Actually taking a moment to reflect, he said, “We don’t.”
In order to become an organization that improves — that learns and evolves — a school needs time for intentional and disciplined reflection. Reflection is the process of deliberately deconstructing a situation or endeavor for meaning, impact, values, logistics, relevance, and strategic import. Reflection is different from evaluating or debriefing because it is fuller and more intentional in using the organization’s mission as a lens. In this sense, reflection is more radical, going to the root philosophy of the organization. Reflection requires honest and open questioning of assumptions. It requires the skill of making cognitive connections, seeing patterns. It provides honest perspective and reveals gaps. And, ultimately, it provides intellectual and emotional growth by allowing information to become knowledge. In short, organizational reflection begets organizational learning begets organizational innovation.
The Importance of Innovation
Why is innovation important for schools? Innovation is the ongoing process of analyzing critical market factors and evolving customer needs and aligning your organization — its knowledge and its people — to meet current demands. One innovates to remain relevant. A school must align its business fundamentals — including pricing and market position, curricular offerings, pedagogical approaches, and values — with market fundamentals. U. S. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki expresses this without frills, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” If the market fundamentals have dramatically changed, as they have in our “flat world” and with unprecedented instability in our credit markets, it is imperative that school leadership align for the future, not resting on the status quo of what is comfortable, familiar. Change, of course, is not the goal. Change is the method. Sustained relevance in the lives of our students, their parents, and our communities is the unequivocal goal.
It should go without saying that an organization does not innovate itself. The leaders of an organization initiate strategic innovation by bringing knowledge and resources to the system so that people can reconsider their beliefs, assumptions, and behaviors. The key is to be precise about the knowledge and resources you bring to bear. New knowledge and understanding helps people challenge their often limiting concept of what is necessary and their often confining ideas of what is possible. New knowledge and understanding help move people into the new thinking needed for the organization’s sustainability.
The Power of Questioning
In the process of reflecting for innovation, questioning is a powerful tool. It is subversive, bold, and not always welcome because it exposes vulnerabilities. I have found the simple question, why, to be an effective tool in ferreting out assumptions and beliefs that need to be reconsidered, dispelled, or retired. I am amazed by the number of times that I have asked why a person did something in a certain way, only to be told that the person before me did it this way, or it’s just the way it is done around here, or simply, I don’t know, I never thought about it. For me, these are red flags of organizational stagnation because they indicate that the person is more manager than leader, working more to keep things orderly than to move an organization forward.
A leader uses the power of questioning to reach full, expansive decisions that are as void as possible of faulty assumptions and myopic thinking. A good leader welcomes questions from others because they create space for reflecting, regrouping, and recommitting oneself to a course of action. An innovative leader uses the power of reflection and questioning to push himself or herself and the team members to new heights. I knew that creating a sense of the new at Grace-St. Luke’s would involve time and space to reflect (not easy to create in a calendar-driven environment) and a tolerance for questioning, which is hard to engender in a school culture that is heavily identified with expert status.
Central to the way one should structure innovation initiatives is the belief in the power of conversation to solve complex problems and to create engaged problem-solvers. Organizational expert Margaret J. Wheatley expresses this well, “People can work well together, can be creative and caring and insightful when they are actively engaged in meaningful conversation around questions that count.” Wheatley’s research on organizational systems has led her to oppose “highly controlled mechanistic systems that only create robotic behaviors.” She postulates that a better way is to have a thinking, dynamic culture that adapts and changes to its context. One of the first steps we took at Grace-St. Luke’s was the creation of conversation cafés, which offered opportunities for faculty and staff members to organize into small groups (four to six people) across divisions to discuss big, open-ended, meaningful questions. Capturing the thread of each small group’s discussion has revealed interesting patterns and perspectives. It has allowed us to harvest core aspects of the school culture and values that were foundational to subsequent projects.Customer Service
Understanding customer expectations is a complex and nuanced endeavor that is critical to a school’s relevance. Because the customer perspective is not commonly represented in school management, I challenged the thinking and decision-making at Grace-St. Luke’s to have intentional elements of co-creation with its customers (parents) and consumers (students). It is not clearly understood that customer expectations are not demands, but direct statements of need. Co-creation is collaboration around these needs. Schools, again because of being heavily identified with expert status, have scarce history or experience in collaborating with its users. But it’s certainly time to change this thinking.
