How to guarantee mediocrity through change and innovation

No, you’re right. Mediocrity is not what we usually try to work for. And I’m not recommending it. The problem, though, is that many of our innovation strategies work to guarantee just that --- mediocrity.

You’ve heard of the statistical principle of reversion to the mean. Exceptionality keeps working its way back toward the middle, be it test scores or change initiatives. I’m not going to go all theoretical here. I have a simple strategy which is practical. By experience, I do find that it works. If we ignore it, I think mediocrity is guaranteed. If we shape our change leadership in light of it, success is certainly not guaranteed. But the possibility of outstanding improvements is within our reach.

I’m intentionally being rather sloppy about calling these initiatives change or innovation or improvement. I don’t mean incremental, continuous process improvements. I don’t mean organizational change just to be ready for externally necessitated movement. What I mean is closest to innovation, but I’m not pretending to enter extended theory on disruption or competitive response or questions of whether innovation is possible from within. I guess I think it is possible, and the rest I’m just not addressing.

I’ve found this strategy to work when changing for the better in curriculum, student mentoring and technology integration to name a few vital areas. I think it applies to most any innovation effort we’re leading, in school or business or wherever. I’ll put the strategy in five points. Within the points, I’ll offer an example or two.

1. We lead people, not programs, and people have different strengths. I was founding a high school with an innovative core interdisciplinary course series. We had ‘normal’ courses, but this was to be our integrating center to the curriculum. The question was whether to expect all faculty members to teach in this interdisciplinary course. It was a worldview course, something of a humanities seminar taught Socratically, including elements of history, literature and science together with theology and philosophy. The course series was program-defining for us, yet we had many standard curricular elements as well which called for more traditional pedagogies. So, should all faculty be teaching in these special seminars?

I decided they shouldn’t, and believe that was a hugely successful difference-maker for us. If all teachers taught this unique course, our ‘innovation’ would have been birthed with great pain while also ending up being a much more traditional course taught more like folks were used to teaching and being taught. Some of our teachers had incredible strengths which were not suited to this course. Others were absolutely phenomenal at just this sort of teaching.

Did we just show a weakness of will and resolve to train and prepare a faculty to teach as our program required? No, because our program didn’t require it. It would have been our idea of a totally unique program which required it, but what we had available to us was a program which included groundbreaking innovation along with elements which called for more commonly available talents, yet talents which required undeniably excellent teachers to teach those more common elements well.

This course series was only one element of the new high school, but a vital one which offered identity and cohesion and student formation rather than just another curricular program. The whole K-12 with the growing high school increased from 300 enrollment to 1200 over a decade, and the program came from neighborhood quality to be regionally and nationally competitive.

With the various strengths our folks brought to their incredible efforts, our students and our school enjoyed undeniable blessing. I’m grateful we didn’t require a common denominator which our faculty as a whole did not have in common, and we got the innovative strengths of an entire team doing what they did best.

2. Leading for change or innovation doesn’t mean we lead all the people the same way at the same time. Again, we have an example of a choice to employ the whole team in a similar way which may or may not match their innate abilities or their current preparedness, or to adapt personnel utilization to most closely match unique skill sets. The example at hand is a program and structure for student advisory or mentoring. In this example, the need for teacher ‘coverage’ of students encourages most schools to use an all hands on deck strategy. It works to some extent, and a large number of schools do it. I propose what I think is a reasonable and fruitful difference.

Small ratio student-teacher relationships are undoubtedly positive, all things being equal. Those things which need to be equal are the quality of those relationships, and that quality is not determined solely by the numbers. This is sort of a “duh” kind of point, yet one that I see many programs implement as if the “duh” was a “huh?”

Even as you recruit and train and encourage all faculty for committed, quality student relationships, do you find all your teachers to be gifted and prepared for advisory roles and motivated by the assignment? This is not to say that I want any faculty who can’t or won’t major on relationships with students. I want some who find relationship in math, others through athletics, others at the chess board, and others in creative writing among hundreds of other fruitful options. Some of those teachers are also astoundingly good at explicit mentoring or advisory group settings and individual relational offshoots. Other teachers struggle forever at translating their student magic from the science lab or the history seminar or the choir to the advisory setting. Certainly, all teachers differ in these settings, but it’s hard to deny that some meet the threshold standard while others just stand at the door and watch as relationships should be being built.

