The Monthly Recharge - September 2015, Seek Questions Not Answers
Leadership+Design


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November 11-14, 2015

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L+D Board of Directors

Ryan Baum
VP of Strategy
Jump Associates

Lee Burns
Headmaster
The McCallie School
Chattanooga, TN

Sandy Drew, Board President
Development Consultant
Sonoma, CA

Matt Glendinning
Head of School
Moses Brown School
Providence, RI

Trudy Hall
Head of School
Emma Willard School
Troy, NY
 
Brett Jacobsen
Head of School
Mount Vernon Presbyterian School
Atlanta, GA
 
Barbara Kraus-Blackney
Executive Director
ADVIS
Philadelphia, PA 

Karan Merry
Head of School (Ret.)
St. Paul's Episcopal School
Brooklyn, NY 
 
Carla Robbins Silver (ex-officio)
Executive Director, L+D
Los Gatos, CA 

Mary Stockavas
CFO
Bosque School
Albuquerque, NM

Paul Wenninger
Interim Head of School
Alexander Dawson School
Las Vegas, NV

Christopher H. Wilson
Head of School
Esperanza Academy
Lawrence, MA 
Welcome Back!
Greetings!

Happy New School-Year! Whether you are already well into the year with over a month of the "three Rs" under way or whether you are just getting back into the routine of year having had the post-Labor Day start, all of us at Leadership+Design wish you a very joyful start to the year and hope you achieve all of the ambitious goals you have set out to accomplish in the months ahead.  

The Leadership+Design Recharge is a monthly publication, designed to do just that - recharge your work with a jolt of energy and new tools and ideas, to provide new ways of thinking, doing, teaching and leading, and to re-energize your spirits.  Each month we feature thought leaders in education and our own L+Doers - our amazing collaborators - and we like to think that these short articles can serve you on your leadership journey.

All year, the Monthly Recharge will focus on the habits and mindsets of successful leaders and learners - both adults and students.  This idea speaks to the core belief of L+D that great leaders and great designers embody a set of skills and habits and mindsets that can be learned and practiced.  At L+D, we believe that individuals who lead with these habits and mindsets shine brightly and find greater resonance and joy in their leadership.



This belief diverges from the theory that "great leaders are born that way" or that some people are simply cut out to lead.  At L+D, we believe that every human being has the capacity to demonstrate leadership, to mobilize others to do hard and challenging work, and to solve highly ambiguous challenges.  We also believe that individuals in schools lead from every role - teachers, administrators, staff, students, board members, and school heads, all have the responsibility and the authority to lead in their school communities.

Leadership+Design programs and workshops provide participants with opportunities to learn and practice those skills through the experiences we design for them. Everything we do in these sessions is intentional. And while not everyone has the resources of time, money or desire to attend our session, the Monthly Recharge is free to all and might be just what you need to learn something new.  

Each month, the Recharge will highlight a specific mindset, habit or skill, and feature pieces that focus on these qualities in particular with each month offering some ways to practice of these skills in your work or with your school community. 

This month we focus on the habit and mindset of questioning and inquiry.  Much of the recent work of L+D Collaborators has been inspired by the book by Warren Berger A More Beautiful Question. It has influenced the way we approach our work with individuals and schools.  Berger suggests that finding the right questions is directly related to arriving at better and more innovative processes and outcomes.  (Re)teaching students and ourselves to adopt a "beginner's mindset" and not being afraid to look naive or lacking expertise, to get genuinely curious about a problem, a topic and even about other people - maybe our colleagues and collaborators - allows us to be more successful in our work, relationships and life.

 And speaking of programs and workshops, The Santa Fe Seminar is two months away and we have a few spots remaining for interested school leaders who want to slow down for four days and work on their own leadership development. We often like to say that this particular seminar allows school leaders to do some of the inner work you need to meet the many external demands of the work you do.  It's an awesome experience, away from the busy-ness of school, where slowing down allows you to go back to your work and be more productive, more effective and more connected.  So come to Santa Fe or send someone you care about for the experience.

Warm regards,

Carla Silver
Executive Director
Leadership+Design

What If We Always Start with Questions?
Crystal Land,  
Leadership+Design Collaborator
My new puppy, Riley, is curious and eager: she uses her nose to inquire about every smell, sight and creature she encounters. She gleefully wiggles her way up to humans and animals alike to see what they have to offer. And then there's food! Riley can't help but put her paws on the table to get a better view of what food is coming our (not her!) way. I love watching her insatiable curiosity. Everything in her world is new, fresh and interesting. She's like a preschooler who looks and touches, and incessantly asks "why?" Her curiosity reminds me of how our schools should approach learning and problem solving -- 
by keenly using all of our senses to inquire about the world around us.

