Collaboration as an Essential Practice - A Conversation with Rich Watkins

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Most work that happens in the world doesn't happen by individuals. It happens by collectives. I'm saying something so obvious, so basic, so primordial. It's what humans are. It's who we are. And it's the very thing that we don't train or teach or apprentice when what we're focused on is individual performance.

Hi everyone, my name's Tim Logan and welcome back to the podcast this week. When was the last time that you achieved something totally on your own with no reliance on others? My guess is not ever, not really. One of the things that we humans have always been really good at, despite our relative vulnerabilities individually, is getting hard things done in groups. And part of what education has always been about has been apprenticing our young people into that collective advantage. And yet we've set up a modern formal education system that seems to optimize primarily for individual knowledge and skills. Developing the capabilities to work really well together on complex challenges is at best a secondary consideration in our schooling system. My guest this week, Rich Watkins, has taken on this exact problem and is supporting organizations around the world to build their collaborative abilities. He developed the Let's Go model, which he and a community of practitioners are using to facilitate catalytic conversations and critical reflections that help teams teams grow, improve, and get unstuck. I met Rich a few years ago when he shared a brilliant video that went viral about John Vervaeke's 4 Ps of Knowing and a more grounded way to grow, and I was keen to explore with him how all of this really thoughtful and deep work might connect with our current educational challenges. You can read more about Rich's fantastic work in the show notes. Hey, man.

Hey, Tim. How are you?

I'm all right. How are you?

Yeah, very good. I was sort of reflecting, like, what do I want to come out of the podcast? And I think there's a thing that collaboration gets confused with, which we can talk about in some of your questions that you've set. And this happens in business, and I imagine this happens in school, where collaboration almost gets used as the opposite of good outcomes. So in a way, it becomes a process obsession where you almost try and disconnect from outcomes because that would cause too much stress and blah, blah, blah. And actually, I think we need to bring together the performance of, like, collaboration isn't for collaboration and collaboration isn't for people feeling nice. Collaboration is for achieving things together. And so you can have very challenging projects. You can have projects that don't go well. You can have arguments. Like, all of these things are part of collaboration. They're not collaboration gone wrong. And sometimes what I hear about, like, let's say in the changemaker type space, it can sound very much like we all hold hands in a circle. And holding hands in a circle is a really nice thing to do when what we're trying to do is hold hands in a circle. And it's really not a nice thing to do when what we're trying to do is like, I don't know, put a rocket on the moon. And we want kids with the skills to put rockets on the moon. And we want skills to hold hands in a circle.

Yeah.

And recognizing that those 2 things are different skills is useful because sometimes we need to do one, sometimes we need to do the other. And I would say holding hands in a circle is a really important part of good collaboration, but then you also need to make hard decisions, have arguments, listen to expertise, build structures that make sense. So anyway, but that's, we can get into all of this, but I think that's my overall thing that I wouldn't want there to be a confusion at the end of our conversation that what I mean by collaboration is the same as— Just everything being nice.

Exactly. That's right at the heart of it, isn't it? Because I mean, well, let's dive into it because I mean, really the first thing I wanted to bring in is, is that in a way is because with your, you know, your work and your cards, you open with this tension that we want collaboration. It's hard to do well, but it often gets treated, as you say, as this extra nice to have soft skill, all this language of like periphery and it's, it's marginal and it's It wouldn't, it be nice if we were really good collaborators, but actually what's really important is getting this thing done. Yeah. And so it, there is a tension between those things that I think you're already beginning to speak to. So maybe if you could just, where do you think some of that tension comes from?

Oh yeah. I don't, I'm not sure I could diagnose exactly where it comes from, but I think that collaboration getting confused for being nice is like a really big problem. And I think the way that collaboration feels like a peripheral skill, a nice-to-have skill, is partly because it's got separated from what I mean when I say collaboration, which is getting things done in groups. And if we think of like most work that happens in the world doesn't happen by individuals, it happens by collectives, by groups, by teams, by alliances, by partnerships. So whilst individual performance is a thing, like people can be better or worse at performing individually, I don't think individual performance is the main thing that achieves things in the world. The main thing that achieves things in the world is collective work. If you think of humans, like we evolved, and the reason that Homo sapiens won isn't because we're particularly brave or strong or intelligent as individuals, or necessarily the most. But that we are really good at coordinating. And so that work of coordinating, I don't know whether we call that collaboration or we just call that getting things done. I don't mind. But that is almost the very heart of what it means to be a human, the very heart of what it means to perform in any context, and the very thing that we don't train or teach or apprentice when what we are focused on is individual performance. So it's like the atomization of the individual as the unit of activity is a thing that seems to have happened in society, but the collective work of groups is the thing that achieves things in the real world. And we kind of all know that. So it's not even that I'm saying anything.

It's just—

I'm saying something so obvious, so basic, so primordial. It's what humans are. It's who we are. We want to gather together to do things. Even you are an incredibly intelligent thinker who's thought a lot about education, and still the way that you do that is by going, let's bring other people into the conversation, because then in a way you will become more.

Exactly.

And the conversation will become more and the collective will become more. So again, I'm not saying that at the expense of individuals being good, but individuals are good in as much as they do things well with others. And so I guess that's what I mean by collaboration. And so I am frustrated that it sort of feels marginalized or has felt marginalized, and I can understand that it has, but I don't know if I know why it has.

