neither Wellington’s teachers nor his coevals could have foreseen the struggle against Napoleon, and the faculty and graduates of St. Grottlesex in 1938 didn’t understand that America would soon be battling the forces behind the Anschluss and the Rape of Nanjing. What calamities don’t we foresee, and are we truly giving our students what they will need to face them?

via www.admirablefaculties.org

Peter is very thoughtful here (as usual). Morals and ethics are paramount in the 21st century. It is time to lead with conviction!

The Risk of Not Making Mistakes

How does your school handle risk?

From Bill Alberti at Verbatim, the Communispace blog.

Risk is a tricky concept. Business typically wants to limit, manage, or mitigate it. Eliminating risk altogether probably would be seen as the ultimate success (thank you, Six Sigma). But in life, most great things don’t come without some level of risk.

Getting married, having kids, quitting a job, taking a new one. Think of any of the biggest developments in your life or the broader world around you and I’d bet none of those happen without a fair amount of risk.

However, from an early age we are taught to avoid risk. We understand that with risk comes mistakes. And mistakes can be painful. But making mistakes is also how we learn.

We aren’t born knowing that the square peg doesn’t fit into the round hole. We need to try it for ourselves. We experiment. We learn not only what doesn’t fit, we also learn what does. And in that process of learning we begin to see relationships—those between shapes and spaces, challenges and solutions, effort and satisfaction. More is learned from the time spent trying than if we got it all right on the first attempt.

But in business, mistakes mean more cost, more time, and lost opportunities. With the drive towards higher levels of productivity, higher margins, and more efficiency we don’t have room for mistakes.

Without that room, the ability of business to learn and grow is limited. Sure, companies can capitalize on incremental opportunities but they will miss the bigger breakthroughs because they didn’t see as many relationships, have as many experiences, or try as hard. They won’t learn as much from their mistakes, because they won’t make as many of them.

Companies need to create room for mistakes. To explore and try out stuff with their customers. To learn. And to do so faster, to get to the right solution sooner. When companies can make mistakes (ideally outside of the public eye) they can learn invaluable lessons from doing so and bring their customers better solutions because of it.

Risk isn’t that tricky of a concept if you think about it differently—not as the negative value of an event, but as a process capable of yielding positive, even breakthrough results. Make a practice of making mistakes. Create a private space in which to do so. Build a “learning agenda” for your company. And embrace risk. Because what’s true in life is true in business—most great things don’t happen without a fair amount of risk.

It's Easier to Teach Compliance than Initiative: Seth Godin

Of course, now that's all changed. The economy has rewritten the rules, and smart organizations seek out intelligent problem solvers. Everything is different now. Except the part about how much easier it is to teach compliance.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Teachers as Master Learners

From Will Richardson, today's post on Teachers as Master Learners.

Enjoy.

Cognitive Brain Research Beginning to Shape Teaching: Not the Holy Grail, But a Start

An apt post from Admissions Quest's blog, On Boarding Schools, which I follow regularly.

As imprecise people businesses, teaching and education research have resulted in some general approaches and directions over the years; but, with all the variables that students and teachers bring to learning, precision and prescription haven’t always been a tight fit.

via www.admissionsquest.com

The Difference Between Hiring and Recruiting

Recruiting raises the bar because it demands you have a job worth quitting for. The recruiter doesn't solve an urgent problem for the person being recruited, in fact, they create one. That person already has a job (hence no problem). The problem being created is that until they change over to your job, they'll be unhappy. That's a huge hurdle for a job to overcome, which leads to this key question:

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Seth Godin makes a very good distinction between hiring and recruiting. I'm somewhat surprised that more independent schools don't "recruit" faculty and staff more often in this economy, as opposed to "hiring" them, i.e. fulfilling a function. It would be interesting if a small firm were to come into existence, one that focused on recruiting independent school staff instead of "hiring" them. Recruiting is much more intimate, and it calls for existing knowledge of exactly what we'd like that person to do as a means of advancing our school. I think that it would be representative of a pursuit of excellence, which is precisely what we need to be doing, now more than ever.

Fear of Bad Ideas

Painters, musicians, entrepreneurs, writers, chiropractors, accountants--we all fail far more than we succeed. We fail at closing a sale or playing a note. We fail at an idea for a series of paintings or the theme for a trade show booth.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Seth Godin's post cuts right to the heart of the matter -- are you going to dream of success, or will you stay awake and make it happen?

Be Unafraid to Fail

The video below is from the Tom Peters blog, as part of his focus on Excellence. In this clip, Tom highlights the importance of one's attitude vis-a-vis failure, if one desires to attain success.