I've been doing a ton of writing lately for my fourth book -- a title set to tackle the five frustrations of a Professional Learning Community -- and thought you might be interested in a few of the quotes that I've stumbled across while researching. 

The first comes from school change expert Doug Reeves, whose most recent title -- Finding Your Leadership Focus -- is a must read for school leaders. 

Reeves writes:

"In other words, educational leaders and policymakers can make a large number of changes to improve the lives of teaching professionals, but if they fail to address the fundamental issue of focus---giving classroom teachers more time to focus on fewer priorities and giving teachers a voice in what those priorities are---then that failure to focus will undermine every other reform."

(p. 76)

NOTHING could be truer, y'all.  When classroom teachers have the time to focus on a small handful of priorities, remarkable things happen for students and for schools. 

Reeves goes on to recommend that EVERY school and district complete an initiative inventory every year, warehousing projects that aren't making a measurable impact on student learning no matter how essential they seem to be:

"For school leaders enduring the withering assault of initiative proliferation, the challenge of focus may seem insurmountable.  After all, they are near the bottom of the hierarchical pyramid of a traditional of a traditional school system and, along with classroom teachers, they bear the brunt of multiple demands of policy, procedure, and prescription...

By asking the right questions, focusing on the factors with the greatest leverage, guarding a culture of success, and embracing the power of teacher leadership, school leaders can be at the point of a diamond rather than at the bottom of a pyramid." 

(p. 65)

So here's a simple question for you:  What one initiative are YOU going to ditch tomorrow?

If you need some help deciding, you might find this initiative monitoring handout from my first book on Professional Learning Communities helpful.

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Related Radical Reads:

Decorating the Christmas Tree with Initiatives

Make Like an Obstetrician and Deliver

The Importance of a Clear Vision

For Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen, 1911 was a year to remember. Having set out with a team of five, Amundsen accomplished the impossible, becoming the first person to successfully travel to the South Pole.

What made Amundsen’s accomplishment even more remarkable was that he was literally racing another team – led by accomplished polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott – across the frozen continent.

Despite being similar in almost every way, Scott’s journey ended in complete disaster.

Not only did Scott and his men fail to arrive at the Pole first – Amundsen had planted the flag of his Norwegian king long before Scott arrived – they died a bitter, frozen death just ten miles away from their supply depot months after Amundsen’s team had returned safely to their homes half a world away.

Although Scott’s journals portray a man convinced that Mother Nature was out to get him, success for Amundsen and failure for Scott, argues Jim Collins and Morten Hansen in Great by Choice (2011), had nothing to do with luck or chance.

Both leaders were experienced and well-financed polar explorers who literally left their respective base camps within days of each other in October of 1911.

Both faced difficult – and at times horrific – weather conditions. Both overcame seemingly impossible physical obstacles and both had their initial plans blindsided by unexpected circumstances.

Instead, success in the quest to conquer the South Pole had everything to do with Amundsen’s planning and preparation – for both his historic journey AND for his career as an explorer.

Knowing that exploration of polar regions would require almost unheard of levels of determination and perseverance, he biked from Norway to Spain – a distance of almost 2,000 miles – to harden himself.

Knowing that understanding the inhospitable conditions of Artic regions depended on more than professional hunches, he apprenticed with Eskimos and learned lessons about living in a land of ice that had been perfected and passed down from generation to generation.

Knowing that survival could sometimes require finding unusual food sources in remote locations, he practiced eating raw dolphin.

On the actual 1911 expedition, Amundsen brought along three tons of supplies for five men. He placed black flags at precise intervals for miles along both sides of every supply depot to ensure than they could be easily found – even by teams that had wandered badly off course.

Heck, y’all : He brought FOUR thermometers on the trip.

Perhaps the best example, however, of Amundsen’s commitment to planning was his refusal – despite near perfect weather conditions – to make one final 45-mile sprint to the South Pole on December 12, 1911.

To do so would almost certainly give him a better chance of beating Scott to the final destination that both were pursuing.

But to do so would also break a pattern that he had set for his team when they had set out three months earlier: Moving no more than 15-20 miles in any given day.

For Amundsen, 15-20 miles was an unwavering target.

Moving more than 15-20 miles in a day – no matter how suitable the weather – would leave his men and his animals overextended and unable to overcome unexpected events in subsequent days.

