Never business as usual: lenses, discipline, opportunities, learning and scaling
Dr Peter Thomas (then writing as founding director of HaileyburyX), with Lauren Sayer, (former director of Digital Learning at Haileybury and now Executive Director, Digital Learning, Research and Innovation at Melbourne Girls Grammar).
We originally started this article back in the neolithic past of four weeks ago. Even in that time lots of things have changed — which is a testament to the degree to which how ‘business as usual’ is changing. We’ll give you an update on where StageKings — the company we talk about — have got to at the end of the article.
We came across a really interesting company recently who have adapted to the challenges we are all facing. It made us think about how we are facing them.
The company is StageKings, an Australian business who build structures for big entertainment events like The Commonwealth Games, Ninja Warrior and the Ultra Music Festival. In just 48 hours their entire income for the rest of 2020 was cancelled. No events, no need for scaffolders, carpenters, designers, support staff and labourers to build things.
So what did StageKings do?
They pivoted in such a simple way that it looks obvious, but is actually genius. This is what they said in a blogpost:
“we have a CNC Router, and the people to use it, we also now have entire companies, no, industries having to work from home in Isolation. So we have decided to produce work-from-home desks — let’s call them Isolation desks. Not only will this keep a number of our good crew off the street, but we’ll also be donating $10 from every sale to Support Act — who are supporting music workers impacted by the Corona Virus Pandemic. We hope to be back building amazing stages for concerts and festivals before long, but in the meantime we hope we can help with a place you can work in Isolation, an IsoKing desk.”
We think its a bit of everyday genius because it goes to the heart of what every organisation — and potentially ever person in every organisation — will have to do.
We’re going to talk about what those things are as we see them. We’re not saying that we are doing all of them, or even doing some of them well, or that everyone would see what we see — but that we have come to the realisation that they are the things we should do and that we are trying to do them.
So we’re going to talk about what happens when it’s not business as usual — and later, when it may never be business as usual again — in terms of five connected concepts: lenses, discipline, opportunities, learning and scaling.
As with all of these Medium articles we are sharing our thinking in the hope it might be useful, or at least interesting.
Lenses
So much of what we do is determined by the lenses through which we look at things, rather than the things themselves.
In photography, lenses work by changing the world beyond your camera into a representation inside your camera. A landscape viewed through a 50mm lens looks completely different from the same landscape viewed through an ultra-wide-angle 14mm lens; a building viewed through a sophisticated and highly specialized tilt-shift lens (designed to keep the verticals of a building parallel) looks like a different kind of architecture altogether; some things look bigger in the visual field, some smaller; perspective is foreshortened or distended.
In the world of doing and feeling, the lenses through which we look at the world might also be called cognitive biases — of which perhaps the most helpful (or problematic) is confirmation bias: the tendency to selectively seize upon the information that supports our position. It makes for certainty and comfort, but not so much for making decisions that play out well over the long term. See a dog with teeth bared, move away just in case — especially when the last time you saw one you got bitten. No time to step back and evaluate the data including the owner saying “he wouldn’t hurt a fly, would you Snoodles?” and the fact the dog is a miniature poodle with limited damage capability. Move away.
Cognitive biases. We all have them. They can be a useful survival mechanism, but course — as can be no more evident than the events of the last few months, and the catastrophe playing out in the US around #blacklivesmatter — they can be disastrous.
Like lowering your camera and finding out that the scene in front of you really doesn’t look like that at all, it can be a shock when events — like a pandemic — are made actively worse because you didn’t recognise your cognitive biases.
In the case of the pandemic, there has been a systematic cognitive bias of the scientists are being alarmist variety (of course it's one of very many such biases). So it doesn't matter how much, or what, evidence scientists present, the cognitive bias will always allow you to cherry-pick the evidence, label scientists as alarmist, or in disagreement with each other, and ignore them.
Now if you apply this to education, and especially to K12 education, and especially to the transition to learning away from the school campus, we have seen many cognitive biases at play.
One is that online/remote learning is inferior to face-to-face learning. Start with this cognitive bias and you fail to do things from the perspective of the world in front of you — real students doing real learning — and instead seek out confirmatory evidence for your point of view, ignoring everything else.
