The six domains of Resilence

Educational Leaders

Culture

A school’s culture consists of the customs, rituals, and stories that are evident and valued throughout the whole school. An effective school culture fosters success for all.

Leading cultural change

Leading cultural change involves an understanding of leadership skills and an appreciation of the development of cultures in a school setting.

Understanding school cultures

School cultures focus on learning, teaching, and gaining an understanding of 'what we value around here'.

Developing leaders

The principal has a key role in guiding and supporting others to step up as leaders. This is achieved by recognising and developing the leadership potential of teachers. Building leadership capacity in a school increases the opportunities for improving learning outcomes for all students.

Sharing leadership

Leadership based on shared vision, goals, and commitment to quality teaching and learning is essential in the complex contexts of New Zealand schools.

Leading staff

Effective principals actively lead staff by challenging and supporting staff.

Attitudes, values, and ethics

Effective leaders have a central belief system that is focussed on student learning and well-being. They set clear goals, and pursue them to ensure success for all.

• 03.27.19

Why you should stop avoiding conflict in the workplace

When organizations avoid conflict, they’re missing out on productivity and innovation.

[Photo: Noelle Otto/Unsplash]

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By Liane Davey4 minute Read

I was recently hired to help a group of doctors work through their issues and get their business back on a growth trajectory. They aren’t talking much. They’re barely making eye contact. After only a few hours, it’s clear to me what’s wrong. I share my diagnosis: “You need more conflict.”

It’s the last thing they expect me to say. They’re already in agony dealing with the smallest decisions. Each meeting is an excruciating cocktail of trepidation, anger, guilt, and frustration. How could they possibly need more conflict?
What they don’t realize is that they’re mired in all those negative emotions because they’re unwilling to work through them. As long as they avoid the topics that are creating anger, guilt, and frustration, they’re stuck with them. There are many topics that they haven’t discussed for years. They’ve tried every way to go around the contentious issues, but now they need to go through them.

The importance of conflict

The doctors are not the only ones who avoid conflict. Most of us have been raised to think of conflict as a bad thing. Conventional wisdom holds that conflict is bad for productivity and corrosive to trust and engagement. But that view is totally at odds with how an organization works.
Conflict isn’t bad for organizations: it’s fundamental to them. After all, you need to be able to work through opposing sides of an issue and come to a resolution in the best interest of customers, shareholders, and customers–whether you’re on the shop floor or the boardroom. Conflict is part of strategic planning, resource allocation, product design, talent management, and just about everything else that should happen in an organization.
Unfortunately, most humans don’t embrace conflicts. Rather, we avoid, postpone, evade, duck, dodge, and defer them. The result is conflict debt.

Conflict debt

Conflict debt is the sum of all the contentious issues that we need to address to move forward, but remain undiscussed and unresolved. It can be as simple as withholding the feedback that would allow your colleague to do a better job, and as profound as continually deferring a strategic decision while getting further and further behind the competition.

The doctors I worked with are in conflict debt. Each time they avoid the discussions, debates, and disagreements that they need to have to get their business growing again, they sink further in. Think of it like financial debt–when you use credit to buy things you otherwise can’t afford. You want something, maybe even need it, but you don’t have the cash at the time, so you use credit. You rationalize to yourself that you will pay it off as soon as you get your next paycheck, but if you’re like 65% of American credit card holders, you carry that balance over from month to month. The debt mounts, and over time, it gets harder and harder to get out just from under it.

