Module 4: V.) Assembling the Team and Getting Started pt.1

So one of the clear findings from our research on innovation is that every organization has clear capabilities. But understanding those capabilities also helps you see what an organization's limitations are. That is, an existing organization may not be able to do the new things that you're trying to set out to do.

So what I hear you saying is to do really complicated new prototyping may be easier if you're actually a startup starting from scratch.

That's exactly right. And I actually think that a lot of you may be starting to see this, that if you're trying to do blended learning in a brand new classroom or school, it's probably a lot easier to start to strike that innovation. But if you're trying to do this within an existing classroom or an existing school, there are more constraints, legacy resources, routines, priorities that might constrain you in innovating. Let's explore these different circumstances for innovation in turn.

Summit Public Schools has actually had the experience of starting schools absolutely from scratch in a blended way and also trying to figure out how you convert existing schools. And I've had this same realization in the school that I started. If you're starting from scratch, you have all the variables under your control. Who's on board, planning time. In many ways, you have green earth to begin with.

In our experience so far, new schools are a little bit easier in terms of innovation. Why? Well, you're starting from scratch, number one. In our case, we're starting with a smaller group of students, a smaller group of faculty. It's a little bit tighter culture and they generally have a little bit more Runway to really think about what they're going to do and how they're going to do it before they launch because they're starting fresh. Whereas in an existing school, no matter how well planned, you know, there's a time frame between what you were doing and what you're about to do. And your planning for that is a little bit clouded by sort of reflecting on and dealing with closing up what you've been doing. Our schools are a little bit bigger, the existing schools. There's more established primary practice there, there's a lot of tradition. And in our cases, the kids are a little bit more resistant to change and certainly the parents are a little bit more resistant to change. So you're not necessarily dealing with, oh, this brand new vision that everyone was attracted to and came into. You're trying to talk about this more as enhancements or improvements as opposed to this fresh new idea.

Now, the assignments that you've been working through have actually been leading you through this process of prototyping and creating a new school or from scratch. And in week six, we're actually going to talk about this process a lot more. But suffice to say, right now the key is basically start with the student experience you want to create, and then start to think about the culture, the technology, how you're actually going to structure the use of time for students and all of those other design considerations, and then start to test and learn and actually implement. When we're talking about whole school redesign, we have to think about a whole different set of considerations, because you have an existing model in place with resources, processes, culture, priorities that, while actually huge assets in your current model, might be liabilities as you move toward a new model.

And that said, almost all the kids in America are in existing schools. We're not going to solve this problem just by building a million new schools all across the world. So when you think about converting an existing school to very big new models, we'd suggest four big ideas to keep in mind. First, who do you need to have involved in the process, and how do you want them to be involved? Second, how do you get their buy in? Third, how do you make this part of their everyday job, that they see this innovative process as core to who they are? And fourth, what do you do with the naysayers?

So what our research and innovation has shown us is that the level of change that you're trying to make determines the type of team or who you need to actually have on board to make that change. So if you're operating within schools and you're just trying to change something within a given grade or a given classroom, the right type of team to have on board is what we call a functional team. And a functional team is basically just made up of the members within a given department or a particular grade level. So the kindergarten teachers make up one functional team, and foreign languages might make up another one. And this type of team is all you need when you're just trying to change within a given classroom or grade band. And it doesn't impact any other parts of the school. So the change is basically contained within that unit. So if you're simply flipping a classroom or moving to a station rotation, then a functional team is the way to go. And this is exactly what Riverside Unified School District is doing in their middle schools right now.

