The Secret Ingredients of System Transformation at Scale - A Conversation with Dr. Iwan Syahril

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

This is actually the, the secret ingredient in the system transformation at scale. You have your allies who will fight for the purpose for you every single day, even you're not present, because they believe in the cause and they believe there's something greater than all of us and they influence each other. And that's the beauty of it.

Hi and welcome back. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. There aren't many people who can say that they have won the hard-earned leadership lessons through the actual experience of steering an educational transformation across a whole country, let alone a country made up of nearly 300 million people across 17,000 islands. My guest in this episode, Dr. Iwan Shahril, has taken the time and care to reflect on some of these lessons in his fantastic new book, Students, Students, Students: The Human Journey journey in leadership and system transformation. But he was also kind enough to join me to reflect on it together this week on the podcast. As Iwan argues, the only way to align a massive, complex educational system transformation is a clear, simple purpose and to move away from the bureaucratic jargon and complex policies to focus relentlessly on the child. And then for that transformation to be sustainable, it must be rooted in a society's own values rather than imported models. For Indonesia, that meant drawing on the philosophy of Ki Hajar Dawantara and the spirit of Gotong Royong, or mutual cooperation. Iwan advises global organizations and governments on building resilient, future-ready systems, and his expertise is grounded in his time as Director General at Indonesia's Ministry of Education, where he architected the Merdeka Belajar reforms, digitally empowering 3.3 million teachers and improving outcomes for 53 million students. A former chair of the G20 Education Working Group, his strategic vision is informed by frontline experiences teaching in Indonesia, the US, and Canada, and his leadership as the Dean of Education at San Poema University. You can find more links to the book and Iwan's other work in the show notes.

I just firstly want to thank you hugely for taking the time to join me on the podcast because it is, there are a lot of people talking about systems change and systems transformation. There are quite a few less people who have actually been a part of it and have led it at such a kind of an amazing scale and with such success that you have. So I know it's a real honor to be able to discuss and get into some of that, particularly around the new amazing book that you've just published. So firstly, welcome. Thank you, Iwan. Really great to have you.

Thank you. Great to be here.

So, I mean, maybe firstly, one of the things I was curious about was obviously I'd love to get into the book, but just to, as a preface, what was the kind of impetus and motivation that brought you to actually writing a lot of this down or trying to distill some of your accumulated wisdom now? I mean, what was it that brought you to writing the book at this point?

Yeah, it was more I felt that I had to write this book because I feel the obligation to share the journey or perhaps the scar tissue, Tim, of leading the system transformation and coming from the academia myself. You know, I was previously in the university leading the Faculty of Education, being immersed with a lot of, you know, research and all this analysis, like also engaged with advisory work. And being there in the driver's seat, it's something else. I think I learned a lot of hard lessons, blind spots, and I wanted to share to other change leaders. So then my hope is that quite a few other system leaders or change leaders, wherever they are, don't have to experience sing or swim moment, you know? So I felt that I was being thrown to a role that nobody really prepared me and told me about it. And whatever training that I had before, I didn't feel that it was enough. And it was something else. I was very, very humbled by the experience. And also I feel like the need to share it because we've been talking a lot about change. And I think with the AI and the future of learning, the future of the society, we want change to happen. But when we actually do change, it's not as beautiful as what we thought it would be. I think, uh, Olipeka in Education World Forum, like, captured it very, very nicely in a simple way. In his opening remarks, he said, we love to talk about change, but nothing really changes. And I referred this to also my intellectual journey. I came to the US as a grad student, a Fulbright scholar in Columbia University. From Indonesia and trying to find the secrets on how to do— at the time it's about education change in the context of school, only to find in my first semester reading a book called, I don't know whether you've read this, A Century of Public School Reform written by Tyack and Cuban. Basically this book says that after a century of public school reform in the United States, basically the structure of schooling remains the same. So I was like, wow, I came here to find the secrets and here, you know, like a more developed country, still like trying to make sense of it. So it's not as easy as what we thought it would be. And I think leading change, I think it's more like an interdisciplinary way of being and thinking. And yeah, I hope that I can help and continue to learn and grow together to move this forward.

