How to define your next challenge | Change Series 1.5

Think about all the challenges in your school right now, maybe there's behavior issues, curriculum changes, staff workload, parent concerns, it can feel overwhelming, right? Sorry to just do that to you, but what if I told you when we're trying to solve everything at once, that's actually our biggest mistake and yet we do it all the time. Today we're going to learn how to cut through a bit of that noise and define what really matters. Hey everyone, I'm Shane Leaning.

Welcome to Global Ed Leaders, the chart-topping leadership podcast for international schools. I'm an organizational coach and in this show I get to know the teachers, leaders and innovators making a difference in education across the world. Before we jump in today, I'm delighted that today's episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association. Stay tuned to learn more.

Okay, so this is the next part of this organizational change series. If you've been following along, we've moved through the organizational change model that's presented in my organization I co-founded with FRM Learner Work Collaborative. We've gone through the sponsors perceive challenge. We've looked at connection and the discovery phases and now we are at a critical turning point.

Define. This is where we're going to take all the ideas and possibilities we've generated in discovery and we're going to be focusing them down into something actionable. And I know from experience, this is where many schools struggle. So let me share a little bit of the story of a school I worked with recently and the leadership team came to me with a list.

I remember this list, they had 15 different initiatives they wanted to implement. We'd gone through a bit of ideas with them. We'd gone through a discovery phase of these different issues that they were looking at. And they had plans, for example, for a new behavior system, they had plans at another part of the school, some curriculum changes.

They had wellbeing programs that were just coming into fruition and they even had some parent engagement strategies, you name it, it was on the list. And I wonder, does that sound familiar to you? The problem here wasn't actually that these weren't good ideas. They were all really valuable.

The problem was that they were trying to do everything at once. It's kind of like trying to juggle 15 balls and you're only just learning how to juggle. You're going to drop them all. And this is one reason why the defined stage is really crucial.

It's about making tough choices. It's about having the courage to say, not now, to some good ideas so that we can say yes, absolutely, to the really important ones. You know, it's kind of a little bit like a camera lens, you know, when you're taking a photo, you have to decide the focus for any of you photographers out there, what's going to be sharp and what's going to be in the background. You can't have everything in perfect focus at once.

You have to choose a focal point. And that's really the same for school change. So how do we define that challenge then? So rather than go through a set of questions, I just want to focus on some of the themes we might ask as we go through that together.

So the first area we need to think about is reframing. Have you heard of Carol Dweck and her work on growth mindset? Now this isn't just great for individual learning. It's really, really good for organizational change as well.

When we define in our challenge, we need to have a shift if we can from seeing the problems to seeing opportunities for growth. I'll give you another example. I was working with a school once. They had a bit of a challenge with staff actually collaborating.

I remember they said to me, look, staff are just not willing to share any resources with each other. They're saying, it's mine. I developed this. And we were talking about, okay, well, they're not sharing resources.

Is that the challenge? And they really framed it in that way. We actually started to reframe it. We said, what about instead of how do I make them share because they're not sharing, we go to how can we build a cultural where sharing feels natural?

And everything shifted. When we started asking that question, that positive frame question, the energy changed and the conversations changed and the solutions we work towards were different. So that's collaboration. Second, what we want to do is also visualize.

You don't want to just kind of practice. You need to rehearse what success looks like in your head. So the way you do that is be saying, if we were to imagine we got this right, we completed this change. What does that look like?

What would we see? What would we hear? Is these not just kind of out there questions. They're really important for defining where we want to get to.

And the third thing and where I think it gets most interesting is how at this point we're balancing our feelings with the facts as well. Daniel Kahneman talks about this, right? He talks about system one thinking and system two thinking, fast thinking and slow thinking, fast emotional responses versus slower analytical thinking. Both matter in schools.

This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association. The ICA have been around for about 30 years now, championing quality, unlocking potential and improving learning in international schools. And what I really love is that right at their core is the model for improving learning. This is a model focused on the learning experience and they have tons of great curriculum materials, PD resources, and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours.

If you're interested, head over to internationalcurriculum.com. You know, we sometimes have to take a bit of slow thinking, especially when we're thinking about data. One thing comes to mind.

