Author Archives: boadams1

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About boadams1

Learner. Husband. Dad. Mountaineer. Head of School at Mackintosh Academy - Boulder, in Boulder, Colorado. Have worked in transformation design, educational innovation, and school leadership for 30+ years.

Orchestrating Conflict, Developing Experiments…and Carving Butter: Adaptive Leadership #PBL Ponderings

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When information enters the mind, it self-organizes into patterns and ruts much like the hot water on butter. New information automatically flows into the preformed grooves. After a while, the channels become so deep it takes only a bit of information to activate an entire channel. This is the pattern recognition and pattern completion process of the brain. Even if much of the information is out of the channel, the pattern will be activated. The mind automatically corrects and completes the information to select and activate a pattern. (Michalko, 2011)

So, how do we get the water to flow in a different pattern on the surface of the butter? Perhaps we need to “orchestrate conflict and develop experiments.” (Creelman, 2009) [See “PROCESS POST: Adaptive Leaders, Orchestrating Conflict, and Developing Experiments…School DNA Evolution“]

In the metaphor of the hot water and butter, perhaps a leader can use some prototype of dams and locks to re-channel the water into new patterns. Perhaps, the surface of the butter could be shaved smooth for a new pattern to form with the next cup of hot water. Regardless, conflict orchestrated on the system is necessary to affect the pattern and flow of the water on the butter.

Scientists used to believe that the brain became “hardwired” early in life and couldn’t change later on. Now researchers such as Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, say that the brain’s ability to change — its “plasticity” — is lifelong. If we can change, then why don’t we?  [emphasis added from my Diigo note taking]

Merzenich starts by talking about rats. You can train a rat to have a new skill. The rat solves a puzzle, and you give it a food reward. After 100 times, the rat can solve the puzzle flawlessly. After 200 times, it can remember how to solve it for nearly its lifetime. The rat has developed a habit. [Also see William James Talks on Teaching re: habit] It can perform the task automatically because its brain has changed. Similarly, a person has thousands of habits — such as how to use a pen — that drive lasting changes in the brain. For highly trained specialists, such as professional musicians, the changes actually show up on MRI scans. Flute players, for instance, have especially large representations in their brains in the areas that control the fingers, tongue, and lips, Merzenich says. “They’ve distorted their brains.” [emphasis added from my Diigo note taking]

Businesspeople, like flutists, are highly trained specialists, and they’ve distorted their brains, too. An older executive “has powers that a young person walking in the door doesn’t have,” says Merzenich. He has lots of specialized skills and abilities. A specialist is a hard thing to create, and is valuable for a corporation, obviously, but specialization also instills an inherent “rigidity.” The cumulative weight of experience makes it harder to change.

How, then, to overcome these factors? Merzenich says the key is keeping up the brain’s machinery for learning. (Deutchman, 2007)

Then, with the nature of change in the world today, adaptive leadership becomes a necessity, not a luxury. How might a school leader, working in earnest to guide the change happening in schools, orchestrate the conflict that could keep up a faculty’s collective brain machinery for learning?

If a school leader pays attention to the wider educational environment, then he or she would know that PBL (Project-Based Learning, Problem-Based Learning, Place-Based Learning, etc.) is a powerful trend and force in schooling for the future. But what if the school leader does not possess the personal knowledge capacity for PBL? How might he or she expect to lead such an exploration and R&D effort at his or her school? She could turn to her orchestra and scientists – the creators that we call teachers and students.

Idea #1

In Creative Thinkering, Michalko related a story about Rite-Solutions:

Rite-Solutions combined the architecture of the stock exchange with the architecture of an in-house company stock market and created a stock market for ideas. The company’s internal exchange is called Mutual Fun [love the name!]. In this private exchange, any employee can offer a proposal to create a new product or spin-off, to solve a problem, to acquire new technologies or companies and so on. These proposals become stocks and are given ticker symbols identifying the proposals.

As reported in the New York Times, “Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company’s internal stock exchange. Each stock comes with a detailed description – called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus – and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in ‘opinion money’ to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock or volunteering to work on the project.”

