Tag: systems thinking

The Science of Feedback Loops

Posted on | by Sam

Our world is made of circles: 

Living and dying. Energy and entropy. Cause and effect. 

Why, then, do we so often see straight lines?

According to systems theorist Peter Senge, “one of the reasons for this fragmentation in our thinking stems from our language. Language shapes perception. What we see depends on what we are prepared to see.” And Western languages, with their subject-verb-object structure, are biased toward a linear view. 

“If we want to see systemwide interrelationships,” says Senge, “we need a language of interrelationships, a language made up of circles.”

This is the language, and the science, of feedback loops.

Most commonly, we use the word feedback to describe the process of gathering opinions about ourselves — all too often, unidirectionally (“How did I do?”). In systems thinking, however, feedback is a broader concept that means a reciprocal flow of influence. 

We are always a part of the process, in other words, and never an impartial observer. 

Everyone shares responsibility for the problems created by the systems they inhabit. 

And every influence is both cause and effect.  

This represents a profound shift in awareness, one that requires us to acknowledge that we are both influenced by and influencing our reality (and one another’s) all the time. 

Feedback loops provide a language to map and explain that activity, biologically.  

There are two types of loops, the first of which is called regulatory or negative feedback. The balancing feedback these loops provide exist whenever and wherever there’s a goal-oriented behavior required.  The work of a thermostat is an easy example — but so is the myopia of a school district oriented around its test scores. 

In these sorts of systems, if the goal is one you like, you’ll be happy — and if it isn’t, you’ll be thwarted at every effort to change things until you either change the goal or weaken its influence. 

Negative feedback loops, therefore, keep systems on track once the course has been established, and use information to help the system achieve its predetermined outcomes — even if those outcomes are not explicitly named or understood. 

This sort of system is great for machines — and lousy for human beings.

But there is a second type of feedback loop, positive or amplifying. These loops use information differently — not to maintain the status quo, but to notice something new and amplify it into messages that signal a larger need to change.

Positive loops do not promote order, but disequilibrium, which is the hallmark of a true living system — to continuously import energy from the environment and export entropy in order to constantly change and grow. Our understanding of them grows out of Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine’s work on thermodynamics, which demonstrated that, prior to the conventional wisdom up to that point, disequilibrium is in fact the necessary condition for growth in a living system. 

As he explained, they’re called dissipative structures because of their paradoxical nature — they give up their previous form(s) in order to become something new, over and over. This is why they’re called self-organizing systems. As Margaret Wheatley puts it, “The viability and resiliency of a self-organizing system comes from its great capacity to adapt as needed, to create structures that fit the moment. Neither form nor function alone dictates how the system is organized. Instead, they are process structures, reorganizing into different forms in order to maintain their identity.”

They are, in other words, precisely what our human systems are not — and need to be. 

Adaptive, not rigid. 

Resilient, not stable.

In sum, if stability is the goal, runaway amplification can be very threatening — think of a shrieking microphone — and we may be wise to quell it before our eardrums burst. But if what we seek is something more emergent in its response to new information, positive feedback is essential to life’s ability to adapt and change, whether it’s your own backyard, a healthy workplace culture, or the Twitter storm that helped fuel the Arab Spring. 

It is, quite simply, nature’s way of saying that the system needs to change.

 

At Blue School, the Learning is Alive (Literally)

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on At Blue School, the Learning is Alive (Literally)

Gina Farrar is not your typical New York City school leader.

For starters, she’s from the deep South — although any remnants of a Southern twang have long since disappeared. She’s also quiet and friendly  — the sort of person who likes going to restaurants in the middle of the afternoon, or smiling at kids on the train.

Then there’s her formal education:  a double major in Dance and Mathematics, followed by a PhD in Psychology. Although this is where, if you follow the pattern, Gina Farrar’s career path starts to make sense. “What attracted me to math and dance is that each is a puzzle,” she told me one recent fall morning. “The ways that math is a puzzle are obvious, but ballet is a puzzle, too — how your body fits together, how the steps fit together. And there’s a lot of technique involved, but it’s only when you master the technique that you can soar.”

The same can be said for Blue School, a decade-old independent school in lower Manhattan that Gina leads, and which was created by the founders of Blue Man Group, the global theatrical phenomenon that was designed to inspire creativity in both audience and performer.

To many, that riddle — how to inspire creativity — is the Holy Grail of school reform in 2018. Back in 2006, however, it was little more than a nugget of an idea that turned into a small parent playgroup in lower Manhattan. Soon thereafter, it grew into a full-blown school — albeit one whose theories about teaching and learning were both intriguing and unproven. And now, Blue School has evolved into something I’m not sure I’ve seen anywhere else in my travels — a school community that is, both literally and figuratively, a living organism, and a theory of learning that has, over a decade of strict scrutiny, constant tinkering, and loving care, developed a full-blown pedagogy as worthy of replication as its more famous single-name forebears:

Montessori. Reggio. Waldforf.