Three unproductive ways people deal with conflict debt

As with financial debt, conflict debt starts innocently. An issue comes up that’s a little too hot to handle, so you defer it. You promise yourself that you’ll revisit it when things are less busy, or when cooler heads prevail. You buy yourself time and space. But days pass, and no spontaneous resolution materializes. Instead, the issue becomes more contentious. Suddenly, you’re in conflict debt. You’re feeling anxious, and you find yourself steering clear of your colleagues to avoid having to confront the issue. (Have you ever taken the long way around the office so you don’t run into a disgruntled coworker?) You’re feeling frustrated at the lack of progress, not to mention a little guilty for your role in the stalemate. Conflict debt weighs you down.
Avoiding the issue is only one path to conflict debt. Another is to avoid the opposition. In this case, you broach the topic but exclude people who might disagree or cause tension, surrounding yourself with those who agree with you. You focus on how friendly and productive the discussion is, deluding yourself that your solutions are going to fly with the people who you strategically disinvited. But pretending the opposition isn’t there won’t make it disappear. It will resurface when your opponents kill your plan or, worse, leave it to fail.
There’s a third way to get into conflict debt–avoid the friction. Even if you discuss the difficult subject, there’s still room to get yourself into trouble if you veer safely away from the distressing parts of the discussion. When you make it clear (either intentionally or inadvertently) that nothing antagonistic should taint your conversation, you start to rack up conflict debt. I see this all the time when, just as the discussion gets perilously close to the crux of the matter, someone suggests they “take it offline” to avoid having to deal with the conflict. Everyone smiles and pretends that they’ll actually come back to it at some point–when in reality, they’ve just stifled dissent.
Are you avoiding the conflicts that your organization requires you to work through? If so, you are setting your organization, your team, and yourself up for trouble. When you’re unwilling to work through uncomfortable situations, you stretching your resources thin, stifling innovation, and allowing risks to go unnoticed. On your team, the aversion to prickly conversations forces strong performers to compensate for weak ones and mature people to put up with immature ones. At an individual level, you’re probably burning out from the stress.
When your conflict debt gets too high, it becomes overwhelming. You’re exhausted by the thought of trying to pay it off. You’ve destroyed your credit rating with your boss and your coworkers by letting these issues go unresolved for so long. But don’t give up–there are many things you can do to get out from under your conflict debt. That starts with embracing, and not avoiding, conflict in the first place.

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This article is adapted from The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Based on Track. It is reprinted with permission from Page Two.

https://medium.com/advancing-k12-edtech/maslow-and-the-modern-learning-environment-8593968967cf

Maslow and the Modern Learning Environment

Erin Werra

Jul 6, 2018

Editor’s note: A version of this article was originally published on eSchool News 6/19/18.

What can we learn from human psychology about designing learning environments geared for maximum motivation?

Let’s start by identifying core human motivations using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Psychologist Abraham Maslow studied human motivation as a whole, rather than the discrete pockets of motivation prior studies had identified. Maslow’s Hierarchy is depicted as a pyramid, with the base of the structure housing the most basic needs and more rigorous needs building on top of those. Maslow referred to the first four levels of the hierarchy as deficiency needs, which is to say each lower-level need should be met before proceeding to the next level. Should any lower-level need become deficient in the future, people will work to correct the deficiency before moving forward.

All this motivation builds toward the tip of the pyramid: self-actualization. This may seem like a stretch for students, given that most adults spend their lives striving toward this lofty goal. When we build a safe, motivating place for students to turn their focus inward, they’re free to pursue the beginning of self-actualization. How’s that for whole-child education?

So how exactly do school leaders create a learning environment geared toward nurturing and motivating the whole child? Let’s take a cue from Maslow and start at the base of the Hierarchy of Human Needs.

Physical Needs

The most fundamental human needs linked to bodily comfort and function make up the wide base of the pyramid. In a school setting, we can equate this to creating an accessible, functional environment for all students. A group effort is required to achieve this in schools and districts — enlist the help of the school business office and maintenance teams to correct deficiencies where you find them.

Sources of light in classrooms — whether natural, fluorescent, or some combination of alternative lighting — must be bright enough for students to complete their work. If possible, place SMART boards or other demonstration locations away from any glare from windows or lights.

Help students focus with appropriate sound levels during lessons. To change the acoustics (how sound travels) throughout the learning environment, place textiles and upholstered items strategically to minimize sound absorption near demonstration areas, and increase absorption near echoey cinderblock walls. Consider playing some light background music during group activities to help students focus on the voices nearest to them. For some students, acoustics of a classroom are the difference between receiving a high-quality education and straining to catch snippets of instruction all day.

Accessibility isn’t a trend in learning environments — it’s the law. Follow the basic ADA checklist for existing facilities to ensure accessibility for all students.

Inspect and maintain HVAC systems to ensure a comfortable temperature for learning. Heating problems resulted in frigid temps and burst pipes in Baltimore Public Schools, ultimately shuttering the district over winter 2017.

