I have been tracking book and blog authors who write about organizational innovation with the goal of helping translate their knowledge into language that resonates with educators. I strongly recommend reading an interview with Rowan Gibson, author of Innovation to the Core, offered in a three part series by Braden Kelley on the Innovation Excellence [...]
Late last week I was able to join a Twitter conversation with three great educators, Bo Adams, Laura Deisley, and Jill Gough about the nature and role of failure in schools. We all expressed our discomfort with how schools define, describe, and deal with failure, what an aberration it is from how success and failure [...]
Schools are knowledge-based organizations. We may want to change the balance of skills and content instruction, but our core business is and will always remain rooted in knowledge. We don’t make things; we make “things” (people) smarter through the management of knowledge. Two blog posts grabbed my attention over the weekend as I am working [...]
Yesterday I was writing a chapter of the new book dealing with innovation in schools. This singular point stuck out: Innovation is hard because it is about the future, and most predictions about the future turn out to be wrong. This creates the highest level of risk for organizations that have to commit large amounts [...]
More than a year ago, Keith Evans, Head of Collegiate School in Richmond, and one of the brightest, most forward-thinking educators I know, sent me a list of about five metrics that he had created (yes, a bit tongue-in-cheek) to measure true effectiveness of his school. I added to the list. I swear I cannot [...]
About 25 years ago a very wise mentor gave me a piece of timeless advice: always pick the path that provides the greatest number of options. To this day I cannot recall a single instance where it has failed the test of hindsight. I remember telling my own children that the reason prison or jail [...]
What does real innovation look like in schools and how do we know we are not just stirring up a bunch of cool, but unrealistic, new ideas? Rita Gunther McGrath, responding to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, admonishes us that lots of companies talk about their focus on innovation but empirical data suggest [...]
In yesterday’s Boston Globe online Mary Carmichael summarizes a new report being released by think tank Ithaka S+R that shows little, if any, difference in learning outcomes between online and face-to-face instruction in higher education. She provides quotes by James McCarthy of Suffolk University, Brit Kirwan, Chancellor of the University of Maryland system, Michael Horn [...]
We might refer to the last 20 or 30 years in independent school management as the Era of Strategic Planning. Schools recognized during this time that they were businesses, not mom-and-pop start-ups or old boy clubs. Businesses need to plan for the future, not just believe in it. We learned to do five-year look-aheads according [...]
Education is in need of evolutionary game-changes. There are two important aspects to that simple statement. First, we need evolution, not revolution. Our foundations and traditions are strong, so we don’t need to blow up the walls. What we think of as revolution due to fear of the unknown will present as evolution once we [...]