Tag Archives: leadership

The Great Reset or the Great Rethink?

I can’t believe how often good ideas get buried into conspiracy theories. See this article in the Nee York Times:

The baseless ‘Great Reset’ conspiracy theory rises again

A baseless conspiracy theory about the coronavirus has found new life as cases surge once again.

On Monday morning, the phrase “The Great Reset” trended with nearly 80,000 tweets, with most of the posts coming from familiar far-right internet personalities. The conspiracy alleges that a cabal of elites has long planned for the pandemic so that they could use it to impose their global economic control on the masses…

The article then shared this tweet:


Now, moving away from crackpots that spread the idea of some ruling cabal planning to use the pandemic to bring in a socialist and controlling government to strip you of rights and freedoms… there are actually some very smart people looking for the opportunity in this crisis.

These wise thinkers and leaders are trying to rethink some of the idiocy of our pre-covid world, and take this opportunity to do a reset of some sort. That’s not a conspiracy, that’s leadership.

Check out this World Economic Forum happening now: weforum.org.

What’s on the agenda?

Sustainable production: Almost 50% of the world’s energy consumption and 20% of greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to the manufacturing sector. How can we accelerate sustainable production and make it a competitive advantage? 

New digital business models: While much of the physical world came to a standstill during the global pandemic, digital connectivity soared. How can new digital business models help companies provide value and build resilience? 

Urban infrastructure and services: Many cities face serious obstacles to providing basic services, and COVID-19 has made it even more difficult. How can urban innovations help cities improve quality of life, resilience and sustainability?

Keeping populations healthy: The pandemic has revealed the need to strengthen health systems and ensure that populations have better information and control over their health. How can technologies help to improve and maintain healthier lives? 

Financial innovation: New financial technologies are shaping how services are provided around the world. How can we ensure that they are accessible and deliver greater value and efficiency to all parts of society?

Frontier technologies: Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and synthetic biology, are heralding a global transformation. How can we create, scale-up and govern these technologies so they “do no harm” while delivering the value we need? 

New work models: New work models are essential to address the challenges created by a transforming labour market, new skillset requirements and globally connected technology-driven industries. How can we ensure that employees are able to keep up with the evolving demand for skills and have the opportunity to contribute purposefully to the workplace of the future?

Imagine that: smart people getting together to ask meaningful questions about how our world could be a better place! Of course some of the solutions will be ‘out there’, big audacious (and to some, scary) ideas. But I want to live in a world where people challenge themselves to rethink what’s not working and use times like this to reset how we do things. The fact that some people are afraid of change shouldn’t generate fear-mongering and stop us from making thoughtful progress during challenging times.

For example, as an educator I’ve seen remote learning catapult the use of technology in classrooms and many great educators are rethinking the way they interact with students, and the way they get students to interact with each other. If the pandemic ends and we just go back to the way things were before, we are missing out on using some valuable lessons learned. And, if we go forward haphazardly from here without educational leaders trying to parse what we keep and don’t keep, then we are leaving innovation to chance.

Within every crisis there is an opportunity, and now is the time to rethink and to reset the post-pandemic world we will live in.

Average tells us nothing.

Part 1

It might be an exaggeration to say that it tells us nothing, but averages don’t usually give us enough information to be useful.

Individual student level: In Math class, kid gets an ‘A’ on his test on positive and negative integers. Then he gets a ‘C’ on fractions. Score averages to a ‘B’… but when the kid moves on to algebra, and most of the algebra includes solving problems with fractions, it’s unlikely the kid will do better than a ‘C’. The important information is the ‘C’ in fractions, not the ‘B’ average.

On a team level: When some team members have done amazing things and other tram members have done nothing new, measuring the average means absolutely nothing. You can’t look at averages when some team members will move and some won’t. The reality is that everybody has to be moving in the right direction, and when some are standing still, it doesn’t matter where the average is, it doesn’t matter if the average is moving slightly up.

The fact is that we are failing or we have failed if we don’t figure out where we are weakest and improve where we need it most. Athletes get this. They know that the weakest part of their performance is the area where there is the most room for improvement… this is a mindset we need on our teams to move forward.

Part 2: The Parachute Packing analogy and school grades.

Responses to change

I’ve been working on rehabilitating a couple injuries. One is a shoulder injury that I’m not sure how I injured it? This has been frustrating because it seems to come back every time I go beyond what I’ve already done. The other is my knee, that I broke in February. It has responded really well to me pushing it, but still reminds me every now and then that it’s not 100% (although these reminders don’t set me back).

My shoulder doesn’t respond to doing something new very well, my knee accepts new challenges and seems to be able to withstand new feats of strength even when I’m panting from the effort.

I don’t benefit from pushing my shoulder hard, but I also can’t stagnate and not give it small pushes. I don’t benefit from being reckless with my knee, but it won’t get stronger if I don’t thoughtfully push and push hard when I do.

