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165

Chapter 8

Design Your Team and Your Mindset

Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.

—Helen Keller

If you are feeling a little overwhelmed by the five new roles, take a deep breath and think about what an incredible opportunity you have to design both your team and your mindset. While the heroic leader who takes on the work solo is often celebrated, and we hear stories of leaders confronting challenges with single straight lines to amazing and innovative solutions, we believe leadership is much more complex. The line from challenge to solution won’t be straight, and the work won’t be done solo, because design-inspired leadership practiced by a team will have the greatest positive impact on changes in our school system. It’s not really surprising that most heroic work or discoveries are actually made by teams, not solo leaders. Studies show that

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 2021-10-20 18:14:57.

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166 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

people working in teams tend to achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction. No team can survive on the brainpower or work of one person. Design Thinking is a team sport that requires the involvement of every member on the team, and design- inspired leaders know how to harness and utilize that energy.

Design Your Team Design Thinking not only fosters innovation, it also strengthens teams by creating common language, common artifacts, and a culture that is built on trust. It is not uncommon for teams to have different interpretations of the same idea or goal. Building a shared language helps teams move from figuring out the “what” to figuring out the “how.” The creation of artifacts happens throughout the design process, which is so powerful because it requires people to “show rather than tell” through empathy maps, storyboards, and walls full of ideas written on sticky notes. The visualization of complex ideas actually helps the team sim- plify ideas, making it more likely the team will move to action. The practice of Design Thinking helps build trust across a team, as all ideas carry equal weight no matter whom they came from. While the main goal of Design Thinking is to create solutions to wicked problems, one of the benefits of engaging in the design process is that it also builds strong teams by helping establish the climate of collaboration, risk taking, and trust that will lead to high-performing teams. The simple act of choosing to engage in the design process will result in a stronger, more effective team.

So how do you design and build the perfect team? Google, looking to optimize their teams, set out to answer that question in 2012 with “Project Aristotle.” The group—comprising statisti- cians, organizational psychologists, sociologists, engineers, and researchers—was tasked with researching and identifying the qualities that make up the best and most effective team. They started with research and academic studies, but then moved on to

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Design Your Team and Your Mindset • 167

researching hundreds of teams, scrutinizing every aspect of them. Do the best teams socialize outside work? Do they have similar interests? How does gender balance impact the team? Does a team need to have similar educational backgrounds? The list of factors they researched was extensive, but in the end, they discovered there is no such thing as creating the perfect team. Teams that are successful are successful because of the ways they have chosen to work together. The team’s norms are a greater predictor of suc- cess than the actual composition of the team. So in some regards, it is less about who is on the team and more about the ways in which members interact with one another.

In their simplest form, norms are informal understandings that govern the behavior of members of a group. Norms can be unspoken or explicitly expressed; either way, they have pro- found influence over how a team works together. Individuals on a team may behave in certain ways when alone, but when they are together, the group’s norms typically override any one individual’s preferences or proclivities. It would be easy to think, “Problem solved! We’ll create one set of norms and have those govern every team.” Not so fast. The norms have to be created and enforced by the group as they work together. Even if a team sets out to develop norms explicitly, these norms will organically change over time based on the will of the team. Project Aristotle took their research one step further to see if they could identify any common norms in successful teams. The norms varied from team to team, but they did find two common threads in all suc- cessful teams. Successful teams all had “equality in distribution of conversational turn taking” and “average social sensitivity,” which means that team members were empathetic to other mem- bers of the team. Isn’t it interesting that so much of this work comes back to empathy and relationships? What norms do you have for your school or district? Do they promote empathy and relationship building? Do you encourage teams to actively talk about and set norms?

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Working with schools across the country, we have seen it all. Some schools have well-established norms, some districts have very formal norms photocopied and laminated on the walls (we don’t recommend going this route, as they are seen as fixed and unlikely to represent the true working nature of the group), and others have none. There is no one way to establish these as long as you remember that norms are organic, changing as the group grows and learns together. The creation of norms is the simple part; they can be created in a group brainstorm session. The much harder work comes with asking each member of the group to commit to living them. This means group members also com- mit to telling each other when they believe someone is violating an agreed-upon norm. The norms we bring as a starting place for the teams we work with (which you may use as a starting point if you need to create norms for a group) are:

• Assume best intentions. • Be a learner, not a knower. • Bring your authentic self. • Take risks and choose to engage. • Respect confidentiality. • Play (and work) hard.

