A Hopeful Subversion

February 2, 2022 ~ Colleen

I have been pondering culture and the meaning of community a lot these past few weeks. A recent bout of journaling has led to thinking about our approach to strategy. In my brain, strategy is a learning agenda; it’s a hypothesis of the value of learning. Typically, you choose a goal that you think is going to matter. Then, to achieve that goal you often need to do something – and doing something often requires learning (or unlearning/re-learning) something. For me, it comes down to did we learn (then acted) on what we needed to learn and did it have the value (impact on the learner’s experience) we predicted.

So what does strategy have to do with culture and community? The obvious answer is everything.

I imagine you’ve heard the alleged Peter Drucker quote as often as I: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This quippy statement, often met with chortles and chuckles, has been pulled out in almost every strategic workshop I’ve been in over the past decade, and yet, my experience suggests it’s problematic to pit one against the other in any way. Rather, I believe culture is strategy. Full stop. So, following my “strategy is a learning agenda” one could surmise that why, how, and what we choose to learn is key. All of these processes, decisions, and behaviors shape and will be shaped by culture. Who decides and who does the learning is also critical. Who is the community. (I’ll move on. This is heading into an Abbot and Costello’s Who’s on First bit).

Strategy is a tough nut to crack with decades of assumptions of what a strategy should be and do within an organization. It’s often the operating system that drives the priorities and behaviors of the school if anyone is paying attention to it at all. I’ve been trying to figure out a strategic approach that is more generative in nature, creating space for the “what ifs” to emerge within a model that acts as a reinforcing feedback loop between strategy and culture, with one generating more possibility in the other.

Seeing Possibility

In 2019 I introduced an Objective and Key Result (OKR) model of goal management as our strategic framework. [New to OKRs? Head here or to Doerr’s latest – and hopeful- application of OKRs to solve the climate crisis for some real inspiration]. I had experience with the model when working at AltSchool whose executive leadership team brought it from their days at Google. I appreciated the impact it had on the culture of our teams in aligning and directing efforts to achieve something purposeful.

It’s clear, concise, and drives measurable outcomes – just what a strategy is expected to do, right?

What I experienced as an effective model at a product-driven, market-dependent company, however, is falling short of what I hope for our school. We’re not quite there, yet.

Let me back up for a moment. WHY we chose this strategic framework matters. We shifted from a multi-year strategy so we can continue to be responsive to our community’s needs and learning. Certainly, our school is not an outlier in this shift. Covid has highlighted how unpredictable and ambiguous circumstances really are in reality. More importantly, I’ve come to appreciate that this sense of unpredictability can lead to possibility when and where you least expect. The OKR framework is simply a tool to create alignment and engagement around shared goals on a more dynamic timeline. I believe it also can shift the relationships and power structure within the organization. Yes, leadership is responsible for illuminating a direction, but our OKRs are designed to turn our leadership team into stewards and project managers, acting in service of the efforts of our teams and students. At our school, I see the greatest value of OKRs is the transparency and the coordination of these efforts so they can add up to something valuable for learners.

OKRs signal a different way of valuing and doing work together. It is a completely different mental model of how the school has been operating. Schools are infamous for “top-down” initiatives. In my mind, the inter-relatedness of institutional transformation and individual work are significant. At the early stages of our development, my hopeful connection was our community would see that “my work and my learning matter.” Surely, this new approach would signal a shift. Not exactly.

In introducing this approach, we took the time to gauge our faculty’s response. Why? Only when the system can see itself can it begin to change itself. We did a few things that fed our learning early in the process:

First, we surfaced how we each associate with things differently by playing a simple word association game. (“When I say morning, you say…”) This highlighted that there is an entire “file cabinet” of experiences and emotions that leads to our reaction. We also emphasized that their reaction is rational and informed by a mental model that has been built over time. A moment’s reaction is the sum of our past. We made this visible by creating an iceberg model in teams.

This activity made visible WHY we think the way we do when a strategy is introduced. The iceberg highlights how patterns of behavior and structures reinforce beliefs. Not only can we see the system more clearly in the icebergs, but their reflections also unveiled what we need to attend to over time.

