Leadership

China, Leadership

Grand Champions


Grand Champions

Originally uploaded by chinazurfluh

Shared leadership is tremendously enjoyable when you have people so focused on making it a special event for others. This year’s Pinewood Derby was an example of like minded people coming together to serve the enjoyment and fulfillment needs of their sons. It was a day for the family as almost 100 boys competed in a racing competition with their personally crafted wooden cars. It’s impressive to watch this unfold and with 4 years under my belt, it was especially powerful to see how it has developed over the years to what now exists.

My thanks and appreciation to my com padres on the Derby Committee. It was a powerful team led by Mr. Russ Porter. He is settling into his new leadership role quite nicely and we can feel confident as our boys transition to Boy Scouts, that we are leaving the pack in good hands.

Farside, Leadership

Star Trek, CNY, Noah’s ARK, & Leadership

Three interesting events linked in my consciousness and have driven me into inspiration.  Stay with me while I meander through my thoughts.

Celebrating the Chinese New Year for the 10th time in Asia has caused me to look deeper into this phenomenon with each passing year.  The fireworks, the chaos, the calm and the almost surreal intermittent quiet that descends on the city drives one to ponder in more interesting ways about looking both forward and back.  The almost constant fireworks for 15 days and the non-stop celebration bring special focus to the year – more so in many ways than the calendar based version of the “western” New Year.

Stay with me now – while listening to the reverberations of crackling explosions, I remembered an episode of Star Trek entitled “The Return of the Archons” — an a often forgotten scene where computer controled minds of a civilization are regularly released for 12 hours  allowing a rampant expression of destruction and “celebration” by the population – an escape valve that balances against close control and monitoring.  Roddenberry’s depiction of the essence of humanity is played out in this way – under control and conformity of mechanistic intervention “the body dies.”  Human spirit – creativity and inspiration – are the key to life.

Follow on this with an email from AISH ala Bambi Betts:

From Peter Drucker, management guru extraordinaire:

“What is the manager’s job?  It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite — and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to problems rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.”

More accurately, the allocation of resources might be described as going to the status quo in yet another attempt to maintain equilibrium.  Deviation from conformity drives us all to naturally steer the offender back on course through layers of bureaucracy and the subtleties of long standing paradigms.  These limiters provide a powerful lid to exactly the innovation and powerful deviations that are most needed in an age of economic meltdown and global disaster on our very doorstep.

So what does Noah’s Ark have to do with this.  My guess is we are all looking to a higher power in a time of fearful contemplation.  I am not really suggesting a religious theme of Armageddon here.  In the midst of the above musings, I settled in to watch a humorous film (Evan Almighty) on a modern day Noah and his Ark.  The character playing God (Morgan Freeman) in this popular movie posed some particularly thoughtful questions part way through the drama.

“Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?”

“How do we change the world?”

“One single Act of Random Kindness at a time. (ARK)”

So how does this connect, you ask?  The theme here is ultimately about breaking down the barriers of conformity. It’s about letting creativity and its random spirit spur us to create that which is not yet conceivable.  The human spirit is about randomness.  Chaos theory reigns supreme when you want to accomplish something beyond the status quo – and this is most certainly true when many fearfully cling to a narrow view of what is right, acceptable, and sustainable.

A complex world with difficult problems requires significant out of the box thinking.  Are we ready to initiate the “Red Hour” to solve them in the most creative way possible?

Leadership, Teaching/Learning, Technology

Alan November – He Gets It

During the EARCOS Conference now in play in Malaysia, Alan November presented a keynote presentation followed by two breakout sessions on Sunday last.  As always, I was impressed with the way in which Alan understands and generates that understanding in others.

While some may have walked away from his keynote scratching their heads, I was very aware of a purposeful lack of structure to his presentation.  While I cannot confirm my suspicions, I am aware that his methods were likely directed more toward modeling rather than the typical format of bestowing knowledge from the podium of vanity that is more often the standard of typical conference keynotes.  Alan attempted a “conversation” with an audience of 500+ and I applaud his efforts.