Norms are an indicator of success and can help a team navi- gate challenges. When conflict comes, and it always does, a win- ning team is able to handle the conflict with mutual respect and empathy for each other. Periodically evaluate the effectiveness of the team in achieving its goals and revisit the norms, asking if they are still the working norms of the group. If not, modify.

Adding New Members to Your Team—Hiring Having the opportunity to add new members to your team is quite a luxury and provides a chance to round out the expertise of the team. Too often in education, we get stuck in the trap of hiring more of the same. This is natural; as humans, we yearn to

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Design Your Team and Your Mindset • 169

be with people like us. However, when hiring, it is important to look for others, not for another. Today, more than ever, we need to be hiring people with the capability to learn, unlearn, and relearn. If you hire someone today for what they know, five years from now, they might be a liability. But if you hire them for their ability to learn, they are an asset. Assessing that quality can be tricky in an interview.

While working on really pushing the boundaries of what we could accomplish as a public school system, we quickly saw what an incredible opportunity it would be to rethink our hiring process. Somehow, over the years, our process had become fairly traditional, asking applicants to share textbook answers in front of a very formal interview panel. We were still experi- encing success, but much like students learn to play the game of school, applicants learn to play the game of interviews. We became really intrigued with figuring out how to change the process. Being located near Silicon Valley, we tapped our parent community—many of whom worked for innovative companies such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—to ask for their expertise. How might they help us reimagine the hiring process? Based on research and parental input, we eliminated some of our more traditional questions and asked questions designed to elicit insights into a person’s ability to think and act creatively. Some examples:

• “Tell us about a time when you created a new lesson, pro- cess, or program that was considered risky.”

• “Tell us about a situation in which you had to come up with several new ideas in a hurry. Were they accepted? Were they successful?”

• “Tell us about one of your greatest failures and what you learned from it.”

• “Engage us in a topic of your choosing for three minutes.”

Sure, we still asked about differentiation and supporting the needs of students, but adding these more open-ended questions

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170 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

allowed us to assess applicants’ ability to think, their ability to learn from failure, their risk tolerance, and their authenticity as a person. All these elements were important to us as we built our team to push the boundaries in learning. Do the questions you ask during interviews reflect the traits and characteristics that are most important to you in new hires? If not, how might you change them?

Broaden Your Team, Establish Purpose and Protocols In Los Altos, we were focused on “revolutionizing learning for all students,” a process that had consumed us for the better part of four years, although somewhere along our journey we realized we had been focused primarily on those who had direct interactions with students. We worked extensively with school leaders and even the parent community, but we had completely left out our support staff. Anyone who has worked in a school district knows how many people it takes behind the scenes at a school and a district to provide world-class education to stu- dents. How were we incorporating support staff in our work? We realized that some of the exciting changes that were happening at the classroom level and school level were having an impact at the district level. There were new and different strains on the system, yet we hadn’t prepared people for the new strains. For example, we might have worked with teachers and principals on the importance of creating flexible learning environments, but we didn’t bring our facilities departments into the same discus- sions. Our director of facilities was less than pleased to have many teachers calling and asking to have their desks removed, without any idea of why this request was coming. You can see how the lack of preparation on our part put the facilities depart- ment in an awkward situation. After a few run-ins, we recognized we had work to do. We experienced firsthand the need to include everyone in our process and also saw an opportunity to make

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Design Your Team and Your Mindset • 171

commitments at the district level about the type of service we would provide to our school sites and to one another. Through this work, we got very explicit about our purpose and our com- mitments. We identified our purpose as follows: To ensure the best learning experience possible is available each and every day

for our students in their classrooms.