As you can see from this team’s model, feelings of disconnect and lack of trust proliferate the community. “Same shovel with more snow,” basically says it all. We accepted and acknowledged current mental models with compassion and without judgment. Although we did our own iceberg as a leadership team and predicted much of what would surface, admittedly, it was emotional to read some of the responses.

We also didn’t take full responsibility for a solution or a clear way forward. (Yes, you read that right.) I believe we hold onto stories that serve us and we all share in perpetuating the current culture. Yes, it is important for administrators to acknowledge the experience of staff, and staff shares equal responsibility for our learning culture. This is about our personal growth and the internal dialogue we perpetuate. Things are not likely to change until we each make a choice to engage differently with each other as a community and to accept collective responsibility for bringing our school’s potential to life.

What’s Clearer To Me Now

The source of the strategy came from multiple channels of feedback across our community and more importantly from tuning in to the energy of current efforts. Although I believe we have a valuable start, I trust we can do this process better. Where we seem to be failing (in all the right ways) and where I’m finding tensions is naming the outcome of the key results before engaging in the learning with learners. The pressure is coming from the mental models we hold true for strategy. I’m often asked, “how will we measure this?” and I think many are beginning to tire of my benign smile and “it will make sense soon” response. In reality, I am beginning to sweat this one a bit, too.

Currently, we can only imagine what it is we don’t know and what it’s going to look and feel like after we’ve worked like this for a year. The challenge with the OKR framework is it assumes a certain level of predictability, but students are not a product. We’re working with a complex, living dynamic system. If we map the entirety of our learning for what our efforts could look like, it will be a very static application on something that is organic. It will be a quick way to shut down real wonder or to listen to what is growing in our community and in the work of our learners.

What is becoming clear is we need to have some integrity with the intent of this approach. This is where I come back to community and culture. Alongside this structure, we put in place advisers and critical friends to be sounding boards and provide feedback on each other’s efforts. We have educator competencies sketched out as a terrain for faculty’s reflection and we have learning principles in place to define the impact we hope to achieve with and for learners. This model sits in a larger system designed to help shape a new culture of learning together.

Our strategy – our learning agenda – is my bet on this community. In three weeks, key result teams across the school will come together with artifacts of learning to reflect and tell us- based on the trajectory of learning they see in their teams – the impact we should expect. Then our job as a leadership team is to help hold us accountable for that vision.

What is clear is this model of a strategic framework for our school is my hope for the learning environment of our students, one that represents a shift in power structures and a sense of collective responsibility.

These questions I ask of our organization are the same I ask for the experience of our learners. How can we do a better job of creating multiple channels of feedback to shape the collective learning agenda alongside our students? How can we help students connect their purpose to a project that plugs into cultivating potential and holds value for their community? How do we help students develop plans and access resources to support their development? How do we match students with critical friends and advisers to expand their network of support and stretch what they believe is possible? How do we enlist their perspective to determine if we, as a community, are having the impact we hope and believe possible?

This is why my ponderings of culture and community landed me on strategy. How we do the work and who chooses it is as important as the work that we do. Perhaps this is a bastardization of the OKR framework for the purists out there, but I’m wondering if subverting a structure that holds limits for learning at an organizational level will help us confront the structures we have for limiting the learning of our students. I’m finding the tensions incredibly helpful and hopeful when translated to a living system. In Part II, I’ll break down an example of a project and its inter-related parts in case you’re wondering how this looks on the ground.

Combatting Cognitive Myopia: Traveling the ladder of inference

March 12, 2021March 15, 2021 ~ Colleen

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
Mary Oliver, Upstream

One line, captured in my journal, has my attention today. Again. “Our habitual way of showing up will get in our way.” It was wedged on the side of some notes tracking the conversation on a Zoom call with the team from the Center of Systems Awareness and a cohort pursuing our master practitioner certification. At the time, Senge was leading an exploration of the Limits to Growth archetype, and I was spinning out on how my way of showing up was possibly getting in the way of other’s potential. What is becoming more clear is regardless of my intentions to help amplify the possible, my assumptions, judgments, and opinions could be sabotaging the future I am seeking to cultivate.