The result has been a resounding success. (Michalko, 2011)

Schools could totally do this! I can completely imagine a faculty being empowered to select the most exciting projects through “price bidding” and implementing the experiments together. Could such an approach even resolve some of the issues with the current stick of butter…school system, I mean? Would the decisions about what PBL to implement feel less top-down and more grassroots? Would the mental framing of such a process cause a fun, game like psychology? Would it unify and thread the projects through the different disciplines and departments? Don’t you think it’s worth a try?

I can picture faculty meetings being fun debriefs of how the faculty-decided-upon projects are going. Teams could celebrate short-term successes, share bright spots, discuss conundrums and challenges, share failures and poor/early prototypes. Video could be used to capture the classroom experiences with students and the faculty debriefs. These videos could be integrated into presentation and conversations with parents and alums so that they could be a part of the transformations and experimentations [Hat tip to Bob Dillon in Missouri!]. Faculty leaders could exchange stories with other faculties engaging in similar experiments with various PBL developments. We could learn together and keep up our brain machinery and form new patterns with our water and butter.

Idea #2

Posit Science has a “fifth-day strategy,” meaning that everyone spends one day a week working in a different discipline. Software engineers try their hand at marketing. Designers get involved in business functions. “Everyone needs a new project instead of always being in a bin,” Merzenich says. “A fifth-day strategy doesn’t sacrifice your core ability but keeps you rejuvenated. In a company, you have to worry about rejuvenation at every level. So ideally you deliberately construct new challenges. For every individual, you need complex new learning. Innovation comes about when people are enabled to use their full brains and intelligence instead of being put in boxes and controlled.” (Deutchman, 2007) [emphasis added from my Diigo note taking]

To test new channels in the butter of departmentalized subject delivery, every fifth class rotation, subjects could be combined into double periods. If there were an art class 3rd period and a science class 4th period, they could meet as one, double-class. Teachers could serve as facilitators of the student-generated projects that exist at the intersections of art and science. In the doing, the art teacher could stretch himself in the domains of science, co-teaching, class management, etc. The science teacher could enhance her knowledge and understanding of art, performance-based assessment, design thinking, etc. If another set of schedules revealed that a math section and a history section met 3rd and 4th periods, those could be combined for the fifth-day strategy, and students might explore such topics as historical cryptography and code breaking [hat tip to Fred Young, Laurel Bleich, Angela Jones, and Jen Lalley in Atlanta].

Thomas Edison’s lab was a big barn with worktables set up side by side that held separate projects in progress. He would work on one project for awhile and then another. His workshop was designed to allow one project to infect a neighboring one, so that moves made here might also be tried there. This method of working allowed him to constantly rethink the way he saw his projects. (Michalko, 2011)

As we sidled our “worktables” together, continuous support and scaffolding could be offered and provided to faculty because this is a very disruptive conflict to the schedule and conventions of school, as it has traditionally and habitually been administrated. Communications schema could be re-designed to invite parents and other constituents into the experiments. Partnerships might emerge with alumni business and professionals working on similar projects in their own places of work.

Imagine what we could learn from these orchestrated conflicts and developing experiments. Imagine how admin and faculty could grow to be less “us-them” and more “we” by working in such collaborative, R&D-lab experimental ways.

Imagine the never-before-thought-possible channels in the surface of the butter we could discover.

Works Cited:

Creelman, David. “Ron Heifitz: Adaptive Leadership.” Creelman Research. N.p., 2009. Web. 17 July 2012. <http://creelmanresearchlibrary.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/creelman-2009-vol-2-5-heifetz-on-adaptive-leadership.pdf&gt;.

Deutchman, Alan. “Change or Die.” Change or Die. Fast Company, 19 Dec. 2007. Web. 18 July 2012. <http://www.fastcompany.com/node/52717/print&gt;.

Michalko, Michael. Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2011. Print.

Related Work:

Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. New York: Broadway, 2010. Print.

