The grief metaphor

Leave a reply

This morning at the gym my buddy shared a metaphor about grief that I hadn’t heard before. He said that grief is like a heavy rock that you carry around with you in your pocket. Over time it doesn’t get any lighter but you grow stronger carrying it, and so it doesn’t feel as heavy over time… but you don’t let go of the rock.

This reminded me of hearing Scott Galloway on the Diary of a CEO podcast. Steven Bartlett said to Scott, “You said that you are a middle-aged man who hasn’t gotten over the loss of his mother. Is there a way to?”

Scott replied, “I don’t want to. I think the receipts for love is grief. I hope my boys feel the same way about me. It hasn’t gotten in the way of my life. Makes me be more bold with my emotions.”

Rocks. Receipts for love. Heavy stuff… but important to hold, as long as they don’t get in the way of living. And perhaps we can be stronger in many ways because we choose to hold them.

Truly Student Powered

Leave a reply

For the second year in a row, our Inquiry Hub team has won the SFU Canadian Coding League Nationals. Three years ago, in their first attempt, they came in second. That’s a pretty amazing track record. What makes this record even more impressive: Our teacher who supports this student team doesn’t know how to code. He literally has no background in coding and everything the students do is above his capabilities.

Our students go up against schools with coding classes, and teachers who understand how to both code and teach coding. Our teachers teach students how to work as a SCRUM team, to take on leadership roles, and to distribute the work load among the team… And then our students do all the work.

Our teacher was actually surprised the team won again. He knew their project was good, but figured they probably wouldn’t give first place to the same team two years in a row. They won anyways. When I congratulated the teacher, he said he literally didn’t do anything, it was the team of students that deserve all the accolades.

I’m not going to say that winning isn’t important. The students put a lot of personal time into this challenge, and deserve the accolades. However, I will say that I’d still be very proud of them even if they didn’t win. I just love that our teachers create an environment where students can be so competitive leading themselves. This is a great example of a truly student powered project.

Here is their game.

The MC playing their game during the competition on YouTube.

And the feedback they received: 

Leadership blindspots

Leave a reply

We all have them, things we don’t see, even when we are looking right at them. We all have things that, over time, we get comfortable with and accept, that we would not accept if our perspective was fresh. We even have good habits that make our team better, but which also leaves us with blindspots because we focus on the progress we are making and miss the (hidden) costs of that progress.

This leaves us with two challenges:

The first being that we don’t know what we don’t know…. We don’t see our blindspots.

The second challenge is that when a blind spot is revealed, it’s often hard to accept. There’s guilt felt in not being aware of it earlier, and there is also the realization that you’ve got to move out of your comfort zone to deal with it… or ignore it and face even more guilt.

It’s an unglamorous aspect of leadership. No one is perfect, there are always things to improve, and whether you see them or not, whether you deal with them are not, you know there are blindspots… and having to face them is not easy.

Unzipping my lips

Leave a reply

After writing my last post, I recognized something that I haven’t thought about in a while. Being in a role as a principal of a public school, I’ve held a responsibility to ‘hold my tongue’. There are many blog post ideas I wanted to share but couldn’t. There are many points of view I would have loved to have expressed that I chose not to. I’ve had a responsibility to my position that has prevented me from being controversial.

Not too long ago I learned that a tiny reference to something that wasn’t even central to the point of a post I wrote was brought to the attention to one of my superiors. That person mentioned it to me, to make me aware, but did not ask me to change my post. I appreciated both the heads-up and the fact that I wasn’t asked to change anything I had written. In fact, I’ve never been asked to change my words on a blog post (though admittedly I was for both a Facebook post and a retweet many years ago).

While I’ve never been asked to change a blog post, I have on this blog, and my Pair-a-Dines blog, written posts that have ‘walked a fine line’, but I don’t think I’ve ever crossed that line. I didn’t cross that line in my last post either, but I did write something that could be interpreted as showing a patronizing attitude of superiority, with no real attempt at being humble. That’s not usually my writing style.