I think sometimes we push a group to all change in the same way at the same time. We add something new: a new system, a new approach, a new process, and we expect everyone to respond similarly. But some people are like my shoulder, some like my knee. We need to support the changes we want in such a way that we don’t expect the same responses and results from everyone, and realize that some people are ready to be pushed hard, and others need to go slow.

I think this is one of the biggest challenges that any leader faces when implementing change. No matter how ready the team is, not everyone is equipped to change at the same speed. And the ones that are most resistant or least equipped to change aren’t effective if they aren’t supported in a way that meets them where they are at, or if they are pushed beyond capabilities.

My shoulder has reminded me of this frequently, and comparing it to the progress of my knee doesn’t make my shoulder any more ready to take on the next challenge.

Fair weather leadership

We’ve all seen movies where the captain of a boat or a sheriff in a town (who aren’t the stars of the movies) appear to be doing a good job, and everything is going smoothly. Then the crisis hits, the boat starts to sink or the bad guys ride into town, and suddenly chaos ensues. The captain abandons the ship before the passengers and the sheriff either cowers or puts his life on the line recklessly leaving the town at the mercy of the bad guys.

In the movies, the hero emerges or arrives and saves the day. In the real world, these good in fair weather leaders create chaos and upset, and undermine the productivity and well being of their team, and possibly other teams around them. There isn’t always a hero standing by to help.

It’s often difficult or impossible to foresee a crisis. In the case of a sinking boat, there are drills that can be run, but they aren’t ever run when the boat is bouncing up and down in a storm. Some things can be planned for, but others come out of nowhere… like an iceberg in the fog. When a surprise comes along, that’s actually when leadership matters. That’s when lines of communication matter. That’s when people management becomes a priority. Who can help lead? Who needs direct instruction? What can be delegated rather than added to an impossible to-do list. And who can be asked for help?

It’s when a crisis hits that a leader needs to get the most out of their team. Often we think of crisis situations as making a leader great, but my thoughts align more with this quote:

“Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to our eyes. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and at last some crisis shows what we have become.” ~ Brooke Foss Westcott

Good leadership during the fair weather, before the storm, is preparation for when the storm hits… even if that leadership isn’t recognized as anything special. Not leading well, not pushing the team, when things are calm, may not harm the team during that calm, but it prepares no one for when things get rough.

Leading well in fair weather doesn’t bring much accolades, and may not bring recognition, but it is preparation for good leadership when leadership really matters.

Here come the kids…

School starts next week. Kids will be entering schools in BC after many of them have been absent since the start of March break.

Yes, some will be anxious, and many will be nervous. But I believe most students are (also) exited and looking forward to it! Let’s make sure adults, parents and educators alike, model the enthusiasm we want to see.

We can be cautious without showing fear. We can be safe without projecting anxiousness. We can show our own nervousness as excitement and enthusiasm.

What we project will be projected back to us.

Shifting winds

Most school years are like prevailing winds. You know which way you are sailing and you adjust your course a little and keep going.

This year, and especially these past 4 months, have created shifting winds that keep altering the direction we are going, outside of our control.

If you’ve ever watched a sailing race, the most important aspects of a boat being successful are leadership and teamwork. That doesn’t just mean working together when everyone agrees with the captain. In fact, the test of a true team is how well they work together when there is disagreement.

In the coming months there will be some metaphorical rough seas, and blustery winds. To sail through safely we will need good leadership and great teamwork.

In our Province, we have leadership worth following and listening to. It is sad to see a team crumble under good leadership.

In other jurisdictions people are not as lucky. It is equally sad to see a team crumble because of poor leadership.

What we have to remember is that we are all in the same boat. How well will we sail through this rough patch? Calmer winds and seas will come eventually, until then the shifting winds are testing our resolve to work together.

Podcasting-Pairadimes-by-David-Truss

Conversations worth having

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had some wonderful conversations that I’ve had on Zoom and recorded for my podcast.

I’ve known Kelly Christopherson since I started blogging in 2006. We’ve never met face-to-face, yet I’ve spent years learning with and from him. His philosophy that ‘Every day is a professional development day’ is something I enjoy following on Twitter daily.

I met Jonathan Sclater in late 2011 or early 2012, and was fascinated by his Imaginative Learning classroom. I didn’t realize until this talk that I helped to push Jonathan into blogging and sharing his practice digitally.

Joe Truss and I connected on Twitter last year. We had a quick conversation about our last names, trying to see if we had any connections. That conversation led me to learn more first about his school’s meditation practices, and then about his inspiring work promoting culturally responsive leadership.

One thing that all four of us have in common is that we have taken to physically taking care of ourselves, and that has led us all into more resilient spaces where we have more to offer than we did before. Working in education can seem all-consuming at times and that often leads to poor habits around physical fitness and taking care of ourselves. The idea that a healthy body promotes a healthy mind is one that we have all been working on, and that comes through in all three podcasts.