Blue?

To understand how it happened, you need to begin with the idea that anchors both the Group and the School: a colorful wheel of archetypal lenses for how human beings see and make sense of the world.

As Blue Man Group and Blue School co-founder Matt Goldman puts it, these lenses evolved as the founding Blue Men designed their characters. Each pair of lenses, which are positioned opposite one another on the wheel, represent polar ways in which we are likely to see ourselves (and be seen by others). Our culture is rife with examples of the archetypal Hero, for example, yet almost barren when it comes to equivalent celebrations of the Innocent. We are more likely to value the mindset of the Scientist over that of the Artist. And despite our country’s revolutionary origins, you’re still more likely to gain points in your local community as a Group Member than a Trickster.

This is why the Blue Men, over the course of a two-hour show, spend time inhabiting all six lenses, and modeling for people what it looks like when you check All of the Above in the multiple choice question of What Does It Mean to be a Human Being. As Goldman puts it, “We wanted to speak up to the intelligence of our audience members while reaching in to their childlike innocence. We wanted to create a place where people continually learn and grow and treat each other with just a little more consideration than is usually evident out in the real world. We wanted to recombine influences to create something new. And we wanted to have a good time doing it.”

That sensibility is also at the center of Blue School, which is equal parts ritualistic, research-y, and rebellious. At weekly community meetings, for example, kids and adults take time to celebrate these different ways of being, as a way to reinforce the extent to which all six are equally valued. “I saw the Trickster in Dana yesterday,” said one young student on the day I visited, “when we walked to the park and she asked us if we had heard of any mysterious mishaps in the area.” Moments later a teacher added that he “saw the Innocent and the Artist in Mati when she was working really intently and precisely to draw negative space.”

Beyond culture-building rituals, Blue School also works proactively to translate the latest research on cognitive science and child development into all classroom practices and professional development courses. Its teachers are deeply experienced practitioners. And its initial emphasis on archetypal lenses, playful mischief, and joyful learning has since grown into what Blue School calls the Balance Model — a richly visual comprehensive learning framework that is equal parts Academic Mastery, Self & Social Intelligence, and Creative Thinking; that proclaims the school’s determination to cultivate Adaptable Thinkers, Collaborative Problem-Solvers, and Irrepressible Innovators; and that outlines Blue School’s intention to cultivate a specific set of habits of mind in its students, from Openness and Empathy to Literacy and Self-Expression.

“There are so many ingredients that have gone into making this school work,” said Farrar. “And now we find ourselves in a position where we’re able to provide all these different conditions in which different kids can flourish. That’s the thing about schools — they don’t hold a static amount of energy; the energy is exponential. And when you’re feeling creative and relaxed socially, and when there’s real clarity of expectations, that’s when it becomes magical.”

One day after school, just a few weeks into the 2018-2019 school year, I asked Blue School’s three divisional directors — Laura Sedlock (Pre-Primary), Pat Lynch (Primary School), and Laurie Kardos (Middle School) — exactly how these different pieces had come together to wield such a place. After all, it’s one thing to know an expensive private school in New York City has found a way to be magical. The real question is, to what extent is that magic transferable — to all schools, and all types of communities?  

“All the things that look un-magical are what creates the space for the magical things to happen — here or anywhere else,” said Sedlock, a New York native with nearly two decades of experience in early childhood education. “Almost everything flows from our ability to answer two questions: What does it mean to really observe children? And how do we document each child’s learning more meaningfully?”

As an example, Sedlock pointed to an essential element of Blue School’s Primary program: “Big Study,” in which the children go deep on a particular subject over an extended period. Many schools have something similar, and usually, the subject of study is set in stone: the 5th grade will study ancient Egypt, the 2nd grade will study Ants, and so on. “But if we’re serious about listening deeply to children, we can’t project out that far. We have to remain nimble and go where they take us. It’s the children’s excitement that will lead to the big study, not a predetermined topic by the adults. But that requires a different skill-set than we’re used to as teachers.”

Pat Lynch agreed. “Our teachers have worked to become highly skilled at knowing that the best instructional fodder is right in front of them, and it’s unfolding in real time. Our role as leaders is to protect the space that allows our teachers to do that work. It’s very emergent.”

Indeed, emergent is a word you hear often at Blue School, and it’s illustrative of what makes the Blue School Pedagogy distinct. Spend a day there, and at all levels you’ll see students and teachers working on established courses of study — and wandering off in spontaneous directions. It’s an intellectual high-wire act — more jazz than classical — and it made me wonder what Blue School’s teachers have done to build the confidence that is required to teach this way.

“I think a real danger is to think that the solution is simply not to plan or have goals or to just give yourself over to the whims of whatever the kids want to do at any given moment,” said 4th grade teacher Ashley Semrick. “It’s the opposite, actually: it won’t work unless you have really clear goals for both individual kids and the larger group. The ability to be emergent as an individual flows from our ability as a group to have clear schoolwide intentions. Our job is to read what’s happening on any given day, and then to flexibly adjust as needed.”

