Leading by Design - A Conversation with Anne Fischer

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

What does your workplace need? Do they need empathetic leaders or do they need leaders who make sole decisions top-down? But it's about giving them that coaching and that guiding to understand, like, your workplace is changing. I like this design thinking standpoint because the users, as a teacher, as a student, as an administrator, as a parent, whatever, people can deal more with understanding, like, how do we change the experience or the feelings of these people?

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm very happy today to be speaking with Anne Fischer, who is a learning leader and innovator turned UX designer, putting her skills to use in intentionally redesigning better learning experiences for users, whether they are parents, teachers, students, or colleagues in school. Anne has two decades of experience in designing and leading for change and adaptability in schools in Germany, France, Switzerland, Dubai, the US. Anne is an expert in design thinking and agile methodologies, and she puts these to good use in her current role as the assistant principal and curriculum coordinator at Form School in the Berlin Süd campus. Anne is also the co-founder of WomenEd Germany with Angeline Au. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina and a Master of Science from the London School of Economics. You can follow Anne on Twitter @edtechanne or connect with her on LinkedIn in or via email. All of the links are in the show notes.

Hi. Hello.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you as well.

All right, awesome. So just to start off with then, what was it that attracted you to Agile and design thinking and using those in part of your role in schools?

What mostly attracted me was, in the short sense, was just listening to what was happening in the workplace. I have a lot of friends, family members, contacts that don't work in education. And so what I found really interesting is about what they were doing in their workforces, how they were tackling problems. And, you know, with things such as Scrum or just general agile methodologies. My dad worked for Toyota for many, many years. So the idea of lean and even Kanban is not something that's not unfamiliar in my world. I think it probably started out really when my husband was, they were implementing Scrum in company. He works in IT for a bank. And the way he was just describing it, I thought, wow, this could be really something for schools. And so I kind of started to do a bit more research and was also personally frustrated. That's not really necessarily the word I want to use, but a bit down with what was going on in education. I had been through Teachers College, I had been told to do these things, and, you know, here I was 5 years in, and I was thinking, like, is this the rest of my life? And when we think about the history of education as we know it, you kind of come back to this idea of the Industrial Revolution and the idea that school was kind of a two birds with one stone thing. It was childminding, but but then also preparing people for the workforce. And a lot of these practices like sitting in rows and, you know, working individually on work, or this is the job that you're going to have to do. That was what our parents and our grandparents needed for the traditional workplace. And these practices are unfortunately still in a lot of schools today.

When you're talking about that, are you meaning in Germany, in Berlin, where you're working now? Or is that experience from other countries as well?

In Germany, where I work now, absolutely. I worked in the French system, but I was living and working in Switzerland, but it was a French school, and that was even more prominent than in Germany, I would argue. This idea of the teacher standing up there as this all-knowing guru, and we actually sit here and talk about grades for each student, and it was kind of argued. So here we are standing up here and saying, well, this child should just get this because this is what they received on their test or whatever. And so moving forward to the 21st century, the idea of internet revolution, AI, automation of jobs, We as teachers, it's not satisfactory for us to be getting students to individually work on their goals. And nor is it satisfactory for us to say, if you focus on this, you will be successful in life. Agile and design thinking methodologies are popping up all over the workplaces. Who's preparing people for that? That was kind of my aha moment. Why am I sitting here worried about the test? Because at the end of the day, in many systems, you need to pass the test in order to take your, get your leaving certs, anything. And I was really kind of thinking, hold on. So we're telling them, okay, be individualistic and learn, learn, learn and pass these tests. But then you're going to have to go out into the real world and know all of these skills. You're going to have to understand all of a sudden what collaboration is and what design thinking is and being agile. And then you're going to actually have to be flexible. Yeah. So that kind of was this aha moment for me. And of course not one person can change the world, but then I started thinking like, hey, you know, we should be starting backwards. So companies saying what they need, universities secondary schools into primary schools.

No, it's true. And I mean, ironically, you're talking about the industrial model and the influence of that, but actually the close connection between the evolution of business world and professional workplace with the school somehow just kind of disassociated. Schools haven't evolved in the same way that business and organisational functioning have over the years. I don't know, there hasn't been the compulsion to move and evolve and innovate because of the changing environment, perhaps. But there is definitely this clear disconnect between the real world and the world of education.

