Posts Tagged ‘ Cultural change ’

Questions, not many answers.

Here is an example in The Atlantic of how data is used for analysis that changes strategy. Sabermetrics correlates statistical data to outcomes and has been used for strategy in baseball since Billy Beane began using them in Oakland (Moneyball). It is now as unthinkable in baseball to build a strategy without using this tool as fielding a team without a pitcher. The current controversy is about who should really get credit for the win. What if the pitcher didn’t have a single strike out for the entire game? What if the catcher made every close pitch look like a strike? Does it matter? Only if you are responsible for outcomes.

How do we develop sabermetrics for education? Do we measure outcomes for teachers or students? What’s the educational equivalent of winning the World Series? What’s the equivalent of winning a division title? How about the equivalent of winning one of the 162 games in a season? How about the outcome for each inning of each of those games?

I love baseball, the great American pastime, and the correlation of data to outcomes that sabermetrics has brought to the game make all the more effective and exciting.

More importantly I also love education, the great American ask time. A time of inquiry and discovery. The current correlation of data to outcomes is that a child’s family income is a good predictor of their test scores. Is that as deep as we can go? And once we have the data, can we use the information to change outcomes?

2014
07/21
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Ten for Ten?

Lots of talk recently in the Ed Press decrying the high turnover rates among education professionals. If you add the number of teachers who leave the classroom for administration, the numbers are horrific.

Liz Ryan in her recent post in Forbes talks about the ten ways companies drive away talent. Is your district ten for ten?

2014
02/04
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Matthew May’s Three Hour Vision

Matthew May has it right. We no longer can afford to wait until the annual offsite retreat to react to the latest innovation in the education business. His three hour vision meeting is a good alternative. Perfect? No. But if you build some flexibility and interim decision points into the key projects in the last step, you will be miles ahead.

Educational institutions are notoriously risk averse. What if you get it wrong???

You have still learned much more about the problem than if you did nothing. Still worried? Don’t bet the house, use Peter Sims tactic of Little Bets.

2014
02/02
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By Any Other Name

All education organizations are risk-averse. It comes with the territory. We believe that no parent will ever entrust their child to an organization that is the institutional equivalent of Fast and Furious. But here’s the thing…every parent (and grandparent) wants their child to receive the absolute best in terms of instruction. Often what that means in this day and age is innovation – at least some variation to our time-honored pedagogy.

Yes innovation is scary. But how can we teach our kids that it’s okay to fail, if we are afraid to fail ourselves? Lisa Bodell, one of my heroes, says in her latest article in Strategy + Business,

Making it safe to try new things is critical for innovation to happen.

And yes, my educator friends, we must innovate! Think about it. By the time our current fourth graders graduate from high school, it will no longer be necessary to know how to manually drive a car. Maybe “FAILURE” just has too much cultural baggage in the educational environment. We need to find another term for a temporary lack of success. Any vocabulary suggestions?

2014
01/21
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Education
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10,000 hours of Leadership Practice?

There has been a great deal made of the 10,000 hour rule to accomplish mastery discussed in Gladwell’s Outliers and Colvin’s Talent is Overrated. Unfortunately, most of the references neglect the other part of the research that says that 10,000 hours must be spent on deliberate practice.

There is a great discussion of the Anders Ericsson research regarding deliberate practice in the book, Influencer. The authors apply it to the practice of leadership.

Granted, business schools typically offer a course in giving presentations and speeches where the performance components that students are asked to practice are so obvious. but this is not the case with other important leadership skills, such as addressing controversial topics, confronting bad behavior, building coalitions, running a meeting, disagreeing with authority figures or influencing behavior change – all of which call for specific behaviors, and all of which can and must be learned through deliberate practice.

OK, so how many of you have practiced those crucial conversations? Think it might be time for some role play? Your executive staff could probably use some practice as well.

2014
01/13
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What good is a performance review, if it doesn’t change behavior?

Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone in their article in the January-February issue of Harvard Business Review say that feedback, a necessary component of continuous improvement, is problematic because it creates a tension between two very human needs – the need to learn and grow and the need to be accepted for who we are. They describe the three ways criticism can push your buttons – truth triggers, relationship triggers and identity triggers. then they suggest six ways to be a better receiver, that is ways to find the coaching in the criticism. Here is the article.

http://hbr.org/2014/01/find-the-coaching-in-criticism/ar/1

Understanding and adjusting your attitude when you are receiving or delivering a review is one aspect of the process. This sensitizes the giving as well as the receiving. The other aspect of the productive review is frequency. In order to make reviews more productive they must be delivered frequently. Timing is everything. More work? Not necessarily. Go back and review One Page Talent Management by Marc Effron and Miriam Ort. This technique absolutely nails the productive review process. The review as described by these experts eliminates complexity and adds value…and changes behavior! And isn’t that what you want?

