Running two operating systems in concert. #PLC #ATPLC #Leadership #Strategy

From John Kotter’s article “Accelerate!” in Harvard Business Review, November 2012 -

The existing structures and processes that together form an organization’s operating system need an additional element to address the challenges produced by mounting complexity and rapid change. The solution is a second operating system, devoted to the design and implementation of strategy, that uses an agile, networklike structure and a very different set of processes. The new operating system continually assesses the business, the industry, and the organization, and reacts with greater agility, speed, and creativity than the existing one. It complements rather than overburdens the traditional hierarchy, thus freeing the latter to do what it’s optimized to do. It actually makes enterprises easier to run and accelerates strategic change. This is not an “either or” idea. It’s “both and.” I’m proposing two systems that operate in concert.
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During my fourth year as a middle school principal, in 2006-07, we began to restructure as a professional learning community, implementing the incredible work of Rick and Becky DuFour and Bob Eaker. As we progressed in this restructuring around a different work ethos, we tapped volunteers to co-lead the various departmental learning teams. Together these co-faciliators created the PLC-Facilitators PLC – a kind of meta-team to serve as a guiding coalition for the entire PLC transformation.

We ran two operating systems – an admin team known as the Guidance Committee (hierarchical), as well as the PLC-Facilitators PLC (networked). The Guidance Committee was tremendous at running the logistical operations of the school, just as Kotter describes the strengths of a hierarchical administration. The PLC-Facilitators PLC, and the “solar system” of PLCs throughout the middle school, was tremendous at adeptly navigating – even map making – for the strategic transformations necessary in a learning community being influenced by technology enhancements, brain research, assessment literacies, pedagogical improvements, etc.

Two operating systems may seem counter-intuituve. Yet, it was this practice of running two systems in concert that permitted us to embrace complexity versus trying to manage it.

[HT to Tod Martin for the Kotter article!]

238 Provocations for School 3.0 – John Maeda’s TEDGlobal 2012 Talk #School3pt0

There are at least 238 provocations for School 3.0 in “John Maeda: How art, technology, and design inform creative leaders.”

I see ideations for such things as form + content, networking diagrams for learning communities, play leading to powerful discovery, and 235 more!

What do you see?

PROCESS POST: Roused emotions of possibility – choreography as teaching and school leadership

This morning, I realized that I aspire to be a choreographer. While watching “Wayne McGregor: A choreographer’s creative process in real time,” I was moved by the emotion of possibility. Not only was I moved by the literal art and science of McGregor’s work as a master choreographer of physical dance, but I was also moved by the metaphorical force of McGregor’s message – for the translation that this work can be for teaching, school leadership, and education.

As McGregor recounted:

So this is not the type of choreography where I already have in mind what I’m going to make, where I’ve fixed the routine in my head and I’m just going to teach it to them, and these so-called empty vessels are just going to learn it. That’s not the methodology at all that we work with. But what’s important about it is how it is that they’re grasping information, how they’re taking information, how they’re using it, and how they’re thinking with it.

 

I’m going to start really, really simply. Usually, dance has a stimulus or stimuli, and I thought I’d take something simple, TED logo, we can all see it, it’s quite easy to work with, and I’m going to do something very simply, where you take one idea from a body, and it happens to be my body, and translate that into somebody else’s body, so it’s a direct transfer, transformation of energy.

Likewise, our student-learners are not empty vessels to be filled. They are creative, thinking, energetic forces who can express their constructing understanding of the world…with a bit of support and guidance from a choreographer. [As I learned from Farnam Street's "What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill?,"this transfer could also be called engraving.] Student-learners can do so much more than receive, memorize, and recall for testing. They can connect, empathize, and interpret. What could be used as the stimuli? How about world issues? How about big ideas and grand challenges that we face in our schools, in our communities, in our cities, in our nations, and in our world?

School leaders could choreograph the orchestrated dance of a coordinated, collaborative faculty…working in harmonious partnership with business, government, and non-profits. We could dance together with a bit of guidance and support from our school choreographers (school in the BROAD sense).

Later in the talk, McGregor explained:

So they’re solving this problem for me, having a little – They’re constructing that phrase.They have something and they’re going to hold on to it, yeah? One way of making. That’s going to be my beginning in this world premiere.

