Leadership+Design
"We design experiences for the people who create the future of teaching and learning."
In our work, we build capacity, create conversations, and make connections.
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Plan your professional learning adventures with L+D in 2017.
Coming this Summer . . .
 NCGS Annual Conference
"Pop-Up Learning: Developing an Experimental Mindset in Schools"
June 25, 2017
Washington, DC
Join us for a three hour session on ways to bring more experimentation to your school community.
4D Studio: Design. Dare. Disrupt. Dream.
June 26-29, 2017
The Steward School/Bryan Innovation Lab, Richmond, VA
A deep dive into developing a culture of innovation at your school.
Wonder Women!
July 10-13, 2017
Castilleja School, Palo Alto, CA
Uncover your signature presence and lead more effectively and joyfully.
SuperGirls
July 31-August 4, 2017
Annie Wright School, Tacoma, WA
A junior version of Wonder Women for high school girls. Spread the word!
November 5-8, 2017
La Fonda on the Plaza, NM
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L+D Board of Directors
Ryan Baum
VP of Strategy
Jump Associates, CA
Lee Burns
Headmaster
McCallie School
, TN
Sandy Drew
Non-profit Consultant, CA
Matt Glendinning
(Secretary)
Head of School
Moses Brown School,
RI
Trudy Hall (Board Chair)
Interim Director of High School
Forest Ridge School, WA
Brett Jacobsen (Vice Chair)
Head of School
Mount Vernon Presbyterian
, GA
Barbara Kraus-Blackney (Treasurer)
Executive Director
Association of Delaware Valley Independent Schools (ADVIS), PA
Karan Merry
Retired Head of School
St. Paul's Episcopal School
Carla Robbins Silver (ex-officio)
Executive Director
Leadership+Design, CA
Mary Stockavas (Treasurer)
Director of Finance
Bosque School,
NM
Matthew Stuart
Head of School
Caedmon School, NY
Brad Weaver
Head of School
Sonoma Country Day School, CA
Paul Wenninger
Retired Head of School
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Carla Silver, Executive Director, Leadership+Design
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Welcome, Friends, to the April
Monthly Recharge
.
All year long we have been writing about the future - of school, of PD, of leadership and space. In almost all of our issues, one theme has been consistent. The future is now; the gap between our imagined future and reality continues to shrink. The futuristic ideas that once took generations to emerge, now take only years or months to achieve. Welcome to the future.
This month, we focus on the future of work - you know, that place where our students go after they leave school. Herein lies another gap, but one that seems to be growing rather than shrinking: the gap between the experience of school and the world of work. Once aligned in space, content, and skills, the workplace has evolved at an accelerated pace, while school, well, school has changed very little.
One of the experiences L+D designed for schools this year is the  "Hack Your City Challenge." Inspired by our friends at Wonder By Design who often take school teams out into the city for exploration of space and other inspiration, we were curious about would happen if we sent an entire professional community out into their city for a morning to visit innovative workplaces - including design firms, boutique hotels, film studios, nonprofits, museums, tech companies, and research labs, just to name a few.
What if a whole school stopped everything for a day to be anthropologists and study the modern workplace and how it relates to school?
We see several benefits to this type of excursion.
1. Understand the modern workplace.
Preparing young people for success beyond school is one of the goals of education, but interestingly enough, most educators have spent very little time outside of school. Most (not all) have gone from being students themselves - from high school to college to graduate school - to teaching with almost no time, with the exception of part-time employment, in a non-academic workplace. That gap between school and work has continued to widen as workplaces have been transformed by the impact of technological innovation, yet schools have inched along - or as former Stanford professor David Tyack wrote, "tinker towards Utopia." Factory model schools made sense in an industrial economy. But how are schools adapting to a global innovation economy? As Thomas Friedman writes about in
Thank You for Being Late,
our social innovations (like school) lag well behind the technological innovations, and we are beginning to see the gap become a chasm. What do modern workplaces feel like and how do people do their work? How do workplaces leverage technology, data, automation and other innovations to be more productive and human? How do people work collaboratively on problems?