Thank you. No, I mean, definitely. I mean, there's so much richness in the book on exactly those points, but just for me, what motivates me is that idea of a change leader is not just the education minister. It can be, right? You know, there are educational entrepreneurs all over the world trying to do things differently. There are young people trying to lead change. And, you know, I know you came to one of our Festivals of Hope in Indonesia, in Jakarta, where some of that kind of work happens. And it's so inspiring to see to see those change leaders at all levels of the system, but then also therefore that's why I think there's so much richness in your book because it can apply to people at all those levels of the system, not just, you know, the top policymakers and ministers. But just, yeah, perhaps if we could, I don't think anyone will be surprised by the main impetus of the book from once they've read the title. It's pretty clear what you're committed to, right? So students, students, students. So just to address that, why do you think a relentless focus on student growth is helpful helpful in terms of just orienting before we then perhaps talk about some of the more pragmatics of how. But, you know, what this, this directional motivation— why is it the focus on students that helps you?

I think in any transformation we need to be clear about where do we want to go, what's the destination, what's the purpose, where's the direction. I think having that direction to be explicit, to be clear is super important. And I think also I want to emphasize this to make it clear to the stakeholders. Apparently it's just not enough to, you know, use it in a proper term. Like, for instance, you know, the goal of our reform is to produce students that are ready for the future of work with all these competencies, 4Cs, and et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah.

It's great when we talk to other, you know, maybe education leaders. But you want to communicate, your main stakeholders are actually those on the grassroots level. So I remember being challenged by my boss, the minister at the time, how would what we write here or what we want to say here is understood by a mother in a remote village in that island? And how does it make her or this person feel? And I was like, wow, okay, that is something else. So using the proper Maybe like the educated term sounds nice, sophisticated, but it doesn't really help in, especially if it's a system transformation at scale. We need to actually pay attention to how our stakeholders make sense of the information. So I experimented a couple of ways during my time leading the transformation in Indonesia. And I came up with this, you know, like basically what we focus is, it's about the students with all these competencies and their future. So why don't we use the word student? And I also learned another thing. In addition that you need to simplify in the way that your main stakeholders making sense of the information, you need to repeat it at least 7 times I heard from my communication consultant to really get the attention of your audience. I was like, 7 times? I feel like, you know, like when you are the one who have to say it 7 times, you feel like it's like, it's boring. And it's like, like a broken record.

Yeah.

Right. Broken record. Apparently that's what it takes.

Interesting.

So then, all right. So then I experimented with the word. In Indonesian is murit, murit, and murit, right? So student, student, and student in my speeches. So I tried once, but then I remember, and I mean, like I wrote in a book, like the first time that I used it, like everyone was so serious, you know, like when I gave a formal speech in front of like the school leaders and also the government officials. Okay, so here's the purpose of our education transformation at the moment. Number one, and they are ready to, you know, like take a note, right?

Ready for the list.

Yeah. Ready for the list. And it was like, and I said, student, and there's a pause. And maybe they expected more because usually it's quite like a loaded term and it's quite long. And I said, and I stopped and I said, second, student. And they started to like pause also and like to think, is it like the same as the first one? And I said, the third one.

It's students.

And they started to smile and then student, student, student. And I didn't realize that, but months later, Tim, I visited a remote area, like an underdeveloped area in the eastern part of Indonesia, having a community kind of like meeting with the school leaders and teachers there. And we had a discussion about the problems that they were facing. And one of them suddenly said that in her explanation, Isn't that like what we're trying to do is for students, students, students? I was like surprised. How did this person, this woman say back to what I said in Jakarta? I was like, how did, you know, like that was amazing. And then I saw this moment that like this kind of incident repeatedly throughout my time there until now, actually, when I released the book, you know, like there was a comment on my social media and it's like, oh, this is so Pak Iwan saying, you know, murit, murit, murit.

Amazing.