How long did it take you to feel comfortable teaching this way, I asked her. “I remember back in grad school,” she responded, “someone told me that when things get rough as a teacher, you’ll just revert back to the educational standard you experienced as a student — even if that standard didn’t serve you well. Well, I can safely say that a decade into teaching, I am only now escaping that truth. It’s taken me that long to really trust that my kids always have something meaningful to say. That has made all the difference.”

“It’s taken several years for us to reach that point collectively as well,” added Laurie Kardos, who leads the school’s brand new Middle school division. “This is the first year I’ve felt like we aren’t in start-up mode. I don’t think there’s any way around that as an organization — you need to struggle with it — but for us, the work was in picking the things we wanted to align around, and then using each other to work on those things. What we’ve created is a space with the right balance of flexibility, choice, theatricality, precision, trust, compassion and autonomy. And with our experience has come a deeper ability to plan for the unexpected, not just for kids to learn something new but to become more effective at building off what they already know — and then to assess what they know not just at the end of the year but at every moment. That’s what gives this place life.”

It’s true — Blue School is alive, both literally and figuratively; even the scientists would agree. “We have discovered that the material world is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships,” writes physicist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra, “and that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. Life, then, is an emergent property. It cannot be reduced to the properties of its components. Social networks exhibit the same general principles as biological networks. What is valid for cellular life can be considered valid for any form of life. And the essence of life is integration.

“Organisms do not experience environments. They create them.”

As a result of these insights, Capra and many others — from a wide range of scientific fields — have concluded that “cognition operates on many levels, and as the sophistication of the organism grows, so does its sensorium for the environment, and so does the extent of co-emergence between organism and environment.”

There’s that word again. But what does being emergent have to do with making magic — and what needs to happen so that the magic might travel beyond Blue School’s walls?

If you ask the educators of Blue School, they’d say any recipe is a result of the sophistication of the learning culture they have steadily grown over time — the gradual mastery of technique, perhaps, that has allowed them to soar. They’d say it’s the intentional creation of a physical environment that is meant to reflect the values of the community that inhabits it.  And they’d say it’s their paradoxical willingness to be both highly structured and completely free — to ground the learning in a discrete set of lenses, or to craft a a Balance Model — and at the same time to protect the space and autonomy of the teachers to go wherever the children lead them at any given moment. Consequently, to visit Blue School is to experience it not just as a school, but as an actual living organism — an ecosystem unto itself, one that is both self-organizing and self-aware.

Which leads to the most radical, and replicable, observation of all. “In a nutshell,” Capra says, “nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature.

“The way to sustain life is to build and nurture community” — no matter where those communities may be.

This, then, is the work.

The Age of the Individual is Upon Us

Posted on | by Sam | 12 Comments on The Age of the Individual is Upon Us

One year, early in my teaching career, I got reprimanded for giving too many “A’s.”

“You can’t give everyone the same grade,” I was instructed. “Give a few A’s and F’s, and a lot of B’s and C’s. Otherwise, everyone will know that your class is either too easy or too hard.”

This was unremarkable advice; indeed, it was as close to the educational Gospel as you could find. It was human nature in action.

And, apparently, it was completely wrong.

“We have all come to believe that the average is a reliable index of normality,” writes Todd Rose, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the author of The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. “We have also come to believe that an individual’s rank on narrow metrics of achievement can be used to judge their talent. These two ideas serve as the organizing principles behind our current system of education.”

And yet, Rose suggests, “when it comes to understanding individuals, the average is most likely to give incorrect and misleading results.”

In fact, the origins of what Rose calls “averagarian thinking” had nothing to do with people; they were adaptations of a core method in astronomy — the Method of Averages, in which you aggregate different measurements of the speed of an object to better determine its true value — that first got applied to the study of people in the early 19th century.

Since then, however, this misguided use of statistics — by definition, the mathematics of “static” values — has reduced the whims and caprices of human behavior to predictable patterns in ways that have proven almost impossible to resist.

Consider the ways it shaped the advice I got as a teacher, which was to let the Bell Curve, not the uniqueness of my students, be my guide. Or consider the ways it has shaped the entire system of American public education in the Industrial Era — an influence best summed up by one of its chief architects, Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose applications of scientific management to the classroom gave birth to everything from bells to age-based cohorts to the industrial efficiency of the typical school lunchroom. “In the past,” Taylor said, “the man was first. In the future, the system must be first.”

Uh, yeah. No.

Of course, anyone who is paying attention knows that the end of the Taylorian line of thinking is upon us — and Rose’s book is but one of the many factors that will expedite its demise. “We are on the brink of a new way of seeing the world,” he predicts, and “a change driven by one big idea: individuality matters.”