Finally, movement is a key component of modern learning environments. One method of freeing up space in classrooms is the über-trendy flexible seating strategy. Contrary to popular belief, flex seating is a solution to large class sizes (desks take up tons of precious space!) and it doesn’t have to cost a lot to add a few great options. Sara Moser, head teacher at Benjamin Chambers Elementary in Pennsylvania, added Adirondack beach chairs she and her husband made for flexible seating in her third-grade classroom.

“They’re super big,” she says. “Kids can put their feet up, lay on it, sit on the floor and use it as a desk; it all depends on the kid.”

There are thousands of resources on this topic (like the Classroom Eye Candy series). The goal is to embrace movement as you break out of the cemetery rows. Promote seat rotation by requesting students choose a new place to sit every few days or weeks.

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Safety

Once students’ physical needs are met, turn your focus toward keeping people out of danger — in classrooms and well beyond. Physical safety is everyone’s responsibility every day at school. Challenge staff to look at your environment with fresh eyes every day to spot and speak up about risks before they become hazards.

Students’ digital safety is important in school as well. Data privacy laws, including FERPA, protect their personal information and school records. Digital safety extends beyond student records and information controlled in your main office. Does your district have a recovery plan in the event of a disaster or security breach? What will you do if your data is ransomed? The key component to a speedy recovery is having a proactive plan in place in the event of a data breach.

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Belonging

The next tier of motivation relates to the human need to feel an affiliation and be accepted by others. When students feel like they belong, they are able to show vulnerability, take risks, and try new things to stretch the boundaries of creativity. Igniting this deep feeling demands more than simply telling kids they belong — they have to feel they’re part of a close-knit group.

In Daniel Coyle’s book The Culture Code, he explores the characteristics of outstanding cultures in businesses and teams, including the presence of belonging cues. These cues send a powerful message to the subconscious brain, “Here is a safe place to give effort.”

Focus on cultivating a welcoming school culture. This takes patience, commitment, and time, but the effects are far-reaching — districts with a strong school culture become destinations for high-performing, dedicated employees, and the benefits snowball from there.

Research tells us incorporating visual representation of all types of students is important. Head teacher Sara Moser enlists her third graders’ help with decorating their classroom.

“I don’t put up a lot at the beginning of the year. Everything in the room is authentic,” she explains. “Either I created it, my husband built it, or the students have made it.”

Educating and motivating the whole child incorporates academic skills alongside life skills, including social-emotional learning. Modelling empathy at all levels of leadership in your district helps create a positive, encouraging, and energized culture geared toward growth.

Finally, as much as possible, create a learning environment built on equity for students and teachers. First, identify and remove obstacles holding subgroups of students back from reaching their full potential — a key concept of many states’ approved ESSA plans. Next, listen to students’ feedback on classroom topics. When appropriate, incorporate their thoughts into your lesson plans to increase ownership and motivation.

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Esteem

Once students’ physical needs are met, they are out of danger, and feel they belong, their next motivator is the need for esteem. This tier represents the need to achieve, be competent, and gain recognition or approval from peers and teachers.

Play-based activity for early learners sets the stage for esteem needs. In a drastic shift away from the “kindergarten is the new first grade” trend, schools are incorporating learning models used in preschools. Early learning educators are toning down the structure and encouraging developmentally appropriate student-led activities and choices. One kindergarten teacher told NPR she has noticed improvement in students’ oral-language development and critical thinking skills. Researchers are studying the far-reaching effects of this approach.

Encourage collaboration in learning environments by identifying specific space for whole group, small groups, pairs, and even for individual reflection (maybe tucked away in a corner). If your school is open to it, consider making use of the hallways fair game. Large scale science or math experiments, quiet pair work, or individual reflection can all take place in hallway collaboration space.

For older students, build esteem by incorporating project-based learning. High quality project-based learning not only prepares students for the highly innovative careers on the horizon, but also spikes motivation when projects align to their unique passions. Along similar lines, makerspaces geared toward self-directed STEM exploration also encourage design thinking, engineering, coding, and other creative learning. It’s possible to build a great makerspace on the cheap — most important is a safe, lightly supervised space where kids can test the boundaries of their best ideas to see if they can make them a reality using their own two hands. (And probably a lot of hot glue.)

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Self-Actualization

When learning environments fulfill students’ deficiency needs, they’re equipped to shift their motivation and focus inward, toward what Maslow called growth needs or the pursuit of self-actualization. This isn’t a destination, but rather a life-long journey to realize their own potential and become self-fulfilled, then identify ways they can help others along the way (Maslow called this self-transcendence).