And they remember. And why this is important, okay, for two things. The first one, having the relentless focus on your purpose helps the internal team to make decisions, Tim. So when I think one of the great— this is also I learned later, but I learned it in connecting the dots backwards. Yeah. The great traits of a leader is that people can be confident to make decisions when you are not in the room. So when you're not in the room, they feel like, yeah, I know what the direction is. So when they have to make decisions, they understand that where, you know, they should go. And when we face dilemma and what one of the instances like the high-stake decision that we did was to remove the high-stakes standardized testing to survey-based like a PISA kind of assessment that more focusing on system improvement. We've been debating nationally maybe for over two decades about you know, this high-stake exam is not really helping us, but nobody really took the decision. But I think the minister and the leadership team at the time, we did it in the first 3 months because we just realized our focus is like for student and going forward. This is not relevant anymore. Like very clearly it's not relevant. So it's kind of like very simple suddenly, something that was being the hot topic for 2 decades because of the purpose. And I know, and this is also maybe part of my book too, When we made that decision, quite a lot of people are not happy because they've built their work around the old practices or the old direction. But what we think is not for them, what thing is for these students for the future. So then when you understand what the direction and who is actually your ultimate that you serve for, I think it became easy. And for the external, why it's also important, I've met quite many times people talking to me, we never met them and say like, I never met you, but I know where we need to go. So I just made this initiative. So it created a movement on the ground because they knew and they believe that this is a good direction to go. And the purpose, one thing about the purpose, the purpose should be something for the greater good, not for yourself, not for your group or people, you know, like when we're in the public sector, it's very easy to be politicized. But it's genuine for the greater good, you will find a lot of like these people in the grassroots who would also fight for that purpose. So I think that's why it is important to be clear, to be simple, and to communicate it repeatedly when you have to make decisions, either for like the most difficult one or for your internal team in general, or externally, the stakeholders, to create the ripples of movement And, you know, as I know the complexity of Indonesia, the scale is just crazy. We need these stakeholders to, to do this, you know, fight for the, for the purpose of our education reform.

Yeah, I know. It's so interesting. I remember you saying that to me previously when we met in Indonesia, that just the geographical dispersion of the population across such a wide area and across so many islands. Almost necessitates that kind of cohesion that comes through, through something else. I mean, you say in the book, it's just beautiful. You say that the change is not a blueprint issue and that it's born not in systems, but in souls. And I just love that. I mean, just, it's so interesting the way that you can't almost engineer that top-down cohesion, particularly over such a, a vast geographical and diverse population. But you can somehow inspire it in their soul somehow with some, as you say, some really simple and powerful messages. So it's, love it. It's so interesting. Perhaps would you maybe say a little bit more about the kind of blueprint issue? Because I think that is a trap that often we fall into is that we orient around a purpose, but then we go to the next layer of saying, but then we need to design around that purpose, this blueprint for how this is going to, because I don't know, there's something around the uncertainty that's uncomfortable or the space that we leave for other people to actually, as you say, generate their own responses to that purpose. We somehow want to control with a blueprint because you talk powerfully about that in the book.

Yeah, and I was also guilty of this, Tim. I can, I have to admit that too, you know, like before I thought that when we had good blueprint strategy roadmap and even, you know, like the implementation design, it would be enough and quite straightforward to make change happen. And we base it on the best knowledge that we know, the latest research. But I learned again, this is something else, you know, like this is about one of the part of my title is a human journey and how we make sense of this human journey and how we navigate that, I think is key in leading a disruptive system transformation at scale, because you can have like the the best knowledge and design, but the people who will make sense of it are actually the ones who will carry the reform or, you know, like react to the reform in a way that can be positive, can be negative towards the implementation, towards the, your purpose, which is the student. So you need to touch the human's heart. I think it's not just about changing the minds. In itself, it's already difficult changing minds, but changing hearts. It's hearts and minds. And that's the holistic human dimension that we need to understand. I'll give you a story for an example of that also surprised me. I once visited a regency in an island called Sulawesi, one of our major islands, South Sulawesi to be exact. And this particular regency has 117 islands. So it's quite like a interesting regency. So I visited this regency. At first, I visited the capital and then I moved towards like a coastal area of this and I met the school leaders and teachers there. So we have this like conversation. If I do this visit, I usually want to learn from them. So I ask, you know, like what's working, what's not working, usually like very open-ended questions. And they started to share. And I was surprised one of them shared this. So this woman said that they had been doing this kind of professional learning community where they travel from this major island to all these remaining small islands to help other teachers and schools in these islands to learn this new paradigm in our new curriculum. And what surprised me the most was nobody instructed them to go.