In systems thinking, there’s a word for this approach: equifinality — or the idea that in any multidimensional system that involves changes over time, there are always multiple pathways to get from point A to point B. And the good news is that this revolution in thinking is already underway – it’s not just evenly distributed.

The bad news is that most of us have no idea that a revolution is occurring. Instead, we are stuck in the familiar notion that most American schools are failing, that the problems are too big to tackle, and that our slow and steady decline into, well, averagarianism, is inexorable.

I am here to tell you this is not true.

We know more than we think we do.

We are further along than we think we are.

And so, in the coming months – approximately every ten days for the foreseeable future – expect a new story that is about solutions, possibility, and the people and communities whose work is lighting that new path.

The Age of the Individual is upon us.

#thisis180

To Measure Success in America’s Schools, Count the Flamingos

Posted on | by Sam

As an educator, I can’t think of a more important, elusive, and agonizing question than this doozy: How do you measure success?

So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered a new source of inspiration for how we should answer it, by way of a 27,000-acre fish farm at the tip of the Guadalquivir river in Southern Spain.

The farm, Veta La Palma, is led by a biologist named Miguel Medialdea. I learned about Miguel’s work from a 2010 TED Talk by renowned chef Dan Barber, who first became aware of Miguel after discovering just how unsustainable “sustainable fish farming” practices really were.

To produce just one pound of farm-raised tuna, for example, requires fifteen pounds of wild fish to feed it. Nothing sustainable about that. In response, industry leaders have dramatically reduced their “feed conversion ratio” by feeding their fish, well, chicken – or, more specifically, chicken feathers, skin, bone meal and scraps, dried and processed into feed.

“What’s sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?” Barber asks his audience, to peals of laughter. Yet there’s nothing funny about the ways we have decimated the large fish populations of the world. And there’s nothing funny about an agribusiness model that, in an effort to find ways to feed more people more cheaply, has in fact been more about the business of liquidation than the business of sustainability.

Enter Veta La Palma, formerly a cattle farm, and now a sprawling series of flooded canals, flourishing wildlife, and fecund marshland. In fact, because it’s such a rich system, Veta La Palma’s fish eat what they’d be eating in the wild. “The system is so healthy,” Barber explains, “it’s totally self-renewing. There is no feed.

“Ever heard of a farm that doesn’t feed its animals?”

Eventually, Barber asked his host the $64,000 question: how they measure success. Medialdea pointed to the pink bellies of a thriving population of flamingos.

“But Miguel,” Barber asked, “isn’t a thriving bird population like the last thing you would want on a fish farm?”

“No,” he answered. “We farm extensively, not intensively. This is an ecological network. The flamingos eat the shrimp. The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. The pinker the belly, the better the system.”

It was at this point I thought about how much of Miguel’s work had lessons for our own.

Like agribusiness, education has been shaped by the logic of a single question for as long as anyone can remember. Indeed, just as feeding more people more efficiently has led us into a feedback loop in which we constantly erode our own global supply of fish, educating more children more efficiently has yielded a shell game of metrics that have allowed us to falsely claim success (or failure), when in fact all we have been doing is eroding a different, more precious supply: our ability to fall in love with ideas.

You know this, but it’s worth saying again: the ultimate measures of success in our schools cannot be reading and math scores, or better attendance, or higher graduation rates (though those are all good things). These are not our Pink Flamingos, because they are not indicative of a thriving ecology in our schools.

At Veta La Palma, the best way to measure the system’s overall quality is by gauging the health of its predators. What is the equivalent measure in our schools? If we started to view our schools less as solitary islands, and more as single links in a systemic chain of each child’s growth and development, how would we measure success then? What would we need to start, stop and keep doing?

For starters, I think we’d want to track every available measure of that child’s overall health: mental, nutritional, social, emotional, developmental – and yes, intellectual. We’d stop assuming that schools are capable of being assessed in a vacuum, and start making sense of their effectiveness amidst a larger network of institutions and services (think how much this would change the perception of private schools). And we’d keep looking at existing efforts to apply a more ecological approach to learning, from the Community Schools model, to instruments that help measure a child’s sense of hope, engagement and well-being, to individual schools that proactively measure – wait for it – curiosity and wonder, to, yes, the nearly 22,000 Montessori schools around the world.

These priorities would also lead to a different set of questions that could drive future innovations:

  • Who else, and where else, are our children receiving sources of nourishment for their growth and development? Are the connections between those resources and the school implicitly or explicitly drawn?
  • What are the components of each community’s ecosystem of youth development and support?
  • What are our young people bringing with them to school each day – figuratively and literally – and how is our work at school explicitly designed to help them find the proper balance between their different developmental needs?
  • How can we better measure the optimal reflections of normalized growth – i.e., self-awareness, self-control, self-direction, and self-satisfaction?
  • How much student learning are we expecting to occur in the school building? How else can we leverage the larger community to be an active partner in the overall learning process?
  • In what ways are we creating everyday conditions for wonder and curiosity?
  • How clearly have we articulated our school’s ultimate vision of success, and how clearly do our students and their families understand how what we do each day is in service of that larger goal?