Yeah. So, I mean, I don't either, but I've got, let's, let's explore some possibilities because one of my kind of rabbit holes of thinking and maybe a place of possibility is, and I think so much of what you just said really resonates with an educator thinking, looking around and thinking, how did we end up set up like this in a school situation? Because in a way, as you just said, the unit of activity and success is the individual student. And almost the design of the whole game of schooling, not education more broadly, but of schooling is about optimizing individual outcomes. And in particularly competitive environments, That gets pretty vicious, right? It's really about me and my qualifications and my outcomes for progression onto the next Ivy League university or the next whatever, or thinking about jobs and future possibilities. And this is my leap. Part of my wondering about that is this kind of really pervasive myth about competition in nature and Darwinism and social Darwinism and this kind of Like Richard Dawkins and The Selfish Gene and all of that stuff. I've been down that whole rabbit hole for a while. I think that's why it's on my mind. But there's something interesting there about how powerful that story is, that actually the way that nature functions is really the most competitive and kind of aggressively competitive organism wins out, which is just not true when you look at actually how nature collaborates, cooperates, et cetera.

Yeah.

And so, I know it's simplistic, but there is something there for me in how we might be beginning to see more people challenging that deep myth and that kind of deep grammar of how societies— yes, it's nice to talk about collaboration and cooperation, but actually what we really mean, what we know is really successful, is individuals being really competitive to get the best possible performance for themselves so that they can win out, you know, perpetuate their own genes. And again, simplistic, but I don't know, I wonder what you think.

Yeah, well, definitely. I mean, definitely. And also, I maybe I want to say that individual performance is a thing. So like in business, in school, some people perform— again, if we think task-specific or context-specific, some people perform really well and some people don't perform well. And people performing not well is common and undesirable. Like if you're working with people who don't perform, it's really infuriating because, and then you do think, well, why am I working with these people?

Yeah.

So in a way, I don't want to kind of, again, and I think that sometimes collaboration throws that baby out with the bathwater because it says, well, okay, it's not about individuals, it's about collectives, and therefore individuals, it doesn't matter. And therefore everyone's great and everyone's good and everything's fine. And I sort of feel like, again, there's a bit of a, that's got some truth in it, but it's not true. In the same way, in the other way. I think it is, it seems to me just hearing you, it's much easier to measure individuals. And the person that's coming to my mind is Luka Modrić, who's a footballer who won the Ballon d'Or with Real Madrid. But when he was coming to prominence in Tottenham, people didn't really understand him very well because he didn't score any goals and he didn't get any assists. And then someone measured it that he was the person who assisted the most assists.

Oh, interesting.

As in he did the pass before the pass that got the pass to the goal. And again, I think he's a great example of a player who makes everyone around him better. And so in a way, that is a kind of competence. That's a kind of thing he does. And it is his high performance in doing that that makes the collective stronger. But that's hard to measure.

But that is fascinating though, isn't it? Because it is not necessarily, it took a while for people to go to that next layer of individual performance in service to the collective. Yes, individual performance. I totally hear you, but it is interesting how obvious the obvious individual performance is, but how unobvious the next or, you know, other layers of the way that individuals might perform a different role of equivalent value, but just in a very different and often kind of behind the scenes, we might say, right? Or—

Yeah.

In that supportive role. So it's super interesting.

And sorry to stay with football, but the other kind of football cliché is they're great in the dressing room, which sort of is, is, is they do something to the vibe. They do something to the energy of the group. And I think again, this, we often think in terms of performance, we are attached to outputs and we think that groups make outputs, but really to get great outputs, the spirit of the group is an important thing. And again, that's something that attending to is not always seen. So if I, again, in business contexts, like the person who pulls people together, who reassures people, who encourages people, is sometimes those things aren't always coded as leadership, but they absolutely are because they generate the togetherness that drives group performance. And so the thing that I'm interested in is essentially my work is identifying, in a way, let's call them the types of labor that are needed to make groups perform.

Love that. Yeah.

That's the approach basically that I've taken and gone, there's kind of 5 types of labor and those types of labor are all important for group performance. And we need to get, and you can very easily see that different people are good at those different types of labor.

So let's definitely get into the specifics, but I also just wanted to say, because I read what you wrote really interestingly about how this shows up. Maybe it's sometimes easier to see when it's not working. And you write about like organizations with lack of spirit or lack of vigor. And that's kind of what you're speaking to there is what goes wrong when these things aren't valued. And so yeah, maybe just speak to that briefly.

Well, I was thinking about what to say about that. And I think again, I'll talk about organizational life and I know we're talking about education. And so we'll have to sort of translate it a little bit, but in organizations, people tend to think in terms of are we productive or are we not productive? But I actually think a, a better distinction would be something like, are we enlivened or are we not enlivened? Because when we are enlivened, we produce stuff like that. Humans are very good at making stuff. And I think we don't always pay attention to that enlivenedness, and yet we all feel it. So again, we talk about it sometimes like there's a good culture, there's a bad culture. Like, oh, it's hard work around here. It's hard work to get anything done. I was working with a large financial services organization and they do an employee score, a survey every year. And the score that they got the lowest on was it's easy to get things done around here. Like they find it hard to get things done. Now, why are things hard to get done? Well, actually it's, it's as much about the energetics of the organization as it is about like, we're not machines. We're an organism. Collectively and individually, we are biological. We require energy. We require nourishment. We require safety. We require belonging. And so those things sometimes organizations pay a little bit of attention to, but I like the idea of spirit, organizational spirit. Spirit in most old languages is the same word as breath. So if you think of like having oxygen in your body, what that does to a body, like that feels good. And if you're not breathing enough, then you're going to have certain kinds of problems. And I think organizations and groups can have that sort of breathlessness, that sort of tiredness that means they can't get things done. And again, I think that's probably true in schools, in classrooms. There's probably classrooms that feel alive and classrooms that feel dead. And the deadness is probably not great for learning. And the aliveness is probably great for learning, but the aliveness doesn't always mean fun. It can mean real challenge. It can mean— again, if I think back to my educational experience, like, our favourite teacher was a bit of a hard-nosed French and German teacher who did not take absolutely any prisoners and made us work, and we all worked really hard. But there was a kind of liveliness and aliveness to her and to the room. The conversations that we had, the challenges that came about felt like we were really engaged in something, like a proper dialogue. Yes. I think, again, zipping back to organizations, organizations that have that aliveness tend to be able to contend with the difficulties that they face. And organizations that are dead tend to be disengaged, tend to be just going through the motions. People tend to be dragging themselves through things in order to hit their individual targets. Again, not really attending to the collective sense of what we're here for. So I think all of the language of meaningfulness and purpose and for me, they're all in service of creating an environment that feels alive, that feels human, that feels energetic. And energy, not just to feel nice, but energy as the way in which we perform.