At this very tip-top of the Hierarchy of Human Needs, motivation comes from within. Students respond to intrinsic motivation, giving effort to tasks at hand purely because it is gratifying to them. In a learning environment, this corresponds to student agency — shifting students’ mindsets, encouraging them to choose their learning paths, and sharing ownership of their education. This profile of the Chrome Squad, the student-led IT team at Royse City High School in Texas, tells the story of student agency in action and shares its results: students who gain accountability, problem solving, and service skills they’ll use and take pride in for the rest of their lives.

Creating a highly motivating learning environment takes real dedication and more than a little elbow grease. The payoff comes when teaching and learning takes off in ways that shape the whole child (and every child) for life. Take these cues from universal human needs to build a strong, safe foundation for students to take risks and get to know who they are, and who they’re becoming.

On Student Voice and How All Means All ~ Pernille Ripp

 

 

 This is the article that matches my thinking. We always talk about student voice and how we value it but do we? The same for Teacher Voice, Community Voice. So often voice is lumped together and the 'majority' that often have a stronger voice  can be  the voice and this is what is acted on. If we don't get a cross wide selection of voice then we are not true to our statements that we act on all voice . We need to get a good representation of student voice and ensure this is all heard, recorded and all is important when decisions are made.. And community voice, and teacher voice. Don't lump voice together and don't only act on the the higher percentage collected or the stronger voice.

 

An invitation to create an education that matters to all, not just some, and who can say no to that? 

 

Even when we have parents that have a voice that differs from the school philosophy there can be ways to make adaptions to include their voice biut also stay stong to other beliefs. 

 

let's collect voice  lots from the wider range and act on it fairly.

 

 

 

 

 

Be the change, student choice, Student dreams, Student Engagement, student voice

On Student Voice and How All Means All

March 30, 2019 Pernille Ripp

If I asked most of my students, they would consider me a great teacher for them. They would tell you how safe they feel in our classroom, how they feel respected, how they feel like what we do is worth their time. It is easy feeling like a great teacher if those are the only voices you pay attention to. But if you were to speak to a few, perhaps the ones who would need some extra goading, perhaps those who choose to remain mostly silent throughout our time together, a different story would emerge. They still hate English, they still hate reading and writing, they find little value in what we do, and some, probably, also see little value in me.
I don’t think I am alone in that. Our schools are filled with both kids who flourish and those who don’t. Those who see the value added to their lives in what we do and those who don’t. Those whose days consist of success and those who have limited success. But whose voices are being heard in our conversations? Whose voices are shared in assemblies? Whose voices are shared when we invite incoming families in to discuss what a school experience consists of with us?
And what happens when we don’t monitor whose voices get the most space within our school? When we once again select the few kids that we know will speak up, speak eloquently, and will stick to the message that we know reflects us best? It means that we create a false sense of accomplishment, as if student voice is something we can checkoff, as if everything we do is exactly right and all we need to do is just stay the course.
I worry about the echo-chamber we sometimes create, whether inadvertently or purposefully. How many of us purport to support student voice but then only give the biggest space to those we know will shine a positive light. How we assume that a child must view their schooling as favorable as long as their scores, grades, percentages show them as successful. How we squelch the voices of those who may have less than stellar experiences to share. How we dismiss their voices as simply kids carrying a grudge, or not understanding, or simply just being in a tough spot. How easily we dismiss their experiences rather than recognizing them for the incredible learning opportunity they are. A chance to dive into what we still need to work on, a chance to create a partnership with those whose experiences are not successful despite our carefully laid plans and best intentions.
When I ask others to make space for students to reclaim their voices, I don’t just mean those whose voices echo our own sentiments. I don’t just mean those who will present us in the best of lights. All means all and that includes those who will tell us the unguarded truth even when the truth hurts. This is why in all of my presentations there is truth that hurts, statements that made me grow, that felt like failures when I first was given them. It is important to model to others what real feedback looks like, to acknowledge that at times we will fail our students. That at times we will not be the teacher, or the school, or the district that they needed us to be and we now have to figure out how we can do better, with them. Because that is what the truth does; it gives us a chance to grow. To become something more than we were before, but we cannot do that if we only make space for those voices who will tell us all of the good we are doing without mentioning the bad. If we only select a few to represent the many without giving everyone a proper chance to speak up, to be heard, to shape their experience.
So survey all of the kids. Give space to all of the kids. When students are invited to speak at your training events, at your staff meetings, at your school board meetings, invite a broad range of perspective. Sure, invite those kids in where the system is clearly working, but also invite those who tell us through their behavior that it’s not. Who perhaps may be doing well but who really do not love it. Monitor who you give space to so that all experiences can be represented because if you don’t then it is really just a sham representation. And then ask meaningful questions, not just those where students will provide you with sound-bytes that will do little to move the conversation along.
Ask them if they feel respected.
Ask them if they feel valued.
Ask them if they feel represented.
Ask them if what we do matters.
Ask them how by working together we can make it better.
And then listen to their voices, all of them, and instead of dismissing their words take them for what they are; the biggest gift to do better, to be better. An invitation to create an education that matters to all, not just some, and who can say no to that?
If you are wondering where I will be in the coming year or would like to have me speak, please see this page. If you like what you read here, consider reading my book, Passionate Readers – The Art of Reaching and Engaging Every Child.  This book focuses on the five keys we can implement into any reading community to strengthen student reading experiences, even within the 45 minute English block.  If you are looking for solutions and ideas for how to re-engage all of your students consider reading my very first book  Passionate Learners – How to Engage and Empower Your Students.  