To transform sustainable farming, Dan Barber proposed a new question: “How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself?

The same lessons of scale are true for sustainable schooling. As Miguel Medialdea puts it, “I’m not an expert in fish; I’m an expert in relationships.”

So are America’s educators. The central goal of schooling is not to instill knowledge, but to unleash human potential. The central model for schooling is not a factory; it’s an ecosystem. And the central measure of success is not a single benchmark, but a comprehensive ability to affirm the overall health of the systems that surround our children as they learn and grow.

So let’s get serious about applying two billion years’ worth of proof points in order to build, and measure, the ecological networks our kids actually need in order to learn and grow. It’s the only way to find the Pink Flamingos that have eluded us thus far.

The Brock Turner Case is a reminder of the important work White people have to do

Posted on | by Sam

Like a lot of you, I’ve been consumed by the Brock Turner case, and its particularly egregious form of privilege-soaked injustice.

Then again, we’re continually bombarded by stories that make it impossible to ignore the extent to which our society perpetuates different rules for different people, based on nothing more than the color of your skin and/or your proximity to power.

This week, it’s a Stanford swimmer who rapes an unconscious woman, yet still evokes sympathy from the judge who worries about the consequences an excessive sentence might have on his future — not how a lenient sentence might exacerbate her pain.

Another week, it’s a Black woman who dies in jail after being pulled over for a trivial offense.

Another week, it’s a young Black man who loses his life simply because someone else decided that he looked “suspicious.”

And so on. And so on.

As a human being, I wonder how we can continue to tolerate the inequity of the world we have created.

But as an educator, I wonder how our schools can become more effective at equipping young people to dismantle the conscious and unconscious ways of seeing the world and one another that hold us prisoner — and allow a rigged system to roll on, unimpeded.

So it was through that lens that I watched a powerful new film about racism, and how to become more proactive in combatting it. The film is called I’m not Racist . . . Am I? It follows a diverse group of twelve NYC high school students through a series of Deconstructing Racism workshops. And it is an urgent, up front exploration of race and privilege and power — and a powerful way to seed similar conversations in schools and communities across the country.

If you’re an educator, I urge you to screen the film at your school, and use it as a foundation for becoming more proactive in the ways in which you help all members of your community understand that racism isn’t just individual meanness — it’s the systematic inequity that comes from disproportionate collective power.

New Orleans is an all-charter city. Is that a good thing?

Posted on | by Sam

This week, the last five traditional neighborhood schools in New Orleans’ Recovery School district were closed – making it the country’s first district made up entirely of charter schools.

That’s a good thing, right?

If you look at some of the baseline data, it’s hard not to say yes. According to the Washington Post‘s Lyndsey Layton, prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ high school graduation rate was just over 50 percent. In 2013, it was just shy of 80 percent. Similarly, student math and reading scores have risen over thirty points higher than they were before the storm. Indeed, as longtime PBS education reporter John Merrow shows in his documentary film, Rebirth, there’s a lot to like about what’s happening in the Crescent City.

Of course, Merrow’s balanced coverage also exposes some of the problems with the reform strategy in New Orleans – from reduced financial oversight to increased social stratification. And community activists like Karran Harper Royal have gone further, arguing that school closures in cities like hers disproportionately affect African American students and families. “This push to close schools  . . . is the new Jim Crow,” she explained, pointing out that New Orleans’ “new normal” means something very different to residents like her. In an all-charter city, she says, “You have a chance, not a choice.”

Which is it? Are charter schools the answer? Or are they the beginning of the end of public education in America?

I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot these days, after spending the month of May traveling around the country to talk about my new book, which is (surprise surprise) all about school choice. What I learned can be boiled down to these two observations: first, school choice feels (and is) very different depending on where you live; and second, the question we ask when we talk about school choice – are charter schools the solution or the problem? – is not the question we should be asking.

With regard to the first point, let’s begin with a city like Washington, D.C., where enrollment in both charters and district schools is rising, and where the district and charter community are collaborative enough to have held their first unified lottery this year. Contrast that with a state like Michigan, where four out of five charter schools are for-profit entities. Then look at a city like Chicago, where more than fifty neighborhood schools have already been closed, where more will undoubtedly be shuttered this fall, and where shiny new ones are opening all the time – and this amid a larger climate of declining enrollment overall (you do the math), and you begin to see that speaking broadly about “school choice” or “charter schools” is appealingly simple, and completely inappropriate.

How choice feels depends on where you live, and how high (or low) the levels of trust, transparency, and cross-sector collaboration are in those communities. Period.