[Cross-posted at Connected Principals]

What if we allowed new teachers to choose their own mentors? #WhatIfWeekly

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At this time of year, I am used to thinking about welcoming and orienting faculty who are new to the school. While I won’t be doing that this year, I continue to think of such things. Of course, my own newness and orientation is happening right now at Unboundary, so such is fresh on my mind – from the other end of the rope or side of the coin. Oh, how empathy and perspective teach!

If I were to be welcoming new faculty this year, I might just push for a new experiment or pilot. What if new faculty were allowed to choose their own mentors? Philip Cummings offers a fabulous blog post on this front with his “Find Your Yoda.” I haven’t figured out all of the logistics yet (and probably won’t by myself!), but I wonder if one could do something like…

  • Assign a temporary facilitator (or activator) for a small cohort of new faculty. This cohort could experience the beginning days and weeks as a team, and the facilitator could assist with “need to knows.”
  • As the weeks move along, each new faculty could choose his or her own mentor. Perhaps there could even be some social-media fun associated with this as veteran faculty – Yodas – “advertised” their own strengths and weaknesses on some SM resource, either internal or external. From a combination of the advertising and identity work, along with the face-to-face encounters during the first month of school, new faculty could make a pick for mentor…Yoda.
  • With careful cultural shaping, such a system could take on an EdCamp feel, as mentors and mentees agree to partner with someone else if the partnership is not meeting the needs of the mentee.

Maybe it all depends on whether we want to operate from a platform of delivery and assignment OR discovery and authenticity. Such platforms can really shape how we design and implement…how we try and experiment…how we grow and learn. It’s about learning.

What do you think?

PROCESS POST: Adaptive Leaders, Orchestrating Conflict, and Developing Experiments…School DNA Evolution

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The job of leadership is to orchestrate the conflict that arises in those discussions and develop experiments to find out how to push the frontier forward in an evolutionary way.

These words came from Ron Heifetz in an interview with David Creelman for the Creelman Research Library on thought leaders. The entire article (2009 vol. 2.5) is worth a read for all leaders. For school leaders embracing the changing landscapes of schools and education, I thought the piece was a #MustRead. [Hat tip to Tod Martin for sharing it with me.]

While I might spend hours examining the components of the article and Heifitz’s book that sparked the interview (The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, co-authored by Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky), what struck me most at this time is the idea of ORCHESTRATING CONFLICT and DEVELOPING EXPERIMENTS. And I use the singular intentionally because I think the two parts are an essential pair of one, complex idea.

As educational leaders and school administrators, how are we orchestrating conflict and developing experiments? What a glorious verb “orchestrating” is. I picture a faculty as an orchestra (and I have pondered before if a principal is a conductor or principal violinist). With the current practice of subdividing a faculty into sections – English, math, science, etc. – like we subdivide an orchestra into instrumental sections, I hope we are orchestrating playing from the same sheets of music. I hope we are not merely gathered together in our orchestral round playing disjointedly from different sheets of music titled, “English,” “math,” “science,” etc. For these are just notes and lines from a symphony which is our world, not separate pieces altogether. But now, in this changing environment of education, it is no longer enough for leaders to orchestrate a faculty playing from the same sheets of music. Now, we must orchestrate conflict, too…so that we  might create new music and innovative ways of playing.

In the interview, Heifitz talked of zooming in and zooming out so that “one moves between high levels of abstraction and low levels of concrete action to discover where people start disagreeing.” Then, Heifitz explained that one would “identify the parties who have a stake in that situation and bring the tough questions to the centre of their attention.” Mind you, these are questions that don’t have easily discernible, textbook answers. These are questions for which the leader does not have current capacity to address. Such is the nature of adaptive leadership. “Adaptive context is a situation that demands a response outside your current toolkit or repertoire; it consists of a gap between aspirations and operational capacity that cannot be closed by the expertise and procedures currently in place.” Where will education and schooling be in 2020? 2030? 2050? Because we don’t know what education might look like in 3-5 years, we will need more and more adaptive leadership to orchestrate and navigate this evolution, revolution, or re-evolution. And we will need teams.

