My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
“The good is the enemy of the excellent”.
It is a sentence I have used as a school leader or a member of accreditation teams in many contexts over a period of some three decades.
I have used these words in four continents whenever and wherever I have seen resistance to change being justified on the basis that things are already “good”. The change-resistors might be referring to good examination results, or to the curriculum framework, or to personnel, or to almost any established practice in a school. Sometimes, I hear the contention that the current exam results, the current curriculum, or the ‘current whatever’, is ‘great’, and that reform is therefore not needed. It is an argument I have heard to my irritation over many years to defend inertia.
I was not disappointed.
Jim Collins was a dynamic, animated, charismatic speaker with a well researched and highly challenging message. Although his address was essentially a re-statement of the framework of his recent book, “Great By Choice”, the theme of Collins’ address was that whether we fail or prevail depends more on what we choose to do ourselves than on what the world does to us. It is hard to do justice to all the case studies, anecdotes and challenging material he put before his audience of several thousand people, so instead of trying to summarise his address, I will just highlight the twelve questions for school leaders that he posed at the conclusion of his speech to draw together his points:
1.Do we truly want to build a great school, and do we have the will to make the painful decisions necessary to build a great school?
2.Do we have the right people in the right positions, and if we do not have 95% of positions occupied by the right people, what do we need to do to get that figure to 95%?
3.What are the brutal facts that we need to acknowledge and fix?
4.For OUR school, what can we be the best in the world at doing?
5.How can we accelerate change by committing to disciplined progress regardless of setbacks?
6.What is our BHAG (big hairy audacious goal), i.e. what clear and effective action could have a transformational effect on the lives of everyone in the school?
7.What core values will we not change for 100 years? And related to this, what is the core purpose that defines us such that, if it went away, it would leave a gaping hole that could not be filled?
8.How do we embrace the genius of “and” versus the tyranny of “or”, and especially, how can we embrace the combination of creativity AND discipline?
10.What is the right 20% to change in the school, and why?
11.How can we substantially increase our return on luck, both good luck and bad luck?
12.What should we stop doing?
I thought these were excellent, thought-provoking questions, especially for any school that is developing its strategic vision. Nonetheless, having posed these significant questions, Collins finished his address with a plea to school leaders to prioritise the changes they wish to implement in their schools for the sake of their own sanity and effectiveness.
In Jim Collins’ own words: “If you have more than three priorities, then you really have none.”
The good is the enemy of the excellent
Sunday, 3 March 2013