To be clear, school choice should feel different in different places, because different driving forces are at the root of different parts of the movement. Is the goal to build space for more innovation as a way to not just increase the number of charter schools but also create a rising tide that lifts all boats and improves all schools (of all stripes) in a city? I would argue that’s what’s happening, mostly, in D.C. Or is the goal to create a zero-sum game that results in the disappearance of everything old in order to make way for anything new? That’s what it feels like, partly, in Chicago.

Too often, our infatuation with charter schools has led too many of us – from soccer moms to President Obama – to equate them with reform. More charter schools, the logic goes, equals more quality and a reimagined public school system. And, to be sure, I’ve seen a lot more good charter schools in my travels than bad ones. But you can’t improve American public education, systemically, one school at a time (and, to be clear, although cities like New Orleans and D.C. are inundated, less than 5% of children nationwide attend charters).

This is not surprising to anyone who knows anything about systems change. “From a very early age,” Peter Senge writes in his classic book, The Fifth Discipline, “we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world.” This reflex makes complex tasks seem more approachable. But the truth is we all pay a price for deluding ourselves into thinking that complex problems can be addressed with piecemeal, or, in this case, school-by-school, solutions.

In Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane postulates that one reason we do this is because we fail to recognize the interplay of three different types of complexity: dynamic, generative, and social. “A problem has low dynamic complexity,” Kahane writes, “if cause and effect are close together in space and time. In a car engine, for example, causes produce effects that are nearby, immediate, and obvious; and so, why an engine doesn’t run can be understood and solved be testing and fixing one piece at a time.” By contrast, a problem has high dynamic complexity if cause and effect are far apart in space and time. This characterizes just about any major challenge faced by American public education today. Kahane says such problems “can only be understood systemically, taking account of the interrelationship among the pieces and the functioning of the system as a whole.

“A problem has low generative complexity,” he continues, “if its future is familiar and predictable. In a traditional village, for example, the future simply replays the past, and so solutions and rules from the past will work in the future.” By contrast, a problem has high generative complexity if its future is unfamiliar and unpredictable. Think again of the challenges faced by schools, which must depart from the traditional Industrial-era model of schooling to match the needs of students who are entering a radically different world than the one their parents grew up in. “Solutions to problems with high generative complexity cannot be calculated in advance, on paper, based on what has worked in the past, but have to be worked out as the situation unfolds.

“A problem has low social complexity if the people who are part of the problem have common assumptions, values, rationales, and objectives.” This may have been true in the past, when one’s neighborhood school was more likely to attract families of similar faiths, economic levels, and ethnicities. But a problem has high social complexity if the people who must solve it together see the world in very different ways. “Problems of high social complexity,” Kahane says, “cannot be peacefully solved by authorities from on high; the people involved must participate in creating and implementing solutions.”

So how do we identify solutions for a field that is marked by high degrees of dynamic, generative, and social complexity? One step is merely by asking the question, as opposed to debating whether we need more or less charter schools. And another step, impossible to avoid when the opening question is a different one, is to start seeing public schools and the communities they serve as systems, not parallel tracks.

Too often, this interdependence between charters and traditional public schools (not to mention between charters themselves) is given short shrift. Yet our still-nascent experiment in school choice – national and/or local – won’t work until we do. And although New Orleans’ highly localized experiment as an all-charter city may ultimately succeed, its strategy, applied nationwide, is a fool’s errand. “The most profound strategy for changing a living network comes from biology,” Meg Wheatley explains in Leadership & The New Science. “If a system is in trouble, it can only be restored by connecting itself to more of itself.”

So what does this all mean?

To unleash the sort of generative feedback loop that can improve all schools, we must see reform as a both/and proposition. We need to raze and rebuild, and we need to preserve and improve. We need the ingenuity of single-school autonomy, and we need the scalability of whole-community structures. We need to incentivize schools to instill in young people the skills, habits and dispositions they’ll need to navigate this brave new world, and we need to stop rewarding schools that are merely perfecting our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests. And, finally, we need to realize that as appealing as it may be to assume otherwise, concepts like “choice” and “charter” are not monolithic terms; they are fluid, fulsome, and unfolding before our eyes.

In New Orleans, and everywhere else, we remain in the eye of the storm.

(This column originally appeared in Education Week.)

What’s the Big Idea?

Posted on | by Sam

It’s a good question. And Montgomery County Public Schools superintendent Josh Starr is asking it as part of his new podcast series, which honored me as its first guest.

You can hear the conversation here, but one thing I want to point out: the show is co-hosted by a major urban superintendent and the head of his local teacher union, Chris Lloyd. Their partnership is a model of what’s possible. And their willingness to ask big questions is a reminder that big change is possible even in big districts.

Let me know what you think.

Why Adrian Fenty Lost The City – and How Vincent Gray Can Win It Back

Posted on | by Sam

Now that the dust is beginning to settle from the DC mayoral race, it’s worth examining what outgoing mayor Adrian Fenty failed to understand about leadership and systems change, and what Vincent Gray will need to understand – and do – if he wants a different result.

