Management of the Absurd

I'm reading the book "Management of the Absurd" by Richard Farson (Simon & Schuster, NY, 1996).  Let me share with you how he opens the book.  "All of us like to think that human affairs are essentially rational, that they work like other things in our world, and that we should therefore be able to make them work for us. The wealth of experience that fails to support this notion never seems to faze us. Small wonder, then, that it may require some effort to accept the fact that life is absurd, that human affairs usually work not rationally but paradoxically, and that we can never quite master our relationships with others."

He goes on to say, "The idea that we learn from our failures is built on the notion that we learn from our own experience, that experience is the best teacher.  In one sense that is obviously true, because experience is really all we have.  But to learn from experience means that we have to process it in some way that makes it available to us. We have to analyze it. And, most of us, for some reason or another, don't do that. We don't take the time and energy, we don't want to know the unpleasant aspects of it, we don't want to look deeply into our failures.  Experience could be the best teacher, but it seldom is.  As an example, organization consultant Robert Tannenbaum says that too many senior managers who have been at the job thirty years don't necessarily have thirty years experience - they have more like one year of experience, thirty times."

As we consider issues in our organizational diagnoses, it is important to look for both individual willingness and organizational willingness to REFLECT on failures as well as success.  I might mention that Farson also says that "we learn not from our failures but from our successes and the failure of others."  True reflection - "nothing is as invisible as the obvious."

From great chaos comes great opportunity

Thomas Friedman, op-ed columnist for the New York Times (and author of The World is Flat) wrote an interesting piece today (1/21), the day after Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States.  I offer it to you (see the URLs list on this blog) not as a political statement but as an example of what our new President faces in his Organizational Development and analysis upon taking charge of this country.  Some may say that a country is not an organization. Probably not, but the government, as determined by the President, is (he picks the cabinet and other operational posts). 

How do you suppose Lewin would describe an organization in chaos through his Force Field Analysis?  Since turmoil has 'unfrozen' so much, the opportunity to restructure already exists.  How can we, as leaders, use this current chaos in our efforts to improve our organizations? This is a tremendous opportunity for us to add value to our existing organizations.  It is also a reality that should help you frame your projects.  Think about it - you don't need to create chaos for change  - it already exists!

Understanding Culture

"If you don't understand the culture of the company (or school, district or dept!), even your most brilliant strategies will fail.  Your vision will be resisted, plans won't get executed properly, and all kinds of things will start going wrong."   

Isadora Sharp, Chairman and CEO, Four Seasons Hotels

I am confident in saying that most educational leaders do not value enough the necessity of identifying the EXISTING culture of their school, district, academic department or program before they start off trying to make change - most often under the guise of "improvement."  How can you  know where the organization needs to go if you don't know where you already are? Change for change sake can't be productive. 

For a leader to truly have an impact on improving student performance it is critical that we understand the role culture plays in the educational organization.  Educational organizations are typically VERY stable and somewhat static organizations for employees. That must be where we start......

Organizational Development

The new definition of "Organization Development is the attempt to influence the members of an organization to expand their candidness with each other about their views of the organization and their experience in it, and to take greater responsibility for their own actions as organization members.  The assumption behind OD is that when people pursue both of these objectives simultaneously, they are likely to discover new ways of working together that they experience as more effective for achieving their own and their shared (organization) goals. And that when this does not happen, such activity helps them understand why and to make meaningful choices in light of this understanding."   Neilsen, "Becoming an OD Practitioner", Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Prentice-Hall, 1984, pp. 2-4.

For our purposes in class, we will also use some of the "old" definition of OD: "Collaborating with organizational leaders and their groups to create systemic change and root-cause problem-solving on behalf of improving productivity and employee satisfaction through improving the human processes through which they get their work done." The Center for Human Systems;  http://chumans.com/skills7.htm.

In both seminar and practicum settings we will be considering the issue of organizational change within either K-12 or higher education.  Please begin by reading from the URL listed below.  

Awhile back, Lou Gerstner was hired as the new CEO of IBM. At that time he was inheriting a company that had once been the most admired enterprise on earth but had slumped to be one of the most troubled. Gerstner himself was hired, in fact, as a hard-headed, results-driven manager. His initial plan was to steer the company in a radically more goal-oriented direction. What he quickly discovered, however, was that IBM had drifted from its historically anchored beliefs.  He realized his main job would have to be to restore and revitalize IBM's soul.

