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Chapter 3

Opportunity Seeker

Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.

—Bobby Unser, American racecar driver

When Kami first learned about Stitch Fix, she thought, “Who needs this? What a silly concept.” Stitch Fix is a service that sends women five new articles of clothing each month based on a fashion profile that they create. A fashion advisor “styles” your personalized picks, adds a note to each box explaining why they chose those particular pieces, and shows you three different ways to incorporate each piece into your wardrobe. You can give input before a shipment if you are looking for a particular item or style, or you can just enjoy the surprise. The investment cost is minimal. You only keep items that work for you and return everything else by dropping it in a mailbox in a prepaid postage bag. Low risk. Kami’s friends were all signing up and, although

Gallagher, Alyssa, and Kami Thordarson. Design Thinking for School Leaders : Five Roles and Mindsets That Ignite Positive Change, Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/amridge/detail.action?docID=5437456. Created from amridge on 2021-09-06 03:59:41.

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Opportunity Seeker • 41

she was a bit hesitant, she wanted to be part of the fun. It was so exciting when the first box arrived! The anticipation of discovery was high, and she opened the box with a mixture of hope and trepidation. Kami loved it. While she didn’t keep everything from that first box, she enjoyed the experience and became hooked on a service she didn’t know would make her life so much easier. Stitch Fix has become so popular that they have expanded the service to include men’s fashion. It will be interesting to see if this meets a need for men in the same way it does for women.

Companies are seeking new opportunities to fill needs that we didn’t even realize we had. Often, these new opportunities are hidden in our everyday habits and routines. The next wave of consumerism is focused less on the product and more on the experience. Innovation is often about seeing opportunity in the everyday and being able to clearly identify a need where you didn’t know one existed. Where might there be unmet needs in your school or district? As an Opportunity Seeker, you recognize that each unmet need or problem may actually present incredi- ble opportunities.

Problem Finding

Being wrong until you are right. Are there any other options for people

who seek to innovate?

—Seth Godin, American author, entrepreneur, marketer, and public speaker

Think of all the decisions that you make in a day. Our guess is that whether you are in a classroom or an office, you multitask during much of your day, making decisions at lightning speed and solving problems without the luxury of really pausing to think. While we may think that we are great at accomplishing many things at once, research has proven that our brains do not function well when we multitask, and our performance suffers.

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42 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

For most of the day, our brains process quickly, guided by our past knowledge and experiences. We are efficient. We are prob- lem solvers. Most of the time, these well-worn patterns of behav- ior are our friend, as they help us survive, but these efficient behaviors can also be our greatest downfall. In our quest to move things along expediently, we can be in danger of applying our tried-and-true problem-solving strategies to the wrong problem. Taking time to question the problem we are facing may lead us to a different approach in solving it.

Problem finding is a skill that Opportunity Seekers have mastered. Unfortunately, it is also a skill and process that is undervalued in many educational organizations. With all the changes needed in education, we rush to formulate solutions and check things off our never-ending to-do lists, hurrying to move on to the next item on the list. When a leader faces a problem, it is common practice to offer a solution immediately, asking few questions. In fact, the team that has the problem is likely to be directly asking for “the answer,” feeling a sense of relief when the leader offers a well-packaged solution. As the complexity of the problems our schools face increases, it becomes even more important to formulate better questions and to fully understand what we perceive to be the problem. Not clearly identifying our problems can actually hinder our ability to innovate and effect lasting change.

In a study by the Conference Board, a U.S. business group gave 155 public school superintendents and 90 private employ- ers a list of cognitive capacities and asked them to rate these capacities according to which were most important in today’s workforce. Superintendents ranked “problem solving” as number one, but the employer executives ranked it number eight, listing “problem identification” as their top-ranked ability (Lichtenberg, Woock, & Wright, 2008). Most school leaders find problem solving to be a highly valuable skill because it’s what we practice every day. Problem solving as our primary driver of change has worked

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Opportunity Seeker • 43

for us in the past, but as evidenced in the study, problem solving is no longer enough. How do we know that we are solving the right problem? Problem identification and definition is a crucial skill for leaders. When Steve Jobs set out to build the iPod, he defined the problem as “1,000 songs in my pocket” (itechgear, 2011). We often wonder: what might be possible in education if we were able to identify and define “problems” as well as Steve Jobs?