So, we must gather a room – an orchestra – that is smarter than any one person in the room. In a room full of people, the room is the smartest one in the room, right? (David Weinberger, Too Big to Know) From the orchestration of conflict, we must design, prototype, and implement experiments in the schoolhouse. We need R&D labs in schools. Of course, many schools have them, but very few are more than loosely organized, if organized at all. We must put forth these experiments so that we can learn by doing and grow developmentally from our experiments and iterative prototypes. In my opinion, a wave of the future for schooling will involve organizing and orchestrating these experiments more deliberately (and communicating clearly about these efforts with various constituencies including parents, alums, other schools, etc.).

As it stands, existing schools are likely to have schools within their school. Depending on the collection of teachers that a student has, one can experience a very different school than another student – even at the same school. So there is something like a startup within a school, if the school has a collection of teachers who are innovating practice and taking risks and implementing experiments. But are these players harmonizing together to create systemic change and coordinated enhancement? Such is a job of an adaptive leader who functions as part of the team as well as an orchestrator of the gap-closing between current capacity and aspirations.

About two weeks ago, sitting by the pool, I was re-reading Creative Thinkering by Michael Michalko. While reading page 63, I scrawled the following sketch on the inside book cover:

As Michalko described  a CEO using an idea drawer to juxtapose DNA and his business organization, I could see how school innovators could change the DNA of a school – slowly, over time…if loosely organized. But I could also see how this process could be sped up, more closely matching the rate of change in the world, if the innovators were orchestrated and systemically connected with purposeful R&D efforts. Then, in the interview with Heifitz, I read:

Leaders need to accept that adaptive contexts are not simply win-win games. A lot of the organization’s DNA can be conserved but some will need to be discarded. It’s a painful process….But because there are ways of engaging people so that they tolerate and accept losses on behalf of thriving in a changing world we can be positive in facing adaptive contexts. You can do it if you are compassionate about the strains of transition you are asking people to go through. Once you recognize this then you are far more likely to be successful in helping your organization find its way toward a greater adaptability to thrive in challenging times.

How are we orchestrating conflict and developing experiments in schools and education? How are systematizing and organizing these efforts into synergistic wholes? How are we taking leadership of the DNA changes that will happen regardless of us if we don’t lead them intentionally?

_____

Creelman, David. “Ron Heifitz: Adaptive Leadership.” Creelman Research. 2009 vol. 2.5

[NOTE: In the past week, several people have asked me, “Bo, what’s a ‘process post?'” To me a process post is a place to think and not worry about getting all the pieces to fit together or all of the conventions right. It’s like a journal. I usually use a process post as I am working out some thinking in my mind. I generally set a time limit – like 30 minutes to an hour – and just write. Then, I publish what I have without feeling pressure to re-read and polish at that time. Whereas many of my posts are just waypoints on my paths of thinking, the process posts feel even rougher and more draft-y than a post not marked with “PROCESS POST.”]

Out of the mouths of babes…or stationary bike trainers #GreatQuotes

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Watching stage 15 of the Tour de France tonight, I heard the following on a stationary trainer commercial:

Change is uncomfortable. But for those who strive for continuous improvement, change is a necessity.

Love it! Wish a professional educator had said it and received the quotation credit. Thankful to teachers in all shapes and sizes…even a stationary trainer!

Process Post: Contemplating Juxtapositions

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Juxtaposition is a powerful device. Just this morning, on my walks with Lucy, I listened to a podcast from The Moth:

Martha Manning: What Can’t Be Fixed
Posted: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 15:25:03 +0000
Play Now
A therapist, and her car, break down.

Martha Manning tells a beautiful story about her patient/friend Ann confronting cancer, and she juxtaposes this heartfelt tale with another story about her car and a mechanic.