Like IBM, schools and education have drifted from our core beliefs.  It is difficult to keep the faith when the pressures of reform constrict the purpose of education to producing results on standardized tests.  (Taken from Reviving the Soul of Teaching by Terry Deal and Peggy Deal Redman, 2008)

Instead of trying to make schools more data and bottom-line driven, we should be encouraging a return to our core beliefs and the hallowed principles of why we came to be teachers in the first place - "To make  difference for kids."  People and values first! "We are emotional beings in a social setting."

Let me end this post with some wise words from our colleague, Christina Palmer: " Implications for our group projects are indicative of the delicate balance between embracing technology without losing sight of the human dynamic. How can we remain visionary while maintaining our humanity? Can we facilitate forward thinking and positive change while simultaneously ensuring that the human element is central to our vision? It is clear that we must."

What I know for sure is that our future and that of our grandchildren and their grandchildren, to a great degree, rests in the hands of those current educational leaders who understand this 'delicate' balance.  Yes, we can make 'extraordinary' learning environments, and, yes, it IS in our hands.

The past and the future......

In 1916 John Dewey wrote a book, "Democracy and Education" that has sort of become my educational bible.  I believe strongly in most of what he says in this text.  Let me share a bit with you.... "A community or social group sustains itself through continuous self-renewal, and this renewal takes place by means of the educational growth of the immature members of the group." He goes on to say that the "problem is to discover the method by which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or the older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves. The required beliefs cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot be plastered on.   We must also consider how the social medium nurtures its immature members." Unfortunately, "in too many cases - the activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being."  Shortly thereafter, Dewey suggests that, "Making the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success, its failure as his failure, is the competing step" (pp 10-14).  As Dewey continues, "The only way in which adults consciously control the kind of education in which the immature get is by controlling the environment in which they act, and hence think and feel. Any environment is a chance environment so far as educative influence is concerned unless it has been deliberately regulated with reference to its educative effect.  An intelligent home differs from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the habits of life and discourse which prevail are chosen, or at least colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the development of children." And, "Example is more potent than precept" (pp 18-19).

These words were written almost 100 years ago.  I wish we had leaders that would take them to heart as we build our society into the 21st Century.  As you design those learning environments of 25 years into the future, don't forget the value we can bring from the past.

Begin with Policy

As we look at designing new learning environments, we need to first ask ourselves how we want that environment to feel to the participants - students, faculty, staff, community.  If we want a supportive, safe (to encourage some risk-taking!), engaging environment then we need to decide what our "culture" will be like and thus we need to decide how we will "do things."  That is the point of all policy - to explain how things will be done.  I use the term policy because we don't think in terms of local policy much, since we typically call local policy "rules."  I call it policy so that we understand that ALL policy is about telling us how to do things.  And, what that policy is determines how it "feels."  Just look at the Federal and state policies that make no attempt at considering how those policies might feel by the participants (NCLB anyone?).

Thus we start by designing the affective environment by determining the policies that will provide for that positive effect.  This is the true soul of leadership - determining policy that will give you both the positive affective environment that you want, but also get your team focused on the appropriate results.

I'll tell you a little about how I did that as a Superintendent.  I had walked into a very contentious environment where teachers felt little support. I told them that the one thing we do every day in schools happens in their classrooms and that all of the rest of us are here to provide support (my "policy").  Appropriately, their response was, "we look forward to seeing that."  Trust would come only with consistent behavior over time, both by me and my admin team.  Fortunately, we were ultimately able to see the results of these layers of trust developing.  That was when I made the next "policy."  That was, all teachers will have laptops and projectors for their classrooms (among many other things...).  Added to that was all teachers will be able to choose their own professional development and those choices will all be available in monthly PD series.  My policy was clearly based on my belief that the teachers were professional enough to choose wisely, knowing their own needs.  And without having the technology they couldn't integrate tech or project-based learning as easily into their classrooms.  These decisions were clearly policy decisions in that they identified "how we will do things here" thus establishing a particular culture and climate.  The result of these policies was that a huge percentage of teachers engaged technology and project-based learning in their classrooms.  Since we did not force anyone to "change," they were much more trusting of the policy and felt supported in their willingness to try new things.

So, when I ask, what policy will you use I think you can better get the point.  1. What do you want your folks to feel about the environment, and , 2. what policy will help you with that? And, remember, it is the years 2030-2035!  DREAM!

Character and Leadership

Dov Seidman wrote a book entitled, "Why How We Do Things Means Everything in Business and Life."  He makes the argument in the book that how you do things matters more than ever, because so many more people see how you do things and so many more are affected by how you do things.  That might be called character. How we do what we do, how we keep promises, how we make decisions, how things really happen in our organizations, how we connect and collaborate, how we engender trust, how we relate to our employees, our clients (students/parents), and to the communities in which we operate.... this is the character of our organization.