Reflecting now, I recognize that retiring and no longer having a role in a school, and a larger district, I am probably going to be able to be a bit freer in my choice of topics, and the stances I choose. No, I’m not going to be taking my metaphorical gloves off, but I am going to be able to unzip my lips a bit where I might have kept them zipped in the past.

I’m not sure how this will unfold yet, but at this moment I’m looking forward to being a little freer with my thoughts and ideas than I have been in the past… with less concern about my words misrepresenting others whom I might represent. Don’t expect instant controversy, but after retirement don’t be surprised by me being a little more loose lipped about things that I might have been more careful and cautious to share in the past.

Wrong with conviction

1 Reply

I was going to share a social media post that basically called science a religion and argued that people who ‘believe in science’ are in a cult and so it doesn’t feel like worship, it feels like sanity. I only just decided that I don’t want to bring attention to this post, because when I went back to the post, my comment was gone.

I found it in my activity stream, but on the post itself, it wasn’t there. My comment didn’t fit the narrative so it was deleted. I don’t want to participate in sharing this drivel when it was shared only to promote a biased and grossly misleading narrative, with no intent to stand on its own merit against a disagreeing comment.

Meanwhile the post has over 150,000 views and 10.4K likes. I’m tired of seeing people spew convincing sounding nonsense with conviction, and spreading bad ideas that gain traction. And this is getting worse, not better.

We have access to almost unlimited information, and yet so many people just ride out their biases and beliefs, standing their ground on topics they only have a tiny understanding of… Sharing half truths, misleading ideas, and exaggerated lies that sound as if facts are factored in, but they are not.

We’ve entered an era where being wrong with conviction will gain traction simple because it fits a narrative that is appealing. We are living in a post truth era and I’m struggling to see how we escape this? And there’s no way to say this next part without sounding condescending but I’m going to say it anyway.

I think we’ve reached a point in our civilization where you have to have a certain level of intelligence or you are doomed to get dumber. Either you pass a threshold of intelligence or you succumb to stupidity shared online that simply traps you in the stupidity zone. I used to have faith in humanity but if I use what’s shared on social media as a litmus test then a very, very large number of people are doomed to stay stupid.

Where it all started

Leave a reply

Facebook reshared a ‘Blast from the past’ post with me, it was a Daily-Ink post titled, ‘I teach leadership not followship’. This title is a quote from friend, and first teaching mentor, Dave Sands. What I enjoyed most about seeing this post again was the Facebook comments on it. Here are 2 from colleagues and one from myself:

Dave MacLean:

l’ve drawn from so many experiences from our days as Lakers. Truly the environment that pushed all of us in such a healthy way. So many strong leaders with such mutual respect for each other. I would be lying if I said there weren’t days where I pang for those days of pedagogical debate and learning. Tha for the trip down memory lane. I was recently at Como for an articulation meeting and our legacies are still present in the culture 15 years later.

 

David Truss:

Dave MacLean I can’t think of a richer learning environment than what we had. I believe that more than 1/3 of the teachers we worked with in the first 5 years at Como Lake became administrators… yet it was always about collaboration not competition, and servant leadership, by staff as well as students.

 

Elaan Bauder Gudlaugson:

Dave MacLean, David Truss

Como Lake was my first experience in education that taught me about how I wanted “school” to be. The staff made all the difference.

 

I’m fortunate to have reunited with Elaan, and we have worked together again at Inquiry Hub for the last 5 years. And she’s right… the staff really does make the difference!

It’s hard not to get a bit nostalgic as I head into retirement. And this is a good thing. To this day my closest friends are still people I connected with in those early years of teaching. We knew we had something special going on. We still see former students in the community who tell us things like, “We could tell you liked each other and that you liked us.” And, “Those were the best years of school for me.”

I entered education with an inspiring group of people who were also amazing educators and leaders. We grew up together as educators and we watched our families and children grow up too. I wish every educator could find a community like this in their early years, because I know I had something special.

