NEW School Rules Blog
The NEW School Rules: 6 Vital Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools is both a practical guide for how to improve the practices of schools and districts as well as a thoughtful examination of the self-imposed barriers that can get in the way of getting work done in organizations.
One of the unspoken rules of The New School Rules is “make your organization human.” From the way you make decisions to the way you shape rules and communicate information, being responsive is at its core about making your organization value people over processes. There is no better way to start valuing people than starting to put connections before content.
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Organizational Leadership & Change Management
As someone whose career has spanned everything from circus performance to management consulting, I am constantly impressed by people. Individually, humans can be incredible learners, capable of resilience and adaptation. And, in well-organized teams, we can accomplish even more. Yet our schools are failing to adapt to the quickly changing culture and technology around us.
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Organizational Leadership & Change Management | Strategic Planning
In Rule #1 Planning: Plan for Change, Not Perfection Alexis and Anthony articulate the importance of a clear purpose to help drive the actions and decisions of individuals and teams in an organization. As they’ve written, “We need to stick vigilantly to our purpose, not the plans we make to get us there.”
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As we support districts to use The NEW School Rules to make changes in their teams and organizations, we often hear the terms complicated and complex used interchangeably. I’ve also often used them as synonyms. It wasn’t until facilitators at a change management workshop last year asked my group to define the difference that I Googled “complex vs complicated” and found a simple definition that I like and continue to use today. Complicated challenges are the “known unknowns” and complex ones are the “unknown unknowns.”
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In writing this blog post I revisited notes from the dozens of conferences I’ve been lucky to attend in the past year. One conference that continues to stand out in terms of content, collaboration, and creativity is the Responsive Conference. I was lucky to join as an attendee last year and plan to return with a team of colleagues and clients this September.
There were so many great sessions and presenters, but one quote, in particular, has stuck with me. Jocelyn Ling Malan, Principal Incandescent shared this concise, but powerful advice about organizational culture, “Design things as systems, not in parts.”
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Organizational Leadership & Change Management
In one of the panel presentations at the Education Elements Personalized Learning Summit , Julia Freeland-Fisher (The Clayton Christensen Institute), Anthony Kim (Education Elements), and Lydia Dobyns (New Tech Network) shared what they’ve been reading, thinking, and writing about networked teams and learning. All three have new books out this year exploring the power of networks. I’ve also been thinking a lot about how we learn and how we share information as I’ve worked with Alexis Gonzales-Black and Anthony Kim to develop activities to support their book, The NEW School Rules.
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As we work with schools and districts around the county to help them learn about and implement The NEW School Rules, one of the questions we’re often asked is “how do I become a better manager?” There are many theories of leadership and what it takes to be a great managers. I am particularly inspired by the work of LifeLabs Learning, who help managers develop a coaching mindset.
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Strategic Planning | Teams & Culture
Take a look at your calendars and consider the number of meetings you have each week. Can you say that you go through most of those meetings and 100% finish on time and in each of those meetings you get 80%-90% of the agenda items covered? While getting all this done, can you say that 100% of all meeting attendees get a chance to participate? I can. Just tweaking a few things about your meeting will make a significant difference in your organizational culture.
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Many of you may know about the influential book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World that was published in 2016. General McChrystal and his book have had an enormous impact on how leaders think about teaming and collaboration. In particular, McChrystal’s book inspired Anthony Kim and Alexis Gonzales-Black and how they think about teams and decision-making in their own book, The NEW School Rules: 6 Vital Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools.
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