This is an issue I explore in my most recent book, in which I argue that any organizational leader, whether s/he is an elementary school principal, a Fortune 500 executive, or the mayor of an urban city, needs to develop three foundational skills: self-awareness, systems thinking, and strategically-deployed collaborative decision-making. I also explain, in greater detail than I can here, how each skill is necessary and insufficient by itself, and how, in an organizational context, each functions in a nonlinear fashion. It is only through the combination of these abilities that leaders become more effective, and there is no strict and surefire order one should follow in order to cultivate these skills in himself and in others. As with everything else, human beings refuse to behave so predictably.

There is, however, a general continuum of which we should be aware. At the personal level, we begin by reflecting on who we are, what we value and where we are most likely to thrive and struggle as leaders. At the relational level, we start to become more aware of how our behaviors contribute to the culture around us; gradually we develop the capacity, with the help of others, to “see the whole (chess) board.” And at the organizational (or city-wide) level, we resist the urge to sell “our” ideas, opting instead to consistently invite others to co-construct the ideas – and the responsibilities – we will share.

When these three skills start to take root in individuals and the organizational culture of which they’re a part, a palpable shift takes place. Transformational change, and the collective will and clarity needed to achieve it, becomes possible. This doesn’t mean transformational change will necessarily occur, only that the proper conditions will have been created. At this point, we need a fourth leadership skill: ensuring that people have the understanding, motivation and skills they need to continually work with the forces of change.

Working with the natural forces of change is very different from “managing change,” just as co-creating a common vision is distinct from getting people to “buy in.” In one approach, organizational systems and the individuals who inhabit them are managed like machines, and people are given pre-packaged “solutions” that supersede community input; in the other, people and organizations are seen as complex, living systems, and the inherent creativity and commitment of the people being asked to change is what drives all decisions.

The fact that so many initiatives struggle to change core behaviors or processes is particularly troubling when one considers that, in essence, learning itself is change. But the greater truth is less that people resist change (though they do), and more that they resist being changed.

Knowing what will be easy and what will be difficult when it comes to systems renewal is essential for working with the natural forces of systemic change. And although there is no single way to be successful, there are different stages of the change process that can guide Mr. Gray in his work with us.

The Three Stages of Change – Mind, Heart & Voice

In everything the new mayor does, he should be mindful of how his constituents will experience the changes in three areas – their minds, their hearts and their voices.

Here’s what I mean by that: Before we are willing to change anything about our work or our behavior, we must first understand why the change is necessary and what it will require of us (mind). To actively participate in a major change initiative, we must feel intrinsically motivated in some way to contribute (heart). And to follow through on our individual and shared visions of our future community, we must have the skills and capabilities to not only demonstrate new behaviors, but also ensure greater alignment between our internal passions and our external actions (voice).

Often, what happens in massive change initiatives is we pay attention to some, but not all, of these stages. Teachers are asked to adopt a new teaching style before they fully understand why they should do so. Schools in search of more parent participation fail to explicitly consider what it will take to motivate greater numbers of adults to get involved. And students are invited to play a more active role in school governance before they’ve been equipped with the skills they need to do so effectively and responsibly.

Implicit in all of these scenarios is the recognition that implementing systems-wide change requires an approach that encompasses individual, group, and organizational learning needs. Some of these needs will be simple, visible and straightforward, such as providing basic information; others will be intangible, invisible and elusive, such as addressing basic human emotions.

To me, the most accurate (and damning) criticism of Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee was that they failed to understand, or even value, the importance of addressing the human elements of change. Some might say that such a statement is too soft-hearted, old-school and quixotically progressive to have any currency in the modern world. Yet this is what I learned in business school, not education school. For example, in Big Change at Best Buy, their book chronicling a major restructuring initiative at the consumer electronic retailer, authors Elizabeth Gibson and Andy Billings underscore the universality of these distinctly human elements of change. “Getting merchandise out on the shelves at the right time, staffing the service counter with the right number of people and within the labor budgets – these are the ‘hard’ or concrete issues,” they write, “and they are the easiest to assess and change.

“By contrast, the ‘soft’ issues are more difficult  . . . and they are the heart of transformational change. The tangible features may represent the face of change, but the human factors – dealing with uncertainty, motivating and energizing people, and creating behavioral change – are critical to success. When soft issues are not addressed, the organization and its people appear resistant to change. As with any large system, organizations have their own inertia. Resistance, though an inevitable feature of change, becomes the convenient term for failure to address the soft side of change.”

Understanding the forces of change in this way places a unique set of challenges on a mayor, or a schools chancellor, or an organizational leader, because it means they must balance the community’s attention to both hard (visible) and soft (invisible) issues.

Other insights from the private sector underscore this point, and help clarify the optimal role for leaders to play in systemic improvement work. Harvard Business School professors Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat explain: “The most effective managers [in a multiyear study] recognized their limited power to mandate corporate renewal from the top. Instead, they defined their roles as creating a climate for change, then spreading the lessons of both successes and failures.” Management consultant Jim Collins puts it another way: “True leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to.”