Then, at the district office level, we decided the only way we would accomplish this was by working to give community members, parents, teachers, principals, and other staff what they need, when they needed it, with superior service. We would achieve this by keeping the operating protocols below at the forefront of our work each day, in every interaction.

Operating Protocols Make It Easy

Focus on the needs of others and take the extra steps to ensure they feel supported.

• How will I make each interaction as easy as possible for others (placing any extra burden on me and not on them)?

• What will I do to make each person leave feeling supported and valued (happy/satisfied) during the interaction and at the conclusion?

Seek to Improve

Be open to ideas—seek and embrace change.

• How will I find ways to be more effective not only in my role, but also in other areas in the organization?

• How will I prepare to problem solve? • How will I think ahead to prevent small issues from becom-

ing large issues?

• How will I deal with an issue that requires additional time to resolve or is not in my area of expertise?

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172 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

Assume Good Intentions

Work collaboratively, respecting and valuing what each per- son brings to the conversation.

• What is my mindset when asked for assistance? • How will I exceed expectations in every interaction? • How will I hold myself and others accountable for exem-

plary performance?

• How will my positive actions with others leave them feeling they have received superior service?

• Am I treating others the way I would expect to be treated as a customer/colleague?

While the purpose and operating protocols look quite simple, there was a lot of work that went into their creation. The protocols were commitments that we took seriously, so much so that the superintendent shared them publicly and asked people to con- tact him directly if they had an experience that did not align with the operating protocols. On the flip side, he also asked people to share if they had an experience that knocked their socks off.

This is only one example of how to broaden your team. What would it look like at your school or district? How will you ensure support staff are an integral part of the process?

Capacity Building and Diversity The Justice League, a fictional superhero team appearing in American comic books, originally had seven members: Bat- man, Aquaman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Superman, and Wonder Woman. What makes the Justice League so powerful is that each member has their own unique super- power. The Flash has superhuman speed. Superman can fly and has X-ray vision, among other powers. Wonder Woman is a skilled warrior, with Amazon bracelets and a golden lasso. You get the idea. These superheroes are powerful on their own, but

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Design Your Team and Your Mindset • 173

the collective power of the Justice League is amazing! What are the superpowers on your team? And equally as important: what is everyone’s kryptonite?

Whenever we have the opportunity to work with school teams, we like to begin our work by having individuals claim their superpower in a group, identify their kryptonite—essentially what brings them down in a group or kills their superpower— and share a recent accomplishment. A lot of times we are work- ing with intact teams whose members have known each other for years, and yet every time there seems to be surprises. If we don’t take the time to explicitly share our superpowers, how can we utilize them? Even if you don’t take the time to do this as a group, you can start to identify the superpowers on your team by watching people in action and asking questions. “What do they do better than anything else? What do they do better than the people around them? What do they do without effort? What do they gravitate to without being asked?”

Identifying the superpowers on your team not only helps you build a stronger team, it can also help you connect people to opportunities and establish the right level of support for them. Our colleague Donna experienced this firsthand with Mary, a library media specialist in her district. Mary was discouraged with her role and even considering retirement. She has the ability to lead and inspire others, but was being dragged down by her kryptonite of meaningless work. She felt stuck. Because Donna took the time to know both Mary’s superpowers and her kryptonite, she was able to connect her to a group of librari- ans rethinking libraries as the design hubs and makerspaces of the schools. Mary was reinvigorated and excited to dig into a new project. Not only is this team doing incredible work within the district, but Mary and her team are now presenting at conferences and talking to other librarians about reimagin- ing the library spaces that exist on every school campus. What

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174 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

opportunities might you be able to connect your team to if you take the time to get to know their superpowers?

Opportunities and Support Connecting team members to both opportunities and support is essential to the sustainability of your team. As a working parent, Alyssa is always looking for ways to streamline life, so imagine her excitement when she heard about Google Express, a shop- ping service from Google that will stop at up to three stores for you. From the comfort of her office in a matter of minutes, she ordered what she needed from Target, Costco, and CVS. When she got home that evening from work, her shopping from all three stores was sitting on her porch packaged in bags, each with a sticker that read, “Delivering you more free time.” She was ecstatic! To have someone help with those errands freed her up to spend more time with her kids and family. How can we provide teachers and staff with more free time? Wouldn’t it be amazing to provide teachers with tools and supports that freed up their time to do the really important work? This would be powerful at all levels of schools and districts.

