Is every part of your organisation’s work on the right level?
Back in April 2020, I wrote the first of our “Provocation” email newsletters.
At the time, people were talking about how school and life, in general, would never be the same thanks to the quickly adopted new habits of learning and working at home, increased opportunities for students to take more ownership of their learning, and the questionable value of qualifications as they stood.
Universities designed and implemented new and better ways to triage and accept students.
By 2023, they’d all gone back to their old ways. The schools. The universities. The teachers.
The students had little say in it, and we wonder why so many still struggle to get motivated by the offering they’re given.
In April 2020 I wrote this:
“What history shows us is that, in spite of massive turbulence, old habits really do die hard. The chances of revolutionising education or “smart working” in the mourning period of this crisis are slim. We’ll build new habits over the next 90 days — that’s what it takes to build a habit. But we also know it takes just days to break them.
“That’s why it’s so important that leaders don’t panic, don’t rush to name the revolution that won’t happen, but instead set up a large chunk of their workforce to do what they could have done at any time in the past ten years: ask how they might work, think, learn or play differently, to achieve more, be happier and choose the way they live.”
If you want to develop more innovative organisational habits, then your school needs to operate on our three levels most of the time.
As I wrote this in Manhattan, dazzled by skyscrapers, I realised that so many leaders and Boards are fixated on the top of the tower. The 86th floor. Or even the 102nd. The shiny bit that everyone sees.
I can tell, because when we do ‘strategic planning’ work they want to talk about those floors without addressing the slight cracks and crumbles at ground level. Or the opposite happens: the ‘strategic pillars’ of the school are rammed full of jobs-to-be-done that should simply be someone’s day job.
The three levels closer to ground are where it’s worth starting your journey into creating focus.
Ground level, or close to it, is often where there’s work to be done before long-term bold ambition can come into play.
Level 1 Work is for all the things that are business as usual should feel like a routine for most people.
The work should be automatic, well-rehearsed, slick. We call this Level 1 work. It’s often about building capacity in adults and students in a school. It’s often slow work, and building capacity isn’t the work that will set the heather on fire — it’s redoing your plumbing and it can be expensive in terms of people’s time.
But it’s also largely operational (so your Board will just need informed). It includes things like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion work that should’ve been routine before now. It’s honing your formative assessment skill, learning about the latest teaching methods that will give an incremental edge. Even really big projects like designing the campus to suit those new ways you need to learn belongs in this category.
Level 1 Work should be routine. If you’re a leader your job is simple: hire good people, ensure they develop their capacity day in day out, give clear goals and trust them — get out of the way.
Level 2 Work is the stretch goal, that singular and new focus that you’re asking everyone to bear in mind.
Level 2 is having a bold ambition that everyone is pulling towards. It’s the singular focus that’s at the front of their minds.
You’re not going to tell people what to do to get to that goal — you’re going to let them work out how their work adapts to it. And you’ve got to promise them and yourself that you’re going to stick at it. The plan for Level 2 work is that it doesn’t feel like a stretch forever. It should, with practice and time, become business as usual, too.
Level 3 Work is essential, all the time: prospecting. But not everyone does it. Level 3 is work undertaken by that small, quiet group in the corner, the ones who have a feverish interest in what’s emerging, thinking about how it could be useful, writing off what’s useless and planning how to seize the opportunities that could be great for everyone.
The R&D group. The working party.
Their work has to be quiet so as not to distract the crowd from their focus on Level 2.
But the work in Level 3 is what informs the next bold ambition once everyone has arrived at Level 2.
And crucially, the work on Level 3 doesn’t need to succeed. As Vaclev Havel put it: ”Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Finding focus is not about lowering your ambition nor taking your eye of the many balls you’re keeping in the air. Those balls in the air should nearly always be firmly in Level 1.
And you shouldn’t have so many balls in the air at all. If you feel that, it’s a sign that what should be routine isn’t, that the ball flying through the air has not been brought deftly, skillfully, habitually to the ground by your talented team. As yourself why not, and work out the long term resolution to that routine-breaker, so you can focus on that singular fresh bold ambition ahead.
It’s much easier to work toward achieve X, Y & Z if you’re already automatic and routine at X, and getting there with Y. By focussing you give yourself a strong platform to go after the next thing.
What’s the work you’ve got going on at each level? You can have as many things as you like in Level 1 as long as they’re all routine, ticking along like clockwork. You can have one thing on Level 2. And Level 3 is a bountiful place, defined only by the amount of talent on your team.
Key to making all of this work, particularly at Levels 1 and 3, are talented, confident middle leaders. Consider joining NoTosh’s Leading from the Middle online course, which develops the confidence and qualities of middle leaders, taking talented people beyond simply managing.