Today, in our very connected world, this issue of character is more important than ever.  Would the recent financial crisis have happened if the organizational leaders were in tune with the character of their organizations..... or was it just a case of failing to pay close enough attention?

As educational leaders we must not let these patterns dissuade us from our calling. We must be absolutely intentional in our approach to the character of our organizations.  Check out his web page:  www.howsmatter.com

Emotional beings in a social setting

We are emotional beings in a social setting, regardless of whether in a classroom, department, school, district, church or business.  We humans must have emotional well-being as the core to our existence.  The first four layers of Maslow's hierarchy all address this issue.  The first four layers are called "deficiency needs."  If these needs are not met, the body may give no indication externally, but the individual feels increasingly anxious and tense. As leaders we must build environments of trust and security - FIRST!  Thus, all learning is emotional.  

I want to use the term intentionality here.  We must be intentional in our approach to building these safe secure environments and that approach is most controlled by the language we use in our communication with others.  Linda Lambert, in her book, The Constuctivist Leader, explains, "The function of leadership must be to engage people in the processes that create the conditions for learning and form common ground about teaching and learning. Leadership must address the need for sense-making, for coherence, for seeing educational communities as growth-producing entities."  Lambert goes on to define Constructivist Leadership as "the reciprocal processes that enable participants in an educational community to construct meanings that lead to a common purpose about schooling."  These "reciprocal processes" might more simply be defined as trusting relationships.  Considering that

we are emotional beings in a social setting encourages us to remember the importance of relationships in our communities.

Our final project is,  in small groups, to design a multimedia presentation that showcases a learning environment for the years 2025 to 2035.  Please allow yourself extreme creativity in thinking and designing, the more creative the better!

Leadership is more than just good management!

We need to understand the difference between good management and true leadership. Good management is certainly a key trait to good leadership but it is not necessarily true that leadership is included in good management. Unfortunately, too often we think good managers are also good leaders and these are not related functions. Good management includes good fiscal, facility, human resource, and support skills. Leadership is about vision, inspiration, and motivation for improvement.

The Real Meaning of Technology

I am very involved in the education and training of educational leaders. Recently I taught a doctoral level class, Educational Leadership, Technology, and the Future. At the beginning of the class, students were asked what they hoped to take away from the class. Not surprisingly, most suggested that they were looking forward to learning about new software or hardware. When I dis-informed them of that potential outcome they were curious what my focus would be.
I explained to them that the real meaning of technology in leadership is that of a lens through which we look into the future. 19th Century technology was a blackboards, pencils, and pens; 20th Century technology was TV's, overheads, whiteboards, pencils and pens, et.al. And, we can see the ongoing development of 21st Century technology hardware and software as well. But it is not the technology that is the point - it is what the technology allows us to do. Actually the real value of 21st Century technology is what it allows our students to do. So, looking through the lens of technology, what are some of the things that we and/or our students can do with these tools to increase their learning and academic success?
Leaders that are not asking that question are stuck in the past. Our current K-6th grade students will be attending college (or looking for jobs) in the years 2014 to 2020. Are we preparing them for their future?
All educational leaders must be considering these issues. If not, does "troglodyte" ring a bell?

Fascination with the past....

It appears to me that the leadership of our country and to a degree our profession (education) has a fascination with the past. We still believe that there is a specific batch of core knowledge that every child must "learn." Why is that? Who determines what that core knowledge is? Does it include data other than that of white euro-centric history, or does it include multicultural awareness? Does it include memorization, or is it OK for students to use hard drives, calculators, computers and other tools to solve problems? I guess I can say those are rhetorical questions since we all know the answers.
I just read a recent study that suggested that up to 20% of our high school drop-outs could be identified as 'gifted' students. These students say school is so boring they don't want to stay. Human motivation theory says that when a human is truly engaged in learning they get what into might be called a "flow" - not aware of time or distractions. Where is the real learning and engagement happening then, if not in schools?
The bigger question for me is why is this OK? Few students truly engaged in learning, huge numbers of drop-outs, obvious lack of competitive academic performance with much of the rest of the industrialized world. It isn't the competition that concerns me - it is the lack of true global understanding in an increasingly global community.
We have a very difficult time looking past our immediate personal and family needs - but if we don't address this soon, our grandchildren will be paying a very heavy price for our denial.

The Future.....