In one district, a team of kindergarten teachers came together to solve a problem through their district’s innovation incubator and hub. Typically, the incubator encourages teachers from across multiple schools to form teams, but in this case, the teachers were all from the same school and were focused on creating flexible learning environments. After listening to the team talk, the designer of the innovation incubator knew the problem went deeper than creating physically changeable classrooms. She pushed the team to reexamine the problem they were trying to solve. Through research and empathy work, the team realized the issue was less about furniture and much more about how they were personalizing learning for students. Had they not been encouraged to spend time in the problem-identification phase, they easily could have spent time solving a problem they didn’t have.

Defining the “True Problem”

It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much

about the problem.

—Malcolm Forbes, American entrepreneur

Almost everyone’s first step to problem solving is suggesting solutions. We rarely stop to ask a clarifying question, dig deeper into the issue, or even listen to the entire problem. We jump right to “here’s what I think” mode, throwing out ideas and solutions to the problem. And most likely, no matter how well

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an issue is presented, everyone hears the problem and under- stands it somewhat differently. This isn’t anyone’s fault. As a quote ascribed to the Talmud reminds us, “We don’t see things the way they are; we see things the way we are.” Our different background experiences come into play, our relationships with the participants have an impact, and our own needs influence the solutions that we suggest. Visit an exhibitor hall at any educational conference and you will see solutions to all sorts of problems, likely some you didn’t even know you had. In some cases, vendors selling these “solutions” find themselves debating and defending why their solution is so much better than what previously existed, leaving you to question if there ever was a problem to be solved in the first place. Let’s try to avoid the vendor trap by spending more time understanding our problems from multiple perspectives.

Reframing Problems as Opportunities When Alyssa was working as an assistant superintendent of a mid-sized school district, one of the tasks that fell to her department was the scheduling of a team of music and physical education teachers that traveled to seven different elementary schools. As you can imagine, the schedule was complex; not only was travel involved, but students had choice in what instrument class they took, instrumental music class backed up to PE class, and these instructional minutes provided the classroom teach- ers with contractual prep time. The system had been in place for years, with several known issues. What happens when a student opts out of taking instrumental music? How do you balance the instrumental sections when students get choice? But no one ever seemed ready to tackle the schedule. There was very little wiggle room, and yet Alyssa knew there had to be a better way to optimize the experience, for both the students and the traveling teachers involved. She tried everything. She printed out complex schedules. She drew on whiteboards and moved sticky notes

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Opportunity Seeker • 45

around. She spent so much time with this problem, she was liter- ally dreaming about schedules at night. She felt like there was an obvious solution, and yet she was stuck. It was making her crazy. Alyssa actually had to walk away from the problem and come back to it with a fresh perspective. She revisited the problem and, to help reframe what she was looking at, asked herself the following questions:

• What am I actually trying to solve? Am I solving a symptom of the problem or am I solving the core of the problem?

• What would happen if I didn’t solve this problem? Who would be impacted and what would that look like?

• What are the hidden opportunities in this problem? • What constraints have I self-imposed on this problem? • What if I’m the problem? Am I too close to the prob-

lem? Who might be able to share new insights and fresh perspectives?

By stepping away from the problem and asking these questions, Alyssa was able to see that her self-imposed constraints had pre- vented her from coming up with solutions. Sure, the program had always been instrumental music and PE, but that didn’t mean that was all it had to be. She was able to remove this “artificial constraint,” and a whole new world of possibilities opened up. What if they included choice beyond the type of instrument? What if they were able to allow for fine arts choices outside of music, like drama and dance? By removing constraints, they were able to get creative. They developed a new fine arts block for students that expanded their learning opportunities and solved many of their original challenges.

This is the essence of positive reframing: taking what appears to be a difficult situation and finding ways to turn the problem into something positive. The power of reframing is that it forces you to harness your creative thinking to achieve new solutions. When you use positive reframing, you actually view problems differently. Instead of first exploring how to get the problem to go

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away, challenge yourself to ask, “What is the opportunity here?” If you still feel stuck, step away from the problem and come back to it using the five questions above.

Shifting Perspectives When you’re stuck on a problem and struggling to positively reframe it, try explicitly looking at it from a different perspective. This might be all you need to come up with a great solution. The ability to successfully look at problems from different points of view comes from empathy, which we explored in the previous chapter. You can practice shifting perspectives by finding the humor in the situation, getting outside your bubble, and using a perspective matrix.