Blended at this point takes lots of different forms of the models that are out there. I think that we probably cover all of them one fashion or another. The other thing that I would say is that again, these go from probably kindergarten through the 12th grade, but they're largely teacher initiated, independent. In other words, they use that as a tool and a strategy in a classroom, not because as a district we've compelled them to use it in a particular way. We count on our teachers to be teachers. And so it's not that we compel anybody to do this, but in fact, we say, if you would like to do it, we'll provide devices, we'll provide support, we'll provide training, all the things that you might want. But as a teacher, this is one more instructional tool. And because it's in the hands of teachers, they actually get extraordinarily creative about it. And things that we would never dream up, they've dreamt up and put in place. And then there's an organic sharing that happens between teachers, because I guess my view is that teachers are fairly idealistic. They want to get it right for their kids. And so if the teacher next door is making something happen and it works well for them, they say, how can I do that too? How can I replicate that? Predominantly, they're staying within kind of the normal classroom structure. We've always had some amount of sharing where I'll do the math and science, you do the English social studies.

So as we're thinking about redesigning schools beyond just a classroom level, that's going to take a different kind of team.

That's exactly right. So when you're starting to coordinate from the classroom to other parts of the school, you need what we call a lightweight team. In a lightweight team, the teachers still remain in their departments, but there's basically a project manager on the other side that's coordinating the activity across these departments. So say you're implementing a lab rotation model, and you just need to coordinate when you can use the lab versus when another teacher's students can use the lab. You need to start coordinating across the school to make that work. Similarly, you might be implementing a station rotation, and you have certain technology requirements. And so you need to coordinate with the IT staff to actually deliver those requirements for your classroom. That's basically a lightweight team.

So the innovation is allowed to happen separately in different settings, and they need some coordination. What if we want to redesign the whole school? What if everybody wants to come together and have a big vision of new teaching style, new approaches to education?

Yeah. So then you're starting to talk about really an unpredictable process. Right. And so actually what you need there is what we call a heavyweight team. And a heavyweight team is where you actually take people out of their traditional departments. And you say, bring your expertise to the table, but don't bring your loyalty to the department that you've always been in. Bring your loyalty to the way things have always been done, and use your expertise to really redesign a new schooling model. And the key thing about a heavyweight team is that you need to appoint a leader who everyone can say that when that person is signed off and we've made a decision as a group, we don't need to go back to all of the other existing departments and get them to sign off, too. So we really have the autonomy that we need to rethink all of those things we've been talking about in this lesson.

So as we think about nurturing change within our organizations, this isn't just a change management strategy for schools. The same thing is true in almost any setting. And I was actually driving down to shoot this video today, and I listened to a conversation between Clay Christensen at the Harvard Business School and Dominic Barton, who's the global manager for McKinsey Consulting. And Dominic was talking about launching this new venture within McKinsey that was going to be startup and different. And he was so deliberate in how he thought about who led it and how they protected it. And I just want to read this to you so you get a sense of how he was thinking about this strategically. What I did, he said, was to put one of the most experienced and senior people in the firm, who's a close friend and has been with the firm for 30 years, he used to run our Americas group. I had him lead our McKinsey solutions. And it was a bit of a new ventures group because I knew he would stimulate it and protect it. When you try new things, it's amazing the number of people and antibodies in the organization that try to kill it, because it's different. So we needed a very strong leader to protect it and to nourish it. And this is exactly how our school leaders that we've been talking to have been thinking about the change management process in their organization, how they protect it, how they nourish it, and the role of the leader in this organization. This kind of heavyweight team that you've been talking about, Michael, is what makes blended learning so different than the past. You know, let's stick technology into classrooms. People say all the time, we've already done it in schools, we get it. And I actually think this is a really important point when I say high quality blended learning. It requires having the right people at the table who can truly redesign schools. That's why in this movement, it's all about having the lead teachers there, the principals there, the assistant superintendents of instruction, and the folks on the tech side of things who understand the logistics. Because if we get them involved in really redesigning schools, then I think we might have a shot of actually getting this right.

Yeah, I think that's exactly correct. And one more critical note about this, the reason that these team structures matter is that if you're trying to redesign a whole school but you only have members from a functional team there, you're just not going to get it right. Similarly, if your ambition is just to flip a classroom or something like that and you try to bring a whole heavyweight team on the process, you're going to make that process slow, burdensome and bureaucratic.

So basically what you're saying is match the team to the change you have in mind.

That's exactly right.