2. Understand Space.
I visit dozens of schools every year. With some exception, classrooms - especially middle and high school classrooms - generally look the same. (And why are students ALWAYS in classrooms, anyhow?) There are some variations and some advances in developing more flexible spaces, but more often than not, the set-up largely promotes a teacher-centered pedagogy. Whether that looks like a row of desks, desks in a circle, or a Harkness table, classrooms still feel more like the workplaces of the 19th and 20th centuries and rarely reflect contemporary businesses. Individual desks separate students so that they can "do their own work" and Harkness Tables offer opportunities for discussions - but are actually huge impediments to real collaborative work for teams of 4 or 5. On a recent visit to the company Jump Associates, I noticed that there is an open library of books, magazines, and board games next to the kitchen/eating space. Why not turn lunch into a time for getting inspired with colleagues? How might that look in a school? With libraries changing, maybe combining the lunch space with the library is a new model? Is the traditional classroom still the best model for learning and working?
3. Experience Analogous Empathy.
Finding inspiration in seemingly unrelated experiences is one of the greatest benefits to Hacking the City.
The less like a school a hosting workplace is, the more likely it will provide inspiration and open participants' minds to seeing the world through a new set of eyes. Even a few hours with some careful observation and a curious mindset might offer a morsel of originality to a teaching experience or a giant breakthrough to a challenging problem. Spend a day with designers or architects and you might completely reimagine assessment in your classroom. "How might we offer assessment that feels more like a design crit?" "How might we help students offer and receive meaningful critical feedback that really moves a project?" Spend a day at a museum and a teacher might start to consider the power of careful curation of thematic materials (quality) versus chronological, memorizable events, facts, and dates (quantity) as a framework for a history class. Analogous empathy helps to challenge assumptions and reframe solutions.
4. Have a shared adventure.
If the day is framed correctly, it's also an opportunity for some good, old-fashioned collective fun. Who doesn't love a road trip? If we want to provide students with place-based, experiential learning, we need to do the same with our professional community. It's just not that hard to get off campus and the benefits are huge. If you can't spare a full day for everyone, this can be done in small teams over the course of a year.
So, what brave school took the challenge?
The Curtis School
in Los Angeles did, thanks to the adventurous spirit of Meera Ratnesar, Head of School, and Sarina Fierro, Lower School Head, who believed in the idea from the very start. The school devoted a full professional day and arranged time at businesses that included Hulu, Snapchat, CBRE, Liner Law, YouTube, Google, Morpheus and BuzzFeed.
During their visits, teachers were asked to make observations about how workspaces and communities are designed, both physically and culturally, to create an environment that fosters productivity and ingenuity.  L+D provided the note-kit and a post visit debrief and design session that helped to synthesize the visits and allowed participants to share and cross-pollinate with those who had been to other locations. When asked about the key benefit of the experience, Sarina said, "By introducing our teachers to forward-thinking, contemporary work cultures (outside of a school environment),
we were able to broaden their
understanding of which skill sets our students will invoke most in their ability to innovate, collaborate and communicate, and in ways that will distinguish them apart from the rest."
Interested in hacking your city with a team of educators or with your entire professional community? Contact us and we'd love to help make it happen. It's also available as part of our
NextQ
program for schools that really want to dig into a compelling question for a year with Leadership+Design and gain both institutional capacity and human capacity along the way.
This month's articles
share with you some habits and mindsets for both yourself and students that might allow you to be more productive in the increasingly busy world of work (Ryan Baum, Jump Associates),
provide you with the landscape of the changing world of work (Erin Cohn).
And of course, don't forget to register for one of our two summer programs - 4DStudio: Design.Dare. Disrupt. Dream. and Wonder Women - both filling up! A list of all of our upcoming programs are listed on the sidebar. More Bootcamps coming!
Happy April!
Carla and the L+D Team
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| The Power of Quiet Reflection in an Increasingly Hectic Work World |
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Ryan Baum, Principal, Jump Associates, and L+D Board Member
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Before you keep reading, pull out your phone or laptop and open up your calendar. Take a look at your schedule for the rest of today, for tomorrow, for this week. If you are like most people, you are looking at a wall of multi-colored rectangles all butting up against each other; a back-to-back, hyper-scheduled blanket of appointments from 8am until 6pm or later; an attempt to check off as many To Do's as possible by squeezing as much as you can into every minute of every day.
Instinctively we know this is a terrible way to run our lives, but it's a hard pattern to break. Any deviation from this "hyper-efficient" pattern feels unproductive. It doesn't matter how many HBR articles warn of burnout or lack of focus, we keep filling every moment of our work (and increasingly home) lives with "productive activity." Technology has aided this pattern by making it possible to respond, read, talk, click, listen, or check-in at all times. That means moments of quiet reflection are all but disappearing.