A Whole New School
So, what did we specifically do at Grace-St. Luke’s to spark innovation? First, we resolutely acknowledged that the school’s focus must be on the need to educate students for their futures, not our past. Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind became a guiding text in categorizing the challenges of the 21st century. A Whole New Mind offers a way to make a school’s conversation about 21st-century sustainability manageable and containable because Pink offers six critical lenses to use in considering the future. On his first page, Pink writes, “The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind — creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people — artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers — will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”A school that wants its students to be the ones who reap society’s rewards and joys must design itself to provide students the relevant aggregate skills and knowledge to do so. To engender reflection, create a tolerance for questioning, and create a collaborative learning practicum toward the goal of redesigning the school, I arranged a series of “solution retreats” for the core leadership team. The idea was to get the core leaders out of their pressurized daily lives to intentionally look for solutions of all sorts, so that, once a problem developed, they’d have an arsenal of solutions at the ready.1 Understanding solutions helps you develop critical thinking gestalts, or schemas, that you can then apply to analogous situations. The effect is that you begin to recognize patterns.
We embarked upon six analogical thinking sessions over the course of a year. The core leadership team spent six full days with an expert in each of Daniel Pink’s “six senses” — story, design, symphony, empathy, meaning, and play. Our intention was to ask at each session: What does this mean for what we do and how we do it at Grace-St. Luke’s?
Play
Joe’s Liquors provided the expertise at our first solution retreat. Brad Larson, former Grace-St. Luke’s parent, is contagiously passionate and knowledgeable about wine. He talks wines — the taste of wine, the science of wine, the history of wine, the innovation in the wine industry — all day, every day to anyone who will listen. Larson has morphed Joe’s Liquors from a low-end package store into a premier wine shop. During the solution retreat, Larson set up a wine tasting for us, and began to describe the distinct aspects of each wine that we sampled. He was able to talk about each individually and intimately, quantifying its taste and bouquet, explaining the growing conditions, the climate region, the vintner’s standards and history. Larson’s inventory includes about 8,000 different labels. He has to know about them all specifically. Each wine is analyzed with the same criteria, yet each entry is different from another, like our students.Larson brought with him a two-foot-tall stack of his monthly reading materials, which included label ratings and reviews, weather and topography reports, industry trend analysis, food and wine pairing information, and marketing research. He works hard at continually learning about his industry at a micro and a macro level because he loves it. He is playful and intensely passionate about what he does, and that affinity drives him to continually do better. Larson’s driving passion fuels his learning. What would our schools be like if they were full of consummate, playful adult learners, who were intensely passionate about what they did all day every day?
Story
Susan Stephenson, cofounder and chair of Independent Bank, is a former Grace-St. Luke’s parent and board member. This local bank uses a story booth in its advertising campaign, and we wanted to understand why. Stephenson explained that Independent Bank’s corporate values inform everything it does, including its mission statement, which has nothing to do with money. She stated its mission: “To build a heroic culture.” Stephenson explained that building a culture that is grounded in values and is prepared to go beyond the ordinary must be reflected in all parts of the business. Independent Bank’s stated goal is to provide unparalleled customer service that is derived from customer need. Defining and valuing heroism is what allows the bank to provide authentic and unparalleled customer service. Independent Bank solicits the authentic stories of how the bank meets customer needs and why customers value their relationship with Independent Bank. “Story,” Stephenson explained, “values the path and journey of each individual’s relationship with our business. And it is not contrived spin. Story creates an opportunity for our organization to powerfully express its authenticity through the stories of our customers. Story leads others to act upon their desire to be a part of this culture that happens to be a bank.” Every school is full of unique stories and hero journeys, and these are much more powerful and indicative of what a school does and how it is valued than the statistics that are the mainstay in marketing materials and presentations.Meaning
Buckman Laboratories, a Memphis-based specialty chemical company, is highly recognized for its effective knowledge sharing across its 1,500-plus workforce and operations across 90 countries. Most of its competitors are five times its size in workforce and capitalization. Central to its success is the visionary principle of “creativity for our customers.” Kathy Buckman Gibson became chair of the board about 10 years ago. Her immediate challenge was to develop an organizational culture that honored the employees’ cultural diversity and created a capacity for collaboration across divisions. Her tool for establishing a culture of trust and collaboration was to develop a code of ethics. “A written statement of how we respect one another and how we respectively work together infused our culture with a sense of meaning,” Gibson explained. Grace-St. Luke’s subsequently developed a code of ethics to establish standards and norms that define our professionalism, our collegiality, our service objectives, and our work ethic. This gives the professional community a common understanding and language to observe and manage our interactions with peers, students, and parents.Symphony
Young Avenue Sound Recording Studios and Tim Sharp, the conductor of the Rhodes College Symphony and father of a Grace-St. Luke’s student, provided expertise in the skills of symphonic thinking. Sharp taught conducting and was chair of the music department and dean of fine arts at Rhodes College in Memphis.2 Because the challenge of managing complexity was familiar to all, Sharp showed the Grace-St. Luke’s leaders symphonic scores, which require a conductor to read and manage 16 different musical maps at once. He talked about the process of incorporating the intricacies of a musical score until it was fluid, meaning infused, and automatic to him. Sharp explained that he relies on his ability to synthesize and he fosters that ability with ongoing mental preparation. His process is intensely studious, taking hours of research, practice, and reflection. He also talked at length about managing talent and the difficulty involved in motivating and influencing a player who was at the recognized top of his or her field. “As difficult as [the music] is,” he says, “without collaboration, if each player did his or her own thing, the end result would not be worth anyone’s time.”One example Pink highlights in symphonic thinking is facility with metaphor, which focuses on how figurative language helps us construct meaning. Metaphors often develop organically in an organization. In some cases, they may work well, but, in others, they may not be as growth-oriented and inclusive as we’d like. The Grace-St. Luke’s team identified the school’s organizational metaphor as “family” — as do many schools — and derived some important insights as to the limits of self-identifying with “family” instead of an alternative metaphor that more accurately encapsulates the range of work within the school. Because they suddenly understood that language can be self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating, the team members resolved to focus on re-visioning their organizational metaphor and making some changes in the language used to describe the school culture.