Because systems change is such a nonlinear experience, and because it requires leaders both to engender a sense of order (as opposed to control) and give people the freedom to co-author the process, it’s easy to imagine Mr. Gray feeling overwhelmed about what to do. I believe the three-stage framework of mind, heart and voice can help him for two reasons: first, it will provide a guide for him and his staff that helps explain human, group and organizational behavior in any major change initiative; and second, it can be used as a framework for outlining a specific set of knowledge, skills and dispositions that our schools and community agencies should strive to cultivate throughout their student, faculty and parent communities.

All Systems Go!

Posted on | by Sam

Increasingly, I hear people talking about the need for “systems change” and “systems thinking,” and when I do I always wonder what people mean when they say it.

My own interest in systems thinking began a few years ago when I read Peter Senge’s classic The 5th Discipline. It influenced me so much that I dedicated a full chapter to the subject in my new book American Schools. Overall, though, I haven’t seen a lot of work in education based on systems thinking. But that seems to be changing.

I’m particularly excited about Michael Fullan’s new book, All Systems Go: The Change Imperative for Whole System Reform, which I just finished and highly recommend. Not surprisingly, the book begins with a foreword from Senge, who grounds the origins of our current system in the Industrial era. “That’s why they were organized like an assembly line,” he writes. “That’s why they were based on standardized timetables governing each part of the day (complete with bells and whistles on the walls), and fixed, rigid curricula delivered by teachers whose job was first and foremost to maintain control, much like an assembly-line foreman.” Senge urges us to imagine a very different challenge today. “The challenge of our time is not economic competitiveness. The challenge is to build not only “sustainable” but also regenerative societies — ones than enhance natural and social capital.”

Amen. And in the pages that follow, Fullan shows how that work is taking place in a number of different places around the world. He cuts to the chase on page one: “If there is one thing you should remember  . . . it is the concept of collective capacity,” which Fullan defines as “generating the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone can come close to matching.”

Fullan says, and I agree, that collective capacity is the hidden resource we fail to understand or cultivate. Instead, we overvalue single-resource strategies — making smaller classrooms, raising salaries, drafting common standards, etc. — when what we need is an investment in compound resource strategies. Smaller classrooms mean nothing, after all, unless the move is coordinated with relevant professional learning for teachers that helps them employ new teaching strategies. And adding national standards will mean nothing if the end result is merely more national exams and less high-quality locally driven assessments using the standards as a common frame. But this is what we do, over and over again. We’re playing a game of chess as though it’s checkers, making one move at a time.

This does NOT mean that all we need to do is give people more opportunities to collaborate. What Michelle Rhee understands, I think correctly, is that collaboration, or student voice, or democratic governance, is not an end in itself (as I alluded to in a previous post titled, “To What Do We Owe Our Fidelity?”) What is required instead, and what Rhee fails to grasp, is disciplined, strategically-employed collaboration that fosters a shared vision of how to create the optimal learning environment for children (and, by extension, adults). As Fullan writes: “Quality instruction requires getting a small number of practices right. These practices involve knowing clearly and specifically what each student can or cannot do, followed by tailored intervention that engages students in the particular learning in question, and then does the assessment-instruction-correction process on a continuous basis.”

Fullan provides myriad examples throughout the book, but a particularly illustrative one comes from Ontario, where government officials realized they needed to provide resolute leadership on some core priorities that could impact not just the government education agencies, but also district and local school leaders. The government realized that if it wanted to engage the whole system in a coherent, focused effort, it needed to do three things:

  1. focus on a small number of ambitious instructional goals
  2. create an instructional capacity capability to help coordinate the efforts of the many players (government, district and local ed leaders)
  3. change the culture of the state education ministry so that it had greater internal coherence and a commitment to work in a true two-way partnership

As someone living in DC, I read Fullan’s case study of Ontario and saw an immediate disconnect between what they did and where we’re headed. In particular, check out this quote:

The gist of the strategy is to mobilize and engage large numbers of people who are individually and collectively committed and effective at getting results relative to core outcomes that society values. It works because it is focused, relentless (i.e., stays the course), operates as a partnership between and across layers, and above all uses the collective energy of the whole group. There is no way of achieving whole-system reform if the vast majority of the people are not working on it together.

To me, that last word sums up why I worry that Michelle Rhee will not be able to move the city any further on its overall reform efforts. In work this massive and important, how we speak, and not just what we say, matters greatly. (This is what I was trying to get at in my recent review of the new film The Lottery as well.) Fullan’s book convincingly demonstrates that systemic reform is difficult but possible. It also demonstrates, once again, that until the tenor of our national conversation suggests a deep awareness of, and commitment to, working together to achieve results, our efforts at developing collective capacity will remain agonizingly out of reach.