I would also reflect on the fact that the working world, if you want to label that, has been moving too fast for us to gather enough research to understand how the education system is not fitting.

Absolutely. I mean, I've certainly seen an increasing number of people who are in schools, in leadership roles, or in curriculum design roles, trying to embed these practices just to implement and then reflect and learn from practical experience, then we can grow the understanding and the research of how these things are functioning. So for you, what's been the practical implications in your school in Berlin or previously? What practical use have things like Scrum or Kanban been?

So when I decided to do that, I knew that I was going to come up against a lot of resistance because changing the mindset of people in general is hard, but I would say even more so for teachers because we are taught so much to be individualistic. This is your classroom, this is your management. Your grades, this is your results. And so I was cautious in the approach that I was taking and tried to be an inclusive leader. So I try not to be too much of a top-down. I tried to get a lot of opinions from, from, from the other people from the bottom up. And so what I started on was a pilot program last year with a few colleagues in my school. So that was actually quite successful and we presented on it last year at the ECIS conference in Lisbon about how it was really working. And I've seen a lot more increasing interest this year in teachers because I think— so you have the 3 categories. You have the ones who just dive right in and are ready to do anything, not even Agile, just whatever you say. And you have the ones who are comfortable with the concept but not necessarily secure in themselves to understand like, okay, I can actually implement this, right? And then you have the resistors. My goal was never to say like, we're doing this, because it would never really have worked. So starting with those ready to dive into the deep end, and then now, you know, with those who are feeling a bit more confident in the projects where it's kind of spread out to several colleagues, and we've seen really, really interesting results with it.

And so what is it specifically?

So the students who were involved in the biggest Agile project last year were in 5th grade, and you had one classroom that was Agile and one classroom classroom that was not agile. And what you've seen then is the ones who were agile, they were more able to get to work on problems and projects and topics and were able to dive right into the deep end without actually knowing what they were doing. There was not this like, oh, but dear teacher, you didn't tell me exactly what to do. And what we've actually seen is that they've been able to just in general solve more problems both inside the classroom as well as outside within the social atmosphere. So that's actually been really successful because I've For me, it's not just about the academics, it's about the whole child.

No, definitely. And helping them with the mindset around it, you know, which is not about academics, it's about a way of thinking and working.

Yeah, and one of actually the surprising things for them was the idea of not failing actually, but taking reflection and feedback and actually turning it into something. And that was a success for them. And actually, you could see a lot with them, they almost— it was too much. They almost wanted to give too much feedback to their classmates and colleagues. But I love that mind shift of them, you know, because in the traditional German system, it is really about the grades, it is really about the individual. Yeah. And I loved seeing them say, okay, just because there was some, wouldn't call it negative feedback, doesn't mean that I failed. It actually means that I have a chance to like work on it and improve it. And it was really, really, it's a great mindset to have in general.

That's great. So were you using specific frameworks like Scrum boards within that?

We were using Scrum over a project of 6 to 8 weeks. We were doing within 2-week increments within Scrum. We had a Kanban board that we were using and a lot of other agile methodologies. So we did a lot of the kind of starfish feedback, what worked, what didn't. So there's kind of looking at a starfish, and then within each of the triangles that the starfish arms kind of make, you kind of talk about what worked, what didn't work, what can we improve on as a team. We set team agreements. We talked about later on where we could grow, what we could throw, and what didn't go, basically. So we spent a lot of time on a lot of different things, and they really caught on to the Kanban board. They absolutely loved it.

Brilliant. And they were doing that in smaller groups, or was it one board for the whole class?

No, they were doing it in smaller groups of teams. Originally, we started out before we got into the project, we started out with individual Kanbans for a small writing assignment where they needed to kind of research and so they could understand like what actually is a task, what is considered a task. Finish my project, that's not really a task.

I mean, that work planning is part of the learning, right? I mean, in terms of looking at the backlog and trying to divide it up into these chunks, which you can then manage, that's a huge piece of learning for young people when they're given a large project by a teacher.

