leading!for!the!future! annual$conference$spotlight$ by:holly!chesser… · 2018. 4. 14. ·...
TRANSCRIPT
© 2012 SAIS www.sais.org
the conversation continues inside of
SAISconnect http://saisconnect.sais.org
Leading For the Future Annual Conference Spotlight By: Holly Chesser, SAIS Published: November 2012 “Innovate or die,” summarized one attendee, characterizing the salient message from keynotes to breakout sessions at this year’s 2012 SAIS MISBO Annual Conference. Everyone is feeling it: an urgency to compete, the need to remain relevant, an end to business as usual. Leaders can no longer sit on the sidelines, taking note of the changing rules of the game; now, there’s a bias toward action. Bob Johansen, author of Leaders Make the Future, argues that this brave new VUCA world defined by volatility, complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity will challenge and ultimately permanently disrupt our traditional social, business, and organizational systems. Certainly, the demographics of our nation’s recent election offered a portent of that future. However, according to Johansen,
leaders must discover the opportunities that lie even in dramatic change. Developing forecasting skills, leaders must provoke the future they wish to see, not predict the future that awaits them. At the SAIS MISBO Annual Conference in October, a keynote panel of SAIS school leaders presented Johansen’s ten critical leadership skills, offered as a new leadership profile for the future. Called “skills” because they can be learned, the ten move in order from “instinctive to transformative.” Beginning with the
“maker instinct,” the most basic of the skills and essential to the development of the others, and ending with the “commons creating” skill, dependent on connectivity and collective action, Johansen outlines a way forward to meet the VUCA world head-‐on with preparedness, anticipation, intervention, and advancement.
Maker Instinct At the heart of the human experience is the desire to create and construct. Leaders who recognize this fundamental impulse “can choose whether or not to encourage people in their organizations to express their maker instinct.” Reggie Nichols became Piney Wood’s Head of School (MS) in 2006, joining a venerable leadership team whose members each averaged twelve years with the organization. Despite having been with the school for fourteen years, the Director of Presidential Affairs, although equipped with a master’s degree, had only been asked to file and type.
Videos are available at www.sais.org/talks
© 2012 SAIS www.sais.org
the conversation continues inside of
SAISconnect http://saisconnect.sais.org
Acknowledging and honoring her maker instinct, Nichols challenged her to grow. She now coordinates the school’s master calendar and writes the popular weekly e-‐magazine. Nichols asserts that the greatest capitalization of the maker instinct occurs when leaders build networks of makers, each kindling the maker energy in themselves and others. Clarity In a hazy, contradictory VUCA world, clarity is the ability to envision a future that others cannot yet see. Distinct from certainty, which is expressed in rules, clarity is communicated through narratives and stories, through helping others participate in and uphold the vision of the school. Doreen Kelly, Head of Ravenscroft School (NC), highlights the need for personal clarity fostered through reflection, prayer, personal wellness, and gratitude as well as institutional clarity developed through strict adherence to the school’s mission statement. Laminating the mission on cards, she and her leadership team guard against creep or leak, recognizing the wisdom in Johansen’s words, “We need great clarity about direction but great flexibility about the details.” Dilemma Flipping Future leaders will need to thrive in a world defined by dilemmas: messy, unpredictable, complex, demanding, unsolvable dilemmas. Where others see limitations and experience crippling anxiety, future leaders will discover opportunities and pose transformative alternatives. As Director of Instructional Technology at The Westminster Schools (GA), Colleen Glaude, a veteran math teacher, found herself frustrated with her students who seemed unable to keep up with their work due to absences, apathy, or lack of skill. Resolved to flip that age-‐old dilemma, she literally “flipped her classroom.” Today, homework is done in class under her guidance, students are actively engaged in projects, and all learning is individualized to meet the specific needs of each student. Likewise, in her role as Dean of IT, she was overwhelmed with students’ damaged mobile devices. Flipping this dilemma, she created a technology program allowing students to obtain tech certification and the opportunity to engage in an apprenticeship with a local Apple store. Outlining the route to dilemma flipping, she advises first to accept and realize you’re faced with a dilemma; second, listen, look, and learn and familiarize yourself with the problem; third, focus and find opportunities to transform the dilemma into a net positive. The key, she explains, is to love the process of puzzling, not just putting the final piece in place. Immersive Learning Ability As Head of The Pine Crest School (FL), Dr. Dana Markham travels a predictable route each day, fifty steps to her office where “she manages the operating budget, identifies development opportunities, and protects the integrity of the curriculum, all while supporting the strategic plan and vision of the school.” However, an experience this summer contemplating a student’s photos of her travel abroad helped her recognize the limitations of her prescribed path. Leaders, she contends, must frequently immerse themselves in the currents to break down the barriers of rigid thinking and to appreciate the validity in other perspectives. Encouraging her faculty and staff to walk in multiple sets of shoes, Markham argues that we cannot insist that our students take risks if
© 2012 SAIS www.sais.org
the conversation continues inside of
SAISconnect http://saisconnect.sais.org