I love having these conversations, and I think it’s wonderful that I get to share them. I also like that they are conversations that are as long as they need to be… they aren’t 3-5 minute sound bites, but rather full conversations. This is something I’ve enjoyed about listening to podcasts myself and I’m glad that these wonderful educators were willing to share their time with me… And you…
I’ve shared the podcast descriptions below along with links (names and images) for you to get to the podcast page to listen to them. Enjoy!

Kelly Christopherson: “Every Day is a PD Day!” Kelly and I have been connected online for 14 years, starting on a blogging platform called ELGG, which included a number of different educator communities and social networking apps that predated Facebook and Twitter. Although we have never met face-to-face, we have been connected members of each other’s personal and professional learning networks.

Jonathan Sclater is an Elementary School Principal in Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada. He completed a Master of Education curriculum studies degree in Imaginative Education from Simon Fraser University in 2011, and he was awarded The Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2012. Jonathan is passionate about using imaginative thinking in his role now as a lead learner. We discuss Imaginative Learning and the importance of taking care of ourselves in order to be able to give more of ourselves as leaders.

Joe Truss and I start the conversation off talking about taking care of ourselves so that we can be better leaders. Then we move on to meditation in schools, and then on to what it means to be a culturally responsible leader. The focus is on hearing the voices of the disadvantaged, and power differences for those that are disadvantaged, including students in relation to teachers and adults. “Moving from more equitable to equal.”

The quick answer isn’t always the best answer

Tomorrow marks the first day back from March break in our school district. Teachers will not be returning Monday/Tuesday, and can schedule a time to come in to collect resources etc. after that. The continuation of learning plan will evolve over the week in response to schools being closed to students due to COVID-19.

I know that students and families want to know what things will look like after that, but no one is rushing to give answers, and for good reason… This is all very new to us and our approach moving forward deserves thoughtful planning.

We need to consider:

  • Ministry expectations and requirements
  • District plans and protocols
  • Capabilities of staff & technology
  • Capabilities and needs of students and families
  • Fairness with respect to expectations across the district and province.

This last point is interesting. At one my schools, Inquiry Hub, we could almost run everything the same. Every class already has shared digital spaces. We could have students meet on Microsoft Teams during class time and students are only in class 40-60% of their day, so they could still have large parts of the day to do school work, and inquiry projects, and have free time. But how fair is it for us to expect this of them at home, when no other school is expecting this? How fair is it when we don’t know how equitable home situations and supports are?

We need to go slowly. We need to ask a lot of questions. We need to think about expectations at the provincial, district, school, and home levels.

A quick response will not be as good as a slow, thoughtful response. The pandemic has everyone thinking in ’emergency response mode’. What we need now is long term thinking and planning. We can’t treat a continuation of schooling like we are in a constant crisis with immediate response time required. We have to remember that the school year ends at the end of June, and quick responses now, without thinking and processing time, will not help us get to the end of June in a thoughtful and supportive way. We need to slow things down, think things through, and put the long term well-being of our students first.

Adopting tools in a transformative rather than additive way

Years ago I was doing a presentation to high school educators and things didn’t go as planned:

I started my presentation and within 30 seconds the power went out. I picked up my laptop and said to the 100+ audience members, “Ok, everybody gather around here.” 😉

I started a conversation about ‘What tech tool can’t you live without, that didn’t exist 5 years ago… and by the time people had discussed this with their neighbours and we started sharing as a group the power turned on… “POP” … that would be the sound of the ceiling mounted LCD light bulb burning out.

That’s when I asked a new question: “How many of you have had the experience before of having a lesson planning epiphany… suddenly you are up late at night planning… you head into the school before class starts in the morning and when you get to the photocopier… it’s BROKEN!“ ~Most teachers raised their hands.

“So, keep your hands up if you said something like, ‘That’s it, I’m never using the photocopier again?’“ ~All hands went down.

Sometimes ‘technology’, be it a photocopier, a presentation, or even a pen doesn’t work.

Other times the technology is new, and different, and not intuitively transformative. That doesn’t mean the tool can’t be transformative, it just means it’s hard to see the benefit or the value.

This afternoon a good friend and educational leader, Dave Sands, and I will be presenting to principal and vice principal colleagues. We will be sharing the value we see in using Microsoft Teams with our staff in schools.

For some people this is just one more tool to add to the list of other things they need to look at in a day… it doesn’t add value, it adds work. However Dave and I see it differently. We see how this tool can change workflow in a positive way, making it an effective way to streamline communication with different teams of people that you work with. Here are a few key points about how a tool like Microsoft Teams can be transformative:

1. It can reduce and be more efficient than email.

Have you ever shared an email that requires a response from a group of people? Some ‘Reply All’, some don’t. And you’ve got to figure out what’s what, and collate the information while responses trickle in.