There is nothing wrong with being nostalgic when I can frame it as being lucky and blessed to have had the opportunities to learn and grow within the community that I got to. It paved the way to a career I can look back on with love, warmth and fondness.

____

Update: Two more posts where I share this perspective.

Right and wrong

Leave a reply

I was talking with a colleague yesterday and he shared two interesting things with me. The first was that he has a friend who works for a large company, I think he said Oracle, but I’m not 100% sure. He told me that this friend has unlimited holidays, but the output expectations are so high that she can’t really take advantage of this. The premise is that you can take more time off than just the designated 10-15 days a year (as a traditional US company would allow) as long as you get your job done. The catch is, the workload probably doesn’t even allow that much time off.

That’s a case of ‘The right idea but the wrong outcome’.

The other thing he said was a prediction that I agree with. He predicts that very soon we’ll see the implementation of 4-day work weeks. The reason he thinks this will happen sooner rather than later is AI and robotics. Essentially the economy requires citizens to have buying power, and so you need a paid workforce… but there won’t be enough jobs to sustain everyone putting in 40-hour, 5-day work weeks, and there will also be efficiencies each worker has, thanks to their use of AI and robotics.

That’s a case of ‘The right idea but for the wrong reason’. The societal benefits of a 4-day work week shouldn’t have to wait for technological advancement in my humble opinion.

I would like to think that we are advanced enough as a species that we could do the right things for the right reasons, but more often than not we have to accept the wrong to get the right. We have ‘just’ wars, citizen surveillance to fight terrorism, over-censorship to reduce perceived conflict… the morality of these is dependent on how one is affected.

If you live in country where you have many freedoms but fear violence, you might appreciate heavy surveillance. If you live in a country where expressing your opinion could get you jailed, surveillance feels Orwellian.

‘The right idea but the wrong outcome.’

‘The right idea but for the wrong reason.’

Right and wrong.

Own it

Leave a reply

We all make mistakes. Sometimes we say or do things that we might believe is true or that we think is right, and instead we were wrong. No one is immune. Everyone errs at some point.

But not everyone understands an apology:

“I’m sorry that you didn’t understand me.”

“I made a mistake but…”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“I was just joking.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Ok, ok, I’m sorry, are you happy now? “

None of these are an apology. None of these accept real responsibility. If you really want to apologize, own it, don’t justify or belittle it. Own it. Or be a jerk and don’t apologize, because apologies that are excuses or explanations make you a bigger jerk.

Own it. Own your mistakes. And while you are at it, you’ll probably earn some respect.

_____

Related: ‘3 parts to an apology’

Breakfast for dinner

Leave a reply

Tonight I made breakfast wraps for dinner. Bacon, eggs, veggies, grated cheese, garlic mayo, cilantro, and some hot sauce, all wrapped up in a tortilla. It was delicious.

This got me wondering, why don’t we have more crossover meals? What would be wrong with a healthy granola cereal at lunch? I’d love to have steak frites for breakfast. What about pancakes for dinner, or a nice hot soup on a cold morning?

I think this could be a good challenge to kind of spice up meal time. Pick a food you love and enjoy it for the first time at a meal time that you’ve never had it in before.

Transparency Versus Need To Know

Leave a reply

There seems to be an inverse relationship between the higher up you go in an organization and how transparent decisions are. Yet most organization claim to be striving for transparency.

“It gets complicated.”

“We can’t appear to…”

“We don’t want people thinking that…”

“We wouldn’t get buy-in if we admitted these are the reasons…”

“Our customer wouldn’t understand…”

“That wouldn’t align with our messaging…”

These are all justifications while simultaneously touting that, “We value transparency.”

No you don’t. You value being perceived as valuing transparency. But the reality is that transparency means that you admit that you were wrong. Transparency is explaining an unpopular decision because you feel it is the right decision. Transparency is not hiding the uncomfortable truth.

Sure, there are things that should only be shared on a need to know basis, but other than for respect and privacy reasons, most of those less frequently shared things would not be a secret in a truly transparent organization. And it’s not just customers but employees who would appreciate transparency, and maybe feel more valued in the process.