Believe it or not, shifting perspectives or reframing can be taught through jokes. In fact, most jokes are funny because they switch perspectives in the middle of a joke. A great exercise to increase perspective-taking is to create captions for humorous pictures. Think this is easy? Try The New Yorker online cartoon caption contest; it is one of the more difficult contests to enter. Each week, The New Yorker provides a cartoon in need of a cap- tion. Readers submit their captions, three finalists are chosen, and readers vote for their favorite. It is entertaining to go online and see the three finalists and the very different perspectives shared.

Another strategy to increase your ability to shift perspec- tives is simply to challenge yourself to get out of your “filter bubble,” a term that describes a distorted view of the world resulting from uber-personalized experiences. In today’s world, it is easier than ever to surround yourself only with people who share similar viewpoints and perspectives. We are able to curate all our news feeds through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, so that we might not ever see that there are people with differing points of view. Now, you may say, “I know some people do that, but not me!” The Kind Foundation is challenging that notion with research that indicates only 5 percent of us regularly see

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Opportunity Seeker • 47

posts on social media that we’d say “differ greatly” from our own world-view. Living in filter bubbles certainly does not help us build empathy or shift perspectives. It actually allows us to com- fortably exist without ever challenging our own views.

The good news is that, like most things today, there is an app for that. The Pop Your Bubble app scans your Facebook profile for likes, shares, and friends to get a sense of who you are and the type of news you choose to expose yourself to. Then it offers you a challenge by encouraging you to follow people who hold radically different views than you. Getting outside of our own bubbles can make us better, more empathetic people. My guess is you won’t agree with everything you’ll find in your Pop Your Bubble feed—I know I didn’t—but that is the point. It is a good idea to see what other people are saying about the news, politics, or latest hot topics, even if it’s just to remind yourself that not everyone thinks the same way you do. Are you up to the challenge? What new opportunities might you find by continually exposing yourself to those who think differently?

Another tool we offer to help you shift perspectives is a simple matrix (Figure 3.1). A perspective matrix helps you identify and look at the problem at hand from a minimum of four perspectives. The perspectives can change, but general categories in schools include students, teachers, parents, and community. Depending on the problem you are trying to solve, you may want to look at different subsets of a population. For example, if you are solv- ing a problem on teacher professional development, your four perspectives might be a brand-new teacher, a veteran teacher, a single-subject teacher, and a multiple-subject teacher. What you are trying to do with the matrix is establish a minimum of four perspectives on an issue and challenge the notion of a problem through each of those perspectives. One of the schools we worked with was struggling with communication, specifically “back-to- school communication.” Here are four perspectives on the issue:

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48 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

Figure 3.1

Perspective Matrix

Perspective 1 Perspective 2 Perspective 3 Perspective 4

• New parent: School starts the second week of August, it’s July 30, and I don’t have any information. I am feeling anxious and wish I had more information about our new school. Are there meetings to attend? Will I need childcare? Will I need to take off work?

• Returning parent: I know we will get information during the first week of August. I remember it came late in the past. I will have to be flexible at work and juggle as best I can when I get the information.

• School office staff: We are so busy closing out one school year, we can barely take a breath before we close the office doors the last day of June. After summer vacation, we are ready to start thinking about the new year and will get the information out as soon as possible.

• Principal: I tend to work off and on over the summer get- ting things ready. We have always sent out info the first week of August, and it seems like enough time.

Taking the time to actually identify the different perspectives helped the principal see a real need for new parents. Seeing this

Problem or Issue

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Opportunity Seeker • 49

so clearly then empowered the principal to make a few changes, and he committed to earlier communication with families. Want to push yourself? Try taking on a perspective of someone you dis- agree with or who wouldn’t solve a problem the way you would.

Invite Others In When problem solving, it can be easy to go it alone and forget that not only are there other perspectives, but that other people have really good ideas as well. Not everyone will offer their ideas without an invitation. You can structure the invitation to partici- pate depending on the degree of input and involvement you want from others. One of the simplest invitations to problem solving I’ve seen was done via sticky notes. A principal we once worked with was struggling with a problem and decided to post the chal- lenge on chart paper in the teacher workroom, where people would see it coming and going. Included was an invitation to add their thinking, with a few stacks of sticky notes and pens nearby. Soon, the chart paper was surrounded by thoughts, feelings, and ideas. The longer the challenge was posted, the more ideas were posted. Sometimes people need time to ponder, and seeing a challenge in a visible place can prompt their brain to think deeper. People will move beyond their first “quick-fix” responses to more perceptive and detailed thinking.