Yet those "moments of quiet reflection" are becoming more important than ever. They are not just good for our sanity, and not just good because they help us prioritize and focus more effectively. They are one of the few ways that we as humans think deeply and creatively about how to solve problems. William Deresiewicz articulates why this concept is so important in a speech he gave to West Point grads in 2009. He said, "I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn't turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing."
Without active intervention, the "Future of Work" will be one of ever increasing efficiency, and ever diminishing creative or strategic problem solving like the kind Deresiewicz describes. We will rehash old answers simply because we have not taken the time to reflect on what better answers could exist. But it doesn't have to be that way. Even in our hyper-scheduled lives, there is still time for reflection. It just requires some advance planning. The trick is to start small.
Here are four simple steps to start adding reflection back into your life:
(1) Get yourself an idealog; a dedicated notebook where you
can consistently wrestle with ideas. Make it something that feels special so that you will be excited to use it regularly. The act of writing things down will help you reflect more effectively than just sitting down and thinking. It will also help you remember and reference your thought process.
(2) Schedule a few 30-minute time blocks for reflection each week at the same time each day (e.g. 8:30 - 9:00 am on Tuesdays and Thursdays). It is important to actually schedule these into your calendar as meetings so that you hold yourself more accountable to them and so that other people do not schedule over them.
(3) Force yourself to wrestle with one topic or question for the entire 30-minute time block. Avoid the temptation to constantly switch between the 50 different topics that are on your mind at any given moment. Start by writing down one question or idea that you would like to explore, and then follow that thread for the entire time.
(4) Don't let your pen stop writing until the 30 minutes is up. Don't censor yourself or slow yourself down. Keep moving and get out as much as possible of what is in your head.
Many of the people who are praised in our society as creative thinkers and leaders were deep and prolific idealoggers. Bookstores sell the idealogs of folks like DaVinci, Disney, Edison, Darwin and more. These collections are a marvel to look through. They show how solo reflection led to the germination of ideas that have had profound impact on our society. Yet at the same time we celebrate this thinking in coffee table books, we are increasingly creating a culture of work that doesn't support it. It takes effort and diligence to bring solo reflection back into our busy lives.
As leaders of education, you all have the opportunity to help build these solo reflection habits and skills early. Today, everything in a student's life is pushing him or her to cram as many classes, sports, volunteer opportunities, and extra-curricular activities as possible into already unimaginably busy schedules. These students are struggling with the same technology enabled inability to reflect as many people in the corporate world. The more the schools we create can help these students build the habits necessary to think deeply about problems and reflect on their experience, the more they will know what to do in 10 years when they look at their calendars and see a wall of multi-colored rectangles. They will be prepared to step back, reflect, and lead.
About the Author:
Ryan Baum is a Principal at Jump Associates, a strategy and innovation firm that helps companies build new businesses and reinvent existing ones. For the past 10 years he has acted as a partner and advisor to Fortune 500 executives setting the course for large-scale transformations and aggressive growth. He also teaches a class at Stanford University on design strategy and research methods. Ryan is a member of the board of Leadership + Design. Contact: [email protected]
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Thriving in a Lily Pad-Covered World
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Erin Cohn, Senior Partner and Experience Designer, Leadership+Design
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A classic question on the Cognitive Reflection Test - a quiz that is meant to measure the test-taker's ability to push past instinctual thinking - goes something like this:
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Most people, conditioned to linear thinking, would place the half-  covered mark somewhere around 24 days. The answer, however, is Day 47. If you owned a boat on this lake, you might not notice the encroaching lily pads until pretty late in the game, by which time it might be too late for a joy ride.
The problem above requires one to be able to mentally grasp exponential growth, which is not a rational mode of thinking for the average human brain. Yet it's important that we begin to think exponentially, because this is the model of change we are currently living through. In his book,
The Singularity is Near
,
Ray Kurtzweil uses the lily pad analogy to demonstrate how technology is growing and transforming exponentially; in the 1960s, "Moore's Law"
predicted that computing power will roughly double every two years, and this prediction has come true and shows no signs of stopping.