In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, author Warren Berger states that curiosity and open-mindedness are key traits for those in the "C Suite." While I'm thrilled that our country's top companies are run by the curious and open-minded, I wonder if our schools are doing everything possible to promote these same traits for students and educators. For many of us who have deep experience teaching and leading, it is often easy to fall into a pattern of being the expert in the name of efficiency. I know I've gone down that road when I have a long list and just want to get things done.  It takes more time to be curious and to, as Berger states, approach our work with a "beginner's mind."

If we follow the approach suggested by Berger in his inspiring book, A More Beautiful Question, we could habituate ourselves and our students to regularly use questions to create possibilities that were not originally in our sphere of thinking. Berger wonders, why do children stop asking those really creative and open-ended questions as they get older? Research shows that as students move through the grades, the focus shifts to finding the right answers instead of developing the best questions. What if we spent more of our time asking questions in order to get to an even better question?

There are so many benefits to questioning instead of answering:
  • Questioning opens up problem solving: the better the question, the more interesting the solutions might be. A question like "How can we make our classrooms more child-centered?" might evolve into "How might we make the classroom feel more like the playground?"
  • Questioning leads to cross-pollination of thinking and ideas--one question leads to another and moves us in new directions. The film director, Brian Grazer, in his book,
     A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life, has weekly "curiosity conversations" with an accomplished person in another discipline in order to expand his thinking.
  • Questioning is similar to divergent thinking--it opens up a wide range of possibilities before we start to converge and solve.
  • Researchers at UC Davis have noted direct links between curiosity and improved memory and learning! Really good questions help students' brains create new neural pathways.
Beger advocates moving from the traditional "why" questioning to the more generative "what if" and "how might we" formats.  So, here are some questions for this school year:
  • What if we let questions and curiosity drive our lesson plans?
  • What if we started every meeting with a truly curious question?
  • How might we change the climate of our schools one conversation at a time?
  • How might we use our community resources to inform our curricular choices?
  • What if we asked students to create innovate approaches to concerns about equity and inclusion?
  • How might our school lunchroom feel more like the family dining room table?
Can curiosity change your life? I think so. But ask a few more questions and see what you think.

The Adjacent Possible: How Does Successful Collaboration Happen?
Christian Talbot, Head of School, Malvern Preparatory School
 
We asked a few thought leaders to share a compelling question that is shaping their school year.  Here is a specific question that Christian Talbot, Head of School of Malvern Prep and excellent questioner, is pondering this year.

Did you know that in the four decades - decades! - leading up to Thomas Edison's 1879 lightbulb patent that 23 other inventors had filed patents for an incandescent light source?
 
According to Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now, a history of six technological innovations, the lightbulb was a product of "the adjacent possible": Edison's predecessors, who had experimented with a variety of filaments, created the conditions for Edison's team to solve the problem from another angle.
 
But there is more to this compelling thesis.  Note that Edison's team solved the problem.  Contrary to mythology, Edison was not a solitary genius but rather the captain of a 15-person crew.
 
As Johnson puts it, "Because the Edison lightbulb was not so much a single invention as a bricolage of small improvements, the diversity of the team turned out to be an essential advantage for Edison.  Solving the problem of the filament, for instance, required a scientific understanding of electrical resistance and oxidation that Upton provided, complementing Edison's more untutored, intuitive style; and it was Batchelor's mechanical improvisations that enabled them to test so many different candidates for the filament itself.  Menlo Park marked the beginning of an organizational form that would come to prominence in the twentieth century: the cross-disciplinary research-and-development lab.  In this sense, the transformative ideas and technologies that came out of places such as Bell Labs and Xerox-PARC have their roots in Edison's workshop.  Edison didn't just invent technology; he invented an entire system for inventing, a system that would come to dominate twentieth-century industry."
 
Stories like this make me wonder:
 
How does successful collaboration happen?
 
This is not an idle question for me.  Like many schools, Malvern Prep has been exploring project-based learning, which depends upon students working not in groups, but in teams.  As Head of School, I take seriously my role as "Chief Learner," so this summer I offered a Social Entrepreneurship course - inspired by the design thinking workshop offered at the 2015 NAIS Annual Conference by L+D's Carla Silver - to learn alongside my students how teams can innovate with purpose.
 