Michael, director of professional development at a large pub- lic high school, used a similar strategy when he was determined to clean out and rearrange the faculty room. Over the years, the faculty room had become more of a place to store junk and less of a place to eat lunch and socialize. Knowing that solving the faculty lunchroom dilemma was a small but important piece to building a stronger school culture, Michael met the challenge head on. He started by putting up signs on objects in the room: “Do you use this?” “Does this need to be here?” Inviting people to weigh in on smaller decisions along the way helped him clear the room in no time. Prior to Michael tackling the problem, it had been talked

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50 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

about, but no one did anything about it. Michael invited the faculty to be part of the solution, and within months they had redesigned the space and were being intentional about getting everyone together more frequently in the new and improved faculty room. How might you choose to invite people to solve problems with you?

Opportunity Knocks

If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.

—Milton Berle, American comedian and actor

Opportunity doesn’t just happen; we need to actively seek it out. It’s a little like becoming a lottery winner. The lottery happens every week, and we all dream about what we would do if we won, but unless we drive ourselves to a place where we can purchase a ticket and then place our money on the counter, the opportu- nity is not even a possibility. We solve problems every day. They don’t all need deep thinking and close examination; however, there may be some winning lottery numbers hidden among them that we may miss if we don’t seek them out.

Find and Capture New Opportunities

If you’ve read a Harry Potter book or seen any of the Harry Potter movies, you’re familiar with the game of Quidditch. Quid- ditch is a magical competitive sport involving flying contestants. Harry plays Quidditch as a seeker, which means he must fly quickly between all of the players, looking for a small object, the Golden Snitch, which is also flying and changing directions. The seeker must be able to see not only the opportunities that currently exist, but must fly into the space of future opportuni- ties, paying attention to a continually changing path if he ever wants to catch the Snitch. The details and strategies of the game are many, and the player’s focus must always be changing as he

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Opportunity Seeker • 51

adjusts course, avoids crashing into other players, and works for the win by successfully navigating a new opportunity.

The game of Quidditch, like daily life in schools, is fast-paced, complex, and at times competitive. It can be tempting to wait until the game is over, school has let out for the summer, or things have slowed down to find and chase new opportunities. But unfortunately, opportunities don’t always present them- selves in that manner. Many times, opportunities are like the fast- paced Snitch, something we have to chase while navigating other obstacles. You must remain flexible and adaptable. Catching the Snitch is about being ready to move when you see the moment.

This can be challenging for schools. We sometimes miss opportunities because we are so busy with the day-to-day work. Opportunity Seekers, like Ashley Auspelmeyer, lead teacher at Studio D, recognize the need to capture opportunities even if they might be a little ahead of current needs. While attending SXSWedu (the SXS EDU Conference and Festival cultivates and empowers a community of engaged stake-holders to advance teaching and learning; https://www. sxswedu.com/), Ashley was drawn to Real World Scholars, an organization that helps bring entrepreneurship to high schools. Currently the authenticity of learning is still a challenge in Studio D. For instance, having stu- dents teach their peers about human rights is a good first step, but they aren’t yet solving a problem related to human rights. The more authentic the learning, the more likely students are to solve a real problem. Knowing that a future next step was for the staff to bring more authenticity to their learning, Ashley started investigating Real World Scholars and now has a new opportu- nity for her teachers, with funding when they are ready to jump over that hurdle. Ashley remarked: “I wasn’t entirely sure how it would fit, but I am learning to be comfortable with ambigu- ity while exploring new possibilities and opportunities.” What opportunities are flying by you that you could capture?

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https://www.sxswedu.com/

52 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

Find Opportunities in Your Rearview Mirror

Sometimes we are so busy looking forward to new solutions and opportunities that we forget to take the time to look back at what has already been done. We need to actually stop doing and make room for deep questioning and thinking: reflecting. How can we consciously rethink or challenge the way we have always done things without first looking back so as to look forward? Most problems are not new, and we have encountered them in some form or other at an earlier time. Looking at a problem’s history can lend an interesting frame. When we do look back, it’s usually with a quick glance. A typical response to new ideas we hear when working with schools is, “We tried that and it didn’t work.” Oftentimes, if we follow up with, “Why didn’t it work?” people aren’t really clear. They likely never took the time to dig into what went wrong and understand the specifics of the failed solution. Here are a couple of effective ways we have found to look backward.