It turns out, of course, that there is very little evidence that will help us here. There have been very few methodologically sound experiments to look at the two and how they work, and arguably in something as important as learning — where everything matters, all of the time — it would be ethically problematic to do those experiments.
But we have been in the biggest live trial ever conducted on what works in learning and what doesn’t. Conservatively, a billion children learning outside of the boundaries of the classroom, and maybe a hundred million teachers working with them. What have we learned from that, or what might we learn?
Not much probably, because it depends on your cognitive biases.
Enter into this situation with the online/remote learning is inferior to face-to-face learning bias and its likely that a government’s, a school’s, a subject’s or an individual teacher’s approach will be very different. Is the fact that a student can change their own display name in Zoom an unwelcome opportunity for mayhem, or a useful tool? Depends on your lens. Is someone who behaves badly in a video call an argument for no video calls, authentication, waiting rooms and better encryption, or a learning moment for both teachers in mapping secure processes and for how students should engage with peers? Depends on your lens.
Like the rabid cybersecurity rhetoric that labels technologies “dangerous” or “appalling” (we talked about this in our previous articles on TikTok and Discord) you see what you want to see. Go down that road and you may as well turn the internet off because everything is dangerous. You cherry-pick some evidence, make it the only evidence worth taking account of — then TikTok is banned. This, just as not shutting down international borders in a pandemic immediately, doesn't lead to a good outcome.
So what can we do? The obvious thing is to try and identify what your cognitive biases are so at least you can try and figure out when they are in play.
In our case of the Haileybury response to the shift to remote learning, we had an advantage: we have a campus in China. This enabled us to see into the future of what happens when you dismantle the structure of a school day, and a school classroom, and take it into homes. This foresight was incredibly helpful in helping us to step beyond an online/remote learning is inferior to face-to-face learning cognitive bias and into a period where we could discover, organise and make sense of partial knowledge.
Back to our example of StageKings, sidestep the cognitive bias that says we are a company who builds stage sets and you can pivot quickly, and effectively, to do different and powerful things.
Discipline
Identifying cognitive biases, just like many other things that stretch us, requires a certain level of discipline.
Not just discipline in execution, which is essential, but the discipline to stay with a course of action while avoiding simple partial solutions and instead look for the best possible solution based on evidence.
To draw on the pandemic as an example again, the actions of Chinese and Korean governments in implementing an entire solution across an entire population (inform, test, trace) accounts for the different levels of success in limiting infections and deaths compared to European countries.
But there are lots of examples of where discipline is essential— whether that’s creating strategy in a purposeful manner, organising yourself to allow the strategy to work by removing barriers, taking action and then continually evaluating outcomes and recalibrating, or in implementing a change programme through an entire organisation.
One of the key things we have observed in our own organisation is just how important teamwork is — and just how hard it is.
We all work in teams, of one form or another, but very few of those teams are cohesive and effective. The challenge to address is how to improve the capability, and so the effectiveness, of teams.
General Stanley McChrystal, in Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, says:
“Today’s rapidly changing world, marked by increased speed and dense interdependencies, means that organizations everywhere are now facing dizzying challenges, from global terrorism to health epidemics to supply chain disruption to game-changing technologies. These issues can be solved only by creating sustained organizational adaptability through the establishment of a team of teams.”
In our case, we have majored on not just creating many teams, but on trying to upskill those teams with knowledge and tools.
Our HaileyburyX project is entirely team driven. Courses are developed by teams, they are evaluated by teams, and those teams change and adapt driven by their own priorities. Everything is transparent (we have a Slack backbone that teams use and teams track their workflow using Trello). This is new and unfamiliar territory for many teachers, but those that have engaged are getting it—and getting it right. All of this is underpinned by the development of an Agile mindset (about which we have written about before).
And all of this requires discipline. Not discipline in the military sense (as McChrystal also says “Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative.”) but discipline in the sense of putting the conditions in place for adaptability.
But perhaps the time where discipline is most required is to keep asking questions about your why. For StageKings their why morphed temporarily in response to the pandemic to “If we can keep a few people in work, and a few more people productive at home during this crazy time, then we’re happy with that for now.”