The District of Columbia Public Schools are taking a lead in trying to “free the school principal” by adding directors of oper- ations and logistics. The idea is to provide support for principals on daily issues that have little to do directly with teaching and learning: school maintenance, the cafeteria, safety, transporta- tion, and paperwork. The goal is to liberate principals to focus more on teaching, evaluation of programs and personnel, future planning, and assessment. What would it look like to “free the teachers”? If we are going to be successful in asking our staffs to engage in new work, we might have to provide the space to do the work. Sometimes, that means helping them with the equiva- lent of running errands so they can engage in more meaningful work. Leaders who recognize this are getting creative in “deliv- ering teachers more free time.” One of the schools we visited

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Design Your Team and Your Mindset • 175

created a parent volunteer copy squad, so teachers never have to spend their prep time doing clerical tasks. Let’s support teach- ers when necessary through change to ease some of the burden. As soon as teachers see positive outcomes from their efforts, no matter how small, it’s cathartic.

Moving in New Directions

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working

together is success.

—Henry Ford, American captain of industry

With a broad team in place, you are ready to start moving them in new directions. Use the design-thinking process, but remember, it is just that: a process. Think of it as a suggestion, like a recipe you use the first time you cook a new dish, but don’t let it limit you. Design-inspired leadership frees you from having all the answers all the time. Engage your team members in helping you identify where to start. Activate thinking using the three most powerful words, when combined: “How might we . . . ?” These three words are so powerful because the “how” implies there is not yet an answer and there is room for discovery, the “might” implies there is a world of possibility, and the “we” implies we are in this together. “How might we . . . ?” becomes an irresistible invitation to the work. Once people accept your invitation, you can continually nudge them further.

• Move the goalposts a little at a time. When we are looking to stretch beyond what we know, it helps if we move the endpoints a little at a time. Give your teams a chance to experience a series of small successes, building creative confidence, and then move to a larger scope. Think about learning to ride a bike. Most start with training wheels, then riding freely between adults, and finally making it solo to

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176 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

the end of the block. Once we get it, we’re free to ride that bike in any direction. T.J. Edwards, director of design and engineering programs at Mt. Vernon, shared that change in education can feel like pushing against an ocean at times. To combat this, Mt. Vernon started using the word “ooooch,” which they discovered in the book Decisive, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. How can you “ooooch” closer to your goal? In posing this question, you are essentially ask- ing people to think about small hacks they can make that can incrementally change experiences and policies. As a result, faculty tried “unschool” for one week a year, during which they had no bells and no classes, and students were allowed to work on passion projects. Unschool wasn’t the goal; it was a little hack that eventually evolved into iProj- ect. Now there are 90 minutes a week when students can work on passion projects in school. It is oversimplifying to say that the “unschool experience” led right to iProject, but it was definitely instrumental in changing people’s thinking. Incremental changes, combined with effective storytelling, are key as you move closer to the goal.

• Ask for harder work, not more work. At times, it feels as if we leave our team meetings with a longer to-do list, thinking that if we were just able to get more done before the next meeting, we could be finished. Perhaps the work that we need to be helping our teams do is deeper and more thoughtful. If we focused on a specific practice, such as homework, and armed team members with a list of thoughtful questions to examine through their own indi- vidual practices, the discussions that they would come back to would be very different than if we asked them to just bring in homework samples and policies for a surface comparison and a debate of who does it better. Asking teachers to dig into their beliefs and values allows a much deeper and more thoughtful conversation, which leads to a

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Design Your Team and Your Mindset • 177

consensus with a better understanding of needed changes. Get comfortable asking other people to be uncomfortable. Learning comes from discomfort.