This is the tricky thing about assumptions, right? You have to take a bit of time to surface them or you march along, blind to the fact that these beliefs are not necessarily true. If Kegan and Lahey’s work on immunity to change taught me anything, it is that only by surfacing assumptions can we examine them objectively instead of living through them – and, hopefully, in this examination, can we perhaps remove whatever barrier may be getting in the way of really listening, of shifting to learning that is generative in nature.

So all this pondering about how to “hang our assumptions in front of us” as physicist David Bohm would say, has me itchy for action, especially in light of my obsession with ACT (covered in the last post) and my attempt to see with new eyes. This is where Bucky’s brilliance and the Compassionate Systems Framework intersect.

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which, will lead to new ways of thinking.”
Buckminster Fuller

In my last post, I admitted to abandoning all the typical ways I’ve engaged with educators in the past. In this case, I didn’t feel a need for a new tool. Instead, I simply opted to immerse and observe – and to withhold any conclusion or labels. Ha! It’s amazing how much easier said than done this is… how my lens of learner-centered environments often blocked the view of what was happening right in front of me. What I quickly discovered is I needed something more tangible and concrete to break the habitual thoughts, to move beyond my eagerness to help with instructional ideas and resources, to move beyond coaching and questioning, to move toward surfacing the assumptions that were getting in the way of seeing a current reality.

Meet the ladder of inference.

*Chris Argyris developed a Ladder of Inference to describe how people form and sustain mental models.* Image clipped from Foresight Design Initiative and all the notes are my own, based on reflection.

Without dragging you up the ladder step by step, I’ll call out a few things of significance that may be beneficial in work beyond my own.

Slow the heck down. Taking the time to fill out the tool combats lazy thinking and the lightning-quick conclusions that happen by default. I’m reflective by nature, but it wasn’t until I slowed down and traveled the prompts did I honestly appraise my own thinking and thought process.
Attention and intention go hand and hand. Although the tool falls short of helping to examine the realities of assumptions (the Immunity to Change maps are far better for that) it does serve to open the aperture and provide space to shift attention to more dynamic, organic ideas. Without creating this visualization I couldn’t see the gap between where my attention went when I was with educators and my intention to help surface possibility.
The more expansive the observable data, the more expansive the action. Observation takes time. The more data one can collect, the greater the terrain to choose from when it comes to adding meaning. When I could select different data, I attached different meaning — which led to a shift in a set of assumptions. In previous structures, I noticed we were limiting ourselves to data that perpetuated our existing beliefs about kids and learning. All of this to say, taking the time to gather more data opens up the thinking and the possibilities.

I can only speak for myself, but I imagine it’s true for all of us: It is difficult to grasp how entrenched our beliefs and practices may be until we choose to consciously break from a “cognitive myopia” that may be perpetuating our actions regardless of our best intentions. I’m trying to walk a more balanced inquiry between advocacy (what I hope and want) and investigation (what the data is telling me). Leaders need to work much harder at taking the time to collect data. In this way, I increase awareness of my thinking and reasoning. More importantly, tools like this make my reasoning visible to others, inviting dialogue around how they may see things differently, and why. It is in this space of dialogue where potential unfolds.

Every darn time.

March 1, 2021March 1, 2021 ~ Colleen

Today I return to why I write. While many may write as a form of rhetoric, to persuade or inspire, I write to deepen my understanding of a subject, as a way of navigating and honoring complexity and truth. Sometimes my writing lies dormant longer than I’d like, awaiting a spark that combats all resistance. This is such a moment. What I am grappling with right now is the thinking found in one of the finest articles on leadership and change I have encountered in a long time: Quinn, Spreitzer, and Brown’s Changing Others Through Changing Ourselves: The Transformation of Human Systems. So much of it resonates and stretches my belief of what is possible that I want to sit with it beyond a single reading and a single post, so beware… I’m enjoying wading through some mud right now.