Oh, wow.

Nobody funded them to go. And these are the teachers in not a very rich area. And they themselves also struggle. And to travel, by the way, I don't know whether this is what you already have in mind, to travel, like island travel is expensive, Tim. It's super expensive. So they had to figure out a way to travel together. And 90% of them are female. You know, they have this fighting spirit to help others there. And we were sitting with the head of the local education office there and This hat didn't know about this, but they've been doing this for like, I don't know, at least maybe 6 months. So more than 1 semester. And some of them, I think maybe at least 50% could not swim. Oh, wow.

Oh my goodness.

And this is during their free time, maybe on the weekends, you know, and I was wondering like how in the earth, like they would think about this, but that is what happened when you managed to communicate the purpose and the sense of mission and they feel part of this greater movement. And maybe in the teaching profession, I think you know this very well, one of the core traits that we need to tap into to identify a good teacher, not a not so good teacher, is this altruistic motive, you know, altruistic dimension in trying to make sense of your profession. So we find this a lot, like these educators like this a lot in Indonesia because we also use our cultural wisdom. We call this gotong royong, which is about social solidarity, helping each other, even though that's not your direct problem, but you feel like the sense of obligation to help others. And we tap into this, into our education transformation. And what I'm trying to say too here, in trying to touch the souls of the educators or the stakeholders, I think we need to also look into our own heritage, sociocultural roots. So then they feel that the transformation is actually part of the social fabric, our social DNA. I think all around the world, we have a lot of this, you know, our ancestors' wisdoms to, you know, this togetherness collective to help each other in order to move forward. So I think this is actually the secret ingredient in the system transformation at scale. So you have your allies who will fight for the purpose for you every single day, even you're not present, because they believe in the cause and they believe there's something greater, you know, than all of us at the moment. And they influence each other and that's the beauty of it. So yes, maybe you have the early adopters, but then they will influence the others and this is how finally they will produce the results into the direction that we want to get.

Oh, it's amazing. It's so, I mean, it's so inspiring to hear how moved they were to, as you said, to just act on their own. I mean, just amazing. But I really also wanted to ask you about this cultural wisdom piece because to me that's absolutely fascinating and not as often talked about, I think, because there is sometimes in the kind of global conversations about educational transformation or systems transformation, there's almost an implication, sometimes unsaid implication that It's the same everywhere somehow, right? That, that this is just education and we can, we want to transform what was, you know, many people call the industrial schooling model, but we want to transform that into something that's effectively the same everywhere. And that's a real trap, I think, because as you are talking there, those women were moved not only by the purpose of students, but something about something that connected with their hearts and their souls of that place, of their their culture and their people and their community, right? And, and that's not to say therefore it's a kind of a tribal boundary creation, but it is, it has to speak to them, not just generically anyone anywhere, right? And so, and I love that in your book you talk a lot about that in relation to, I mean, you can help me understand a bit more, but not just Indonesia nationally, but maybe more regionally, culturally specific things. But also you, you talk specifically about this person, and forgive me, I'm gonna, I will not pronounce it very well, but Ki-haja Dewantara.

Yes, perfect.

Just being inspired by his work and, and just this idea of rootedness in the culture. So yeah, perhaps you could just maybe just explain who that person was and what he did and, and how it inspired you.