Similarly, moving less than 15-20 miles in a day would expose his expedition to the inhospitable climate for too long.

To put it simply, Amundsen refused to let conditions dictate his actions.

Conditions, on the other hand, were Scott’s puppet-master.

When the weather was perfect, he would drive his men forward in a blind sprint. When the weather was awful – or when his men needed time to recover from their self-imposed exhaustion – he’d spend days cowering in his tent.

The result these two distinct approaches to polar progress is entirely predictable: Amundsen and his slow-but-steady pioneers arrived at the South Pole a full 34 DAYS ahead of Scott’s weary and exhausted – and soon to perish – team.

Amundsen, according to Collins and Hansen, succeeded because of an absolute commitment to discipline, a term they define in this way:

“Discipline, in essence, is consistency of action – consistency with values, consistency with long-term goals, consistency with performance standards, consistency of method, consistency over time.

Discipline is not the same as regimentation. Discipline is not the same as measurement. Discipline is not the same as hierarchical obedience or adherence to bureaucratic rules.

True discipline requires the independence of mind to reject pressures to conform in ways incompatible with values, performance standards, and long-term aspirations.”

(Kindle Location 357-363)

There are real lessons in Amundsen’s success for the leaders of complex organizations like professional learning communities.

Here are three highlighted by Collins and Hansen in Great by Choice:

Consistency of action depends on setting realistic goals.

Organizational discipline, argue Collins and Hansen, is dependent on building organizational confidence in employees – and organizational confidence is a result of consistently meeting growth targets.

Over the course of their months in Antarctica, Amundsen’s men grew to believe in their own abilities to succeed regardless of what each new day might bring because “success” was defined as 15-20 miles of progress – a goal that they met time and again regardless of what Mother Nature decided to throw at them.

Scott’s men, on the other hand, quickly came to believe that there was little that THEY could do to control their own circumstances. Good days and bad days were the result of the weather instead of their own efforts.

The responsibility of leaders, then, is to understand circumstances well enough to set growth targets that are simultaneously challenging and attainable.

Stretch your organization too far and you are left with a discouraged and exhausted workforce. Fail to stretch your organization enough and you’ll never make progress.

 

Consistency of action depends on making forward progress every single day.

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of his men and believing in the goals that he had set for his expedition, Amundsen often walked straight through conditions that Scott considered impossible.

In fact, Amundsen’s expedition woke up to gale force winds 15 different times on their journey to the pole. They traveled on 8 of those days.

Scott’s team, on the other hand, faced gale force winds six times during their trek and never even thought about moving forward.

Look closely at each man’s journal during one December blizzard and Amundsen’s propensity to act becomes clear.

“I doubt if any party could travel in such weather,” wrote Scott (Scott as cited in Collins & Hansen, 2011, Kindle Location 1030).

“It has been an unpleasant day,” wrote Amundsen, “storm, drift and frostbite, but we have advanced 13 miles closer to our goal” (Amundsen as cited in Collins & Hansen, 2011, Kindle Location 1035).

Once they’ve set realistic organizational goals, the most successful leaders are unwavering in their commitment to making measurable forward progress every single day.

 

Consistency of action depends on a willingness to push back against outside forces.

Despite being an incredibly successful explorer, Amundsen was at his core a conservative guy who refused to embrace popular changes without sufficient evidence.

Scott, on the other hand, was blinded by “progress,” resulting in his decision to embrace a promising new technology – the motor sledge.

An early version of the snowmobile, the motor sledge SHOULD have given Scott’s team a huge advantage over Amundsen’s expedition, which was relying on more traditional dog sleds for transportation.

Unfortunately for Scott, the motor sledges – which hadn’t been previously tested in the South Pole – failed within the first few days of the expedition, leaving his men to “man haul” gear hundreds of miles through miserable conditions.

While Amundsen’s initial decision to ignore the motor sledge may have left him outside of the mainstream view of the direction that polar exploration was heading, he refused to conform to common expectations until he was convinced that those expectations were right for his team.

That’s an important lesson for organizational leaders: In a world of almost constant change, it’s difficult NOT to conform, isn’t it?

While it may be difficult to push back against outside expectations, however, resistance to the unsubstantiated whims that can leave an organization distracted is a defining trait of the most successful leaders.

Sure, Scott’s decision to head to the South Pole with motor sledges was sexy. But survival in harsh circumstances depends on something more than sexy.