Have you ever shared information with a group and one-by-one people ask the same clarifying question that you end having to respond to individually?

Have you received an email from someone that you wish you looked at sooner than you did, but instead you were dealing with 30+ other emails that came in after that?

Using Teams contextualizes conversations. It allows you to keep responses public to the team, and to clarify responses in contained conversations rather than scattered throughout email. It also allows you to prioritize your teams over the most recent items in your email inbox.

2. Using Teams creates a shared learning space within your community.

Have you ever worked as a staff on professional development, sharing paper resources that never get looked at again? Then someone shares a great resource through email, but that resource stays in your email?

My staff has created channels within a Team to work on our professional development. We co-create the notes, share files, and publicly follow through with our plans. Afterwards if someone adds anything, everyone has that resource available within the context of the learning that happened, not lost in email.

3. You are working with a team of people in other buildings and you don’t see them often.

Email is brutal for this. Conversations get scattered, supporting each other is challenging, it doesn’t feel like you are a community. When you create a Team with this group, everything is shared in one public space. When a question is asked, the whole team is there to respond, and resource sharing is easy. It shifts the environment from a broken up group into a shared community.

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That’s three quick examples of how a tool like Teams can be more effective than other tools like email, but it requires shifting practice to be truly transformative. If you are communicating with your team or staff using both Teams and email, then you are being ineffective and adding more to your plate. But if you replace communicating through email with Teams, now you have a few key advantages you didn’t have before:

  • You can actually prioritize the people within your community that you want to give your attention to by going to teams first, before dealing with the most recent and often erroneous emails at the top of your inbox.
  • Communication on Teams is public to your team, and responses are easily clarified for everyone.
  • You can embed forms where everyone can see everyone else’s responses.
  • You can easily switch to the private chat function when information becomes relevant to just one or a few people.
  • You can use the @name function to specially address a person or a whole Team.
  • You can build a sense of community and support that email does not provide.
  • Conversations are contextual. I can prioritize what I look at first, at a glance, not just by the most recent items.
  • You can reduce the amount of email you get! My email has gone down by more than 1/3 since adopting Teams.

For me the ability to prioritize my teams in a space outside of email, and reducing the amount of emails I get, have been the greatest benefits to moving to Microsoft Teams.

Note: I share expectations and etiquette with my teams about how and where to communicate. It’s a good idea with any new tool to make the intentions and expectations about how to use the tool clear. Otherwise, the tool isn’t transformative, it’s just one more shiny new thing to check, without really seeing the value in using it.

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Related: Transformative or just flashy educational tools? (Written almost a decade ago.)

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Also shared on my Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog

Bitter Sweet

I’ve been listening to Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve for about a month now, every time I do my chin-ups.

Sometimes I get a song in my head and I just want to hear it again and again when I’m doing a specific task. When I do plank workouts, it’s Eminem’s Lose Yourself. And when I write, it’s a lyric-less song called ‘Nerve Centre’ on the Calm meditation app. I’m listening to this now, too late on Thursday night, because I can’t sleep.

Tomorrow is bitter sweet. For the past 2 years I’ve been principal of 3 completely different schools: An online school, a small innovative, uniquely structured, but ‘regular’ school, and an alternate school. These schools have nothing much in common except for being in the same building… and having me as Principal. After tomorrow, I’m no longer in charge of the alternate school.

I’ve been needing a change. The role has been exhausting and 2 years in it hasn’t gotten easier. It has been too much, and I always feel I’m letting at least one school down. So, although I’ll be adding some additional responsibilities, I know after 2 years, I will have more balance. But more importantly, I know I can do more for my schools and feel good about that.

So why is this bitter sweet? Where is the bitter part? I’m leaving a school with students I’ve connected with; I’m leaving a school I wish I did more for. I feel guilt that I feel relieved.

But I felt ready to quit a year ago. I was at my ropes end (figuratively only). What kept me going was my early morning fitness and meditation routine, my audio book consumption, and my healthy time restricted eating routine. Last summer, I added this daily blog. With these routines I created something outside of my work schedule that encouraged self-care. They gave me sustenance when my work scheduled didn’t.

It seems counterintuitive, that adding a bunch of extra routines helped me manage my busy schedule better, but they have strengthened my skills as an educator and a leader. I’m fitter and have more energy. I’m listening to non-fiction books that I constantly connect to my job. I reflect on my learning and life lessons here on my blog. And, I’m sure my daily meditation is helping too, although I still can’t calm my monkey brain down and concentrate on my breathing for longer than a minute, even after trying daily for over a year.

I look forward to dedicating more time to my 2 schools after tomorrow. I know this is a good thing… But Friday… Friday is going to be bitter sweet.