Absolutely. And for the kids as well to understand who was going to be doing it. So we had kind of checks and balances and who was going to be doing what of the project and who was going to be more or less bringing their team up to date on this aspect of the project. And that is really, really important. I would say they were actually easily more able to come up with the backlog and the tasks, like break them down into actual real tasks, but actually to understand who was responsible for what and to take that responsibility, but then also to be able to communicate with each other about what was working and what wasn't working. That I found really interesting. You know, you have somebody who said, "I want to be the group manager," or whatever jobs we had assigned them. And then later on, after realizing, like, "Actually, I don't like this job. This is a lot of responsibility." I thought I could just tell people what to do, but at the end, I couldn't. So that's a really good thing for them from a personality perspective.

Yeah, brilliant. Did you get a good response from Lisbon at the ECIS conference?

I did have a lot of response from people who are interested in us coming and talking about it. I think that one of the biggest problems is this concept. So like I said, I kind of stumbled across it because I was outside of the world of people who are in education, right? And so it was something that was just kind of clear for me. And in Berlin, Berlin is a very kind of IT city and startup. Everybody's doing agile, everybody's doing design thinking, everybody has a Kanban at some point in their, in their career. So for me it was kind of normal. But I mean, I used to live in Switzerland. That's much more of a traditional school setting, even in the international schools. I think that's for many schools really hard. Like when somebody comes back and says to their leader, hey, this is really interesting, then to say like, uh-huh, uh-huh, what is agile? Like what is Kanban? Like what is even any of that stuff?

Yeah, but it's also the sense that it's not just that idea of just doing agile because it's the latest tool that you can use to change the way that we're doing teaching and learning. You know, it is a bigger conversation to try and engage with the idea of the mindset. Rather than just, hey, let's do this thing and then we'll see how it goes.

And I think that many people, you know, as you just said, are kind of wary of the latest fad. I mean, when I talk about 10 years ago when iPads came out, it was like every school needed to have a one-to-one iPad until they realized actually there was no real, real advance in learning behind that. And so I think, imagine that some schools are more resistant to kind of diving into that change. But when it's successfully implemented, it works actually really, really well.

Just to kind of move it then up to the level of the organisation, do you see impacts that this kind of mindset, both the design thinking and the agile, can have at the organisational level in terms of the way that the organisation works and the way that teachers collaborate together, plan together, the way that leadership involving people in decision-making and trying to get past some of those rigid hierarchies that persist in schools?

Absolutely. And one of the things that I also believe in is we implement a lot of projects, which I'll talk about in just a minute, but implementing this agile methodology, and we do a lot of design thinking methodology in the administration level. And what I really like, especially for the teachers, especially for those who are wary or just not really sure what it's all about, is getting them involved in these projects at an outside-the-classroom level, let's call it that. It's really, really important for them because then they can understand the concepts, they can understand how it's working, so then they are then more willing and able to implement it into their own classrooms. So absolutely, it was a really important thing for me to be able to implement this into the administration level, because like I said, in Germany it's very hierarchical, but people are also understanding that they're at a loss for something. They don't really know where education is really going. And I think it's a great way to kind of open up their mindset. I always joke where I say in Germany, the first reaction— so I'm American, right? So we're always like, oh, how can I help? And, you know, what can I do? Yeah, right. And in Germany, it's when you call to ask somebody something, it's kind of like, no, we can't do that. And then you kind of ask a little further and it's, well, maybe I can help you. And then after, when you keep going, it's like, well, actually, yeah, we can, we can work this problem together. And so my point with that is that by implementing these agile methodologies and this design thinking methodologies at the administration level, that kind of, no, this would never work, comes down to, oh, actually, it's actually— am I successful the first time? Actually, let's go to the next project. So that's actually really, really important for us. Like I said, we implement a lot of design thinking methodology in the administration level. And that for me is really important because design thinking really focuses on the emotions and the experiences of the user. That is not to be underestimated in a high-pressured environment such as school. And so it's really great for school leaders. And I came across the book Reinventing Organizations from Frederic Laloux. I don't know if you know it.

Yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah, exactly. And when I, when I started reading that, I thought, okay, Schools are so typically orange and very hierarchical, but there's actually a way. I mean, I can't change the system, but there is definitely a way of getting my team involved. And that's what I said. I like this design thinking standpoint because the users, both as a teacher, as a student, as an administrator, as a parent, whatever, could really get the users and the empathy behind that. And then people can deal more with understanding, like, how do we change the experience or the feelings of these people? Just saying, okay, get a Kanban and some sticky notes, that can seem very hard.