But in reality StageKings’ why is about being creative. As Stagekings Managing Director Jeremy Fleming said:
“Here at Stagekings, we do things differently — we’re not just saying that — we actually do. We are super proud of our creative reputation. We try to get better every day — be more creative, give better service, go harder, bigger. Every time.”
Opportunities
We’ve talked about discipline in the sense of being adaptable. Just like StageKings, when you shed cognitive biases and become disciplined, opportunities present themselves.
In the case of StageKings, it’s the IsoKings desks (and other new product lines). In our case, it has been a huge upswing in new projects — all aligned to our why of providing excellent education to our students.
We have increased our collective digital literacy a thousandfold — not just delivering remote teaching but experimenting with new and engaging technologies like AR; used applications like Flipgrid to build new ELC courses; built entirely new blended course materials; shared our practice with the educator community in community contribution webinars (all of which are started, planned, and executed in the space of a few hours, not days or weeks); built new professional development materials for our own community and other educators; built a best-practice evidence-based microcredentialling and digital badge framework; and many other examples at whole-school level, and at the level of individual teachers and courses, of identifying, seizing and acting on opportunities.
Winston Churchill said “never waste a good crisis.” When we have no other option we seem to easily find new innovations that lead us to new ways of working that we never thought of before.
One example is parent-teacher interviews — a tired and time-consuming tradition in schools which teachers and parents spend five-minute sessions sharing pleasant banter in cold gyms to support children’s learning. The current crisis has led us to finding new ways to do parent-teacher interviews — such as zoom meetings where parents and teachers can conduct confidential shared discussions around learning from wherever they might be at that current moment.
Another is about collaboration. When we ask students what they have enjoyed during remote learning the feedback is overwhelmingly that they cherished moments with their friends, their teachers and were able to focus. This is because we engineered opportunities to have strong social interactions every day to the point that whilst many other schools scaled down social synchronous opportunities we scaled up. The feedback is that it worked and that students wanted times to socialise and interact with their peers.
This is not to say we are the best at any of these things or that others are not doing them. It’s more about reflecting on what happens when you are open to opportunities.
Part of that is thinking hard about the idea of business as usual.
Almost every Twitter feed is full of either it will be back to business as usual-type statements or conversely it will never be business usual again-type statements. Our view — and hope — is that neither of these statements are true. Despite calls for ‘revolution’, ‘changing the game’ and ‘radical overhaul’, everything isn’t broken —but neither is everything going to stay the same.
As we said in our previous article about innovation, the very best that can come out of our experiences of the last few months is an openness to opportunity. That doesn’t mean pursuing every wild idea but being careful about how we do it. This means maintaining a firm grip on our why, identifying our cognitive biases and being disciplined.
How have we thought about business as usual/never business as usual again?
One way is to simply acknowledge that there is a range of views about what ‘business as usual’ was anyhow and be prepared to accept them, discuss them and learn from them. After all, our colleagues have been at the sharp end of delivery—all day, every day — and we have to acknowledge their experience as valid. If you have managed to gracefully maintain normalcy — excellent, let’s learn how; if you found it difficult, adapted and came through — excellent let’s learn from it. If you struggled—let’s apply the first two learnings and see how we can help.
It’s well known that one of the difficulties in any organisation is the diffusion of knowledge. What people know tends to stay with them or in small silos. At a time when knowledge is being generated very quickly, the problem becomes more acute — resulting in either the well-intentioned spraying out of undifferentiated information or a kind of sharing fatigue where nothing gets out. It’s important to share, we have found out, not just what works but what doesn’t work — which can be some of the most useful information you can possibly share.
There are lots of lessons here about opportunity but our recommendation is to try and be, to the best of your ability, a learning organisation.
And in a learning organisation, it’s never business as usual.
Learning
And of course, this all about learning. What else could it be about?
In an earlier post, we talked about the HaileyburyX project as being one of the ways we are trying to be a learning organisation that:
“…can identify, understand, embrace and effectively use emerging technologies in teaching and learning. And we are doing this so that we can best serve the needs of our students not just today, but in ten, twenty or thirty years’ time, and make sure our teachers are prepared to satisfy those needs every step along the way.”