• Use assessment as proof. Educators are driven by data, so include ways to show early on that change is working. Assessment comes in many shapes and sizes. Think about ways to gather and engage with feedback, using different formative assessment measures. Also, build in some more formal assessment methods: surveys, interviews, student artifacts of learning, testimonials, and other data points that support your initiative. When you are ready to ana- lyze your first prototype, think about what proof you want brought to the table. You might start with those quick formative assessments and build into more formal and in-depth forms of proof as you work toward a final version. Figure 8.1 is an example of a self-assessment that we used with our team of principals. As a district, we had been working on a number of initiatives, such as personalizing learning, providing meaningful professional development to teachers, creating school climates that promote creativity and innovation, and active learning spaces. This simple rubric allowed school principals to acknowledge where their staff was on each of the initiatives, and we were able to have a powerful conversation as a result.

Creating a Network Building your team is so much bigger than just the people at your school or in your district. The same people sitting around the same table produce the same results. To avoid this sameness trap, you have to create a network and find kindred spirits out- side your organization who can provide both inspiration and sup- port. These kindred spirits can help push your thinking and see what is possible in different contexts with different constraints.

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178 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

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180 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

Kindred spirits can be found in many different places. Through social media, we have discovered new friends and educators who are striving for some of the same educational changes. Try using a hashtag—#edleadership, #changeschool, or #dtk12—in a Twitter search. You will find Tweets from others who are interested in the topics you can follow. Look for Twitter chats, such as #dtk12chat or #edchat, and participate in conversations. Conferences can also offer a great place to find your people. While sessions are great places to learn, look for makerspaces and blogger’s cafes where you can sit and interact with other conference attendees.

Part of creating a network is to act as the connector and intentionally bring people together. Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta, Georgia, has mastered the art of networking and connecting within their community. In 2013, Mt. Vernon launched a Council on Innovation, bringing together 18 individ- uals who are experts in entrepreneurship, education, business, and community leadership. Members included leaders from Coca-Cola, Turner Entertainment, Spanx, The Weather Channel, and many other businesses vital to Atlanta. This council was established to provide insight and inspiration to the school’s leadership team. Mt. Vernon’s leadership poses questions to the council, such as, “How might we continue to prepare our stu- dents to be globally competitive?” “How might we connect our students to authentic learning opportunities in the community?” Through the Council on Innovation, Mt. Vernon has been able to identify what it means to be globally competitive and ground this work in the community. How might you leverage your commu- nity to create a network of learning for the school?

Go Flat We often hear the words “top down” or “flat” as a way to describe an organization. Top down implies that all decisions filter down from the top, and those at the bottom are powerless. To flatten an

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Design Your Team and Your Mindset • 181

organization means that leadership decisions are spread across all stakeholders and everyone is part of the process. Education has traditionally relied on a top-down model, and most educa- tional institutions embrace this structure. This top-down leader- ship structure can be detrimental to our teacher leaders. Often they become burned out and leave the classroom, looking for an opportunity to have a bigger impact. Sometimes this leads to administration, one of the only options in the education world for higher salaries and more global responsibilities. Teachers are our greatest assets. How might we empower teacher leadership roles so that they feel valuable and have a wider impact? Moving from a top-down organization to one that is flat is challenging; however, it is a vital move for education. We need to find a way to use the many talents that are spread across our school sites in ways that encourage and value each individual. And even if we may not be able to “go flat,” at the very least we need to commit to models of distributed leadership in our schools and establish teacher leaders who have responsibilities beyond their classroom. At Design39 in Poway, teachers are empowered to make many of the decisions. They have distributed leadership through a multi-team approach. Teachers meet as a grade-level team to design learning experiences and discuss school issues, and also as multi-grade- level spans to compare and discuss alignment. They then meet as a whole group with their principal to bring all discussions together and strive for consensus over major decisions. While they are still working through some of their meeting protocols and processes, they feel that every staff member has an opportu- nity to express their views in the decision-making process.

A Final Word Before You Begin: Design Your Mindset

It always seems impossible until it’s done!

