If you’re looking for a textbook or want to read a book re Leadership. Check out book just published where I am co-editor and a co-author, “Leadership for a Global Economy”.
Available through Amazon and North American Business Press.
Category: Futuring
1. How will you know if the Yankees met their strategic goal?
Answer: They won the World Series.
2. How will you know if you lost weight?
Answer: You lost weight.
3. How will you know if your organization’s systems are working?
Answer: Everything seemed to work.
Answer to number one: Yes, they must win the World Series. Anything less is an organizational failure.
Answer to number two: Technically yes, i.e. if you lose weight. But HOW much weight? One pound? Two? One hundred?
Answer to number three: How DO you know if your organization’s systems are working?
– if no one complains?
– if you have a profit?
– if your students are achieving?
Before we answer number three let’s piggyback off the first two questions: We all know that any athletic or competitive team (not only the Yankees), “measures” itself by whether or by how much they have won their respective championship. It’s an absolute, either you have won the championship or you have not, sort of like if you’re pregnant. Either you are or you aren’t.
If my goal is “lose weight” it might be fine to lose a pound or two. But I’d also offer that a dieter measures her “success” by more weight loss than one pound.
If we consider organizations, especially schools as systems – as organizations those first two throw – in questions offer some guidelines, although not nearly enough to truly assess the extent to which the school-as-system-as-0rganization (SASAO) has met its goals.
For one thing, there is no World Series by which it can measure itself for school systems. For sure we “create” artificial World Series types targets. 100 per cent diploma rates, everyone meeting standards, are two examples. But they are more nearly akin to leaves on a tree than they the stoutness of that same tree’s trunk.
For another thing, and maybe more preferably, if a school-as-systems-as-organizations measures itself incrementally it can keep track of a promising or not so promising trend. Oh sure there is that AYP, Annual Yearly Progress. This type goal basically says “Well you haven’t met the ULTIMATE goal but you are showing progress toward that goal. Let’s be satisfied with that for now. So let’s look at that. I’d proffer that that sort of measurement COULD be more effective than “winning the World Series” if the yardstick measured a continuum toward a meaningful goal in the first place.
I’d argue that the mental models offered and practiced in just about any schoolhouse have surface level merit but in their collective aggregate miss the mark because the goals that steer them are faulty to begin with.
Because the “vision”, the shared vision, is not enunciated, or if vocalized from time to time, is not truly the beat by which the school-as- systems-as organization marches. Visions and so-called missions like these are the kind you find posted somewhere in the school entrance and in the masthead of the school newsletter, or even on its website if it has one. But the so-called vision has little or no collective conscious in the day to day energies of the stakeholders.
More than that if the purpose of American schooling is to prepare citizens of the 21st century with economic, critical thinking, creative, and technological literacies and capacities, we will need to create CRITERIA BY WHICH WE ASSESS goals as offered in this very sentence that will give us true input as to whether we are in fact doing this or something far less effective and far less worthy.
So when we craft that plan to meet that vision, let’s wag the school-as-systems-as organization’s tail effectively by knowing how we will know before we construct what we think we want.
The Root Cause term has garnered some attention these past few years of economic upset. When the market tanked in 2008 commentator after commentator pontificated on the root cause(s) for this systemic failure.
There are ways to more nearly isolate what “lies beneath” and how or to what extent groups and individuals can do this, first on a micro level and then at its counterpart. This is a skill and a mindset that needs more structured attention than what I intend to do in this blog series.
This blog series instead is meant to showcase how leaders “teach a man to fish” systemically. In this instance that idea appears to speak most nearly to Senge’s Personal Mastery and to Team Learning Disciplines but I would argue that neither has much traction without a reversal of prevailing Mental Models.
The Mental Model in this City appeared to be a dangerous mix of Futility, Powerlessness, Resentment, Frustration.
But I couldn’t tell them that. I needed them to figure that out and that was the challenge! I needed to teach them to fish.
I do not claim major victory here. I do claim that I distilled their feelings about the issues noted above by flat out telling them. “You feel Futile.” “You feel Powerless.” You feel Resentment”. and “You feel Frustration.”
They were almost surprised that I had “diagnosed” their concerns. And then came the key point.
To borrow a page from the late Steven Covey, I asked, “So there’s nothing you can do about any of the issues you lament?”
I guess it’s better put that I used a “reverse” Steven Covey. He among many practices, speaks to identifying what power or influence an individual or in this case, a group may actually have and to seek to use those competencies or abilities to work at solutions.
At first there was nothing. No answers or ideas. I waited the famous 6 seconds “wait time” strategy hoping that someone would offer up an idea.
Then I got, “Well, maybe the community has lost sight of what they want us to do. Maybe we should either reassert our vision or invite stakeholders to review it with us.”
Then I got, “I’m not sure we are communicating about the many wonderful projects and programs our districts offer.”
Then I got, X and then I got Y. And then I got Z.
And then, and then.
The ideas flowed! The Mental Model had been punctured.
What was necessary next was to take the bundle of ideas and show them how to make them happen.
At this point I am pretty sure I know what educational future I want for today’s and yet – born children.
I want a schooling system, formal and informal, that will enable all of our children to not only survive uncertain futures but thrive in them.
I want a formal and informal schooling system that will power wash off the collective crusts of stultifying mental models and of self serving interests that do little more than perpetuate mediocrity.
I want a schooling system, formal and informal, that will repudiate organizational structures that only mostly work for middle class white children and that acknowledges all children deserve all chances to be all of what they can be.
I want innovation and creativity to rule all forms of instruction, formal and informal. I want rote, Baltimore Catechism (most of you will have to look that up!), spit back learning to be BANNED at best or at least permitted as a minimum quota of instructional time.
I want technology used, NOT for technology’s sake but embedded in innovative and creative instructional strategies that will in the end create what I want most of all:
I want schooling, formal and informal, to create what the future, whatever it may be most nearly, most certainly, will demand, to create people who can think for themselves rather than to accept the Flavor of the Day or to mindlessly accept their lot life.
What did Paul Simon once sing?
When I think about the crap I learned in high school it’s a wonder I can think at all.”
Systematizing Schools We Need And Want 