If you see learning, organizationally, as a continuous process and learning professionally as a continuous imperative, the effect is incredibly powerful. By dismantling cognitive biases — or put the other way around, choosing the right lens through which to look at the world — you create opportunity. It’s almost impossible not to.
But it requires a certain mindset to make learning happen. Part of that mindset is the Agile values and principles we have talked about before.
The four values (which you can read about in a previous post here) start with the idea of Individuals and interactions over processes and tools:
“Great outcomes stem from groups of people focused on a common goal. Processes and tools help along the way but alone aren’t enough to make the magic happen. Giving people the time and space to interact with each other and form good social bonds pays dividends when it comes time to collaborate on the work at hand”.
The best learning—as we have seen during the period of remote teaching — is essentially human and social. Some of the ways we have used remote learning tools have actually increased social bonds; others not so much. The Agile value focuses on people, not things; interactions not tools; and the benefits to be gained from effective collaboration.
In our case, as we discussed, it's all about teams working and learning together. No amount of training can ever match the deep learning that happens when teams of people come together around a common goal.
That learning can be extremely focused and limited in scale. For example, we used a tool called coda.io to create a collaborative script for our enticEd event in May. We hadn’t used it before until typing in the first character, and never bothered to explore many of its features, but this tool essentially got out of the way to let the work happen and collaboration to flourish.
Combine the freedom for teams to pick the right lightweight tools to use with the Agile value of Responding to change over following a plan, and it’s almost impossible not to learn — and learn more about how to collaborate effectively.
StageKings seems to us to embody exactly this even if they have never heard the word ‘Agile’. They say:
“Within the coming days we’ll be releasing more of your suggestions, including art easels and scooter stands (I must admit after tripping over my 3 kids’ scooters which seem to get left in front of our front door every damn day…I’m very happy about this one!) So please keep your ideas coming!”
This ‘ wisdom of crowds’ approach is also something we have also written about previously as Eno’s term ‘Scenius’:
“Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius. Individuals immersed in a productive scene will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenes, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.”
And just like StageKings, the feedback we have from students, parents and teachers is not a reason for us to merely pat ourselves on the back. It presents us with new opportunities to change and flourish — if we are ready to take those opportunities.
Scaling
As a final comment, almost an aside, we want to talk about how you grow opportunities, and why.
In the startup ecosystem, the term scale is used as a mantra for startups. Scale gives you prestige, access to funding and success. A business that scales stays around, gets big and often gets bought (one statement of the startup mission is This is what we know. This is the hypotheses we will test. This is what it could look like at scale).
And scaling applies not just to startups but to opportunities in a school setting.
It’s a matter of motivations. Because we know our why, have tried to counter our cognitive biases and applied some discipline, we can have a realistic view of what can be scaled.
For example, we know that microcredentialling is a scalable opportunity. Why? Because we tried to shed our bias towards microcredentials as inferior credentials, think about the long term, learn from those who know more than us (see our podcast season on Soundcloud) and then apply some discipline to this opportunity in the form of a slow, consultative and measured approach working with teams of teams. We’ll be sharing this with the wider education community soon because the more people we share it with, the more we learn and so the better we can scale.
Not all opportunities are scalable though. Some things can stay as small experiments but these too can be learned from given the right environment.
So back to StageKings.
On 22 March, Stagekings Managing Director Jeremy Fleming said in a blog post:
“So, we have decided to produce work-from-home desks — ‘isolation desks’. As a nod to Stagekings, we’re going to call them The IsoKing desks. We aren’t sure how it will go, but in true Stagekings style, we will sure as hell give it our all.”
On 27 May, Jeremy said:
This past weekend marks 2 months since we received the news of the ban on public gatherings, the abrupt cancellation of all of our upcoming work, and our decision to switch to making work from home office furniture…over that time we’ve taken 5,000 orders, released over 30 products and have 50 crew working in 4 states to supply the demand. We’ve also completed many of your requested custom builds [and] very importantly to us we have now donated over $30,000 to Support Act.”
A success, I think we would all agree. So how did they do it?
We think some of it is about the five ideas we have discussed: revealing cognitive biases, being disciplined, identifying opportunities, learning and scaling the right opportunities.
We think, just like StageKings, that we will be better positioned having done these things to fulfil our why in the future — whatever the future turns out to be.