Yeah. And energy in a way that's not hand-wavy. And like, you know, this is not, as you said, kumbaya, airy-fairy, you know, hand-wavy stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, different rabbit hole, but I think there's some more and more science supporting the fact that this is a dimension to our reality as organisms, as you said, right? It's not, oh, that's just, you know, let's all stand in a circle and hold hands and doesn't this feel good? There is something actually going on there materially, energetically, scientifically that is important. And the fact that we sometimes lack the concepts to hold it in a way that doesn't sound hand-wavy is a problem. But hopefully we're beginning to get there. So I think that's, yeah, no, super interesting. But the other thing I just quickly wanted to say is what you're saying there really resonates thinking about working in schools as organizations. Like there's a massive teacher retention issue, massive teacher burnout issue. These, they are human organizations, just like a corporate organization that works in the media sector or the whatever industry. It's still a group of people coming together around a particular set of tasks. And there's a massive issue, I think, in schools.

And we tend to diagnose these problems as individual problems.

Absolutely.

Richard has burnt out. Richard has burnt out. So Richard, there's a problem with Richard.

Yeah.

Or there's a problem around Richard, or Richard is, you know, he's burning out. She's burning out. Whether or not we judge him for it or not, like, oh, of course he's burnt out. He's got class F2 and they're really difficult. Like these kind of individual diagnostics, whereas I think there's a collective, which is like, and again, in the language that I would use for collaboration, I'd be like, Well, is there enough care in and around the school system? If we were talking about a school system, you know, is the right structure in place? Do we have belief in where we're going and do we know where we're going? Are we making the progress that we promise that we will make or say that we're gonna make? And are we involving people in the right way? And when we do all of those things, things like burnout, I wouldn't say they never happen. And I wouldn't say that burnout is only that, cuz sometimes we burn out for all sorts of reasons that do relate to us as individuals. But I think in a way there's the bit that the the collective has to be responsible for. And that's the energetics of the group, of the collective. And I think getting that right solves a lot of the problems that we typically think about on an individual level.

Yeah, absolutely. But in addition to that, I think often if the burnout is an individual aspect, it's often to do with other collective responsibilities that that individual is also— so the idea that sometimes workplaces can flatten the complexity of an individual to the role and function that you perform in this organization is also a part of a challenge to this, right? Like seeing individuals in their multidimensionality that you are simultaneously in this role, but you're also a dad and a football coach and a friend and a grandson, whatever it is, you know? So just bringing that in as well, I think that's part of the bigger— conversation that's happening, which is good. So maybe let's get more practical into the actual, because we're dancing around it, but maybe it's useful to start actually getting into some of the specifics of the model that you've been working with, because I think then we can branch off from that into other places. But let's ground it maybe in that. Could you just, yeah, talk to that a bit?

I think that will help because in a way, the thing that we've just talked about, organizational spirit, for me is like the organizational lens of exactly the same dynamics that I think are going on in any group that does anything. So if we think of just any group, any, and this could be a project, this could be a classroom, this could be an organizational team, this could be an organizational project, a partnership between 2 organizations. So just a group of people trying to get something done. The approach that I've developed called the Let's Go Model basically holds that there are 5 dynamics that are shaping the performance, aliveness, and effectiveness of that group. And the first dynamic is belief. That is the sense that we know where we're going, why we're going there. And again, we, the belief is a thing that we feel. It's not necessarily about having a purpose statement, but having that sense that we know what we're doing and where we're going and why we're going there. So that's like the first dynamic. The second dynamic, and they don't go in any particular order, but I'll just introduce them in this order. Another dynamic is structure. So structure is like, have we got the processes? Have we got the governance? Have we got the resources assigned, the roles and responsibilities such that whatever it is we're doing, we know how long we're going to take. We know how much time we've got to do it. We know how much money we've got to do it. So again, we might lack belief, but do we have structure? And if we have structure, if belief has us feeling excited, structure has us feeling calm. Like, ah, I know the plan.

Can I just say on that, because we can get into the— Anna, I don't want to jump in too much, but just on the structure piece, I think there is a really interesting tension that shows up where we think collaboration and the more social-emotional stuff should be able to happen without structure, and somehow the structure is an enemy of those things. And I really love the fact that you are bringing in, and I know you're strong on this because I think it's so important, and I really, maybe just to emphasize that.

