Accelerating R&D Work in Schools

Around a year ago I read the book Accelerate by John P Kotter.  One year on from this, our R&D Department has published the book R&D Your School, and one of the chapters in this book is about accelerators for school R&D work.  Here, then, are Kotter’s 8 Accelerators as applied to R&D work in schools:

1. Focus on high impact opportunity - to meet important learning needs.  One example of this at ASB is that we have focused on improving our existing teaching and learning practices by new innovations in professional learning and technology integration.
2. Attract and maintain an inquiry coalition - our R&D Department and the various Task Forces are made up of people with shared interests who wish to pursue them.  These are people with diverse viewpoints, a hunger to learn and an openness to creating novel ways to meet learning needs.
3. Envision impact and design a prototype - our R&D Department and the various task forces prototype - it’s the single most important thing we do.  A prototype is a first model of something from which later forms are developed.  Prototyping allows us to come to new understandings and insights that let us develop new approaches, practices or systems that meet the needs of our community.  It is completely different from piloting which selects, takes on and assimilates a pre-existing practice.  Prototyping, on the other hand, drives continuous development and improvement.
4. Attract voluntary inquirers - this is an important job of the R&D task forces, along with opening up the prototypes to others in the school community.  Everyone on these prototypes is a volunteer who wants to contribute to researching the impact of the new idea.  These volunteers give feedback for improving the prototype.
5. Remove barriers to inquiry - Prototypes lead to new learning, visions and impacts, which can come up against the barriers and resistance of fixed mindsets, existing systems and structures, or people who do not support change.  Removing these barriers is essential to maintain the energy and momentum of the volunteer inquirers.
6. Generate and celebrate early impacts - celebrating short-term wins energizes the volunteer inquirers, and draws interest and attention from others in the school.
7. Keep learning from evidence and experience - be careful as early successes can result in “taking your foot off the accelerator” before the prototype has reached its conclusion.
8. Institute change - New innovations need to be instituted by the school’s Leadership Team - they will need to further lead and manage the new innovation so it is effectively and reliably instituted to meet learning needs.

Would you like to read more about how ASB has used accelerators to promote innovation throughout the school?  You can purchase a copy of R&D Your School on Kindle to find out more (it costs just $5).

A new look at strategic planning

I've worked in a number of schools that have had strategic plans.  Some of these were goals that needed to be accomplished within one year, others had more longer term goals that should be met within a 3-5 year period.  In John P Kotter's book Accelerate, he writes about the future of strategy.  First he describes the 2 basic components:  creation and implementation.  Traditional one-year strategic planning is often done in organizations with a management driven hierarchy, where all the decisions and the responsibility for implementing those decisions is done by those at the top of the hierarchy. However Kotter argues that the world is moving faster and faster and one year strategy cycles are no longer useful.  He writes:  "Creation and implementation will start to blur as new data are discovered during implementation which immediately need to inform new creation."

Instead he sees strategy as more of a dynamic force, that is constantly seeking opportunities and identifying initiatives that will capitalize on them.  He describes this as "an ongoing process of searching, doing, learning and modifying".  In this new system, based on networks, he argues that more eyes and ears and hearts need to be in the strategy game, not just a limited number of senior managers. I agree with this.  The most dynamic schools where I've worked, the most strategic, are those that have won over the hearts of minds of the people working there, and where those people have a voice, and where that voice is listened to and respected.

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Economic carrots -v- jumping through the window of opportunity

One of the things I'm reading about in John P Kotter's book Accelerate is creating a sense of urgency in order to bring about change.  In education I think this is really vital - we all know that it's important to prepare students for their futures, which are very different from our pasts, yet even though we know this there isn't the sense of urgency to do this in many schools.  Kotter writes about role modeling urgency - influencing 10 other people, who in turn will each influence another 10, leading to exponential growth of a change mindset.  He explains that this role modeling can be very simple - talking to people in the hallways, for example, or raising issues in meetings, telling people about what you are doing and why what you are doing is important, and in this way gradually influencing those around you to start to think in new ways too.  I think this is something that I have tried to do for a number of years - coming from my feeling that it is urgent for students to be empowered to use technology.  Writing these blog posts has reached out of countless thousands of educators, even at a time when people in the school where I was working at the time were fairly dismissive of these thoughts.