To walk the talk, I built my own team by recruiting two other teachers to help me with the class.  The three of us decided that throughout the course we would each "coach" a team of students rather than "teach" them.  This often amounted to asking our student teams to reflect frequently on their team interacts, with an emphasis on harmonizing their individual strengths.  Now I am offering this same course as a full-year elective, and a new team of teachers and I will use a variety of techniques to facilitate genuine collaboration.


 
Why worry so much about how to teach kids to collaborate effectively?  In a course like this, especially with its focus on social impact issues, we are attempting to "prepare our students to solve problems that don't even exist yet," as Google's Chief Education Evangelist Jaime Casap has said.  And as Walter Isaacson shows in his most recent book, The Innovators, the most important advances in the last century have emerged from deeply collaborative environments.
 
Which makes me wonder: when Edison's team finally solved the problem of incandescent light, how many lightbulbs really went off?

The Beginner's Mind: How Not Knowing Makes You Smarter
Carla Silver, Executive Director, Leadership+Design
One of my favorite movies is The Smartest Guys in the Room (based on the book of the same name).  It's the story of ENRON and the treacherous and manipulative corporate culture that put California in the dark, destroyed careers, and left thousands of people in financial ruin. The egotistical and cavalier corporate culture of Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and the top Enron executives was made possible by two primary factors: 1) the mythology that Lay and Skilling were experts and smarter than everyone else in the company and 2) a complacent culture that failed to question the leadership and the workings of the company.  We know how that story ends.

Placing a premium on knowing the "right" answer can sometimes do more harm than good. I am hired by schools to help them to develop strategic plans, but my role is more of that of chief question asker, rather than expert.  Sometimes I'm asked very early on in the process what direction I think a school should go. I'm more prone to offer up my favorite trio of words and reply,  "I don't know."  The minute those words fall from my lips, I paradoxically feel much smarter.  As a consultant and facilitator, I have the luxury of being a beginner every time I walk into a school.  I get to ask the honestly naive questions, "Why do you do it that way?"  "What can't you try this?" 'Who should be involved?" "How will that decision be made?"  "What if, you did it differently?"  I get to be curious and ignorant with no consequences.  

What if we all embraced our inner ignoramus?  What if we simply stopped offering up the answers every time a question is posed and instead offered up "I don't know," and got a little curious instead?  Warren Berger suggests we adopt the "beginner's mind" a concept in Zen Buddhism.

Take a look at this (two minute worth watching) video by The Atlantic from the Aspen Ideas Fest called What People Can Do to get Better at Learning.  The featured speakers, who include Tim Brown of IDEO, journalist Amanda Ripley, and Stanford Professor Jo Boaler, all refer to the power of being curious, managing ambiguity and not always knowing the answer. Tim Brown says "one of the biggest problems with our education system today is that we are sort of force fed the questions. Kids get used to being asked the questions instead of asking them for themselves."  They evolve, of course, into adults who are not very good at asking questions and who feel like they have to be right all the time - in the classroom, in the boardroom, in the workplace, at home. And that, is where we end up with debacles like ENRON

So try this: for one day, approach everything you do with a "beginners mind" and question all of your actions and everything around you.  You don't need to change anything or solve any problems or validate your actions, but rather just write down the questions in a notebook.  "Why do I drive to work this way?"  "Why do I go to Starbucks and not PEETS?"  "Why am I teaching this lesson the way I am teaching it?"  "Why are some of my students seem engaged today and others are less engaged?"  "Why am I starting class this way?"  "Why are we having this meeting."  You get the point.  

At the end of the day, look back on your list and pick one-three why questions and go deeper and ask more questions.  Using Warren Berger's Why/What if/How might we technique, try to flip the assumptions in the question.  "Why do I start class this way?  What if I started class outside tomorrow?  "How might I start the class in a way that requires all students to actively engage immediately?" "What could be the most boring way to cover this material?"  "What would make my students wish class would never end?"  "What if my students left class today wanting to take action?" "What if my students left class today with a burning question they wanted to explore?"

Forget about the answers; that is not the point of this particular exercise.  If you want to return to generate answers to your questions another time, you can. The goal of this exercise is just to practice asking questions, managing ambiguity and being curious about yourself, about others and about the many assumptions you make about your own habits, practices and routines.  In fact, the best answer you might give yourself all day, is "I don't know." If you are asking the right questions, the ones that will likely lead to better answers, you probably don't know and half the fun will be finding out!




               

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