Yeah, I, I have to admit that I found, quote unquote, Ki-haja Dewantara after I completed my PhD, Tim Logan. So I learned about his teaching before when I was a teacher, when I started my career as a teacher, but only after completing PhD and coming back to Indonesia and read his work again did I have like the, I feel like a better understanding about what he was trying to say. So he was like actually a freedom fighter to start with. He was from a noble family. He was like the crown prince of one of the kingdoms in Java. But then he decided to leave that and to fight for the independence for still like, you know, a nation that we are trying to free from the colonization, from the Dutch colonization. And he was actually one of the founders of the first political party. And then he got arrested and he was exiled to the Netherlands. And there he had the realization that, hey, we need to use education to fight for independence. So, and I think maybe what he was thinking is developing human capital that will be our asset when we have an independent nation. So when he got back, he founded this school. This school was based on, he got an education diploma in the Netherlands. What he learned there was very much influenced by Montessori and Froebel. Yeah. So Friedrich Froebel and Maria Montessori, that was like, like the biggest influence in his thinking. But what he did when he came back to Indonesia was translating those teachings into something that is easily understood by common Indonesians and also culturally rooted because he's from the royal family. So he's very like educated in this, you know, cultural wisdom. So he has this kind of way of saying things and we use his philosophy in our transformation. And that was one of the magical Moments happen when instead of using, of course, we can use, you know, like John Dewey or Vygotsky and, you know, but when we use Ki Hajar, he already did that work translating, you know, something from external, contextualizing it to our context in Indonesia and also something culturally relevant. And I give you an example. He said that, so teachers are like farmers and students are like the seeds that are being given to farmers. The farmer's job is to take care of each seed according to the nature of its seed. If a farmer is given a seed of rice paddy, so you have to grow it as a rice paddy and make it the best rice paddy ever. If it's the seed of a coffee, so then your job is to grow it as a coffee and to make it the best coffee ever. You cannot expect if you get a seed of coffee to grow it as a paddy. Rice paddy, never going to happen because the nature of the seed is different and vice versa. And you cannot grow coffee with the knowledge that you have to grow rice paddy. And that is like differentiated instruction or whatever you call it, like very much Maria Montessori and also thinking about, you know, Froebel. It's exactly that. But when you communicate in that way, the educators not only get it, it touches their heart. They felt very emotional to feel that Oh, this is like my compass in, you know, in acting my role as an educator. And this is like a confession session, Tim, for them to feel like they've been doing the wrong thing and they feel so bad because they're proud educators. They feel like they've done, you know, something terrible to their past students, not, you know, trying to understand the kind of seeds that they are. And I think this is, yeah, this is very powerful to us. And, you know, because we are very agricultural society. So when you That kind of example, it's like so simple and it makes sense.

It lands, it resonates with them. It lands.

Exactly.

Beautiful. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Because there's also a tension there about not deciding too early what kind of seed different young people are, right? I mean, it's a really interesting question, I think, because, you know, we're not going to decide age 5 that they're a rice seed or a coffee seed, you know. Are we going to decide at age 18 or maybe never? And there's just something really interesting about that. It's, this is given how long these discussions have been going on and, you know, the amazing work of Montessori and Froebel and others, you know, these are deep, deep questions. And just, I just love that you are managing to kind of land those questions in such a powerful way that really connects with the hearts of the people doing the work because otherwise it's just, you know, these, as we, as you said at the beginning, these kind of high-level academic-y kind of conversations disconnected from the reality of the actual work. So no, just beautiful. Could you say maybe a little bit, Iran, about the, again, excuse my pronunciation, but Medeikabellajar reforms? So, because this, I'm conscious we've been talking in general terms, but there were some quite specific reforms that you were, you know, very involved in. That I think the English translation is Emancipated Learning. Is that correct?

Yes, that's right. Yeah.

So, and I remember, you know, when I was in Indonesia and talking to teachers about it, and it was very interesting to hear about it from them. But yeah, perhaps you could just say a little bit more about what that meant. What was your personal experience of leading some of that work? And, you know, some, maybe some of the successes and challenges of actually kind of bringing those reforms in practically.