Ultimately, two things occurred as a result of his efforts:

1) Many left asking questions that inspired very competent conversations.  This is the product of a good keynote: creating a degree of tension in the audience that inspires dialog and discourse well after the presentation.

2)  Many left scratching their heads wondering what they just did.  Despite that, it is clear that as time allows the example of his performance to sink into gray matter, many will look back on their experience in an unpredictable “Ah-Ha” moment and realize the import of what they experienced.

Technology integration will have to follow a path like this to really achieve what its potential purports.  We need competent examples (exemplars) of integration and observers must walk away under inspirational moments to apply those skills in their own classrooms.  I remember in my own teaching career that the most effective staff developments were the inspirational and engaging speakers that brought information and emotion together into that critical tension that engenders both motivation and deep understanding.  Staff development and learning in general has to reach into your soul if you expect it to convert daily realities into visionary change.

So, thank you Alan for changing me.  Either intentionally or unintentionally, you brought new insight to how I might choose to achieve our common goal of preparing students for the world in which they will eventually thrive.

Leadership

Good to Great, Pt. 1

As part of a series on summer reading, I offer a synopsis of thoughts on Jim Collins book, Good to Great. His research solidly uncovers some key concepts on organizations moving from being good and capable organizations to something that is far beyond just being in maintenance mode.

Jim’s research uncovers 6 core concepts built under 3 unifying themes:

  1. Disciplined People
    1. Level 5 Leadership
    2. First who…. then what
  2. Disciplined Thought
    1. Confront the Brutal Facts
    2. Hedgehog Concept
  3. Disciplined Actions
    1. Culture of Discipline
    2. Technology Accelerators

Level 5 leadership provides insight into how great companies cultivate leadership and nurture it internally.  In a time when many companies look for CEO’s with name recognition and corporate pedigrees, this research contents that there is less about ego and more about lack of self-interest at play in great leadership.  A distinction is created here between the majority of leaders that live at Level 4 and the more elite Level 5’s who…

Build enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.

Humility + Will = Level 5

Level 5 leadership is also about unwavering resolve to do what is "right" and in the best interest of the organization.  It’s about leading with a core belief in the work of the organization and what is best for it’s growth and success. 

Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce results.

Consistent with the unique blend of humility and will, Level 5 leaders seldom attribute success to their own actions and conversely look inward when challenged by poor outcomes.  How many of us are capable of that kind of introspection when boards and stakeholders turn away from their normal distant role toward micro-managing tactics due to their perceptions of failure?  Isn’t it more often the case that the leader instead seeks to find fault elsewhere or with the constituents themselves?  How many leaders actually accept responsibility for their shortfalls?

Evolution, Leadership

Response to the Evolution Debate: Memes

Susan Blackmore uncovers a new concept about the development of thought and ideas as she characterizes them as similar to viruses of thought.  She extends on this core thinking and presents a new concept:

"Temes" = technology generated memes.

 

So, here is conjecture about the concepts and their application to education and administration:

1.  Static and unresponsive curriculum is the antithesis of memes/temes.  We saw an example of this in an ASCD article about the absence of quality material representing Asian and Middle Eastern cultures in our textbooks according to a recent study.

2.  Instructional practices that focus on product without attention to process are grossly disconnected from memes/temes.  While the expression is to be considered important, there is an essential attention that needs to be driven to the process of how memes – conscious and unconscious – develop in the brains of children inside and outside of the traditional classroom.

3.  Technology, especially, is likely emerging as the primary method for developing conceptual processes that are self-generating and "infectious".  Consider examples like Digg, Facebook, and the like.  With this understanding we change from a focus on intelligence to a focus on Susan’s concept of replications.

So, in response to the evolution argument elsewhere in this blog, it’s not about evolution in the Darwinian sense, but is instead about the iteration of replicators that we are currently engaging.  Digital natives are at a higher generation of teme replicator than the immigrant generations before them.