 

Okay. From there I’m going to do a very different thing. So basically I’m going to make a duet. I want you to think about them as architectural objects, so what they are, are just pure lines. They’re no longer people, just pure lines, and I’m going to work with them almost as objects to think with, yeah? So what I’m thinking about is taking a few physical extensions from the body as I move, and I move them, and I do that by suggesting things to them: If, then; if, then. Okay, so here we go.

“So, they’re solving this problem for me.” Student-learners, in partnership with their teachers choreographers and collaborators from the “real-world,” could construct phrases to test and trial against a dialogue with the big ideas and grand challenges we face. Our learning architects could assist in designing “structures” that provide for such dancing with ideas and interdisciplinary problem solving. For the accompaniment – the assessment, the communications, the engineering – would have to be re-imagined to facilitate well-architected dancing and duet-ing.

And, nearer the conclusion and the unveiling of the completed dance premier, McGregor articulated:

That was the second way of working.The first one, body-to-body transfer, yeah,with an outside mental architecture that I work withthat they hold memory with for me.The second one, which is using them as objects to thinkwith their architectural objects, I do a series ofprovocations, I say, “If this happens, then that.If this, if that happens — ” I’ve got lots of methods like that,but it’s very, very quick, and this is a third method.They’re starting it already, and this is a task-based method,where they have the autonomy to makeall of the decisions for themselves.

Do I even need to translate this one? “This is a task-based method, where they have the autonomy to make all of the decisions for themselves.” Isn’t this what we all want for our student-learners? Don’t we want to choreograph in such a way that they are not vessels to be filled but the paradoxical wonders of simultaneously independent and interdependent thinkers and doers? That they have autonomy to go and make the dances themselves that will solve our school, community, city, nation, and world issues?

Yes, I aspire to be a choreographer. A choreographer of School 3.0. And I’m looking for dancers.

Marrying power and context in the organizational pyramid. Lessons inspired by Gary Hamel. #PedagMasterPlan

Power and context.

This morning, on my walk with Lucy, I re-listened to Daniel Pink’s Office Hours with Gary Hamel. I continue to return to Gary Hamel’s session for a number of reasons, some of which are:

1. I find that the information I internalize changes depending on what else is on my mind.
2. The interview is super packed with incredible, thought-provoking ideas.
3. Gary Hamel is exploring organizations that are not conforming to industrial-age paradigms for management and operational structure. He is interested in management 2.0. I see countless lessons here for school transformation in the next decade.

This morning, I was most enamored with the ideas surrounding the organizational pyramid – the hierarchical org chart that defines many companies, institutions, and schools. Of course, I am primarily interested in schools.

Hamel outlined that power resides at the top of the pyramid. For this session with Hamel, power seemed to be defined as the positional ability to set organizational strategy and direction. However, context resides at the base of the pyramid. The situational and conditional parameters for employing strategy and direction – through tactics and daily actions – lives at the classroom level, not the head of school level (in my immediate world). Obviously, this dynamic creates a tension. Those at the base – those with the richest context immersion – often feel that they have very little, if any, power to enact systemic change. Those at the top – those with the power to set the organizational direction and strategy – often lack the context needed to fully understand, in a learning-by-doing kind of way, if the strategy and direction makes sense in the daily operations and actions of the workforce – with the teachers, in a school setting.

So, organizational change and transformation is easy, right? We just have to figure out the most effective ways to move power down the pyramid and/or move context up the pyramid…that is, if we don’t want to replace the pyramid altogether with some other design. How might we move power and context through the pyramid?

1. We could improve the pyramid’s ability to conduct communications electricity. One way to enact this type of conduction enhancement is to utilize the ethos and practices of a PLC (professional learning community). During my last five years as a school principal, the junior high established PLCs in multiple departments. I attended all of the PLC meetings as we began, but as the number of PLCs and participants grew, I was only able to attend one to two of every four meetings for every PLC. While I wish I could have been in 100% of the meetings, the 25-50% attendance (mostly as a co-participant) allowed me to get more of the context, and it allowed my teammates to contextualize the strategic and direction-setting power with which I was invested. Consequently, as one example, the English PLC was able to create significant course change in a few weeks because we could mix and mingle with context and power. The department chair was also a regular member of the PLC. As a result of improving the exchange of power and context, the writing program in grade 8 was revolutionized in short order.
2. We could flatten the pyramid. By doing so, context and power would reside in the same neighborhood and play at the same playgrounds. Recently, I have been exploring such an idea with suggestions like bringing “Mutual Fun” to school faculties. Instead of using a top-down approach, engage more of a bottom-up methodology. Give more strategy and direction-setting power to those with the best context. Empower the faculty to generate and select the ideas that are most worth doing as a collective whole. I imagine some would consider this inverting the pyramid.
3. We could build a new shape within the pyramid. (I picture a sphere within the pyramid, essentially connecting the top and the base through proximity to a common object.) Hamel said in his session with Pink that organizational change is directly proportional to organizational experimentation. So, an R&D (research and development) team could be assembled to investigate and implement various cutting-edge pedagogies and methodologies. Medicine uses R&D. The automotive industry uses R&D. Technology uses R&D. Heck, meat cutting and steak makers use R&D (I heard it on another podcast – NPR’s Planet Money). Many industries use R&D. Does education really use a systemic form of R&D? We should. By creating an R&D group and building it wisely, a school could synergize context and power by leveraging this iSchool group.