I feel there is no doubt – regardless of logic, intention, or need – that most efforts to bring about change fail. Why? In a nutshell, we fail to appreciate the complexities of human systems and underestimate the degree to which a change is adaptive vs. technical. (Need a reminder? Technical change, while often challenging, can be solved by applying existing know-how and current problem-solving processes. Change that is adaptive in nature requires individuals to alter their ways and seek solutions beyond their current tools and expertise. Want more? Adaptive Work, Ron Heifetz).

I believe the changes we need in education are undeniably adaptive in nature if we are to transform the system. Not only does this mean we need to bridge a significant gap between a new state of possibility and current reality by going beyond existing approaches, but it also means we need to accept that we ourselves are the problem.

Quinn, et all highlight what is truly at the heart of adaptive change – and it is so much more than I had defined previously:

“In adaptive change, people… must surrender their present self and put themselves in jeopardy by becoming part of an emergent system” (147).
Changing Others Through Changing Ourselves

It’s worth reading that sentence again… surrender their present self and put themselves in jeopardy by becoming part of an emergent system. In this brief article, the authors seek to answer, “How can an individual engage others in a change effort when doing so requires them to make painful adjustments and put themselves in jeopardy?” And the answer is straightforward: Changing others requires changing ourselves first.

The authors present a set of principles that comprise what they call Advanced Change Theory, “a strategy less observable and more complex than the traditional change strategies of rational persuasion, coercion, or participation” (148). [I’ve summarized it in the table below] What is significant for me is even at our “best”, such as engaging in models of change that are co-created and collaborative, our approach will continue to fall short of truly meeting the potential and possibility of this moment.

The ACT principles [the final column above] articulates a journey I’ve been traveling for some time, especially this curiosity around building an awareness of the realities of the emergent system. The authors highlight the importance of creating a new social reality, adjusting away from self-interest, to building an emergent community that can learn, adapt and grow (Quinn, et al. 150). What this highlights for me is an essential question worthy of pursuing: How do I act from a place of integrity to my own values and beliefs, while being able to suspend those beliefs and engage the current context with an openness to new and emerging patterns?

This exploration of “lands that are foreign and uncharted in Western thought” (Wheatley, 139) has challenged many of my assumptions about change and put a lot of pressure on the typical frameworks many of us have employed (ie. Kotter’s 8-Step Process, McKinsey’s 7 – S Framework, Lewin’s change model, ADKAR, C-BAM, etc). Until we experience a new social reality and a true community of inclusion, we can’t recognize how powerful, how hopeful, an education can be.

Well, now what? What does all this swirling lead to when I go to work tomorrow morning? How can I consciously and continuously continue this dance of discovery, expanding and narrowing my gaze between the whole of the organization and the individuals who live, work, and learn there?

For those who have been reading along, these pages have served to anchor me in a growing set of new practices as a leader seeking to be immersed in an emergent system. So, today, I’ll add just one: building on my capacity to see with fresh eyes. This means disrupting my habitual way of thinking and perceiving. Neuroscientist Francisco Varela calls this “suspension” – and as esoteric as this may sound, I’ve experienced tangible steps that are adding up to an ability to become aware of my thoughts, loosening their influence on what I see. It started here: I have completely changed my “protocol” of classroom observations – to no protocol at all. I show up early, stay for entire classes, linger in hallways and with teachers, going beyond the boundaries of the class period. I’ve let go of using our competency framework and referencing our learning principles and simply observe without forming conclusions to what those observations mean and I try to listen to what is beyond being said. I listen a lot. I sit with, sometimes draw, all the seemingly unrelated bits of information and every darn time, I’m amazed by the fresh ideas and the fresh conversations that emerge — and how things are connecting, how patterns are emerging. This is the shift in the generative social field. This is the practice I will take to work tomorrow – and the next day.