My thoughts this morning were in interesting juxtaposition to the story by Martha Manning. For whatever reason, I wondered about why I have made some of the decisions that I have made in my educational career. In particular, two decisions stood out:

  1. In the summer of 1997, I decided to write a new economics curriculum for my eighth graders and to abandon the textbook that had been used for many years. [Choices, the resulting curriculum, still remains, but that is another story – it is long overdue for an abandonment and complete reinvention, in my humble opinion!] Why, in my fourth year of teaching, and only my second year at that particular school, did I decide to do such a thing? And why did my colleague who taught the other sections of Economics 8 agree to such a thing? And why did my principal trust me to do such a thing?
  2. In 2010, I led a launch of a new course called Synergy. My teaching and learning partner, Jill Gough, and I piloted a course that would refuse to be silo-ed into any one department, and the primary curriculum would be community issues problem identification and solution. And it would be heavily assessed, but non-graded. Why, at that particular point in my teaching and administration work, did I decide to do such a thing? Why did I want to break away from the departmentalized, subject-content system and experiment with a course that hypothetically would match more closely the mixed-up, complex world for which we say we are preparing students?

Juxtaposition is a powerful device. In 1997, my courtship and upcoming marriage to my wife, Anne-Brown, was juxtaposed with my decision to write Choices. In 2010 (and even years earlier during the design and creation phases), my rearing and raising of my two sons was juxtaposed with my decision to launch Synergy.

Now, in hindsight, I wonder about how those major family occurrences – those dramatically wonderful life changes – influenced my educational-career choices. In addition to being committed to research and experimentation, I think my marriage year and my childrearing drastically influenced my decisions to create Choices and Synergy. With my marriage, I believe that I identified more strongly with the parents who send their children to school. I believe that I could put myself in their shoes as life partners who were contemplating a family and what it means to be a family in this city, state, nation, and world. And, certainly with my raising of my sons, I viewed each and every student differently. In the faces of the 561 children at school, I saw the faces and hearts and minds of my own two children.

And I want more for them than the outmoded, outdated portions of school that reside in an industrial-age era. Don’t get me wrong – I love school. I believe in school. But I think school needs some significant R&D work! And I would like to be part of that team – those teams – of people who are working tirelessly to review, reset, re-imagine, re-purpose, revise and re-invent school. I want something different for my boys and for all of the children that remind me of my boys. I would love for school to be more relevant and less silo-ed. I would love for school to be less grade-oriented and more feedback and assessment oriented. I would love for school to more closely resemble the world in which we are preparing our students to live and work.

Interestingly (to me), as I sit and type, I am realizing that my 1997 decision about Choices was also juxtaposed with my contemplations about graduate school – would I study the intersections of economics and anthropology, or would I study the complexities of education? And, in 2010, juxtaposed with my decision to pilot Synergy, I was getting much more immersed in blogging and the blog-o-sphere – reading and writing fairly voraciously about what was happening in schooling and education across the planet. Those windows of insight – both those lenses of family and those lenses of my own professional learning and contemplation – made me want desperately to be more involved in the team of people “trying to build a better lightbulb.”

And so, this morning, I face another juxtaposition. Today, I begin officially at Unboundary, serving as the director of educational innovation. For the past few months, I have received some interesting reactions from people about my decision to explore education and schooling from a different perspective than that of an “active school person” teaching quintessential classrooms of students and administrating a faculty. Some have accused me of abandoning education and schooling. Others, of course, have been incredibly supportive and excited by my explorations and intended discoveries. For I do not believe I am abandoning schools or education. I do not think I am “selling out” to the corporate sector. I see that I am working on the next chapter of my education and learning book. I see that I am striving to serve as an operator at the intersection of what school has been, what school could be, and what strategic design and significance consulting can teach us about “schools” of the future.

As Martha Manning says in her story, “Some things just cannot be fixed.” Nevertheless, I am overjoyed to be working in a new type of research laboratory to experiment with the endless possibilities of what school could be. Maybe school doesn’t need fixing. Maybe school cannot be fixed. But school can learn, and school can change. In fact, that is the business of schools – learning and change. So…let’s make it so.

Here’s to the next chapter. Here’s to the juxtaposition of school, education, strategic design, and significance consulting. It’s not about fixing things. It’s about learning and serving.