It depends on consistency.

Is any of this making sense?

More importantly, how does your school measure up against Amundsen in terms of organizational discipline?

Are you setting realistic goals? Are you insisting on making measurable forward progress every single day? Are you resisting the inevitable distractions that bring down organizations every single day?

If not, are you prepared to be buried by circumstances?

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Related Radical Reads:

Evolutionary Lessons for PLC Principals

What CAN Educational Policymakers Learn from Amazonian Explorers?

Learning from Tenzing and the Sherpas of Everest

 

 

Let’s start with a simple truth: Whether it’s the athlete who singlehandedly throws a team on their back to make a run to an unlikely championship, the actor that wins Oscar after Oscar, or the digital genius churning out inventions that change our lives, everyone loves superstars.

The notion that individuals – blessed with nothing more than determination and a set of remarkable abilities – can regularly rise above seemingly impossible situations on their own rings true, doesn’t it?

But is it REALLY true?

That was the core question that Harvard Business School professors Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nanda, and Nitin Nohria (2004) set out to answer when they started studying 1,052 high-flying stock analysts – individuals ranked at the top of their profession by Institutional Investor magazine between 1988 and 1996.

Specifically, what Groysberg, Nanda and Nohria wanted to know was did top performers REMAIN top performers when they moved from firm to firm?

Could stars succeed regardless of new sets of circumstances?

What they found might surprise you: In EVERY situation where star analysts moved from a larger company to a smaller company OR between companies of similar sizes, they experienced a measurable drop in performance that lasted anywhere from 2 to 5 YEARS.

Interesting, isn’t it?

If our core belief in the infallibility of the personal traits that define successful individuals were true, shouldn’t star stock analysts succeed regardless of the company where they’ve chosen to hang their professional hat?

The truth, however, is that company-specific factors – resources and capabilities, systems and processes, internal networks, leadership and training – have a direct impact on the success of its employees.

As Groysberg, Nanda and Nohria explain:

“Most of us have an instinctive faith in talent and genius, but it isn’t just that people make organizations perform better. The organization also makes people perform better.

In fact, few stars would change employers if they understood the degree to which their performance is tied to the company they work for.”

(p. 5)

A similar study of successful mutual fund managers cited by Groysberg, Nanda and Nohria takes this surprising conclusion one step further, determining that 30 percent of a mutual fund’s performance was the result of decisions made by the individual manager while 70 percent was attributable to the structures and processes put in place by the manager’s company.

What does this mean for the principals of professional learning communities?

Perhaps most importantly, teachers and learning teams – no matter how accomplished they are individually – cannot succeed if they are working within a poorly structured organization.

Groysberg, Nanda and Nohria explain it this way:

“Obviously, a star doesn’t suddenly become less intelligent or lose a decade of work experience overnight when she switches firms.

Although most companies overlook this fact, an executive’s performance depends on both her personal competencies and the capabilities, such as systems and processes, of the organization she works for.”

(p.3)

The systems and processes that support your learning community – sets of clear vision statements, school-wide systems for remediation and enrichment, master schedules that create built in time for collaborative work – are essential to ensuring that teachers and teams maximize their individual potential.

So what are you doing to make sure that these structures are in place in your buildings?

Do you spend AT LEAST as much time evaluating systems and processes as you do people?

If not, why not?

 

Citation:

Groysberg, B., Nanda, A. & Nohria, N. (2004, May). The risky business of hiring stars. Harvard Business Review, 2-8.

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Related Radical Reads:

The Importance of a Clear Vision

Are YOU Making PLC Expectations Clear?

PLC Tip: Finding Time for Collaboration

PLC Logistics: Teaming Structure

 

 

 

 

Ross Smith—the director of Window’s Core Security at Microsoft spotlighted in The Innovator’s DNA (2011)—knows a thing or two about structuring collaborative groups.

Responsible for managing almost 70 teams focused on Window’s security issues, Smith noticed that one group—the Defect Prevention team—had been the most innovative for five straight years.

Specifically, this six-person team had developed a series of productivity games designed entertain users while simultaneously gathering feedback on the functionality of Windows products.

As Smith explains, this novel approach to gathering feedback from end users was incredibly successful:

“We saved millions of dollars and improved quality to a level that we’ve never seen before”

(Ross Smith as cited in Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 181).

What WAS it that made the Defect Prevention team uniquely innovative in an organization known for innovation?