What people don't see:

To look forward, don’t beat a retreat

Defining strategy is the most important work a leadership team can do. The last place they should go to do it is a retreat.

Ewan McIntosh

Jan 2

It’s January, and wherever I look online I see so many friends’ new year’s resolutions, strategies to make 2019 a little better than 2018, perhaps. And I see many wittily launch jibes about how they don’t make resolutions (“I never keep to them anyway, so why bother?”

They’ve got a point: we create resolutions at a time of forced relaxation when most of the world has shut down. The inbox is empty (or, at least, not filling up), our families surround us physically or digitally, our thoughts of work are kept at bay, still, through a fog of champagne bubbles and hangovers and bracing twilight walks. The time in which we come up with our resolutions barely resembles any other time of year. It’s no wonder that the daily cycle rides, walks or gym visits subside when the onslaught of reality begins on January 3rd.

In March a few years ago, I had been invited by a group of different schools’ Heads to a joint retreat. It was a retreat in name, at least. In reality, it was an overcharged three-day programme of administrative meetings, mutual therapy, forced fun, eating and drinking a bit too much. I was asked to walk them through an innovation process so that they could make Great Things Happen. I was given six hours during their three precious days. One of the widely-respected Heads proclaimed:

“I don’t know why we’re looking at innovation now, at this point in the year. It’s a terrible time to be thinking about doing anything in a school.”

March is indeed a hectic time in schools. Examinations for older students are looming, the last chance for some serious cramming on the horizon (by this point, many secondary schools admit that the learning is more or less suspended). Even little ones are finalising portfolios and presentations, exhibitions and performances.

But I was perturbed. As the CEOs of their organisations, strategy should be an everyday activity. Strategy is not something for which we can afford to cherrypick a slot in our calendars, something we choose to do at certain more relaxed times of the year. Strategy is definitely not something we can demote to six hours in a forced period of ‘retreat’.

Innovation is change. Change is what strategy both predicts and provokes. Strategy is where we plan.

The strategic plan itself is rendered useless fairly quickly. “Strategy’s great until you get punched in the mouth,” says Mike Tyson. “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything,” is how Dwight Eisenhower put it. Eisenhower was actually paraphrasing what a soldier had told him, and the soldier was much more precise in what kind of plans are worthless:

“Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable.”

And there it is. Peaceful time plans — new year’s resolutions, strategic planning done in the quiet months of an organisation, holiday romances — are often worthless the moment the break or retreat is over. But the process of thinking things through — the planning — is vital. Why?

Peaceful time planning is vital because it lets us go through a process slowly. Think of it like training in a technique, a technique that we should be employing every day, at faster and faster speeds, so that when we’re in the thick of it in our busier ‘real’ lives we can cope with the punches coming our way.

After a deep immersive process throughout their organisation, a Design Team of students, teachers, staff and parents work through a mass of data, perceptions and stories to design simple strategy that anyone can use.

