Michael Horn offers eight guidelines for school leaders managing innovation. He distinguishes incremental from breakthrough innovations, recommends setting clear purpose and pilot outcomes, frames failure as learning, and stresses pruning outdated practices as new ones emerge.
Here are just eight tips for helping your school team innovate. Number one. Innovation is hard. Don't sugarcoat it. Be honest about it. Number two. Don't compare different kinds of innovations to each other. The purpose of an incremental innovation is different from a breakthrough. When you're deciding which ones to do, don't compare them against each other. Number three. Develop a rhythm for your innovation work. When you have a taxonomy of different innovation types, know how many of each type you're going to launch every year. Number four. Before embarking on an innovation, make sure you know the why for it and make sure everyone else who's going to be impacted by it does as well. Number five. When you pilot, state clearly the desired outcomes up front. You know when to shelve it or when to double down. Number six. Failure is a good thing so long as you learn from it. 7. As new innovations take hold, remember to prune the old practices that have outlived their purposes or are not working. Number eight. You've heard of team teaching, but let's see some team leadership as well. Not everyone's good at everything. Build a cohesive team that can tackle innovation together.