Yeah, and when you go back to what you were saying earlier about this Taylorist industrial model of schools, that doesn't feel great for the teachers either, right? I mean, it's not like it's a really wonderful kind of humanizing experience for the teachers and it's just not quite right for the students. It's not really right for anybody. I mean, you know, it's not necessarily an enriching workplace full of meaning and purpose for individuals.

No, especially in modern society where we are searching for meaning and purpose. You know, these cold harsh ways that schools are being done, this is why you often lead to burnout.

Yeah, so I mean, that's quite a good Good segue because you've been quite involved in looking at wellbeing in schools, as I understand, with the wellbeing survey that you've been putting out.

Exactly.

Did that come out of— it was a real issue for you in the schools you'd seen?

Probably a personal journey, you know, at some point in every teacher's life they're dissatisfied. Is it the school? Is it the kids? Is it a bad year? What is it? There's so many different factors behind it. And so when I came into administration, I really was empathizing with with the staff members and kind of to see like, okay, where are they frustrated? And I have a lot of teachers, I mean, who come— our administration is divided up into 4 people and we have these trust people. So I have 15 people that come into my office on a weekly basis and just talk to me about whatever they want to talk about. Often it was just about stressful situations or situations that were both personal and professional that were not necessarily helping them move forward in their career or engage with kids. Yeah, so this is where I started out with that. I was working with Dr. Edgar Powell, who is trying to kind of figure out where, what's going on with teachers. We're all aware that more and more teachers are leaving the workforce due to burnout, increasing demands, summative testing pressure, you know, and teachers are number 4 in the world for burnout. I mean, and that is on top of the fact that less and less people are enrolling in this profession for various reasons, I'm sure. But here you have younger people who only know the world of the internet and only know the world of flexibility, and then being told like, no, you have to be in this rigid system. I can imagine that's probably also not helping them. But I think administration is also feeling pressure. They're unsure, they don't know where to go. I had a CEO at my school once tell me that the internet revolution is a fad and that we'll all be fatigued from it in a few years' time and we'll go back to pen and paper.

There you go.

What am I supposed to do with that?

Clinging on to security somehow, like it'll all be okay again, don't worry.

Yeah, that's the problem is when a lot of teachers, they are driving for change and they also feel like they're not being listened to.

Yeah, of course.

Absolutely. That's what kind of leads to the frustration. Yeah.

So the survey, the wellbeing survey that you're using, what are you hoping to do with the results of that?

We're hoping to do is kind of create a program. So we're not really sure, like in some sort of digital form or an online course, hoping to just find out actually that comes back down to the user empathy, like what are the actual real problems? Because the leader might say like, oh, people are frustrated with kids. People are actually really frustrated with the standardized testing, right? You know, so actually what we're just trying to do with that is first of all, gather the information to find out what problems can we really define? Like what is the actual definition?

Interesting. Yes. So it's like the first stage of your design thinking cycle.

Exactly. It's gathering that observation and then that empathy and then just defining the actual problem.

Yeah. Great. And one of the other aspects of your work is working with the Women Ed Network, right?

Yeah.

What was the origins of that for you? Again, did that come out of a perception of a clear problem or is it a personal experience for you?

So Angeline Au, who is also part of the Women in Germany, she was the one who contacted me. I didn't even really have it on the radar and I must I must say that in my career I've been lucky enough so far to never come across biases, or at least if I did, I kind of just took it with a grain of salt and moved on. Yeah. But no, she kind of came and approached me and said, we need to really start this up in Germany. And what really got me was my friends or my colleagues or just people in general, basically to empower them. That's my whole point as a leader. I'm not there to tell you actually what to do. I'm more of your coach and how to empower yourself. That's kind of also what it comes down to, the well-being of a person. You can't really define that. Box and say, if you meditate, you're gonna be happy. Yeah, that's my whole point about the empowerment. And then I started really thinking about some women who have had more negative experiences than I have, or who are victims to more likability biases, or self-victimizing themselves. That was what really made it for me, where I said, you know what, Ange, okay, let's, let's get this up and running. That's what it is for me, is to empower women. You know, in the UK, they originally started because they had less women in leadership positions than men. Even though you're in a woman-dominated field.

Exactly, yeah, right.