First, its members possessed the kinds of discovery driven skills that define innovators: associating, questioning, observing, idea networking and experimenting (Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011).

These skills enabled the team to think creatively about the challenge of getting users to provide feedback on Microsoft products. They were willing to challenge the status quo and find connections between seemingly dissimilar ideas: gaming and gathering feedback.

They were also able to draw on their own networks—of ideas and individuals—to polish their thinking and they were willing to tinker with their ideas over time.

Equally important, however, each member of the team was particularly gifted in a different discovery skill. While some were expert networkers, others made associations or asked questions with ease.

This diversity, notes Innovator’s DNA authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen, defines the most successful collaborative teams:

When complimentary discovery skills exist, the rich skill diversity increases the team’s overall ability to innovate.

Thus, the team’s capacity to generate new ideas consistently outstrips the ability of either any individual team member or another team when team members excel at the same discovery skill (e.g., networking is the primary source of new ideas for all team members).

Moreover, when different team members shine at different discovery skills, they can learn more from each other, creating further innovation synergies.

(Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 182).

But discovery driven skills aren’t the only skills necessary for driving innovation on collaborative teams.

Delivery skills—analyzing, planning, detail-oriented implementing, self-discipline—are equally important (Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011).

As Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen explain:

Successful innovation as a team requires the ability to generate novel ideas and the ability to execute those ideas on the team.

Both skills sets are necessary.

Smart leaders know this and consciously think about team composition, making sure the team is balanced enough in terms of discovery and delivery skills.”

(p. 184).

Pierre Omidyar—eBay’s discovery-minded founder—recognized the essential role that delivery skills play in successful innovation and intentionally added Jeff Skoll—a detail-oriented Stanford MBA—to to his leadership team (Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011).

Omidyar explains his relationship with Skoll like this:

“I’d say I did more of the creative work developing the product and solving problems around the product, while Jeff was involved in the more analytical and practical side of things.

He was the one who would listen to an idea of mine and then say, ‘OK, let’s figure out how to get this done.”

(Omidyar as cited in Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 183)

And Omidyar’s not alone. The most successful period of professional growth at Dell Computers came when Michael Dell—the creative founder of Dell—worked closely with delivery-oriented president Kevin Rollins.

As Rollins explains:

“Michael simply owns more of the entrepreneurial juice stuff. He has an idea a day, an hour.

In big companies, you can’t do an idea a day. I’m the governor of the innovation engine.”

(Rollins as cited in Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 183)

So what lessons can the principals of PLCs learn from the successful collaborative teams at Microsoft, eBay and Dell Computers?

Here’s two:

If you care about instructional innovation, team composition is an essential ingredient to consider.

I’ve grown increasingly disenchanted with the content-first-and-nothing-else-matters approach to creating collaborative teams that has become so common in many professional learning communities.

The fact of the matter is that just because teachers share a content area and/or grade level doesn’t mean that they’re automatically going to be a successful collaborative group.

Think about Microsoft’s Defect Prevention team: They weren’t successful simply because they were all Defect Prevention specialists.

They were successful because they were Defect Prevention specialists who brought a broad range of complementary discovery and delivery skills to their team.

The lesson is a simple one: To be successful, a team has to have the right mix of discovery and delivery oriented members.

Sharing a specialty alone just isn’t enough to hold a group committed to innovation together.

 

Delivery skills are as important to successful teams as discovery skills.

Think about the teachers in your building who regularly wow you. They’re discovery-oriented, aren’t they?

Constantly dreaming about new ways to transform learning environments for today’s students, their practices seem revolutionary.

Sustainable change in organizations, however, isn’t about revolution—it’s about evolution.

The best ideas aren’t the ones that are the most radical; the best ideas are the ones that can actually be implemented systematically across a schoolhouse.

Like Michael Dell, every learning team needs a “governor of the innovation engine,” and those governors are often the delivery-oriented people in your buildings.

While delivery skills aren’t sexy, they make the difference between a dream and a tangible change in a learning team’s practices.

Sure, a learning team needs dreamers. Schools have earned a well-deserved reputation for being resistant to new ideas, y’all.

But school leaders must recognize that a group of teachers with great imaginations but no follow through is just as weak as a nose-to-the-grindstone group who never dreams.

 

Long story short, team assignments in a professional learning community require a level of nuance that often seems to be missing from our current practices.