So, the question for all of us in the administrative world is guessing at the temes that will "survive."  Ultimately, these "temes" will best prepare our students for the concepts they must "inherit" in order to lead a productive and successful life.  How we spend our educational dollars to support this process is an essential discussion.  While we resist trend temptation and early adoption, it is this kind of consideration that is, in fact, critical to replication in a fast paced information oriented world.  Can we avoid it when kids are plugged into this at home – or more accurately when they are away from both home and school either physically or virtually?

I don’t think so.

Evolution, Farside, Leadership

With the Mind in Mind…Evolution

I won’t pretend to be a lead scholar on this topic and will, where appropriate, link you to the authors that are leading thinkers in this area.  The premise reads like this:

At a recent conference on technology tools for educational use, the statement was made that we “must come to grips with the evolution of the human brain.”  This stirred some controversy in the crowd to say the least.  How can you call this evolution?  What about the studies that point out how the brain can’t handle multi-tasking without giving up long term memory?  What about ….?  Haven’t you gone too far with this…..?”   etc. etc. etc.

So I consulted my handy search engine and found a couple of links to share and will conclude with  my thoughts.

First, from one of the leading theorists of brain research, I lead with the work of Dr. William Calvin and his book A Brief History of the Mind.  His concepts of how the brain has developed over time are interesting and although he lays out a belief that the brain has some catching up to do with regards to biological evolution, he has laid a framework for the next wave of brain “evolution” that is likely now that we have generally gotten ahead of ourselves.

Speaking of frameworks, no discussion of the brain can happen if you haven’t watched the TED video of the speech by Jeff Hawkins – Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing.  Jeff postulates that current theories of brain science lack a framework and, thus, we really know very little about the brain and it’s adaptability – but we are about to see a significant shift in our understanding because of his recent work in this area.

So, the question remains – Is the brain evolving as we get smarter and understand more and more about our world and everything around us?  I can’t answer that question, but I can’t help but look at history and conclude that it seems that the brain is always catching up with our own creativity.  Similar to the classroom, we have people that reach across a spectrum of brain “capability” and those that are at the front of the line are creating a world of increasing complexity.  If we accept the Darwinian concept of “survival of the fittest,” we must accept that these leading thinkers will propel us down a path of increasing brain capability.

The educational connection here is not about whether or not the brain is actually evolving.  I think it is a forgone conclusion that the brain will continue to develop and pass on genetic enhancements over long spans of time.  The real question is how to deal with the growing changes in the world and how to best prepare children to live in this world where brain capacity will determine survival.  If we can’t accept that the mind is changing – and likely faster than other biological aspects of the human species – then aren’t we doomed to delivering another unprepared generation onto society?

Even if we can’t agree on evolution (and don’t get me started on the creationist debates at the root of this), can we at least agree that the challenge of education is the preparation for what is clearly on the horizon rather than what we remember?

Leadership, Technology

Are Technology Directors an endangered species?

This entry was recently posted on “The ThinkingStick“, Jeff Utecht’s site.  Copied here for developing some additional thoughts.

Integrate and embed are both good words. Like Jeff, I lean towards the latter as more consistent with a more intuitive and natural approach to technology as a tool.

The issue remains that, for education at least, we still have a predominance of leadership at the highest levels that don’t have a clue about technology. In their minds, that’s why they hire technology directors and form technology committees – to do what they can’t.

So beyond the suggestions above of disbanding the technology committee, what we need is leadership that is tech. competent and immersed. More than that – we need administrators that are in love with technology because they have the vision of what is possible. They’ve got to have the spark, the twinkle in the eye when they see the utility of online collaboration, and world wide video streams and twitter based micro-blogs, and and and…..

When that happens to a critical mass of our leaders and when “Technology Directors” are all but extinct, then we might be approaching the stage of “embeded.”

I want what Jeff wants – classrooms oozing with technology that is not seen as technology – but only as fixtures in a classroom that allow kids to access their learning. Like the faucet in the corner that provides vital hydration, I want kids walking up to interactive devices that seem like nothing more than furniture in the classroom. They touch them and a world appears giving them access to whatever their mind desires. A teacher is there guiding the interaction, but the learner drives the process (shouldn’t that be true all the time). How many can actually picture that vision?