We are living through a revolution that is equal parts exciting and exhausting, as we try to keep up with breathtaking change. In a 2013 essay entitled,
"The Jobs Crisis: Bigger Than You Think,"
historian Walter Russell Mead reflects on how these technological changes are affecting the labor market, describing it as a "vast jobquake" shaking the country (in fact, the world) much like the 19th-century shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial one utterly rocked the United States and required radical retooling and reskilling. Yet in the 19th century that transformation happened over the course of several decades, while now it is happening over the course of a few years.
It's hard enough to stay current with these changes in our own lives, but as educators we have the added responsibility of keeping track of the progress of the lily pads and finding ways to endow our students with the ability to navigate a pond that already looks very different than the body of water we navigated as we were growing up and entering the workforce. There are really three options:
1. Stay close to our shore and ignore the growth happening across the pond.
It's tempting to opt out and pretend the world isn't changing - to go all
Walden and reject the railroad
because
"we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us."
In terms of school, that means undergoing business as usual and failing to challenge our assumptions about what our students will need when they enter the world. (For what it's worth, the railroad ran only about a third of a mile from Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, and post-Walden, Thoreau himself was instrumental in making his family's pencil factory more efficient, so even those who seem to reject change can be at the center of its development.)
2. Work hard to eradicate the lily pad infestation.
The recent rise of populist politics has shown a tendency to romanticize an industrial world of well-paid, middle-class factory jobs, or even straightforward white-collar office work, and a will towards returning the world to that model. (This look back to the halcyon days of a previous economic model in a time of change is common; see: William Jennings Bryan.) However, the lily pads aren't going away, no matter how hard we work to remove them from the pond. A
2013 Oxford University study
estimated that as much as 47% of current US employment is at risk for automation, and no amount of resistance will change that trend. In schools, the equivalent of this sort of pushback is doubling down on traditional approaches to teaching and learning that prepared students for a world that is increasingly no longer recognizable.
3. Start building skills and strategies that will allow our students to thrive in - and even capitalize on - a lily pad-covered world.
The central flaw of the lily pad metaphor, I realize, is the idea that the pond will ever be fully covered; in fact the pond keeps growing, the lily pads will keep doubling, and they might not even be lily pads in a couple of days. Our job as educators is to help our students be ready to navigate this rapidly transforming scenario, because they might need to grow gills one day, and learn to genetically engineer lily pads to harvest sunlight for human energy consumption the next. And you can bet they'll need to combine their creative efforts with others in order to make that happen.
That is our real current challenge: how might we reinvent school to endow our students with the ability to be adaptable and supremely human in order to face a future that will include both mind-bending change and ubiquitous automation?
As Thomas Friedman points out in his excellent new book,
Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations,
we already live in an economic reality that requires all of us to constantly adapt and reeducate ourselves in order to keep up. Gone are the days when the average citizen could confine learning to ages 5-18, have the knowledge and skills to join the workforce, and be able to remain in their chosen profession with little additional training for the remainder of their days. Even a college degree increasingly doesn't guarantee a knowledge base or skill set that will provide graduates with what they need to succeed. More than ever, success will depend on a worker's self-motivation to adapt and learn independently
throughout their lives
. These "soft skills" of adaptability, independence, and perseverance are
already paying off in the job market
, and the more we can instill that mode of being into our students the better.
We would also do well to restructure school to incorporate the four "P's" emphasized by
Joi Ito
and his colleagues at the MIT Media Lab - projects, peers, passion, and play - because the workplace of the future will likely require employees to be adept in engaging in all of them. As computers take over more routine tasks, workers of the future will need to be able to conceive of and carry out complex projects (yet so much of school is still structured around information delivery and regurgitation). They will need to have the emotional intelligence to be able to collaborate actively with peers (yet so much of school is still about individual work and the prevention of "cheating"). The ability to adapt and innovate in the future workplace will require people to identify and pursue diverse passions (yet so much of our curriculum is based around someone else's idea of what's worth knowing or learning about). And creativity is impossible without playfulness (but sadly play seeps out of academic learning time quickly after elementary school, and as adults "work" and "play" become distinct opposites).
Our schools pay lip service to life-long learning, project-based learning, collaboration, and passion, but how much are we really implementing them and how much are we holding onto old structures and systems? How can we disrupt our industry even further to commit to them fully?
While some might see the advancing lily pads and feel anxiety and pessimism, I recognize a world of possibility. There are many ways to navigate a lily-covered pond. The inventions and epiphanies ahead of us - that our students will need to produce - are exciting to imagine. But perhaps they can only be discovered as soon as our old boats no longer get us anywhere.
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