Yeah. So Mordeka Bladjar is It's like a movement to make education relevant to the students and also to the future that we're going to face. We give the autonomy to the educators and to the schools to teach at the right level, to make sense of their own context and to innovate, to cultivate to trust them with the culture of learning and innovation at the local level and among each other. And from that growing professional agency and professional trust, professional judgment, and we use technology to scale all of this, you know, either the purpose of for the students going forward and how to help the teachers and the school leaders and We should not forget that we have 552 autonomous local governments to go to the same direction in their education transformation. And I think technology, we cannot have done what we did without technology. I think technology made a lot of things possible, given our scale, given our complexity, to simplify a lot of things, how to help, you know, to communicate what good looks like. How to help the change agents on the ground to find samples of good practices, to connect with each other, how to help the school leaders and the local government to identify what are the core issues that they need to pay attention to, because what to notice and not to notice is also not an easy thing. And what are the possible options about system improvement that they can do. And also how these system leaders also collaborate with one another and also to celebrate the small wins. I think we use that either with technology or with our engagement. So it is quite a massive system transformation. I would say comprehensive. We try to make it as coherent as possible with clear purpose. And we have like the key metrics for this, which is we define our problem, our core problem as before, even before COVID it was, we call this the learning crisis. The foundational competencies are literacy, numeracy, and character. Those are the most 3 important things. We simplified the curriculum, 30 to 40%, cut the content to allow deeper learning, to also allow teachers to, again, to teach at the right level. And then we mentioned earlier, we cut the standardized testing and moved to more like assessment for system improvement. So we held ourselves accountable. By how we progress in literacy, numeracy, and also the non-cognitive indicators. Let's say like school safety, teacher learning, collaboration. And yeah, and I think we, we emphasize on collaboration rather than competition. Like for instance, if a school or teacher is being recognized for doing good work, the reward is some incentive to help other schools or other teachers. So instead of just like take home, like, you know, whatever reward that they have. We have like this school improvement special program. And the idea was to help these schools. And some of the schools are in remote areas, but then the goal is so then this school will be the lighthouse school for other schools. So we will create ripples of collective effort for transformation. So collaboration, I think, and that is again, like our spirit of the Gotong Royong, I think you also maybe read that in the book.

Yeah.

The cultural wisdom really like help us to transform, but it's not, it's not as beautiful as it sounds now, Tim. I think, and I have to say this now, I think this is part of your journey as a leader. This is the struggles, you know, I really believe in, and this is one of the core theories that I believe now in the system change, in social change, that you always find this, you know, the the bell curve, the normal curve. You have like the, I always make it simple on 3 groups. The first group is the one on the left. Let's say it's about 20%. They are more open to innovation, new ideas. These are your main supporters, especially at the beginning, 20% early adopters. In the middle, the biggest one, you got 60% of the second group. I call this the late adopters. They will be on your camp, accept change, when they see evidence from the first group. And that's when they start to be convinced, try, and they have their own journey too. But they will accept the other idea. And the third group, the last 20% is the group that you have to accept no matter that what you do, what kind of evidence that you give them, they will never accept your idea of change. And that is given in any context, in a school context, in an organization or in a system. The only way that they will change is because they have no other option. And I think the struggle of leader of transformation is your first supporters are this 20%. What it means is that the rest of the population, 80%, will resist the change, will be not your supporter, will give you difficult times. So yes, you know, it's nice to have this 20%, but think about it in the bigger picture. So the majority, 80%, is still not there. So as a leader, how do you make sense of it? And this is where I think the emotional intelligence is so important. If you are reactive to it and you don't have like first, like the awareness of this journey, and second, you don't have the mental strength to deal with it, what happened is you will surrender and then there will be a new kind of initiative that you try to introduce. And you know what? It will happen again, same cycle. And you will get the 20%, the rest of 80%. And then the ecosystem will be what the researchers call the, like, reform fatigue.

Yeah.

At that stage in the ecosystem, when they are reform fatigue, they will be super skeptical of any innovation that will happen.

Exactly. Anything. However good the idea is. Absolutely. I mean, it's phenomenal, isn't it? How Rogers is, you know, all of that kind of the early adopter stuff. I mean, 1960s. I mean, it's incredible how it's still so relevant.

Yeah.

But as exactly as you say, I was just thinking as you were talking, there's such a time element for that as well.

Yes.

Because so often the move of a leader is then to get defensive when it's not working. And as you say, either surrender and change or just kind of dig in and become, it becomes more negative. And all the, all the kind of more generative inspiring stuff we were talking about at the first half of this conversation kind of goes out the window because the, the people in charge start getting defensive and protecting this new idea. And it's, I mean, it's such an art form, I think. And that's again, just how it's so inspiring the way you've talked about it and just being honest about the fact that it's messy. I think that's so important. It's not clean and it's, you can talk about it in a beautiful way that sounds retrospectively coherent as you're saying, but at the time it's messy and you've just gotta keep building trust and keep building inspiration on the ground at the grassroots level to kind of begin to use the 20% to help to inform the creeping into the 80%. I mean, it's hard emotional work, but as you say, if you give up, then there's all sorts of nega— you know, negative ripples that will happen if you kind of just say, oh, this is too hard. I'm gonna move on and come up with a different idea. Or that the political leaders change, right? That's the other issue I think that we have.