Reference

Wheatley, Margaret J.. Leadership and the New Science Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Changing Others Through Changing Ourselves (linked)

Uncovering Blind Spots of Experience: Facing Urgency with Patience

October 11, 2020October 11, 2020 ~ Colleen

We make the road by walking.
Paulo Friere and Myles Horton

I’ve been facilitating professional learning for the bulk of my career, beginning as a school designer and instructional coach with EL Education in 2004. What I learned in those early days of working with teachers and principals is the importance of “wearing the student hat” in our own learning, of experiencing the role of a student when expanding pedagogy. Friend and former colleague Meg Riordan and her writing partner Emily Klein highlight the research behind the experiential professional development model in this article exploring the four key components that contribute to the success of transferring their learning to the learning experience of students. Over the years I’ve learned an experiential model of professional learning does lend to meaningful change.

Now we find ourselves in need of urgent change, not only because the systems and structures of education fall short of serving all students, which has been true for a long time, but because so many teachers, students and families have been catapulted into new environments for engaging in learning.

We’ve always held high expectations for our teachers, and over time we’ve piled more and more on their plates without really removing anything. Now we’ve placed on them the need to revolutionize an education system brilliant in its design – but certainly not its outcomes – resilient to change in so many ways. We bombard them with webinars; we drip-feed new instructional strategies via twitter; we cheer from the sidelines, changing their job descriptions and expanding their roles. Until we rethink how we will approach change, our efforts are likely to fall short of achieving a future that is possible.

So where might that leave us? Last week I wrapped up the first stage of what will be a year-long commitment focused on Compassionate Systems, a mindset and a set of tools that helps uncover blindspots of both individuals and communities. This global team of forty educators and community leaders, led by Peter Senge, Mette Miriam Boell and the team at the Center for Systems Awareness, has been invited to grow into master practitioners who can develop an organizational climate and culture that ultimately ensures people within the community (students, parents, teachers and leaders) are adept at integrating the inner and outer dimensions of systems awareness.

Dustin Yellin’s Psychogeographies invite viewers to engage with the legions of their own consciousness and its embodied emotions as well as that of our shared collective society and its infrastructures. To me, his work is a perfect representation of the social field. (Courtesy, https://dustinyellin.com/)

After five days immersed online with this community, it’s interesting that I found my way back to what I’ve believed to be true for most of my career: experience is the ultimate teacher. Much like my days with EL, I recognize how important it is that we don the learner hat and experience the shifts intimately for ourselves. What is becoming clearer, however, is how we experience things. Yes, reflection is critical, but over the last five days I recognized there are additional dimensions to experience I hadn’t considered both personally and in my role as a leader. There exist dimensions that will allow us to move beyond historical approaches and replications of “better”, yet similar, systems of bias and inequity.

At this stage, I barely have the language to capture what is emerging. The closest I can find is the work of neuroscientist Francisco Varela. Verala’s work highlights the importance of an awareness of our lived experience, not just reflection after the fact.

What is becoming more clear is the role the Compassionate Systems tools play in deepening this awareness – an awareness perhaps that allows us to break the patterns of the past and make space for a very different future to emerge.

I see implications on my (well, anyone’s) work based on Verala’s insights. The first is a commitment to modeling meta-awareness. In this moment’s urgent need for change, I recognize speed will only diminish the potential of the school. I’m committed to stepping into this space of change conscious and careful so as not to reduce the transformational promise of this moment. Not only does this demand a patience I often struggle to employ, it means cultivating both the vulnerability and the discipline to make visible my own attentive state and my emergent thought process. This is sure to be an interesting ride.

Mission, Meetings, and Muda

August 30, 2020 ~ Colleen

It’s been a while since I took the time to gather my thoughts. The end of last school year was such a relief that I ran, both literally and figuratively, from so many of the realities that remain. While the pandemic continues to sweep the globe, impacting millions and racial pressures continue to bubble above and below the surface, I feel choked up with emotions and words unspoken. Silence and inactivity, however, are not a solution.

So, I return to chisel away at the fixed, industrial age of education that seeks predictability and uniformity to reveal a system that honors and grows the uniqueness of each individual.