Of course, at a school that finds itself enmeshed in the world 1.0 hierarchical pyramid, it would take some very special and atypical leadership to disrupt the comfortable and familiar. Another thing that Hamel said that continues to stick in my mind – most leaders are not able to “depreciate their existing intellectual capital.” He earlier had indicated that “change is so hard, not because the future is unpredictable, but because it is unpalatable.”

So, I would definitely say that designing and strategizing the management structure – the power and context grid – must be a part of a school’s “pedagogical master plan.” Such is one of the primary engines that is charged to motor the entire organization. I imagine that purposeful alignment and integration must happen for the management dynamic to “fit” with the organizational progression dynamic. You simply must use the correct engine for your vehicle.

If you expect to get somewhere…pleasantly and enjoyably.

___

Related post(s):

• Pedagogical Master Planning – the beginnings of a major study and implementation

Tracking Time to Learn from Our Patterns – a Lesson from My New World

At my new company, we track our time. I imagine many companies track how time is spent. For me, in these two weeks, during an 8-9 hour day, I probably spend 3 minutes total going through the exercise of tracking my time. So, it’s easy. The software we use makes it easy. There are pre-poulated pull-down menus and sub-menus. There are wonderfully granular levels of such activity as “research.” There are text fields so that I can add commentary, too. Then, I can look at reports of how I am spending my time. Of course, my coaches can also view how I spend my time, and I totally and completely trust them to do so.

What if we teachers tracked our time like this? Recently, at lunch with a colleague, I mentioned how surprised I was to learn that I am loving my self-tracking of time. Because I have spent 20 years in schools, and because I love to integrate most of what I am learning with school life, I could imagine us teachers tracking our time. I could imagine content-oriented pull-down menus and sub-menus. I could imagine skill-oriented pull-down menus and sub-menus. I could imagine methodology and pedagogy menus and sub-menus. I could imagine running a report after two weeks and seeing for myself, “Wow. I spent 78% of my teaching time this week lecturing. Is that a good thing? How might I re-balance my methodology and approaches given my SMART goal and desired outcome for the year?”

Of course, I also imagined students tracking their time. In the spirit of making education “more pull, than push,” I would love for a student to share with me in an individual conference how he or she had spent his/her learning time during the week or two-week period. I could imagine doing this with advisees, so that I could discover with them how they are exploring their interests and spending time in their structured school-learning environments. I could imagine seeing the cross-polinations and synergies among class-content time recordings and self-directed time recordings.

In many ways, I see my time tracking as related to the tips shared in an article that a colleague sent to me about 11 secrets of leadership. My time tracking allows me to record reality in short bits, and then I can study my time to be more proactive about how I structure my days to further leadership and learning.

Time is a valuable resource. In fact, time may be the most valuable resource. I am thrilled to have a better handle on how I spend my time so that I can be purposeful, intentional, and strategic about making the most of my opportunities to create impact and to make a difference.

How are you spending your time…your time learning…your time teaching…your time working?

[Interestingly, after talking about this with my friend at lunch, he sent me a link to Lesson Note, a digital tool for tracking class activity, particularly as it relates to "lesson study," an action research collaboration in learning communities for which I am a strong and dedicated advocate. However, the kind of time tracking that I am sharing above is very different and only distantly related to Lesson Note tracking. The type of time tracking I am discussing feels more self-initiated and self-directed. Of course, Lesson Note could be used in very positive and powerful ways, too, if a team decided to employ such a digital resource to advance their work and understanding about their teaching.]