That's right.

Yeah. Amazing. But I mean, just the, maybe just to kind of begin to wrap up, there were two elements I just loved about the way you were talking about some of that lead, those leadership aspects. That maybe we could finish on. One being the idea that this slightly kind of almost conversely, the willingness and the courage to actually cut things and to prune so that the tree can get stronger, as you talk about, again, is really, it's a really hard thing to do. 'Cause you've, as you've talked about this powerful vision and purpose and, but if you just add that into the mix of all the other things that were already happening, you lose the clarity. And so we'll finish on the hearts, but if you could firstly just, yeah, say something about that courage to make the cuts and to prune when that's a hard thing to do, I think, for a leader.

It is, it is. You will make unhappy people in your own team when you do that. And maybe they actually mean very well with the best intention to contribute to the change. I had those moments quite a few times, Tim. But what steadied me was, well, first of all, it wasn't my first instinct for this. Again, like this is coming from academic Tim. I was, you know, so used to having the framework and we need to have all elements in the framework to be able to this to work. And when one or two elements are not there, and I think that that's not going to work. But when you are in action, when you are on the ground, you never have like the perfect situation and things are never going to happen according to whatever control environment that you did in your research. And that's the beauty. And also the messiness is just part of the human nature and our society. So how to make sense of it? I think I learned this was one of my, the criticism that I got from my minister. My boss in my first maybe 6 months in the role. And he kept telling me, Iwan, do not boil the ocean.

Yeah, okay.

A few times, do not boil the ocean. First, I was like, how can it be? Because this, we need this, we need that. No, you have to figure out, but do not boil the ocean because we have limited resources. We have limited time. Again, you mentioned about political time there, regime. Indonesia is still lucky. We have 5 years. I think some Countries have like 3 years, 4 years before like the next cycle, right? That's even shorter. But we have to think about resources. We have to think about our talent. And then we cannot do everything and do it well. Because when you want to, like just boiling the ocean, it never boils. You will never get things that will create result because you spend your limited energy and resources for too many things. And that's never going to work. So the idea to, and When this is also another simple way to say this, and I repeat it so often with my team, when everything is important, nothing is actually important. When everything is a priority, what you're telling me is nothing is priority. And, you know, like having this awareness is key, but making that decision is the toughest one. And then dealing with that, living with that decision is even harder. Now, what makes it easy is the purpose, Tim. When you have a clear purpose and the purpose is not about you or your group, it's about the greater of the society and people this is like genuinely for that, people will give you like an opportunity to do that. That's that. I'm not saying that it's easy, but it's a bit easier when they see that. And the second one is that this leadership, your job is not to make everyone happy. Your job is to do what you're responsible for, for the mission that you are being tasked for. And for me, you know, like I'll give you an example during COVID I think we never had any training about how to deal with situations like COVID, no matter how excellent your training was at the time. And we had to make budget cut, Tim Logan, right? And because like a lot of the state budget was then being removed to fund the COVID situation. And I had to, you know, for some programs, like zero budget. It was like, how could that be? You know, I let my people down because they were like, you know, so excited. And then suddenly, but then I explained. And I said, let's move for what we call these more priority programs. And one of them, and this is focusing on technology. I remember at the time, you know, we were trying to find ways to build teacher-facing platform and also student-facing platform to mitigate the learning loss at the time. And then we realized we didn't have enough people to do both and do equally well. And then we had to decide, oh, okay, we cannot do both. So we will focus on the teacher-facing platform. Instead of bypassing the teacher and go straight to the students. And the reason why, because we believe that, you know, we cannot bypass the teacher, but the quality of student learning is dependent upon the quality of the student-teacher interaction. And we kind of like, not like a straightforward thing, but we believe in that. So we need to support the teachers and the schools in how they reach the students. And this will be the foundation for our system transformation going forward when we collectively, like these adults in the ecosystem, align together to fight what is good for the students.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's, I mean, as you say, it's almost the hardest part in all of that is holding the explanation for those people who are being cut, you know, the people who have committed so much energy and creativity and emotion into building something. And you say, actually, that's sorry, there's no more budget for it, or we can't do it.