As we know, this fundamental change of how we “do school” cannot be approached as yet another “change initiative.” We cannot combat challenges such as systemic racism nor learning for our complex future by inserting online instructional strategies or adopting a new project-based management tool. As Senge et al, highlighted in The Dance of Change “the sources of these problems cannot be remedied by more expert advice, better consultants, or more committed managers. The sources lie in our most basic ways of thinking. If these do not change, any “input”, will end up producing the same fundamentally unproductive types of actions” (pg. 6).

The thinking I’m challenging at this time is the use of time itself. Our school leadership team launched the school year in typical fashion: a retreat to both ground ourselves and calibrate direction based on the spring’s learning. Plans were in place to use Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, our summer read, to reflect. Interestingly, however, we ended up in a very different place than we first imagined. Instead of doubling down on improving the processes of our team as predicted, we started by questioning why we even meet as a team.

Aside from admitting every school we’ve worked at had a leadership team that met weekly, it became less clear if coming together with any regular cadence was of greatest service to the organization and actualizing our mission. Instead, we committed to coming together only if there was an explicit purpose that required us to be in a room together and that this meeting would be the best use of our time.

Time, or lack thereof, is always noted as one of the greatest constraints of change. Senge underscores that “the fundamental problem, in the end, is not lack of time per se, but lack of time flexibility... Often, people’s time is so consumed with tasks and goals forced by management, they have little discretionary time to pursue what might be much more important for them, and the organization, in the long run (Dance of Change, 68). To this, I would add we are so consumed with tasks and goals not only forced by management but also by sheer momentum and routine as well. Until we consciously disrupt “business as usual”, we will fall short of creating the generative space that allows for new possibilities to emerge.

So how do we do this? I’m quite taken by lean improvement processes and have spent years exploring how other industries approach change. Toyota Production Service is a model I return to again and again. Through systemic structures, Toyota’s organizational culture includes cultivating an awareness of “Muda.” In simplest terms, Muda means wastefulness, uselessness, and futility. (There are complementary concepts – Mura and Muri – which I’m sure I’ll be eager to explore here at a different time). If we are to open up time not only for leadership but more importantly for educators and students alike to pursue emerging ideas, what are we asking people to do that does not bring value to the learner’s experience? Without taking you too far down the rabbit hole of Taiichi Ohno’s management philosophy, there are seven wastes recognized in Muda. I’ve taken what are typically manufacturing wastes and translated some of them into questions I’m exploring as we start the year.

Unnecessary movement between stages of a process: How do I support ISZL in amplifying small powerful acts to develop and test in the simplest way possible? What triggers the move from one state to the next?
Idle tasks. The Muda of waiting is easily the most obvious form of waste. There is no doubt that ISZL is peppered with potentially transformative ideas, left idle. Commonly this exists because people lack the capacity to pull the ideas through the queue into exploration and action. How might I create flexible spaces to invite the willing and the curious to build skills and understanding that may translate across the system over time?
Doing more than is necessary. The over-processing Muda often comes from defining success for your “client” too loosely. For example, team members strive to deliver 100% when one might only need 75% to reach their goals. At ISZL, what is the smallest unit of change that would inspire and engage learners in new ways?

The leadership meeting, when left without revisiting intention, each and every week, was slipping into Muda. I discovered it was easier to let go of our leadership meeting because other elements and behaviors within the system had already begun to change. We could identify waste because we sharpened our focus on ISZL’s mission and vision. This focus allowed for a strategic approach that included shorter timelines modeled after Grove’s philosophy made famous by John Doerr’s OKR framework at Google. This shift from the 2-3 year strategic improvement plan enabled us to identify essential projects and the people best positioned to tackle these projects. We quickly discovered those projects required different people in the room than us.. Anthony Kim and the team from Ed Elements have unpacked this responsive approach beautifully in The New School Rules. It wasn’t until I rethought how we approached strategy and questioned my fundamental belief about who drives change that I could let go of inefficiencies I once believed necessary.

