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.
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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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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