—Nelson Mandela

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182 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

Throughout this book, “change” is a major player. No surprise, and not really new news. There are tons of articles out there about how hard change is, tips for how to manage change, and motivational pieces to help see you through change in an organization. In fact, if you Google “change is hard,” there are 123,000,000 results. We haven’t taken the time to investigate all these resources, but the sheer number of related items is a clear indicator that change is something humanity struggles with. Now, this isn’t to discount all the incredible research that has been done on the difficulty of change. Clearly there is a lot to be learned about change. But what if we were able to reframe change from “being hard” to “being messy”? This simple alteration of word choice has helped us rethink a lot of ideas about change.

Reframing change from “hard” to “messy” instantly makes it feel more doable and action-oriented. We all have different tolerance levels of messiness, but we all know what it feels like to be in the middle of a mess. In our chaotic world of change, some form of messiness comes with the day-to-day. Two things we have learned: some of the best times come from the biggest messes. Watching children come home with dirt caked on their clothes and under their fingernails means it was a good day at school. The other thing we have learned is that messes are temporary. All messes eventually get cleaned up. Embracing the messiness of change seems to give permission to experiment and freedom to play and investigate answers along the way. How many people have we let off the hook by overstating how hard change is, thereby giving them permission not to change? It is our hope that we collectively embrace the messiness of change and get going!

So where do you start? Our advice is to start where you are and start with whatever problem is in front of you. There is no perfect solution or prescription; it really is about engaging with the problems you face using new design-inspired mindsets and

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Design Your Team and Your Mindset • 183

skills. As you engage in the messiness of the work, we offer a few final thoughts.

Be You

Channel your inner Oprah and be authentic. During Oprah’s first nationally syndicated shows airing in 1986, Oprah shared with the audience that she had hives in her armpits from being so nervous. Jesse Jackson told Oprah she is the only person he has ever met who is exactly the same way she is off television as she is on. That is a huge compliment and perhaps one of the reasons that Oprah has gone on to be one of the most influential women in the world. While we don’t expect you to talk about hives in your armpits, think about your own signature presence. What makes you unique as a leader? Own it and bring it to the table.

Run Your Own Race

We have shared stories of amazing leaders, schools, and dis- tricts. It can be easy to get caught up in comparing yourself, your school, or your district to those shared; however, the more time you spend comparing yourself to what others are doing, the less time you are focusing on your situation and your own success. Think back to the beloved story of the tortoise and the hare. The hare was speeding for success, but got caught in his own arrogance and simply coasted. Meanwhile, the tortoise plodded down his path, one step at a time. Every school or organization has a unique set of circumstances. You can only practice leading like a designer in the circumstances you are in. Unlike the tor- toise and the hare, there is no need to focus on winning the race. The challenge is to just be more like the tortoise, intentionally moving toward the finish line.

Practice Gratitude

We are so fortunate to do the work we do; there is nothing more powerful than impacting the lives of future generations.

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184 • Design Thinking for School Leaders

Take a moment to reflect and remember this. Gratitude sees what is good and right with the world. Gratitude can help us find something meaningful in nothing. Leaders who see their staff through the lens of gratitude will always see the untapped potential in people and inspire them to achieve what others think is impossible.

Be Passionate

Passionate leaders spread passion to others through their love of the work, doing new things, taking risks, being motivated, having a sense of urgency, and reinventing themselves. The more passionate you are about the work, the more likely you are to awaken possibility within others. Challenge yourself to notice the number of shining eyes you have around you. How might you involve other people in your passion rather than go it alone?

Together, we explored the changing landscape of leadership and explored five practical ways to reframe the school leader role using design. Our hope is that through this journey, you will start to see your world differently and bring a new perspective to your work. We hope you now see yourself as a designer, capable of inspiring great change and addressing challenges with new insights and methods. While the tools and strategies we have shared are powerful accelerators of change, none of them matter if the thinking doesn’t change. Shift thinking first, then anything is possible. The more you adopt the mindset and realize it’s not about following a prescription, the more successful you will be. As a design-inspired leader, you are at the forefront of a new movement in education, one that will move traditional education into the modern world and drive the future of learning.

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