Kotter explains about why it is hard to demonstrate leadership and positive energy for change in a management-driven hierarchy - this is because they are designed around economic rewards or threats (carrots and sticks).  He refers to economic carrots where new goals are created and passed down from on-high, and new strategies to reach these goals also communicated.  These systems rely on measures being in place to track and make people accountable for reaching these goals, and then rewarding them with money if they achieve them.  Some years ago I was part of a group looking into a new salary structure at a previous school.  Most of the time it was just like that.  Interestingly enough, the consultant the school brought in to do these workshops made the statement that he felt these "economic carrots" would be attractive to teachers and keep good teachers in the classroom.  However he also went on to say that he would limit these bonus payments to under 15% of the teachers.  There were a number of ways of reducing the numbers to 15%, even if many more were performing at an excellent level, some of which involved looking at how closely people were toeing the school line, which was fairly nebulous and very subjective.  At the time I always felt this approach was flawed - it was based purely on extrinsic motivation and the belief that economic carrots can win hearts and minds and produce positive action.

There were sticks too.  I guess the biggest stick was also economic - the threat of not having your contract renewed.  Kotter writes that pressure from the top can often generate anger and create passive resistance.  Basically he writes about how the carrot and stick approach will ultimately fail, since they come from outside and are controlled and defined by others.    What is needed, he argues, is a big opportunity to pull people together by drawing on their hearts and minds.  Show them a window to the future, he writes, that is open or about to open, and get the people involved excited about jumping through that window.  Windows open all the time, of course.  They close pretty quickly too.  That's why it is important to have this sense of urgency.

In traditional hierarchies, however, managers look at the future in fixed ways - mostly through their silos (school division, department, how this window will change things in the future).  Some people won't like what they see as the future may involve a shrinking of their power and influence, or that of their department (less budget and resources for example).  Once again, this can lead to negative reactions and resistance, in particularly when vision statements are passed down from on-high.  Kotter explains the best way to change this is to reverse the traditional order of things:  first start with the window to the future ("big opportunity") that is realistic and compelling, then change the vision to be able to capitalize on this opportunity, then finally design the activities that will make the vision a reality. Combine a big opportunity with a network rather than a hierarchy and you can really have powerful results!

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An army of volunteers

Reading through John P Kotter's Accelerate, I've come across the phrase "volunteer army" to describe how networks get populated.  Since we are reading this book as part of our R&D work, it has made me think about how all the various members of the R&D teams were "recruited".  When I arrived at ASB I remember getting an email, sent out to everyone, asking if I was interested in becoming part of R&D.  From memory there were just 2 questions to answer - what do you think you will get out of this, and what skills can you bring to the team?

Now I already knew that I wanted to be on this team - it was one of the attractions of coming to Mumbai.  I don't know of any other school that has an R&D department and I'd already heard about several initiatives that took place the year before I arrived, such as multi-age classrooms, BYOD, games based learning, project based learning, personalized learning and facilities design.  The thing that most attracted me to volunteering to be part of this team was that in the year that I started, several areas researched by the R&D teams the previous year were already being implemented.  I liked the way that I could be part of something that would be making a difference immediately.

Last year several of the teams from the 2011-12 school year continued with their work.  For example I was part of the BYOD task force which turned its focus to mobile devices.  Later in the year I was also part of a small team prototyping internships.  Other new initiatives which have now been incorporated into "the way we do things" are the alternative school year and intersessions.

The R&D core team brings together a large number of people from across the school.  It's completely different from a management driven hierarchy which relies on a small number of people taking on important roles.  In the R&D network all sorts of people are taking initiatives and not simply following orders.  In Chapter 5 of Accelerate, Kotter writes about a "get-to" and a "want-to" attitude, instead of a "have-to" one.  Our R&D meetings are dynamic and I come home with my head buzzing, and I'm sure everyone else does too.  It's such a contrast with the bi-weekly team leader meetings that I used to attend at a previous school where people were incredibly passive and where I seemed to spend a lot of time looking out of the window.  This was typical of a system where people were appointed to these positions, and then took on their posts of responsibility in addition to their regular work.  It was also a control mechanism - we were told that we had to support various initiatives that were brought to us from on high because of being in this" leadership" position.  There was no discussion about many of these issues and our views were not listened to.  It was not a team that people wanted to be on - in fact some colleagues refused to take on positions of responsibility for that very reason, instead saying they wanted to "focus on what they were doing in the classroom".

A network make up of volunteers works because you have energized people who know they can be instrumental in bringing about change and make a real difference to the organization - many people are prepared to put time and effort into that and so the mindset is completely different from one where you have "busy, harassed people who feel they have been stuck with one more set of tasks".  Kotter writes that both head and heart must pull people into the network, not just the former.  Volunteers have the right mindset:  they initiate action without waiting for higher-ups to give orders/permission.  In fact being in a network promotes the development of leadership behaviours (much more so than being in a hierarchy I've found).