Yeah, absolutely. Structure is super important. And again, having the right amount of structure, not too much, not too little, that's the same as belief. So belief, structure. The third dynamic, again, they're called dynamics because they move, they're moving, but we can also understand them. The third dynamic is involvement. And involvement is about, well, okay, we're trying to do something. Who are the people that are going to gather to do that thing? And do we have the right skills, experience, expertise? To do that thing. So when we have the right people, the right skills and involvement, the right people listening to— so involvement would be people listening to each other. It would be people sharing ideas and learning from each other as we go and each contributing what they can contribute. So belief, structure, involvement. When there's involvement, again, if structure makes us calm and belief has us kind of inspired, involvement has that feeling of creativity or New ideas flowing or energy or flow. So involvement. The 4th is progress. So progress is, if involvement is lots of listening, progress is deciding. Progress is cutting options down. It's narrowing down on a particular proposal. It's measuring success. It's seeing, okay, we made a thing, a project. Oh, what's the mark? Like that would be part of progress, but also progress would be the bit we have to do in a project to decide, to narrow down. Again, involvement could include arguing.

Yeah.

Progress could include us disagreeing, but agreeing on what we're going to do with our disagreement. So, let's decide this. Okay, let's see what happens. Let's experiment. Let's try. Again, without progress, and if you're in a group that doesn't make progress, you can very quickly get bored or frustrated. But progress unlocks a kind of, a different kind of energy, a kind of drive, a kind of like, ooh, if we've done that, what else could we do? What's next? What's next? So there's this pride in what we do and the drive to do more. It's quite exciting. Progress is exciting.

Can I ask one question on that? How much does it also therefore relate to the assessment that the progress is happening? So, because like the whole measurement question is a real issue in education. I just wonder, and for me personally, I just wonder how much the assessment measurement question comes in there as well.

Yeah. And then this is where I might be out of my comfort zone in assessment in school settings, exactly how they work or what they are. But I think progress includes, is the home of judgment. Like, we have to judge the quality and speed of what we're doing. Like, is it good? And so how we judge, is it good? I think there's a whole conversation to have. But judgment, and this is again, my critique of some collaboration philosophies, is that they almost think that judgment is the enemy of collaboration. And I would say no, judgment is absolutely essential for good collaboration because without judgment, there's no progress.

Yeah.

So judgment being a really good positive force. Now that needs to be grounded, respectful, all of that, but it can involve judgment. And then the 5th, just to say, so we've got belief, structure, involvement, progress, and care. And care is togetherness, a sense of being in it together. And this is where I think the, the kind of some collaboration approaches really get it right. The spirit that we have, the way we relate to each other is absolutely essential to our performance. If we want to perform as a group, we need care. And care is honest conversations. It's being heartfelt. It's knowing what you are in it for and how can I support you? It's consoling each other when things don't go well. So again, if, if we are obsessed with progress, great, but we sometimes might not hit our goals. Care is the way we stay resilient and committed, even though we are disillusioned. And without care, you lack resilience. So, and we all know that these things are sometimes present and sometimes absent in different groups. But what I think the main skill of collaboration is the center of the framework, which is presence. And it sits, these 5 things sort of swirl around presence. Presence is knowing, well, what do I need to pay attention to now for this collaboration, for what we are doing here? So sometimes attention should absolutely go to care, but other times actually that's just sticky and it takes a lot of time. And I don't know, I'm getting a bit annoyed that we're doing all this emotional stuff because what I know we need is structure and we don't have it. So sometimes we basically, good collaboration isn't the performance of any of these 5 dynamics. It's the noticing which dynamic needs our attention and noticing how that changes over time. So knowing when, okay, now is the time for structure. Let's put a plan in place. Let's agree the timeframe. Let's agree the framework in which we're working. Okay, right now that's clear. Okay, maybe now is the time to attend to involvement. And that whole approach is completely different than when you're attending to structure. And if what you really, really need is belief because you lack belief and you have no clear sense of where you're going, pushing for more progress won't help you. You need to turn around and say, well, why are we doing this?

I love it. Yeah.

And equally vice versa. If what you really, really need is progress, more hand-waving about how important this is and why it really matters and where it fits into the broader picture of what we are doing, it just seems like hot air. And so I would say in collaboration, most of the difficulties in collaboration is when someone is attending to one of these dynamics and others are trying to attend to different dynamics. And the work is to figure out, to agree which dynamic needs our attention right now. And of course, sometimes we need more to pay attention to more than one, but we don't need to pay attention to all 5 all the time.

Yeah.

We need to notice what is needed and move there. So that's the basic picture of what I think good collaboration is. Good collaboration is noticing these collective dynamics. It's not my belief and your belief, but do we share enough belief? Noticing those and then Attending to what needs to be attended to. And that is basically the thing that I work with senior leaders on. It's the thing that I work with project managers on. It's the thing that I work with organizations on. Can we notice these in the projects that we are part of? Can we see when we need to pay more attention to one dynamic or more attention to another dynamic? Can we diagnose a problem so that we are not just left saying a collaboration is bad or good, like it's some sort of gladiatorial contest, but we're saying, Well, in what way is it bad or good? What actually needs to shift in order for it to become better?

Beautiful. So just a few comments. The presence in the center feels like so much educational resonance there for me, because that to me feels like such an important set of capabilities, that ability to be energetically and psychologically present enough to be observing. You're not lost in your own head and you're not lost in your own Well, you are with the, the thing that you're doing. You're very present in that way, but also present. So as you say, you can really notice what's going on. But where there's also an educational link for me is that you need to know what you're looking for.