2014
01/04
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Changing Culture in order to Succeed

On November 14, 2013 Booz & Company published a whitepaper containing their survey findings about culture and organizational change. They surveyed 2,200 executives, managers and employees and analyzed the results. 

As an enabler of change, culture remains stubbornly under leveraged. Both the survey data and our years of experience observing a wide range of companies trying to transform some aspect of their business or operations suggest that culture is usually pretty far down the priority list.

Day-to-day attention to organizational culture from leadership is the only way to make sure change is successful. Your strategic plan must stress the “why” and its connection to culture. Change management consultants frequently use the analogy of a ship’s trim tabs as an illustration of how to apply leverage and change direction. Organizational culture is the trim tab for change. Recognize culture’s importance, or your initiatives (regardless of how logical or well-meaning) will likely fail.

 

2013
12/18
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What’s Your Story?

Turnover in the education business is a fact of life. I have been told there are 200 new superintendents in the state of Texas alone every year. In the United States it is unusual to find a superintendent who has been in a district longer than five years. It is even more unusual as the size of the district increases.

We work in education because we want to make a difference in this world. For a superintendent, regardless of your years of tenure, leadership is about making your district better than how you found it. One simple way to do that is to help your district to write their story. Ty Montague talks about writing a company’s narrative when a leader departs. http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/08/if-your-leader-departs-preserve-the-companys-story-first/

To ensure continuity of purpose, doesn’t it make sense for school districts as well?

2013
11/27
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Educational Moneyball

  1. Although they require a living wage, teachers unlike baseball players are not motivated by money; if they were, they wouldn’t be in education.
  2. The real measure of a high quality educational organization should be how many of their minor league teachers can they turn into major league all-stars. Hiring effective teachers that someone else has trained is cheating. Buying the Red Sox just before the World Series, doesn’t make you the world champion. 
  3. Most educational organizations put their rookies into the starting lineup from day one. Most baseball organizations carefully cultivate their minor league players make sure they are ready for the big dance.
  4. Even the best professional baseball player doesn’t win the world series every year, and the best teacher doesn’t dramatically improve their students’ test scores every year. In fact some excellent teachers don’t even teach tested subjects!
  5. You can’t predict the winner of a baseball game by knowing which team had the highest income. And yet, academic performance and a students’ family income are very closely correlated. You can even predict ACT and SAT scores based upon this.
  6. Just like in baseball, disruptive innovation in education will not come from the big money organizations.  There are thousands of highly capable general managers (public school superintendents) in this country with low-budget educational teams in small revenue markets just like the Oakland A’s. These educational leaders will be the source of innovation. Not because they are flush with cash from grants, but precisely the opposite. There were no baseball teams using sabermetrics until Billy Beane came to Oakland.
  7. Baseball is now a statistically rich game, education (though surely more important) is statistically anemic – almost all of our performance conclusions are based upon the annual results of three to five standardized tests. This too shall pass.
2013
11/10
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I’m not sure what it is…

Charter schools were originally proposed as schools run by innovative teachers to test experimental pedagogy. They were intended for students that had difficulty learning. In fact, the enabling legislation in many states for charter schools includes that explanation. These schools are created to try new things and share what they have learned to improve and inform the practice of education.

Today’s charter school students do no better or no worse than public school students. And the good idea of experimental charter schools has been co-opted into a profit-making entrepreneurial opportunity, or a way to reinforce our society’s socioeconomic  prejudices, or one of the government-sanctioned punishments for those schools that are unable to change the predictive nature of poverty. The most recent ACT and SAT scores still correlate precisely to family income. If charters are experimenting, shouldn’t they be experimenting with that? With a few exceptions (one or two here in Charlotte), they are not.

Many charter schools exclude students by offering no transportation, or access to free and reduced lunches, or the timing of the open house experiences, or school location. If a charter school’s enrollment does not include students of all abilities and family incomes, then it is  really not a charter school is it? It is clearly not experimental. It is clearly not available to all of the public.

I am not sure what it is…

2013
11/04
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Education
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