Five whys. The next time you hear the phrase, “We tried that and it didn’t work,” ask why, but don’t just ask it once. Ask it five times. Don’t be surprised if the first response is both simple and defensive; it’s natural. Digging deeper and gathering knowledge around the entire experience will tell you more about the process used to implement the solution that failed and help you see the path that led to the failure. When we were working with a junior high school on reallocating time and resources, a possible solution that kept bubbling to the surface was block scheduling, a practice of lengthening the instructional time for classes and holding them every other day versus every day. Any time there was any mention of block scheduling, body language changed, and there was a distinct shift in the group. Sensing some discomfort, we asked if someone could share the history of block scheduling at their school. As expected, we were given a curt response of, “We tried it and it just didn’t work here.” The five-whys conversation went as follows.

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Opportunity Seeker • 53

• Why? “Block scheduling doesn’t work for all subjects.” • Why? “Some subjects, like foreign language and PE, are bet-

ter taught in shorter blocks.”

• Why? “Our lessons and materials are created for 50-minute classes, not 90-minute classes.”

• Why? Long pause . . . “Because that is the way we have always done things.”

• Why? “Because a long time ago someone arbitrarily made the decision that students should attend every subject daily, and the day was broken into equivalent pieces.”

Now we have a real conversation. By asking “five whys,” we have unearthed a false constraint around why things are scheduled the way they are, and we can wonder together if this is the best way for students to learn.

History mapping. Gather your team and map the recent his- tory of your organization. If you’re a teacher, map your last three years of classroom practice. It’s helpful to have a range of per- spectives for this exercise so you get a consensus of truth. Insti- tutional memory can get in the way of seeing a true pattern to the past, so having a range of input is important. Get gritty here. History contains both positive and negative moments, highs and lows. Map all of it. Looking at your past practices can give you amazing insights into how you’ve identified and solved old prob- lems and give you a better vision of where you want to go moving forward. When we worked with one elementary school on history mapping, they were able to realize that they had been working on similar problems a couple of times in their recent history, with- out actually solving the problem. In 2014, the faculty began ques- tioning the effectiveness of their character-building program for students. In 2015, adding conflict managers on the playground and revamping student leadership opportunities were topics of discussion. Then, in 2016, the school had an increase in the number of bullying concerns being reported. The school faculty was expertly navigating each of these challenges, but it wasn’t

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until they mapped them that they were able to see the problems holistically. Taking the time to map their history gave them a new perspective and a different focus on their work that helped shape their future direction.

Divergent Thinking: Moving Beyond the Obvious Once you have a clearer understanding of your problem, it’s time to get creative in your problem solving. This is where things start to get really fun! In order to move beyond the obvious solution and into more innovative ideas, you need to practice building your creative confidence and divergent thinking skills. Divergent thinking is more than thinking outside the box; it’s thinking with- out the box and figuring out how to create the structure later. Divergent thinking is broader than brainstorming. Brainstorming is one of the better-known techniques that encourages divergent thinking, but there are other techniques. People are sometimes uncomfortable with divergent thinking because it really does push them beyond their comfort zones. It takes practice and a culture that’s accepting of risk, since you’re asking people to think beyond the first response.

What If . . .

Those two little words are quite possibly our favorite two words when combined, because together they have so much power. The utterance of these two words opens up a world of possibilities and signifies that the person asking them doesn’t have all the answers and is open to exploring new ideas. One person asking, “What if . . . ?” is intriguing; a collective group of thought leaders or educators within an organization asking, “What if . . . ?” is powerful.

When working in Los Altos, California, we structured a “What if . . . ?” conversation with a group of 20 administrators, teach- ers, parents, and school members, all focused on brainstorming

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Opportunity Seeker • 55

ideas that could improve learning for students. We structured our “What if . . . ?” conversation to fall in line with our strategic planning process, where we celebrated accomplishments toward our five-year goals and set short-term objectives. So while the process of strategically planning for the future wasn’t a new con- cept in this district, the process of exploring and playing with the unknown possibilities was entirely new. We spent 90 minutes fully immersed in a conversation that was both exhilarating and exhausting! In less than an hour, we brainstormed over 200 ideas that we believed would improve student learning for all students and then narrowed our focus to 50 ideas we felt warranted fur- ther investigation and exploration.