Mm-hmm.

And so you fleshing out that framework, I think is incredibly helpful for people to be able to notice, to have a language to notice, because they might have a general sense, an undeveloped sense of what this isn't working, but I can't quite articulate why it's not working. So there's a, I think there's a really interesting educational role for helping people come into, it doesn't have to be these particular terms that you've chosen, but they are pretty good in terms of giving a full picture of some of the dynamics, as you say, that might be going on. And related to that, I suppose, is a question. Do you see patterns in more of, in certain kinds of things being out of balance one way versus another way in organizations? And related to that, therefore, Or is there a kind of a disposition in many leaders that tends to overemphasize one aspect of that framework and forget others?

Yeah, so I think there's a disposition in each of us individually. So we might, I might be more interested in care and belief, and you can feel the kind of person I would be then. I'm very concerned with purpose. I want us to feel connected, and maybe I miss or sometimes miss structure and progress. And you can feel the kind of frustrating collaborator I would be because I'm always talking about the vision and I want us to be connected, but are we doing anything? Are we making anything happen? Are we deciding? And maybe the answer might be, well, not always. But then we could also have a different person. Maybe you might be really interested in structure and involvement. And you've really got like very clear. So it's whenever I work with you, there's a very clear laid out process and all the right people are there and the different voices are being heard. But again, am I sure why we're doing it? Am I, is there always the attention on that? And is it clear that we agree where we're headed or maybe, or maybe not? So what I would say is individuals can have tendencies and also systems have tendencies. So when we talk about culture, this is a good way of talking about culture because we can say, I know, again, I work with 2 different banks. One of those banks is all about structure and progress. And one of those banks is much more about involvement and belief. And again, they're different. They have different dysfunctions and different people get on in those systems in different ways. So I'm not saying anything like, oh, we need to be perfectly balanced between these 5 dynamics. No one is. I'm saying something like knowing what you're dealing with and trying to attend to what is actually needed in your context helps.

Exactly. But that's what I was trying to gesture towards with the educational work, because that exactly, I think, is so interesting and so important. That it's like, let's live in contact with the actual reality that we're dealing with, rather than impose this normative framework on, oh, I want it to be like this. I wish it was like this, and I'm just going to keep bulldozing my agenda. That's not meeting the reality, right?

Yeah. So again, I would say there's no right amount of care. There's no right amount of care that you need. What you need is enough, and enough depends on what you're trying to get done. So again, The let's go approach isn't really, it's not really saying, here's a normative picture that we need to meet. It's saying, these are like the 5 colors that we need to paint with. And depending on what we're trying to paint will depend what is needed. And then that depends on, you know, international culture, individual culture, sector culture, and organizational culture. All of those things are different. But I think there's never a situation When you don't need all of those 5 dynamics, but how they manifest could be completely different in different situations. And this is why, again, I think it's, I called it the Let's Go model, but I think again, some people have a big distinction between model and framework. I'm not sure that's so important to me, but in that way, if you do, then it's more of a framework. It's the kind of way of saying what's important around here, what matters, what's real, because those things, when we attend to them, they are real. But when we don't, then all we just have is like, oh, it's just, oh, it feels really I don't know, I'm really bored. Okay, you're really bored. Is, is your boredom because we're not making progress? Because then your boredom stops becoming a problem and starts becoming a signal that we need more progress. Okay. Or, oh no, I'm feeling like left out. Okay. Well, that feeling of left out might indicate that we need more care around here. What could you do? How could you step in and bring the kind of togetherness that we need such that you and probably others don't feel so left out? So.

Yeah.

These become very pragmatic aspects of— and each of them is kind of a skill. You can see there's a different kind of skill that you need to build belief and a different kind of skill that you need to push for progress. And to be a well-developed collaborator, to be somebody who people enjoy working with, you will do best if you develop all of those so that you're more present.

It's an interesting question, isn't it? Because I wonder, I don't even know whether I can articulate this, but like, if you then zoom out to the next layer, actually not everybody needs to be a good collaborator and be balanced around these things because actually sometimes, back to your point about Luka Modrić or other people, you know, Harry Kane, they have very particular roles and they're really bloody good at that particular thing.

Yes.

And maybe we compensate for that in other ways by having complementary elements around it. So it's not that we necessarily even want everybody to be a really good collaborator and be balanced in these domains.

But if you want collaboration as a skill, you don't have to be good. Like, I am very not good naturally at structure. And with care, I have an interesting relationship with it in as much as like a lot of my projects in my early career failed because I lacked investing care. So now I have this sort of like habitual attention to, to care, to relationships, but it's not so much like flowing Like there's people who have that flowing much more naturally. But if I want to get things done with people, I need to pay attention to all those things. And that might include going like, oh, I don't think the structure's right. And I have no idea how to get the structure right. So I would say I don't need to be, let's call it like good at structure, but I do need to be good at noticing when the structure's not working or when we need more structure. And the bringing of that conversation is what makes me a great collaborator, not the delivery of good structure.

Interesting.