we only seek safety. Recognizing the need to understand fully all the components, demands, and perspectives that enliven her school, she now takes the long way to her office. Bio-‐Empathy Life on our planet has endured for billions of years. As a result, it has lessons to teach us. Bio-‐empathy, according to Johansen, “is grounded in the ability to empathize with nature and understand its ways, its connectivity, and its resilience.” Related to immersive learning ability, bio-‐empathy involves the capacity to see things from nature’s point of view. It demands the employment of system thinking to understand the connectivity of nature’s parts and its cycles of change. Damian Kavanagh, SAIS’s Vice President of Accreditation & Membership, credits member schools with recognizing the link between environment and student learning, noting many schools are employing natural light in classrooms, emphasizing sustainability through recycling efforts and the construction of roof top gardens, and sourcing cafeteria foods more locally. However, he underscores one aspect of nature that independent schools should model: nature doesn’t keep secrets. Independent schools have long believed that their competition is another private school down the street when in fact it’s the false perceptions the general public and our families have about what we do as educators. Constructive Depolarization In the uncertain world of the future, individuals will naturally desire certainty and reassurance, which they will seek at any cost. Johansen believes that “zealous and self-‐righteous leaders” who will be “clear, certain and wrong” will attempt to fill the vacuum. In these VUCA times, schools will need leaders to employ “the skill of constructive depolarization in order to redirect the energy of conflict and bring the stakeholders toward constructive engagement and dialogue.” As Suzanna Jemsby, Headmaster of The Galloway School (GA), translates, “Grace is what Bob Johansen is asking us to master.” Leaders must listen to, respect, and honor divergent perspectives within their organizations; they must “tease out voices” that are often not heard. They must recognize the inherent richness in diversity, globalization, and even conflict. Most importantly though, they must find something they can place in the middle, a commonality, that will help all to move forward. Quiet Transparency Which characteristic do you value more in a leader: the ability to speak well or the capacity to listen carefully? When you hear the word “vulnerable,” do you think “weakness”? Johansen contends that we’ve got to readjust our way of thinking in the VUCA world of the future to recognize that “quiet leaders have the ability to listen … are vulnerable yet self-‐confident.” Cliff Kling, Chief Financial Officer of Jackson Academy (MS), argues that the days of the “rock star” school leader are over. In this age of transparency, leaders need to be open and authentic about what matters; they need to be self-‐effacing and mission-‐promoting. Encouraged by the new trend toward offering town hall meetings and publishing headmaster blogs, Kling contends that school leaders must be open and transparent with external and internal constituencies, sharing the power and looking for opportunities to engage the community in decision-‐making processes. Citing the surge in open
© 2012 SAIS www.sais.org
the conversation continues inside of
SAISconnect http://saisconnect.sais.org
source thinking, Kling hopes that secondary schools will follow suit, recognizing that in giving ideas away, each will get better ideas in return. Rapid Prototyping As anyone forty years or older remembers, advances in the home phone took place at a snail pace, the rotary dial was gradually supplanted by the push button, the black square on the living room table eventually became the beige rectangular shape hung on the wall in the kitchen. However, in today’s VUCA world, change is a constant; in fact, the only constant is change. Innovation in schools, therefore, has to assume a different form. The focus needs to move from an emphasis on success to an acceptance of failure. Johansen defines rapid prototyping as “quick cycles of try, learn, and try again – in an ongoing sequence.” Keith Evans, Head of Collegiate School (VA), defines this skill as leveraging failure. Failure, Keith argues, is a taboo word in schools. Schools maximize success, value planning, and avoid risk. To maintain relevancy in a VUCA world, schools instead must develop a trial and error mentality and assume a bias for action. They must resist the urge to form a committee but instead prioritize speed. Encouraging his faculty to “make small bets out of sight,” Evans promotes the testing of new ideas in one classroom with one teacher, advising them “to see what you learn and see how you fail.” No motto expresses the future of innovation more clearly than “fail early, fail often, fail cheaply.” Only then can you achieve success. Smart Mob Organizing Most of us consider mobs to be disorganized, unpredictable, and disruptive. But in today’s world of pervasive social media, a mob can channel its connectedness and shared sense of purpose to be smart. “Of course,” as Johansen argues, “how smart a smart mob is depends on the resources of its members, the talent of the leaders, and the effectiveness of their media.” Chris Angel, Head of Hammond School (SC), reminds us that we all have mobs we can organize and leverage. Future leaders need to develop and nurture a strong social media identity, capitalizing on the collective wisdom of the crowd to make connections and draw links. Gone are the days where a leader’s in-‐person presence will be enough and where a leader can simply go it alone. In the future, leaders will need to employ the energy of the mob. Commons Creating In a remarkable form of eco-‐innovation, corporations in Europe have bound together on physical sites to created closed loop manufacturing, analyzing and implementing a production process where each corporation is directly connected to another that uses its waste product as a resource for production. Bob Johansen describes the impulse that designed this model as “commons creating” defined as the “ability to seed, nurture, and grow shared assets that benefit all players and allows competition at a higher level.” Identified as the most important and difficult skill for leaders to develop, commons creating demands truly creative thinking to discover new, shared opportunities. Paul Ibsen, Assistant Headmaster for Finance and Management at Providence Day School (NC), offers example of individuals who have reached out to build organizations of mutual interest, citing MISBO, AISBO, and NBOA as important and valuable examples of commons creating. Ibsen maintains that in our silo structured institutions, sharing ideas and creating symbiotic
© 2012 SAIS www.sais.org
the conversation continues inside of
SAISconnect http://saisconnect.sais.org
relationships is difficult within school let alone among schools. He advocates leaders to encourage their faculty to share what they know and to figure out ways collaboratively and synergistically to make things better. Take the advice we give to our preschoolers, “You can’t get unless you give.”
The final chapter of Johansen’s book is titled “Learning the Ten Future Leadership Skills Yourself.” Offering a series of self-‐evaluative questions, Johansen emphasizes that leaders in a VUCA world will need to develop “inner balance and personal discipline.” Leaders can make the future, but they will need mental, spiritual, and physical fitness. The VUCA world awaits. Are you ready to lead?
The Center for Creative Leadership will be hosting a webinar with Bob Johansen December 11, 2012.
http://www.ccl.org/leadership/community/leadersWebinar.asp
x