I think part of the problem within education is our fear of the future. As long as we were able to "teach" the past, things were fine. Now that it is becoming very obvious that we need to prepare our students for their future, it is not so easy. Nonetheless, change we must. The world is not what it used to be and most businesses and industries are coming to grips with the difference. Education must also deal with this rapid change in the reality of the world. No longer can we teach about the past. We must prepare our students for their future.
It will be an interesting journey for us - to identify what we can use from the past to help us in the future. There are lessons, functions, and processes to be learned. Yet we must look into the future to help us identify what we need from the past to be successful in assisting our students to be capable in their future. These are difficult times, these are difficult decisions, yet our ability to address these issues is fundamental to our future success. Our children will inherit our world - will they be ready for the world they find?

Leadership

We are in the throws of a remarkable time.... leadership in education today is about vision. How do we prepare the students of today for the world that they will face? We MUST attempt to consider their world, we MUST attempt to wonder what they need. Leadership today is about the future - what will the students NEED to be successful in their world? This should be the conversation all educators have - looking at the world our children will inherit and providing the education for them to be successful in that world.

Leadership

I'm taken aback....leadership is a very specific set of skills. I guess that leadership, currently, is seen as a condition of position - 'I am the principal or the superintendent'.... but it is NOT. Leadership is the ability to inspire and influence the movement toward student improvement. Position does not automatically make that happen. From the faculty/teachers, "I will ONLY listen to you if it makes sense to ME'. Student improvement is about making a difference. Does what I (as the leader) do help students make a difference or not? We are in a trying time, we must make a difference. This is a good thing. Can I get students to the next level? As so we should.....

The Power of Reframing

"How do you match the right idea to the right problem, at the right time, and in the right way" is an opening line in the book by Lee Bolman and Terry Deal on the art of "Reframing Organizations." In our quest to consider the possibilities of the future in education through the lens of technology, we can use their concept of "reframing" to help us. Bolman and Deal go on to say, "An artist reframes the world to help us see new possibilities. Modern organizations rely too much on engineering and too little on art.... Art is not a replacement for engineering, but an enhancement. Artistic leaders are essential in helping us see beyond today's organizational forms that will release untapped individual energies and improve collective performance. The leader as artist will rely on images as well as memos, poetry as well as policy, reflection as well as command, and reframing as well as refitting." Within this text, the authors point out Burns' (1978) work, or the concept of transformational leaders that bring out the best in their followers, moving the organization to pursue more universal needs and higher purpose. Transforming leaders are visionary leaders and visionary leadership is invariably symbolic. More specifically, they state, "Transforming leaders use symbols to capture attention; Symbolic leaders frame experience; Symbolic leaders discover and communicate a vision; Symbolic leaders tell stories." How will we become transformational leaders in education, how will we develop the artistic ability to reframe, to see new possibilities, to create new opportunities, and to provide a new vision for the the future of our students?
We deal with people, not machines; we deal with opportunity not control; and, we deal with the future, not the past. How will we paint this canvas? How will we provide a future that truly makes a difference for our students, our society and our world?

Preparing for the Future

I am convinced that it is critically important for educational leadership at all levels, P-20, to lead the dialogue about institutional growth, instructional development, and the use of technology to help. I'm also convinced that the concept of "change" can be released as the issue. We should no longer call for institutional change. If you wake up every morning, the world has already changed, just read the New York Times or LA Times to try to keep up with innovation, global warming, or other scientific and technological advances taking place daily. At the same time we all must acknowledge this daily development. Education cannot stay static at any level. Every day, in every way, we must rethink, re-invent, or re-envision our roles to make a difference for our students. The students' world is changing daily, we must take professsional responsibility for their success. We must be the leaders in the dialogue.

Reinvention

Business folks use the term "reinvention" a lot. As we see the reinvention of autos (hybrids, etc) and energy (solar, wind, etc) and other areas, I think maybe it is time for us to reinvent education. Business is a competitive world - either compete for what people need or you close your doors. Service businesses are the same, either provide an appropriate service for the cost or you won't be in business very long. We should be much more like quality services in education. So what is it that stops us.....? I don't think we see ourselves as quality service providers, nor do we connect much to the outcome we get. That is why I think accountability is a good thing - we need to take responsibilty for the service we provide. Unfortunately, the policy being written for education is more about compliance to method than accountability to outcome.
There are a lot of teachers being very successful with student performance and outcome. Unfortunately, there are a whole lot more that are not. We need to provide the very best service to our students and when the servce provider is not succesful, there are only two choices - personal improvement or discontinuance of service.
Leadership is the key to looking at what we do as high quality services. We can, and must be held accountable for the services we provide (there are no excuses and it is not the students fault.) When we take responsibility for the outcomes and learn new ways to improve our skillsets, we will be successful!