But don’t the ratios require it? You tell me. Do you have any headroom for raising ratios a bit? Even more productively, do you have any other potential advisors and mentors who might be well-suited for the role? Support staff? Committed and well-tested parents? Other caring folks from the community? Due diligence, training, care about confidentiality are all involved along with other complications. But what’s the payoff? Do you see student relationships and transformative interaction become the norm when you put just the right folks into those small ratio relationships with students?

 3. If I expect everyone to be ready for a particular change at the same time, I’ll end up with some very different versions of that innovation as we implement for it.Here, the example is technology in school. Tech as such may find more readiness among the common faculty and staff population than in past decades for schools. We all know the computer lab dust gatherer of thirty years ago, but it was no better at creating dust bunnies than the distributed computing tumbleweeds in classroom corners a score ago. Today’s multiplication of one to one installations is different in kind and not just degree. Connection of those boxes to each other and the world is a sea change difference. We do have more people more ready for what is no longer a disruptive innovation to our classrooms.

But, BUT, we haven’t moved beyond the differences between different teachers. We still have faculty ready for innovation, and others just getting comfortable with what was innovation two decades ago. Truly transformative digital learning is not what most on the hall are ready for today. Most of us don’t teach or lead in High Tech High.

Early adopters make a real difference in any school’s faculty, even of today. As leaders, we can ignore this and assume readiness by all. The result will be something far short of innovation, however. Even if our funding is so good that our tech is bleeding edge, the majority of our people will remain unwilling to bleed with it.

And if I honestly check for that readiness and wait and prepare and wait and wait, that’s what I’ll still be doing when my edge is no longer bleeding and the next decade of innovation has come and gone. But most won’t honestly check for it, and their innovation won’t be in waiting, but rather in mourning. Their push for digital pedagogical change won’t be much really at all.

If, though, I embrace early adopter potential, I can have a school full of pilot projects even while the norm is one to one and looking fairly up to date. But, the reality will be that the future is found in the differences between my team of very different gifts, interests and comfort levels.

4. We will rarely -- Go ahead and say it -- never know which innovations should become commonplace norms in our efforts without putting a lot of different ones into practice first. If real innovation is going to happen within our schools and our businesses, whether out back in the Skunk Works or in room by room and cubicle by cubicle, we have to create our lab schools within schools and our MIT Media Labs (or for the old-timers, the Bell Labs within the Ma Bells) within the design-thinking respecting core firm.

For schools, we almost put ourselves in ethical quandaries thinking we can’t do real experimental design of treatment and control groups with ‘human subjects’ who should be benefiting from our great new ideas. The fallacy, of course, is that without prototypes and pilot projects, we have no real, honest idea of which of the ideas are good and which stink to high heaven.

Or we’re so controlled by our bureaucratic thinking and expectation that we only think in categories of universal implementation with coordinated rollouts, standardized PD and common communication plans.

Humility will serve us well here. We don’t know until we try. That’s not a failure but a fact. The test process is the discovery process is the amazing excitement of seeing one in five (we’re being optimists here) of our plans really come together.

5. For our final point, we need a name for this strategy. Fractal change. How about that? We easily find ourselves thinking of symmetrical, comprehensively pre-planned change efforts where we respond to the unexpected but expect to know most everything of the ending from the beginning. Maybe we think of well-planned military campaigns like this, but we don’t fit the reality of history well if we do. Maybe everything doesn’t change in the fight when the first guy gets smashed in the mouth, but most things that matter change. Flanking efforts and thrusts and early releases and unexpected courage and unimagined stupidity all make their marks in a thoroughly asymmetric, seemingly unplanned plan.

Consider instead how chaos theory shows us the world works. But don’t think of chaos as a loss and a failure and mostly a mess. Think instead of fractals. Those jaw-dropping, beauty creating, newness producing shapes and patterns and tipping point changes and golden ratio attending processes that show us our world emerging from turbulence and butterfly effect connections and whatever other new age-y sounding but real world reflecting commonplaces which fill our days and our neighborhoods and our experiences if we’re paying attention. This is not the physicist’s chicken laying spherical eggs in a vacuum. This is fractal change, and something you’ll want to keep in mind if you’re leading real people in a real world through real change.