So I could just be like, So this is why I say leaning on a Werner Erhard, a problem only exists in the absence of the right conversation. That is, we have problems in any project that we're trying to do, but it's only really a problem when we're not talking about it. When we have it, like, wow, we have a really big deadline coming up and I don't know if we're going to meet it. Suddenly we just have a situation now. Like, okay, now we're talking about it. Well, how could we meet it? What are the options? What could we do? But when we're not talking about the deadline and it just keeps creeping up on us and it's, we're all getting anxious, but we're not talking about it, we have a problem, not a situation. And so I guess there's, that's certainly the framework, but yes, you're right. Like not everyone is equal and not everyone needs to be the same and you don't need to do it even in the same way. Again, traditionally we might think, oh, charismatic people are better at building belief. I don't think that's true. Introverts who present very crisp data can do a really good job of building real belief in a project just as much as kind of hand-waving people. So you can do all of these 5 things in different ways depending on your personality. Yeah, I love that. You don't need to be excellent at all of them, but you need, I would say, to be a good collaborator. And I would say that most people do need to be good collaborators. I think learning to notice these things is going to make you more powerful in your collective work.

No, I love it. And I did want to ask you about this because the podcast, I mean, part of what we talk about on the podcast is the kind of the emergent new kinds of institutions that might replace schools or augment schools or shift education, all of that stuff. And you talk about the difference between, from MacIntyre, the difference between an institution and a practice. And it's super interesting because what I hear you there talking about is this, and I think it's so important, this idea that The noticing, the getting better at noticing, and all of those things that we've just talked about is a practice, is a rigorous practice that you can engage in over time and with support to get better at. So anyway, just maybe, yeah, just say a bit about the difference between an institution and a practice.

Yeah. So Alasdair MacIntyre says, he makes this distinction. So again, it's easier for me to think about an organization. He says a practice is the thing that an organization does that has internal goods, that is internal ways of knowing whether what it's doing is working. So if you're an insurance company, there's a type of thing called a good insurance policy and a type of thing called a bad insurance policy. And a good insurance policy leaves people feeling reassured that they're covered. They are insured against some sort of problem that they might face. And then everyone's happy with that. And that's the practice of insurance is knowing how to build those. There's lots of complexity. There's lots of mathematics, but there's also judgment and all sorts of things. But an insurance company is that practice sat inside an institution, and the institution is like the company. And an institution, unlike a practice, has external measures of goods. So profit margin, market share, these kinds of things, right? And MacIntyre says that the institution and the practice are always in tension with each other, and a good institution should serve a practice, but is always tempted to consume the practice for the sake of the institution. And so to, in a way, to hollow out the good practice of building good insurance in order to make more profitable products. I don't know exactly how that would pan out in a, in a school setting, but I guess you've got the institution, which might be your, all the stuff that's externally validated and then the internal work of making students who learn stuff. So I think just there's the recognizing the tension between those two. And again, the way in organizations I would encourage organizations is to always come back to Serving the customer is always a good way. Like, is the customer happy? I think the reason that's an energizing feeling, because that's in service of the practice, not the institution. But you of course need an institution as well. So I don't know if that's made a connection because I don't know if I've got the full—

Can I? No, no, this is great. Can I make an educational connection? You tell me whether it's correct or not. But what I heard is like, and the patterns you've seen in particularly kind of post or 1990s onwards education in particular, kind of neoliberal logic of delivery and outcomes and KPIs and measures and metrics. And often they are in service much more to the institution, the performance of the institution, and can in that kind of, what is it, Strathern, or when the measure becomes the target, it—

Yeah.

It hollows out the practice of educating, of being in a room and interacting in an educational way with young people or with any people. Because the institution is sending us signals that actually what it values is the external measures of success. It doesn't matter how we get there. If we get there in an educational way or not, it doesn't really matter. But what matters is that we get there. So we make choices that hollow out the practice.

Yeah. And I think it's also recognizing that a school is doing more than delivering exam results. A school is helping children become the kind of people who can thrive in the world. And of course, in the world of work, of course, economics is part of that. They probably want to get a job, but also more than that. So that I definitely think like there's a, my nieces have received scholarships to a private school and they talk about a complete education. And what they mean by complete is like, there's lots of drama, there's lots of sports, there's lots of all of these things. And we intuitively know that these things are good, right? They do good things for the emergence of a person, which is what's happening in a school. So what I'm hearing you sort of say is there's a, again, the type, it sort of depends on the types of targets you set, but different institutions probably set different kinds of targets and again, might hollow the practice in a different way. But absolutely, there's a tension. And I think even just for me, these things aren't things that you solve. You don't go, well, we'll don't worry about targets. Like, of course institutions need to survive and, you know, insurance companies need to make money or they die. So the institution matters, but I think making sure that it's in service of the practice and making sure that that, in a way, negotiation between the needs of the practice and the needs of the institution is proper. And I think that kind of good kinds of leaders are engaged in that argument and bad leaders are a slave to the institution.

Amazing. Yeah, I completely agree. And I was wondering there, I don't know how you feel about this, but is it that then at that institutional level, we're overemphasising progress compared to care or belief, or like, could you apply then the framework at the institutional level, or you avoid doing that?

No, I wouldn't do that because I think you could be overemphasising output, but progress isn't output. Progress is the work of debating, deciding, moving things forward.

I see. Yeah, yeah, that's nice.

The only trouble with the word progress is that sometimes it gets confused for output. But I think for good output, you need belief, structure, involvement, progress, and care. I don't think without— so again, you don't— the problem of not having care isn't that it's not nice anymore. The problem with that about having care is you're no longer resilient. You no longer have the determination and the togetherness that you need to do difficult things. So you actually don't perform without care, just like you don't perform without clear belief and where you're going. So again, okay, good. That's more of a weakness of the model in the word progress often gets used in that way. But I would absolutely say the obsession with outputs gets in the way of, of like attending to the dynamics that are going on that will drive outputs in the medium and long term, or that will tend to drive outputs because of course, like sometimes outputs go down for all sorts of reasons.

