A Stick in the Sand

Lately a bunch of new mail apps have shown up which promise to help us triage our bursting inboxes. I’ve tried them all: Mailbox, Mail Pilot, Boxer, Dispatch, Evomail, Yahoo! Mail, Triage, and Gmail’s new tabbed format. They each take a slightly different approach to doing the housekeeping and in their own ways do the job well.

But they haven’t stopped the flood of incoming messages. They just help us manage the flood better. And that seems like a fool’s game to me. Even when I get to inbox zero I feel lousy: I don’t like that I just passively let a bunch of people suck up my time.

I think we are tackling the email problem at the wrong end. Instead of managing the flood we ought to be preventing it altogether. That means we need to focus on the sender, not the recipient. However good the new crop of email clients are, none of them address the send action, which is where the email problem begins. (See Chris Anderson’s excellent email charter for the reason why.

Fixing the send is really about behavioural change and about creating a different communication culture in the workplace, a complex task requiring time and will. It’s probably not something that can be done with an app alone. Still, it’s an interesting exercise to think about it, if only because it helps understand the whole email process better. A while ago, I suggested that a workplace culture built on trust might be able to get rid of a lot of email with an app like this, the Perfect Communication Tool. As a new exercise, I wonder what an email client that focusses on the sending process might look like…working on that now.

We speak–often in critical tones–of education as if it was a homogenous whole. But it is really several overlaid structures or models:

• pedagogical
• economic
• delivery (place & time)

These are interdependent and the economic and delivery structures model in particular are so tightly connected most don’t see them as separate things.

Education cannot be treated as a single entity when it comes to reform. CORE, STEM (or even STEAM) or in my jurisdiction, the BC Ed Plan, may be laudable, may be necessary, but they’re hardly sufficient to bing about the reform we seek. Unless we address the other two structures at the same time, we will find ourselves merely swapping one set of pedagogical standards for another. The force those two unchanged structures exert will dampen any effects of pedagogical change.

Cities work because they are never finished. I don’t know if I made that up or if I heard it, or something like it, from someone else. But it’s true. Cities, especially great cities, are always becoming. The regenerate themselves. Cities outlive kings and queens and empires: Rome is still here, the Roman Empire is not. Remarkably, Hiroshima is still here. Cities work because they create conditions, rather than outputs, and because civic governments largely stay out of the way of the people they govern. Oh sure there are taxes and by-laws, but these go to building and maintaining the infrastructure that people need to get on with their own business.

Structurally, the public education model is much more like the Roman Empire than the city of Rome: pretty great, glorious even (it’s a wildly successful social endeavor that dropped illiteracy rates in North America to near zero), but monolithic and programmatic. It tries to be self-perpetuating rather then self-regenerating. Alas, nothing lasts forever.

Last Wednesday I took part in a panel discussion called Empowering Educational Leadership to Innovate, one of a series of webcasts put on by Cisco’s GETideas, a global online community for educational leadership (watch the webcast here) I was glad to see us move quickly off any talk of technology which too often dominates discussions of innovation; we seemed to recognize that technology is catalytic but not central to innovation. What came out of our chat was a list of seven qualities that mark a culture of innovation. Great school leaders will cultivate these:

• Trust – We thought it fair to say schools generally run with a top-down control/dependency management model. They need to shift to a trust/capacity model. The pace and pressure of change is now too great to be centrally managed. A high degree of faculty autonomy and capacity means more power in the system overall.
• Transparency – Transparency yields accountability and accountability creates trust. This applies to all stakeholders–students, families, faculty and administration. Opaque systems, characterized by elaborate (read costly in administrative time and money) policies and controls working in place of trust, are stiff.
• Time for Collaboration – This is where faculty and administration develop capacity for themselves as individuals and collectively as a school. This needs to be a significant amount of time–a few hours a week at least.
• A User-Driven Experience – In some sense we’ve treated students as the objects of teaching: We say “We teach students,” for example, and that leads to a passive engagement from students. And we’ve asked students (and teachers) to adapt to a set of entirely artificial constraints–the school calendar and bell schedule, for example. Innovative schools will flip that around and adapt themselves to their users needs. The consumer-driven BYOD movement is just the beginning of this change.
• Maker Culture – “Our whole theory of education,” Henry Miller famously lamented, “is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water.” Innovative schools will embrace the Maker movement, explicitly or implicitly, which taps our human need to make and do meaningful work.
• Hyperlocal Decision-making – One size does not fit all in education and what works in one school may not work in another. There is a huge difference between an inner city public school on a lunch program and an Ivy League prep school. There is good research showing the best schools are the ones most responsive to their immediate communities, not to some central authority.
• Optimism – Change is messy and unsettling. A sense of adventure and an assurance that all will be well makes all the above doable.