Looking back on this work, it is easy to see how much of the district work tracks back to this conversation. The district team went on to create a flexible professional learning space for teachers, created support for teachers in rethinking instruction, hired instructional coaches, and increased professional learning opportunities. Upon reflection, we wonder if any of this would have happened if we weren’t actively engaged in “What if . . . ?” conversations.

Brainstorming

When Kami was teaching in the classroom, she would ask students to brainstorm as part of a project and was surprised by how difficult this was for students. They often got stuck. Brain- storming fell flat, and she was disappointed with the results. It was only after learning about Design Thinking and truly digging into the brainstorming process that she realized where she was going wrong as the teacher. She had made the assumption that because brainstorming was so common, everyone knew how to do it. Wrong. Brainstorming is a skill and, as with all skills, it can be taught and learned.

We have all undoubtedly experienced terrible brainstorm- ing sessions. Our negative experiences have typically gone

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something like this: you run into a meeting, sit down already feel- ing a little overwhelmed, and the person at the front of the room throws out a topic. They want your best thinking as the group brainstorms ideas. The meeting leader is wildly charting ideas as people shout them out, and your mind is blank. You literally have nothing. After experiencing this, we now realize that our blank- ness wasn’t entirely our fault; the real ownership of an effective brainstorming session lies with the facilitator. It is amazing that anything of value is produced in these types of brainstorming sessions, and usually, just as a few good ideas are emerging, the session is cut short before anyone gets to unpack them and do the really hard, truly creative work. So how do you avoid the terrible brainstorm meeting trap? Try these brainstorming tips to get the most out of the process.

• Ensure every participant understands their role. While the per- spective of every participant is valued, it is important to clar- ify roles and set accurate expectations. Participants need to understand that being in the brainstorming session may not necessarily mean that they are making the decisions.

• Establish and review the brainstorming rules:

— Reiterate that there are no bad ideas. — Do not evaluate ideas as they come, but include everything.

— Encourage wild and crazy ideas. — Defer judgment and push beyond obvious solutions.

• Give everyone a pen and pad of sticky notes. The one who holds the pen controls the flow of information in a meeting. During a brainstorming session, we don’t want to limit the flow, so give everyone a pen and a pad of sticky notes. As people jot down ideas, have them verbally share and post on large chart paper.

• Get the group warmed up prior to brainstorming. Don’t expect people to brainstorm cold; give them an activity to warm them up. Try a combine-and-connect activity called

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“Two Buckets.” One bucket has a list of name brands; the other bucket has a list of product categories. Participants select cards and pair up. Their challenge? Create a new product with the information they were given and design a slogan using six words or less. This is a quick activity that requires all participants to loosen up and begin exploring new ideas. A fun example from one of our teams was a “Harley-Davidson Car Seat” with the slogan “Ride Safe in Style.” Quick and silly brainstorms, such as, “How many uses can you think of for a paper clip?” can also get people in a more creative thinking space when you’re looking to problem solve. Most times, these activities take less than 10 minutes and, when incorporated with intention, can form part of the first steps toward a more dynamic school culture that embraces risk and change.

• Provide five minutes of individual brainstorming time. Even once people are warmed up, it is nice to provide a few minutes of individual brainstorming time. Throw out your topic and give people five uninterrupted minutes to get their juices flowing. This also helps build creative confi- dence, as people now have ideas to contribute easily once the group brainstorming session begins.

• Ask for people’s worst possible ideas. Get them out there. Once everyone has shared their worst possible solution to the problem, everything is uphill from there. As an added bonus, sharing your worst idea tends to loosen people up and adds an element of humor to the process.

• Encourage flair. Prepare questions that can be used to spur new ideas. The questions are essential, because the way you ask the question will frame all the solutions. Here are a few samples to get you started:

— What if we could create a school guided by the best instructional, innovative, and creative practices avail- able? What would that look like?

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58 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

— If money were no object, what instructional practices would we want to see implemented across the grades/ school sites?

— If we had the opportunity to visit a school in the year 2113, what would it look like?

— If we wanted to prepare a student to be the individual who cures cancer/solves world hunger/eliminates global warming, what skills would they need to learn and what would their educational program look like?

— What kind of educational program would students create for themselves if given the chance? How could we build in student choice throughout the instructional day?