In Germany, it's a bit of a different situation because especially in the primary school, you have way less men, I would say, working in primary schools in Germany in general than in England. So it's a bit of a different situation. But for us, so you have more women in leadership, that's my point. But for us, it's really about empowering the teachers. What do you want to do? Do you want to lead an after-school theatre group, but you don't know how to approach your school about it? Or do you want to figure out how to get more confidence in the classroom? Or do you want to be able to go and speak at conferences about things? And that's what's so interesting for me about WomenEd in general, is it started in England with a this kind of thing, and that's the core values, but everybody needs to kind of check their own country. If we really wanted to talk about issues here, we would talk more about maybe women of minorities becoming leaders, versus men versus women. But I'm saying, we really need to have a look at what people in your areas need, and maybe they don't want to be school leaders, and that's actually fine, but I'm there to help them be a leader in other ways.

I was interested in this strapline of 10% braver. Does that come into the ethos and the approach of the WomenEd Network?

Yeah, always. It always does. I mean, when we have— when we host events, so we've hosted 5 to 6 events Germany-wide this year and hoping to do an annual conference in May. We'll see how that goes. And basically the idea each time is with 10% Braver is just to talk about certain things. We've talked about confidence, we've talked about gender pay gaps, we've talked about being mindful in general, whether it's session on mindfulness in general. And basically the idea behind 10% Braver is just to give them the tools to understand how to be brave enough to make choices that they want to make.

Yeah.

And it's not always about being that, like, okay, I need to lose weight, right? So then all of a sudden on Monday morning you stop eating, you start exercising like crazy and stuff like that. That's like 150%, right? But being more successful in that sense for losing weight, which is what that is, to take it in slow increments, to cut out sugar or whatever. And that's the whole idea about 10% braver.

And more sustainable change in a way, right? When it's like small steps, iterations, incremental development.

Absolutely. You don't all of a sudden have to say, like, I'm gonna be a school leader. Maybe your first step is to be a year group leader. That's what you need to be doing is focusing on what does your workplace need? Do they need empathetic leaders or do they need leaders who make sole decisions top down? And I would argue probably the modern workforce doesn't need that. Then whoever is in the leadership position, it's not about kicking them out and putting a woman in there and putting somebody with more feminine traits. That's not what it's about, but it's about giving them that coaching and that guiding to understand like this is the workforce. Your workplace is changing. Changing. These are what the qualities are. How can you implement them? So what do I want my school to look like? What are my— what are— again, taking that feedback and that empathy from your school staff. What do you actually want to hear? What do you want to do? And so I guess the point is, is like adapting what we should be focusing on to our modern workplace. What goals need to be achieved? What products need to be delivered? What kind of workforce do we need to be having? And what kind of competencies do they need for themselves? And what competencies do we need for that? I mean, a very concrete example here when we talk about Agile or Scrum is Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, I would call them. The developers of Scrum were both men, but a lot of the qualities of Agile and Scrum are very feminine. Collaboration, leading without power, listening to your team, multitasking. There's feminine qualities with that as well. I would really argue for people to embrace both. I mean, I do think that there's more going to be more of a shift towards these feminine-like qualities, and I do believe more women should be in leadership, but it doesn't mean that men should be like then disregarded.

No, absolutely. But it's also, I mean, for me personally, as a male who has been in leadership positions, I find it useful as a way to coach and enable men in leadership positions to begin to self-reflect and identify their own qualities, whether you call them masculine, feminine, or not. Maybe that's completely unhelpful, but actually just for them to be able to begin to self-reflect, because I think that mindset we were talking about, it has to come in the leadership if an organization is going to move towards more agile ways of working.

Exactly.

And if you've got men in top executive positions who are just still fully in the mode of, you know, what I say goes, command control, they're clinging on for dear life, let's say, to the last stand, as Brené Brown calls it. I mean, that's a bit of a challenge for everybody shifting towards these ways of working that you're describing. So I think for me, it maybe provides a vocabulary for some people in leadership to self-reflect and think about it, of the different traits that we're we're trying to dial up or dial down in order to make this shift. So yeah, it's an interesting one.

Exactly. In the design thinking, when we talk about wicked problems, and that is, there is more and more coming in this world, and education is a great example of that. And you need definitely people who have more of these traits of flexibility and be able to collaborate instead of just command.

Brilliant. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. And I'd love to stay in touch just in terms of building the network around these things.

Absolutely.

Alright, thanks, thanks so much, Anna. Cheers. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.