No, I, I, I'm glad I said that because that highlights a kind of misconception that I had that it's actually really quite useful, I think, when you've just described that. That's great. And then beginning to then think about how might this framework model, you know, way of thinking about all of these land in a school. Like, I'm genuinely interested in that.

Yeah.

I think there's a really interesting depth of thinking and language here that, and clearly, you know, applied practice that you've done in all sorts of contexts that would really benefit, you know, young people and educators in schools because I've seen over the years. I mean, even like this morning, I was looking back at a book that I bought in when I was training as a teacher on collaborative learning, right? And it was kind of early 2000s. And you see sometimes these fads in education of like, oh, now we need more collaboration. We need more collaborative learning, part of the kind of active learning thing. And then it was, there are these fads that also conceal a really important issue underneath, but they present as the latest fad or fashion for a teacher?

Yeah. So the way that I've thought about it is because in a way, there is a lot of depth, but there's also quite a lot of, it's quite simple. We're really saying there are these 5 things that you need to attend to. I think it doesn't, it probably needs contexts in which students are working together because I don't know if you can learn about this other than through practice. Love that.

Exactly.

So it's probably some sort of, I know that there's a bunch of project-based learning type approaches and that some different schools will be using projects in different ways to different It probably requires— when I've done a pilot in a school in Liverpool, and one of the slight challenges is that in a way the project was entirely packaged up, given to the students, and all they had to do was the work that sits inside the project, if that makes sense. So the timeline was already set, the scope was already set, the vision was already set, who's in what group was already set. But these are all parts of setting up collaboration, like involvement is a thing, right? Structure is a thing. So None of those choices were given to the students. So they're just in a way within a context. So I do think that probably to do this well, there needs to be some sort of project that is somehow, there needs to be enough guidance on what that project is so that it's useful for the thing, but there needs to be some options for students to decide on what should be the right structure for our work together. What does progress look like for us? Like, and what is our belief? Like, where are we going? And why do we think this matters? So at a certain, at a certain level, I think project-based learning, I think using a framework as a way to practice and then reflecting on that practice and reflecting on what's worked, that is probably the way that makes the most sense to me because that sort of mirrors how I do it in organizations in as much as in organizations, people have work and we use the framework and the thing to reflect on their work and to make choices about their work. So it's never learning about it in the abstract. That said, I've also sometimes wondered if the 5 Dynamics could be thought of at an even simpler level as the basics of working well with people, so that if involvement is really about listening, like that's the main skill, like, are you listening? Then you could use the framework as a precursor to more complex project work to train the skills. Like, let's talk about listening. Listening is the heart of good involvement with other people. Okay. Deciding. How do we decide? That's progress, right? You know, caring for each other, like checking in with people. That's a good thing to do if you want to work with people. So again, some of these things are already taught, but almost as like, or I imagine almost as like a moral instruction, like it's good to be nice to people.

Exactly.

But this kind of just contextualizes it a bit. Like, if you want to get on in the world and if you want to work with people, You're going to need to be able to develop care. Let's practice that. Then there's a whole load of practices you could do about the skills that underpin the dynamics. So I think, I guess the 2 main thoughts I've had, using the framework as a basis for skill development, let's call it social skills. And I think you could do that right from very young to much older. And then probably once there's a developed sense of autonomy enough that a group of kids could take on a project, but I think there would be I don't think it's just as simple as saying, oh, throw them a project because you have to throw them the ability to decide what the project is as well as the project itself. And I think that, I don't think that's impossible, but I think it might require some thoughtfulness about what's the right way to do that. When's the right moment to do that? And again, I don't think any of these things need to be grand. So I wouldn't ever do anything like say, oh, the only way to do this is to throw out the old learning style and do this instead. I think we are very much talking about a type of skill that is developed alongside all the other skills that are really important and need to be kept developing. So this might be, okay, let's use 2 hours on a Friday every 2 weeks on this particular project associated with this thing. And there's a degree of space, but there's also a degree of containment and holding and coaching. And again, I don't think it's— I think versus maybe other things, I never go into organizations and say, forget everything you know, now we've got this. I'm like, hey, look, this is just a good support for what we already do. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I really appreciate that. But I would also say the thing I really like about the way you frame it is that, as we said at the beginning, it's not a dichotomy between process and outcomes.

No.

And actually, that is sometimes, I think, a challenge for educators because they're being held accountable for the outcomes, not the process, but actually bringing those 2 things closer together. You could imagine a kind of, as a teacher, for example, you might be reluctant to use group work in inverted commas, collaborative learning. On a maths project, because what's important in the maths project is the developed knowledge and skill of each individual student in that particular maths.

Yeah.

But, you know, there are examples of practice where you hold everybody accountable for everybody's outcome in that group. And at that point, they need a set of supports to help with the hard work of navigating each other.