Push Pause: The Compassionate Pre-Mortem

May 31, 2020June 3, 2022 ~ Colleen

[Before you start reading. I committed to posting weekly, so I’m posting. It’s a reflection I started early last week, before May 25. It is hard to ignore what is happening in the US right now, and quite frankly, the world. The pain and injustices of black people – marginalized people – is all of our responsibility. I post today not blind to the inequities that exist but because of those inequities. I went into education for a reason and that reason has never been more clear. If we don’t think differently about how to cultivate a system where everyone has a right to thrive, then we are the problem. Perhaps what follows may provide a step to honoring the communities that we serve, wherever they may be.]

Wherever I seem to turn these days, people are posting plans for reopening, redesigning, or reimagining school for August and September. I get it. It’s a critical time in education. It’s during such moments, however, that stepping back can make a huge difference when it comes to creating a possible future. Unless we pause during this planning stage, “we will fail to see the blind spots of our change efforts, which are often based on rigid assumptions and agendas. We will fail to see that transforming systems is ultimately about transforming relationships among people who shape those systems.” (Peter Senge)

What could that look like? A key tool I return to again and again is the process of the pre-mortem. In brief, a pre-mortem is a meeting before a plan is implemented or a project starts in which a team imagines what might happen to cause it to fail. The team then works backward to create a plan to help prevent potential obstacles and increase the chances of success. This technique is recommended by behavioral psychologists and neuroscientists as an especially effective way of combatting cognitive bias and reducing project risk. I was introduced to the pre-mortem by a colleague from the Learner-Centered Collaborative while designing an onboarding experience for new teachers. Since then I’ve used it for things such as developing our professional learning framework, in-service days, schedules, and projects with students. There was even one awkward moment when I tried to use it with my husband to plan an especially complicated climbing trip.

What do you do? The process is deceptively simple.

Prepare: Before you start the pre-mortem, make sure everyone is clear on the plan. And by everyone, I mean a team of representative stakeholders. It’s best to have a full range of perspectives. I’ve messed this up before. For example, the first pre-mortem of our professional learning plan was with our senior leadership team. However, when I reran the process with a few teachers, I discovered a whole pile of challenges we couldn’t even see. Once everyone has the plan, drop the bomb and let them know the project was an epic fail.
Why Did the Project Fail? Give the team an hour or more to identify why the project failed. I usually start with individual brainstorming and then shift to small groups. Tell them to be as imaginative as they can, capturing all their ideas in writing.
Share Reasons for Failure: Ask each person to share one item on their list and continue to go around the room until everyone has exhausted their list. Record all reasons on a whiteboard or a shared digital document. Depending on how long the list can get — and sometimes it’s overwhelmingly long – if need be, spend some time prioritizing which ones feel like challenges that significantly impact the success of the project.
Brainstorm with solutions: Get back into those small groups and begin to tackle possible solutions, mitigating risks to success and strengthening the plan through adding or revising their original step.

Here are a few prompts I’ve used to get the ball rolling:

Describe the failure.

What important stuff did we not do?
What unimportant stuff did we do?
What current problems remain?
What new problems emerged?

Consider Symptoms and Causes.

How will we know we failed?
What got in the way?
Was there something we lacked?
Was it not well coordinated? Communicated? Supported?

If you get this far, then it’s a win. You’ll get a whole bunch of mileage from this process. However, recently, I’ve added a new dimension to the pre-mortem using a lens of the Center for Systems Awareness’s Compassionate Systems Framework. It has elevated the process and guided me in considering more systemic outcomes. By simply reflecting on the three core capacities of system leaders as part of this process, I noticed not only better plans but more authentic work.

The three capacities represent an inter-related set of competencies (as Peter would jokingly refer to as, “the three sides of the same coin” or, more practically, the three legs of a stool) for a deep commitment to learning. As a result, they engender an alternative set of behaviors needed to allow a group of people to work at their best so that the organization creates the results that matter to them. The first is the spirit of deep intention. The Learner/Leader crystallizes their vision of what actually we are trying to accomplish. The second leg represents the capacity for reflective conversation. The third leg is about seeing the larger system to understand complexity.