In a network ... people will want to be change agents, will volunteer, and will do extra work without extrinsic carrots, if they feel the task is rational - but much more so because they feel some true passion for the work.

 One thing that I've noticed is how the enthusiasm of the R&D team members is infectious.  A couple of years ago we prototyped BYOD with 2 classes, last year we prototyped BYOM with 3 classes, this year 37 colleagues stepped forward to prototype various mobile devices and to write a weekly journal about what they are doing and learning.  A couple of years ago another R&D task force investigated the idea of multi-age classrooms.  Over the past 2 years our Day 9s have been run in multi-age groupings and have now developed in both Elementary and Middle Schools.  More and more of our colleagues are being drawn into these experiences.

Some of the work we do on our task forces is, indeed, brand new.  Other work is about redefining existing ideas to take account of the challenges of tomorrow.  For example multi-age classrooms were around hundreds of years ago, apprenticeships and internships were also fairly common at one time too, but what we are doing is breaking down the barriers that have been erected by "formal" education over the past decades, and turning these ideas into a new reality.

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Hierarchy AND Network

Today in our R&D Core Team meeting we started to read the book Accelerate by John P Kotter.  The first few chapters that we discussed are about how organizations start as networks but then evolve into hierarchies which are not quick enough to identify important hazards or business opportunities early enough.  The argument behind this book is that both hierarchies and networks are important to take businesses forward and to deal with the rapid rate of change.

Earlier today I had the pleasure of listening to our Superintendent talk at the Board AGM.  One of the parents there later spoke about how the presentations had given her goosebumps (in a good way).  What gave me goosebumps was the way that Craig spoke about wanting ASB to be a school known around the world as being a place where the best international teachers in the world teach, or perhaps have taught, and a place where the best teachers in the world who are not already here want to come and teach.  I started to think about how we need to change in order to achieve that.

Let's go back to the network/hierarchy idea now.  Most organizations, including schools, are organized into a hierarchy.  A superintendent at the top, heads of school below that, heads of department below that, and the teachers sorted out into grades and departments somewhere at the bottom of the list.  Now Kotter argues that hierarchies do have their place and are absolutely necessary for organizations to work - being sorted into departments allows strong expertise to develop and there are very clear relationships and responsibilities.  When you want something to change in a hierarchical system a traditional way to do this is to add task forces or project management teams into the existing system, and usually the same small number of people lead these initiatives.  The problem with this is that change is limited and communication is slow and not very effective as it relies on being passed from the top to the bottom or from the bottom to the top.  However because a business has already been successful and grown - turning itself from a network into a hierarchy - people see it as already being successful and therefore resist change.

The model that is proposed by Kotter is one where a hierarchy and a network exist side by side and operate together.  Hierarchies, while serving a purpose, are not designed to be creative, to be innovative or to take risks and the people who have risen in hierarchies are less willing to think outside the box or to see things from multiple perspectives.  The whole idea behind a hierarchy is to keep people in their place and to minimize risk - it tends not to change from year to year.  The network, however, is flexible, quick to change, innovative and creative and allows many individuals to get involved to bring about rapid change.  The network isn't so much about management, but about leading strategic initiatives.  The network draws information out of the silos and hierarchical layers, so the information flows quicker and further.  It is connected to the hierarchy because the same people are in both systems, and yet it provides a different way to collect information, make decisions and implement change.

This is the important thing about the network:  it must be done with insiders.  People within the organization need to be given the opportunity to step in and get involved.  In fact people do - in my experience organizations such as schools are packed full with very dedicated people who are simply dying to work with others on something that is important and purposeful.  They bring to the network vision, passion, intelligence, commitment, connections, skills and the desire for action, and these are the people who go back into the silos, communicate the information and create the will for change among the rest of the people there, so that large groups of people - not just the senior management team - are thinking about various opportunities and challenges and about implementing the initiatives that have been agreed upon.  In fact only a fairly small group of people is necessary to be in the network - Kotter suggests between 5-10% of the employees of an organization - and this is an easy number to find because people love to volunteer to be part of a network as it is so rewarding on various levels:  for example collaborating with a wider variety of people than normal, being increasingly visible across the organization and being able to develop professionally.

What else is important?  Well in the chapter that my group read and discussed today we talked about the importance of celebrating successes and making them as visible as possible to the whole organization.  We also alluded a number of times to the way that the R&D teams are sort of like Kotter's idea of a network, running alongside the hierarchy of the school itself.  I've ordered a copy of the book, so I'm just waiting for it to arrive now and then I'll blog about the other ideas in it.