If these prompts aren’t working or you need to get people unstuck, try some more general prompts, such as:

— How would Walt Disney solve your problem? What would Kim Kardashian suggest?

— How would we solve our problem if our school were on the space station or on a new planet?

— What if we removed all technology? What if we were designing for a virtual reality school?

• Spend time narrowing the focus to provide closure. After brain- storming in small groups, ask every participant to place a red circle next to an idea with the biggest impact; a blue circle next to a “pie in the sky” idea; a yellow circle next to a quickly imple- mented idea; and a green circle next to ideas that are the most cost-effective. This narrowing process allows every participant to have a say in highlighting their favorite idea.

Find Your Big Three Another way to get beyond the obvious is to question your ques- tions. It is helpful to identify your big questions—not those easily answered, but those that make you stop and think for a moment

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before diving in. Sometimes we are not sure that we started with the right question, and we get stuck. New questions can help us get unstuck.

Identify three major changes that you and your school may be struggling with, and ask three new questions about each of these changes. It is not uncommon for principals to be bogged down with too many initiatives that are competing for their time. Prior- itize. Sometimes initiatives get stuck because we are having the wrong conversations. A well-crafted question is one of the best tools to help uncover hidden opportunities. Figure 3.2 presents two initiatives our administrative team was once struggling with and the questions we used to help reframe the conversation.

Premortem Kami’s mother is a worrier. Any time Kami suggests trying some- thing new or different, her mom explains all the reasons why it won’t work and may be doomed for failure. Kami has learned to “premortem” new experiences with her. Whenever she has some- thing challenging facing her, Kami walks her mom through all the things that might possibly go wrong, and together they think of all the possible responses for dealing with each of them. While they can’t predict every outcome, her mom has a solid plan for different versions of failure, which lowers her anxiety.

At work, we usually end a project with a debrief of what happened; we do a postmortem of the project or event to look at what we could do differently next time. What if we also did a pre- mortem? What if we started by naming risks or elephants in the room, allowing others to voice their concerns and fears? “What could go wrong?” “If this ends in disaster, what would be the con- sequence?” We could then talk through possible strategies for dealing with failures, and everyone would feel like they had the beginnings of a contingency plan. There will always be unknowns and things that we can’t predict, but using a premortem strategy

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60 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

Figure 3.2

Questions to Get Unstuck

Initiative Where We Got Stuck Three New Questions

Rethinking Report Cards

Disagreements about what should be on the report card document, balance of academic indicators/nonacademic indicators, and frequency of report cards.

• What would it take for this to be the last year of students receiving report cards while still receiving quality feedback?

• What can we learn from Wells Fargo? (I wouldn’t be impressed if the bank told me they were redesigning my bank statement!)

• Who needs what type of information? When? For what pur- pose?

1-to-1 Initiative Funding the initial devices is one thing, but securing funding for refreshment plans left us unsure of the right direction.

• What if we allowed students to bring devices from home?

• What if we were device-agnostic and deviated from being an Apple-only envi- ronment?

• What if we only pro- vided devices to those students who needed them?

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will help you feel more prepared for the unpredictable and may help you push further into risky opportunities.

Get Feedback Early and Often As you work to find new opportunities, continuous feedback is essential food for the process. Creativity is fueled by the uplifting words and actions of others. Even in the brainstorming process, using the phrase “yes, and . . . ” is a feedback tool that promotes a positive dialogue, as opposed to “yes, but . . . ,” which shuts down the conversation. Learning to give and receive valuable and meaningful feedback throughout a decision process helps create transparency and invests everyone in the end result. Eval- uate your feedback processes.

• Assess how you currently obtain feedback. What processes are in place? How often do you ask?

• What do you do with the feedback you receive? Does it change what you do?

• What opportunities do you currently have to offer feedback to other people or departments?

• Do you actively seek feedback from a least likely source or someone you know will challenge your ideas? Don’t be afraid to ask other people to help you get better.

As an Opportunity Seeker, you are passionate and aware of pos- sibilities, unmet needs, and the power of imagination. Problems with great complexity require great creativity. Opportunity Seek- ers encourage creativity to keep from flatlining in your solutions and reverting to what you know. You see potential where others see problems. When others get stuck by roadblocks, you soar above and are able to see the big picture. You know that progress will happen if you continually forge ahead. Practice sharpening your vision, creating new frames, and moving beyond the obvious solutions, and put your opportunity seeking skills to work.

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