Where does it fit? For the most part, the process is similar, but I’ve integrated additional reflective prompts to use during the pre-mortem stage to help uncover blind spots and pursue a more generative social field. I noticed in the first round of prompts, I focused teams more on reactive problem solving without acknowledging long-term value creation.

Additional Prompts:

Do we allow people to orient themselves toward what they truly care about?
Do we provide the space for people to change in ways they want to?
How does this align with our shared vision or help us continue to deepen our understanding of a shared vision?
Have we identified what we can do with the new thinking that emerges?
Do we build on our habits of reflection and inquiry?
Have we designed so we can learn from the insights of all individuals?

These few “simple” questions led to a big shift in my plans for a faculty conversation last week. Originally designed as a workshop model where I had planned to solve what I perceived as a school-wide challenge, I completely shifted the structure to invite people to explore their own challenges, offering up shared tools as a lens to see if it helped them make sense of things they cared about. I shifted the bulk of the meeting from the whole group to small group dialogue, bringing people back to share reflections and insights.

It was an interesting first step in reorienting myself. So many of us are eager to step into this time of possibility with dreams that perhaps were seeded decades ago. (At least that is true in my case.) Yet following the approaches to change we’ve always followed is unlikely to lead to the potential we see, and is likely to perpetuate the same systemic shortcomings. As Peter points out, “organizational self-interest becomes re-contextualized, as people discover that their and their organization’s success depends on creating well-being within the larger systems of which they are a part. This typically happens gradually as leaders help people articulate their deeper aspirations and build confidence based on tangible accomplishments achieved together.”

…. creating well-being within the larger systems of which they are a part. Right now, it feels like we have a long way to go.

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in medias res.

May 13, 2020May 13, 2020 ~ Colleen

In medias res, (Latin: “in the midst of things”) the practice of beginning an epic or other narrative by plunging into a crucial situation that is part of a related chain of events…
The Write Practice

More than twenty years in and I’m not sure I can even recall the beginning, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right? If I was doing this right, our scene would open at the end of the journey (insert The Odyssey here) building a driving need to know: How ever did we end up here, like this? But alas, nothing quite so elegant for these pages because I find learning is messy, sometimes poorly timed and most often understood in retrospect.

Our story opens in the space between a quick classroom conversation (yes, we’ve reopened our campus) and a Zoom meeting (hardly a unique setting these days). First, the Zoom meeting. Ninety- eight educators, leaders, and community organizers from around the globe committed to understanding and utilizing the Compassionate Systems Framework. The conversation, launched by Peter Senge, begins with a brief meditation before shifting to the focus of our gathering: generative social fields. In brief, generative social fields are the relational spaces in which we all live. This Zoom call is part of a weekly exploration of how shifts in these spaces can lead to the transformation of individuals, families, and organizations. (For a full explanation, head to Boell and Senge’s School Climate and Social Fields).

Through engaging in this call, I was reminded of the importance of knowing how I show up because how we show up matters. I didn’t slip in that we started with meditation to be “on trend.” I called it out because it’s essential for people (adults and kids alike) to pause and become aware of their emotional, physical state – to make explicit, the implicit. I am of greatest service to the teams and schools I work with when I understand the place from which I (the leader) operate, as Otto Scharmer would put it.

I now know why a quick conversation with one of our third grade teachers gave me pause and hope for the change we are capable of in education. In a conversation with her students, this teacher called out in a very authentic way that it “feels weird” for her to determine how they plan their time when they’ve had such independence. “Does that even make sense anymore?” she asked.

I imagine students scoffing at the idea that they would pick up where they left off. Then, the crucial question emerged, “if we continue to do our work independently, now that we’re back at school when should we come together and why?”

Why, indeed. It does beg the question what is the purpose of school. Why come together and in this way? It also highlights that these students (like so many others) are poised to help us discover our best self as a community when placed in the generative social field like the one this teacher is cultivating. How will we show up in this space we return to? Will we recognize we’ve changed in simple and sometimes fundamental ways? Will we allow for authentic questions to emerge and new voices to respond?

When coming together in generative ways, Senge noted, “We don’t have to work too hard. We just have to look.” And, I would add, listen.