If we want to give every team a chance to succeed at the kinds of innovative behaviors that define the most accomplished collaborative groups in the private sector, we need to think carefully about more than just the content and grade level that teachers are working in.

Instead, we need to think about the kinds of discovery and delivery skills that teachers bring to the professional table as well.

Sure, this kind of nuanced decision-making isn’t going to be easy.

It requires a willingness to screen the skills and abilities of applicants and in-house faculty members. It requires a willingness to tinker with team assignments, looking for the perfect blend of natural dispositions. It requires a willingness to question the current structure of the learning teams in our buildings.

All of this takes a heck of a lot more time than just finding people with the same certifications and then assigning them to collaborative groups based on the content area and grade level that they teach.

But the return on your investment of time is well worth it. As Dan Bean—a core member of Microsoft’s successful Defective Product team—explains:

“All I know is that the discussions we have in this team are the most creative and stimulating I have run into at Microsoft.

And that makes it really fun to work in the team.”

(Bean as cited in Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 182)

Aren’t those the kinds of comments that you want the teachers of YOUR professional learning teams to make about their collaborative work with one another other?

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Related Radical Reads:

What CAN the Principals of PLCs Learn from Love Labs?

Evolutionary Lessons for PLC Principals

Sustainable Change in Schools

What Can PLC Principals Learn from Hand-washing?

Crista Anderson---a K-12 Instructional Literacy Coach with Missoula County Public Schools---recently whipped up one of the best visual organizers of the work done by collaborative teams that I've ever seen.

Check it out here.

After I shared Crista's graphic on Twitter, we both received a bit of friendly push-back in a series of tweets from Jason Lobdell, a high school teacher in Arizona who wrote:

"Must collaboration between engaged educators become this complicated to be legit? My issue with PLCs. 

My PLC experience has been that we now spend as much/more time documenting collaboration as collaborating.

Reflective educators collaborate deliberately as a matter of course; systematization of that brings its own problems."

Sadly, I've worked in enough PLCs to know that Jason's point is legitimate times ten. 

There really ARE a ton of schools attempting to overly structure the work of collaborative teams, introducing a level of mechanical-ness to PLCs that is entirely uninspiring and a level of systematization that can be entirely stifling to real innovation.

Cale Birk recently wrote about his own efforts to find the right loose-tight balance with his own PLCs. 

But I've also worked with enough PLCs to know that there are a bunch of teachers who simply aren't "collaborating deliberately as a matter of course."

Sure, they're meeting weekly. 

But meeting weekly and collaborating deliberately are two entirely different things. 

Heck, if I'm being perfectly honest, it took me YEARS to recognize the full range of collaborative tasks that highly functioning PLCs really ought to be engaged in. 

The knowledge of process that is so well detailed in Crista's visual was hard-won and only discovered as I read more and wrote more and stumbled across opportunities to interact with folks like Rick and Becky DuFour.

I think that's why Crista's visual resonates with me as much as it does. 

It clearly articulates the kinds of action steps and tangible behaviors that PLCs are supposed to be embracing---and by clearly articulating these action steps and tangible behaviors, it helps to ensure that everyone is investing time and energy in the RIGHT places.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Bradley Staats and David Upton examined the role that such clarity plays in the super efficient and highly celebrated Toyota Production System and then worked to draw conclusions for workers in knowledge based professions like education. 

They write:

“The key is to challenge the assumption that all knowledge is inherently tacit...A major benefit of specifying repeatable processes is that knowledge workers are then freed up to focus on the parts of the job where they can create the most value.”  (p. 7)

Basically, what I'm arguing is that when schools challenge the assumption that all knowledge about collaborative practices and processes is inherently tacit and take steps to clearly define the behaviors and practices of highly functioning teams, we eliminate inefficiencies too. 

Clarity leads to deliberate and productive work for EVERY team---not just the high flying groups in our buildings.

Now don't get me wrong:  Principals that are attempting to structure the work of learning teams CAN and DO go too far, making the process of collective inquiry a rigid experience that encourages obedience instead of innovation.

But it is just as common to see principals who don't go far enough in defining what it is that they expect their teachers to be doing with one another. In those situations, tangible organizers like Crista's can be nothing short of invaluable. 

Does this make any sense to all y'all? 

More importantly, what steps are you taking to clarify the essential behaviors that are a part of collaborative work in YOUR learning community?