Empathy
Hospitals, like schools, are empathetic businesses. An empathetic business has to operate efficiently and effectively (numbers-driven) yet deal intimately with people (high need for empathy). We traveled to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital to meet with Pam Dotson, registered nurse and director of patient services. Dotson is a Grace-St. Luke’s alumna. St. Jude’s is a leading pediatric treatment and research facility focused on children’s catastrophic diseases. It is the third largest healthcare charity in America.Some of our beginning questions were: What is empathy? Why is empathy important? Can you measure and develop empathy as a skill? Dotson was able to answer the questions with great clarity. You can measure empathy and you can develop empathy. A leader must manage with organizational empathy for the overall mission of the organization first, and also display personal empathy for the members of the organization. This charge of “mission first” is easy to understand, but incredibly difficult for leaders to implement because empathies (for the organization and for the individual) often collide. One of the takeaways was an awareness that all conversations in schools are critical, be they between colleagues, with parents, or with students. Developing effective communication skills within the organization has become one of Grace-St. Luke’s initiatives for this year.
Design
Hnedak Bobo Group (HBG) is a Memphis-based architecture and design firm specializing in hospitality and gaming facilities. Janet Smith-Haltom, founding partner at HBG and former Grace-St. Luke’s parent, pulled together a team to discuss design as problem solving. Throughout the day, we discovered how well designed HBG’s internal culture is. “Everything springs from your culture and it must be healthy and performance oriented,” Smith-Haltom explained as she walked us through their mentoring programs, performance evaluations, intentional team structures that leverage strengths, and the concept of “the internal client.” The marketing director, Tamara Goff, spoke about how she viewed every architect and designer in the firm as an internal client, with all the sense of urgency and performance anxiety and desire to please that it entails for an outside client. We could see how that attitude and vision could infuse a culture in an exciting way. She also spoke about design detail, “Everything — every large and small thing associated with your organization — is marketing, and it communicates about you, whether you realize it and design it, or not. Becoming hyper-aware and intentional about every detail in your environment and your interactions is marketing, and it pays off.”This was a new awareness because the Grace-St. Luke’s team thought of marketing more as brochures, websites, and placed articles. The reaction from the team was mixed — a great opportunity to see the marketing canvass as bigger and broader, but a challenge to add to every member’s daily purview.
Sharing information is powerful and truly revolutionary. One of my most basic beliefs fuels organizational learning opportunities like these solution retreats: once an individual knows something, he or she cannot un-know it. It follows that knowing obligates doing. Because we know better, we must create an environment that embodies the better that we know. Action, then, because of knowledge, becomes a moral imperative. Thus, creating more knowing in our schools, re-creating leaders as learners in schools, becomes an important goal in creating an organizational mindset that embraces, even seeks, innovation. We should all come to think of ourselves not just as leaders, but as the lead learners of our schools.
It is paramount to understand throughout your whole organization that change and innovation do not fix broken systems. They inoculate systems against becoming irrelevant. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Creating a culture that understands the ongoing purpose and process of innovation and is willing to commit the resources of time and money to new learning is prudent and strategic sustainability planning.
Notes
1. The idea of developing an arsenal of solutions is from Barry Nalebuff, author with Ian Ayres of Why Not? Nalebuff is a professor of management at Yale and a regular columnist in Forbes.2. Tim Sharp has since become executive director of the American Choral Directors Association in Oklahoma City, a 20,000- member association dedicated to the art of choral music.