When school and district leaders read about innovation—defined as improvements for students and teachers that result in real progress, not anything that’s simply “new or different”—the changes can seem daunting. How do they build innovation as a habit into their DNA of their organization at a practical level? What are the real pitfalls?
I spoke recently to the leadership team at a network of schools. Afterwards, they offered some reflections, which they shared with me. That in turn sparked a few reflections of my own, which I’m sharing in the hopes that it makes innovation in more schools more possible.
- Let’s acknowledge the truth. Big innovations and transformational change are “complicated and hard.” When reading about what to do, it can sound so simple. But it’s not. That doesn’t mean the work isn’t worth doing.
- When deciding which innovations to experiment with, don’t compare different kinds of innovations to each other. Organizations should be doing a large number of innovations that amount to continuous improvement each year—incremental, reasonably assured of success, and relatively affordable. They shouldn’t compare those innovations to big platform changes or transformational ideas—which are bigger, riskier, and will be more expensive over time. There should also be far greater investments in incremental improvements than transformational or disruptive ideas. You might run a couple pilots in the latter category once every five years.
- Develop a rhythm for your innovation work. Create a taxonomy of different innovation types that align to your strategic goals and commit to a predetermined schedule of a certain number of these over discreet time periods. To figure out what will work for your organization—that is, how many innovations of different types you can support so that you don’t get bogged down by initiative fatigue—look to and learn from your history.
- Before embarking on an innovation, make sure you know the “why” for it. And make sure anyone who will be impacted by it does, too. That said, for bigger changes—don’t mandate that everyone must do it. Find a coalition of the willing and experiment in small doses at first outside of your core operations.
- When you pilot an innovation, state clearly the desired outcomes at the outset. Not all change produces progress. It’s important to be able to sunset those things that aren’t working.
- Failure is a good thing—so long as you learn from it. To learn from it, you need to have clear outcome measures up-front.
- As new innovations take hold and produce positive results, remember to prune old practices that are no longer working or have outlived their purpose.
- Just as team teaching is a good idea so that one teacher doesn’t have to do everything and be everything to everyone, the same is true with leadership. Leaders aren’t going to be good at everything. It’s about surrounding yourself with the right people to create a cohesive team. All too often we look for people who are mediocre to solid in all aspects, rather than finding talent that is amazing in just a couple areas—and then building a team around them that complements their assets with others. All humans are jagged; lean into the “spikiness.”