And you can be wrong too. Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I mean, That's another dimension of, of this.

Yeah, but I mean, that's— I mean, in a way, that's a perfect way to wrap it up because at the end of your book, I love it, it's such a powerful few pages where you write a letter to the next generation. But one particular phrase in there, as you're offering advice to the next generation, you say, if I could offer one insight about leadership, it would be this: every system is made up of fragile human hearts. Trying to do their best within imperfect structures. I mean, what a brilliant sentence. Just lovely. Because it, I mean, in a way it sums up a lot of what you've been saying, I think. But just that idea that we're all imperfect, the structures are imperfect, we're fragile, we care, we're trying to do this thing for these young people that we love and care for. It's going to be messy, but, you know, so insightful, I think. And perhaps you've, you mentioned emotional intelligence earlier. But I think the kind of judgment and emotional intelligence as just key leadership attributes, I mean, difficult thing to actually enact, but I think an important thing to emphasize.

It is. I found that it's human nature not to like changes. Yeah, I think the work of Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow maybe sums up all, you know, this body of knowledge about why it is not easy. And I think for me, it's like to make it simple, two factors. First is about psychology. I think we are wired to things that are familiar. When it's out of pattern and our radar for, you know, oh, this, there's a danger here. And there is the fear and uncertainty, anxiety will come into our body and our mind that will impact our sensemaking or our judgment. The second one is biology, right? Because when you learn a new idea, especially reform ideas are usually complex. It takes a lot of energy to learn a new and a complex thing. You know, it's not like a 2 plus 2 kind of problem. It's like 2 divided by 1.75 times or whatever squared. You need to, okay, can you slow down and take a piece of paper and take a pencil and try to visualize it and try to, and even that you can get wrong. So when it's problem is more complex, you take a lot of energy and when we are drained, when you don't have the energy, our tendency is not to want to think complex things. You know, like when you are already, you know, like so drained after one full day of work, a lot of problems in the office, and you come home and your kid asks you something, you will not entertain that right away. You'll say, okay, let me breathe first, then I will talk to you after I have a shower, nice meal, and let's talk. And because we need that, it's like, it is human nature. And I think we need to understand both for ourselves as leaders and for our stakeholders, either in your team or the stakeholders that you serve. So you need to understand this fragile human hearts in understanding this. And also the structures are never perfect. And even some of us, because of our craving for familiarity, maybe want the structures to stay the same. And but then we want to do change and it's never going to happen because we need to when we have a new mission. So I think emotional intelligence is key. I would say it's the master key, Tim, in leading change, because the biggest puzzle for a leader in leading transformation is him or herself. When you are not in tune of what makes you, you know, anxious or your fear or what, how you can get energy, even like your past traumas, all these, your inner struggles, that will impact the way you make sense of situation, your judgment, and the way that you have this relationship with others. So the social relationship and having the empathy for others, you will have, even though you have like the best mind, the best knowledge, you will be reactive and you will, maybe you will become toxic yourself into the ecosystem and you will produce decisions that are not best for what is best for your purpose, which is in this case is the students. And that is, I think, where the leader can have the humility to, you know, sit down, listen, step back, try to process. And that can all only happen when they have the good self-awareness and self-regulation with their own emotion.

So, yeah, thank you, Iwana. I mean, it's so important. And I think even just going back to the beginning, tracking through, you know, if we try and create change through the blueprint, it allows the people with the smart knowledge and the, you know, the intellect to do the engineering. And so it often, we perpetuate that idea that the leader is the one, the smart one with the ideas because we've premised this whole change idea on a blueprint logic. Whereas if, as you say, it's not born in the systems, it's born in the souls, the change is born in the souls. How could you not need a level of a kind of humility and biological, emotional, relational capacity to, to move with that? Because it, it's not a blueprint that we're just imposing. So no, it's just such amazing work. I so enjoyed reading the book and I thank you so much for doing it all and just, yeah, for taking the time to chat about it today.

Thank you for having me, Tim.

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