Over the past four years, my team has been involved in more strategy work with organisations than ever before. The word of mouth that drives some of the most successful organisations in the world to us for this help is invaluable, and reveals why people are seeking something different to their usual “strategic planning retreat”:

1. One, two or three days are not enough to come up with a strategic plan. Strategic planning is about the future, but to do this well you need to build on what happens today. People need some time to dive deeply into what makes their organisation tick today, and what people’s hopes and fears for the future might be. If you’re doing it properly, this deep dive immersive experience can take up to six weeks, and should involve everyone in your community contributing their perspectives. It’s a significant communications exercise to ensure everyone knows that they have the opportunity to present, share or post their perceptions of what works well, and less well, in the organisation today.

We use a strategic planning version of our NoTosh Design Thinking process to set up effective teams who can procure, encourage and manage this massive set of contributions, and then make sense of the trends that emerge from it. This kind of inclusive, immersive process is superb for providing that ‘peacetime planning’ moment for every member of the community. Even if it’s just for five minutes in the ‘war room’ or ‘project nest’, every teacher, student, parent, employee or visitor to the school can take the time to reflect, and get their memory muscle developed for planning every day. And the tools we use to synthesis all that data turn even the most ardent moan into a positive force to drive an organisation’s ambitious ideas.

2. The strategic plan itself is worthless within weeks or months. Organisations’ needs change quicker today than they did ten years ago. A five-year strategic plan might help a leadership team feel accountable, that they’ve done their job. But continuing with it headlong, without ever changing the expectations along the way, would be foolish. I don’t know any leadership team which has actually seen through every item in a five year plan, at the exclusion of all others. Most organisations with these kinds of long-term plans have massive fatigue in their teams: initiative after initiative gets introduced as sticky plaster planning for when the original plan isn’t quite working. But no-one ever dares to ditch significant projects in a five-year plan, even when, further down the road from the point of writing the plan, they’re clearly off-target.

Instead, we invest expertise in framing a leadership team’s vision as an exciting image of the future. Individually, a leader will struggle to express a vision that doesn’t make their ass clench with slight embarrassment from being a little too much or, more likely, a bit underwhelming. But with help, it’s possible to translate a team’s individual ideas for the future of their organisation into something that is compelling and which feels like a ‘goldilocks’ vision — not too hard, not too easy, just right.

3. Most strategic plans are actually just long-term plans. They’re not strategy. Strategy should look mercifully short when laid out on a postcard. Three, four or five ‘orders’ that tell the team how to play, but which don’t lay out each and every step you expect people to take. The ideas to realise the leadership’s expression of the vision need to come from and be delivered by the people who will feel the positive impact in the end.

That level of simplicity takes a lot of effort, expertise and time. We use some of the world’s best copywriters to knock strategy into shape so that the youngest member of a team or the person with English as their third or fourth language, can all understand how they’re meant to act.

4. Good strategy is only good when we know it works. So we don’t make anything final until the leadership team have tested the strategy out with their own current big projects. Ideally, there should be some that are clearly in their last breaths, ready to be ditched because they don’t help realise the vision, and they can’t be done in a way that works with the rest of the team’s strategy. Other projects will need changed to be successful — the strategy tells the leader how they need changed. And there will be some existing projects which will move front and centre — they may take on importance they didn’t have before.

Confident organisations test strategy further. In the American School of Warsaw, they’ve been testing for eight months, and are ready now to commit to most of what they set out, with some minor changes. Other organisations just know that they’ve nailed their direction, in days, often because there was little direction before, so any direction helps people have the focus they need here and now. These teams, far from being slapdash in their approach, understand deeply how strategy is something to be revisited daily.

5. Good strategy should be revisited every day. How do you know you’re doing a good job? How do you know that what you did yesterday worked, and what you’ll continue today will realise the vision you’ve got? Success metrics should not be reduced to annual or quarterly traffic lights, percentages and Board-speak management jargon. Success of projects can be measured in so many different ways, every day. Meeting about project success every week for 30 minutes allows the average organisation 48 points of change, instead of what might be achieved with eight Board meetings. For a leadership team to meet every day for 10 minutes to talk about success, accelerates the potential to tweak and amplify success to 240 points every year.