But there's also another thing, which is that because I think collaboration is a craft, and I think it's a craft that you can develop, and I think there's a, and there's a few other layers to it, which we haven't talked about, but let's just say the basic approach we've developed, I think works and works at a decent scale and works with senior leaders and more like entry-level leaders. So it kind of works with people. Because there's a framework, you can actually do things like build an exam about giving kids different scenarios and asking them what would be the right choice in these different scenarios. And of course, there might be more than one right choice, but there's probably not infinite right choices. And there is good judgment that you could make about whether that person has made a good call on a particular scenario that would show that they recognize when they need to build care or when they need to push for progress. So I think, again, I'm, I'm not saying anything like, oh, well, collaboration is all felt and it's all just about vibes and we just need to feel. I'm saying if collaboration is about performance, and there's a framework that makes sense, and that's the framework that we're teaching kids. And in a way, the goal of the collaboration module, or whatever, however you phrase it, is to get people good at collaborating. And this is the framework that we're using to teach that. And again, that doesn't mean that in 5 years' time people can't use a different framework. More than one framework exists, I'm sure. But it's a good solid framework that's got some good ground to it. You can then test against that framework, and that will be— again, we're talking about soft skills, but there you could put some hard measures on these soft skills. And that could be by a teacher assessment, or that could be by exam. Like, I don't think that's impossible to do. And again, if you're thinking about, I'm sure you could build stuff with AI that would, again, that would have that kind of dialogue.

And yeah, and I would say sometimes the schooling trap is if that's all you do, that's just staying in the map. That's not living in the territory of collaborating because collaborating gets messy and difficult and you've got to actually experience What it feels like to have a lack of care in a group.

Absolutely.

Or what it feels like to not be progressing, and then how do you respond? So, it's got to be both, but I like the fact, that's what I was trying to say about an educational challenge, is that there is knowledge to it that is robust and relevant and important that it's useful to know to enhance your judgment, as you said.

Yeah. And then maybe one thing that I've thought about is whether Physical education and drama might be the home for this kind of teaching. Because, okay, you're doing sports already, so you're already playing in a team, you're already playing football. Having a reflection on, do we believe in ourselves as the team? What was our structure like? Do we have good involvement? Do we have— So in a way, turning these things which we deeply know are valuable, and we know they're valuable not just because it's good for kids to run around, we know they're valuable because they're teaching us something. But is everything too implicit in those worlds? Does our football lessons, do they ultimately just teach us that Andy's really good at football and Rich isn't? Or could Rich, through his engagement with playing football badly and his reflective practice that is also held within the physical education department, develop a sense of what team means that means he can go on and thrive even though he's never going to go on and thrive in a football context? But he can understand something about team because here's a real-world application of team in practice. So I've wondered if, again, that something like the Let's Go model could be a redeeming way of these disciplines claiming back some of the territory of real-world value that says, no, you should be putting kids through more physical education and you should be putting more reflective practice on the back of it because We absolutely don't expect people to play football on their own. And we don't exactly expect people to play netball on their own. We want them to be in a team. And we know that that's good for them. But do we give them any of the language around that? Or do we just test them on whether they know the rules of netball, which actually isn't teaching you anything that you can use other than the rules of netball?

Yeah, that's super interesting. Because that makes me think of the constraints-based approach to coaching. I did a podcast about that a few years ago. But there's Something really kind of interesting about using practice boundaries to shift practice in the moment as a coach in a football context or netball or whatever. It's a different way of thinking rather compared to a more traditional teach and then practice kind of simplistic model. It's much more kind of ecological and you don't need to go quite that far. But there is that, I agree with you, that kind of language around talking about what's going on here, what skills and competencies are we developing in this moment that is in addition to the football or the netball? It's super interesting.

Yeah. And the truth is, I don't know, right? I don't know the right way to do it, but I guess I have a deep conviction that the stuff that I've built isn't business stuff, it's people stuff. It's how people work together to get things done. It's resonant in vastly different contexts. And I deeply believe that young people If they're looking forward to the world, they need to figure out how to work well with people. I think there's a lot of sense, a lot of, certainly in, in the sort of, let's call it the cultural ether, there's a sense that they're not developing that as much as they used to because they're not playing maybe with their other kids as much or whatever. So they might, they might be ripe for a more overt rather than tacit way of understanding what it means to work well with other people. And I guess I have this sense that that's of value and that's something that I would want to see in the world. I would want kids to learn how to work well with others.

Me too. I mean, that's why I wanted to do this conversation because I think there is a— the danger of not doing that is that it's hard and we don't really have a language to talk about why it's hard. So let's just not do it and let's focus. Let's double down on the individual tasks in a school context because we can kind of manage those a little bit more carefully. As soon as you open up into group and collaborative learning, it gets messy and tricky and more out of control for a teacher. So actually, I feel less competent as a teacher in that space. So I'm going to actually just zero in on the individual tasks. And I think you do see that happening in many contexts. And there's a real loss of, as you say, opportunities to practice this stuff. So yeah, no, I think it's so important.

We talked at length about Sports as a field, and I think drama as well. So one of the Let's Go practitioners, I got 40 Let's Go practitioners, and one of them is a, is a theater maker. And she, we've sort of engaged in a long conversation about, well, how does this stuff apply in theater making and a theater making context? Because again, lots of talk about collaboration in theater making, lots of imperative to collaborate, not a lot of structures that support or ways of teaching that other than Let's call it the school of hard knocks. The, you do it and it doesn't work. And then again, half the people then retreat and say, well, let's not do that. It doesn't work. Instead of, well, what wasn't working and how could we make it work next time? And what's my role in making it working rather than just being a recipient of theater? Otherwise, become an active participant. And that, I talk about that as leadership, but that stepping into situations and saying, it's my job to make these situations work. Even if I'm not in charge.

Yeah, it's a much more kind of honest and developmental just approach to the whole thing. I think it's really cool. Really cool. Thank you, man. Really interesting.

Thank you, Tim. Thanks for the conversation. Like, I'm really inspired by your roaming around all these topics and how you're connecting some really excellent thinking into the school context. And I think, yeah, it would be a privilege to keep the conversation going and see if there's a way we could, like, spark it into something.

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