1000 points of change over five years, or a five year plan with one process at the start to get it right? Which do you prefer? That’s a lot more opportunity to plan together, to cope with the punches to your collective jaw, to kill off ideas that aren’t working (and assure yourselves that everyone knows why). You can only do this if you’re confident that your strategy is of the people in your organisation.

6. Strategy has to be true, not a trueism. Genchi Genbutsu is the Japanese term for the kind of active observation of the organisation that we undertake in that first deep dive. A leadership cannot take itself away to a five star hotel to presuppose what might be true, and develop a strategy from that point of view. A team can’t just talk about what it sees. It’s got to look. This is Genchi Genbutsu. It literally means: get out and see for yourself. Toyota are arguably the Japanese grandmasters of this technique, led by the founder of their world-famous manufacturing system, Taiichi Ohno, and it forms part of their formal five-part strategy for working:

The best practice is to go and see the location or process where the problem exists in order to solve that problem more quickly and efficiently. To grasp problems, confirm the facts and analyse root causes.

The Toyota Production System requires a high level of management presence on the factory floor, so that if a problem exists in this area it should be first of all correctly understood before being solved.

In Jeffrey Liker’s The Toyota Way we see the notion taken beyond the factory floor. Yuji Yokoya was the chief engineer for the 2004 Toyota Sienna redesign. Yokoya had never worked on a car made for the North American market, and he felt the need to practise some Genchi Genbutsu and get out to North America to gain some sense of empathy for a North American driver, and the potential purchaser of this new car. In the end, Yokoya drove a previous model Sienna throughout all 50 American states as well as all 13 provinces and territories of Canada. He got as far as the streets of Mexico.

Why was such a costly and timely roadtrip necessary? Was this the midlife crisis of a successful engineer, or a genius move to make major changes to an otherwise successful (in the Japanese market) car?

What he learned could not have been learned from any analytical data, survey or web search. Why? Because the things he observed needed observing by a Japanese Toyota engineer to make sense — they needed that empathetic, but foreign eye, to be seen afresh. For example, he discovered that roads in Canada are very different from those in the US — they have a very high central reservation designed to deal with the never-ending snowfall of winter. He learned that the winds in Mississippi are so strong at times that, if the family-sized Sienna were not designed with this in mind, it might have flipped over with the force. The most valuable lesson was perhaps to do with a tiny, non-engineering type problem: cup holders. In his native Japan people rarely eat or drink in their vehicles, while their North American counterparts were relatively settled in the habit of eating several of their daily meals within the car, on the move.

From the many design and engineering problems he spotted, Yokoya’s team developed a new Sienna for 2004, equipped with 14 cup holders and a flip tray specifically designed for your Big Mac and fries. It was their best-selling model yet.

The notion of ‘getting out there and seeing it’ might well seem like a drawback for leadership teams looking after large institutions, or entire districts, states or countries. They might feel that they can’t afford the equivalent of a 50-state road trip to get a firsthand insight. To undertake an extensive immersion, in person, ‘out there’, might not be possible for every individual leader. But it is possible when you harness your community, communicate well, form dedicated design teams to do the work with you. Toyota explain further with a reassurance for leaders:

The nature of the phrase is less about the physical act of visiting a site but more to do with a personal understanding of the full implications of any action within an environment as a whole.

The impact of changing one’s mindset, often by applying a strong sense of empathy to how others might view a situation, is powerful. Even in a workshop type situation, normally within the air-conditioned magnolia of a plush hotel or a school meeting room with no wifi (and no connection to the outside world), the mindset change put in place by considering every actor’s feelings and potential observations of the current situation is profound.

From one workshop in a business centre in Spain looking at problems in schools 500 miles away:

‘This workshop focused on people and used real examples; the process was involving.’

From a Headteacher in England:

‘The fact that everyone can take part and feels a necessity to join in means that all views, good and bad are taken into account.’

From a team in Australia looking at a perennial challenge they hadn’t (yet) overcome:

‘We loved having the time to explore ideas, good and bad, without negativity, to see things from so many perspectives.’

Just making an effort to connect with people from other perspectives transforms our thinking about what the underlying challenges we need to address might be.

This article has elements adapted from my book, How To Come Up With Great Ideas and Actually Make Them Happen, available in paperback, Kindle and iBooks, and in Spanish.

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