I worked with the school once and we were talking about behavior and the school leadership team were hearing reports from teachers that behavior was getting worse. Behavior is getting worse and we're struggling. And yet they had this data system where they were tracking behavior into their central system. You might have one.

I think it was ISAMs or something like that. And in there they were tracking behavior points. But what was weird is that actually when they'd look to the data and look to their reports, the behavior incidents were actually going down. The incident reports that were logged in the system were down.

And yet the teachers were complaining about behavior. So the leadership team, I remember they were quite frustrated because they thought these teachers, you know, were moaning, although there was something not truthful in what they said, or they just weren't satisfied. They thought that data metrics were going down. So we did a bit of digging into that and made it a bit of assumption.

Well, what if the teachers are right? What if we're missing something here? So one of the leaders went and spoke to some of the teachers about some of the incidents that were being logged now. And here's the thing, those incidents were less, but the teachers were also right.

The incidents that were being logged were actually a lot more complex incidents. There was actually an increase of incidents of children talking about quite serious bullying and quite serious things happening at home. These are emotionally demanding behavior incidents. So the low level behavior had gone down, but actually they were getting these much more complex challenges coming through, which was burning out teachers and teachers weren't sure how to do it.

If the data was just looking and we just kind of quickly scan that data and just fast thought ourselves across that, it was totally missed. That kind of revolution really changed how they define their challenge. But I guess when you're in this definition stage, the most difficult part is actually choosing, choosing which challenge you're actually going to go. And I like the question with this, if you could only solve one challenge, what would it be?

It's really important to kind of think very clearly about that. And I'm not just talking about prioritization here. It's really about understanding what the root causes. Sometimes solving one fundamental issue can create that positive ripple effect that then helps address some of those other challenges more naturally.

So can you find that underlying challenge? This is really important because we have to remember there are costs to anything we do, not just financial costs, but time costs, energy costs, emotional costs. You know, Patrick Lencioni, he did some work on this and he talked about how change always has a price. And the question isn't therefore about whether there's going to be a price.

Whether there's going to be a cost, there will be. It's whether they're going to be worth the benefits. So you need to be thinking about that. I've seen schools rush into challenges without considering hidden costs.

They might front-load training, create new systems, and then forget about the emotional energy that's required to sustain that change. When we're defining our challenge, we're not just choosing what to do. We're understanding what it really takes to succeed. So overall, what might this look like?

So in your school, first, I would say resist the urge to jump to solutions. I know it's tempting. We're all problem solvers, right? By nature, that's why we're in leadership.

But you need to not jump so quick. And one way that can be really nice with this is to think about starting with silence. So how about at the beginning of your next meeting, you just take five minutes to write down what you think the challenge is. No discussion, no debate, just writing.

If you did that, what usually happens is pretty fascinating. You'll often get 15 different perspectives on what seems like one clear challenge. And then after you've done that, instead of trying to pick which one's the right answer, look for patterns. Where do these perspectives overlap?

What themes emerge? I was working in a school before where they did this exercise, and they realized that what seemed like some separate issues, they were talking about student engagement, they were talking about teacher workload, one of them, parent comms, but they all actually seem to link to something deeper, which we found was their approach to assessment. And that's really useful. You've got to be careful, of course, you don't want to just try please everyone.

If you end up doing that, you're going to end up with these vague broad goals that everyone kind of agrees with, but no one actually can act upon. Like, for example, okay, we need to improve well-being, student well-being. Yeah, sounds great. But what does that mean?

No, you need to get specific here. Instead of improved well-being, maybe we're talking about creating time and space for well-being initiatives in every year group. There's a big difference there, right? You will know you're defining well when people start to feel a little bit uncomfortable.

If everyone is totally comfortable, you're probably being too vague or too safe because real change requires courage. And that's the courage to say, we're going to do this, not that. So before I leave you today, I want you to reflect on something. What is that challenge in your school that if solved would make the other challenges easier to tackle?

Not the most urgent, not the most visible, but that one that sits at the root of the other issues. And take a moment to write that down. And then ask yourself, are you ready to focus on that challenge? Even if it means saying not now to other stuff.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Seriously, get in touch. You can reach out to me on X, LinkedIn, or email me at shane at shaneleaning.com.

In the next episode, we're going to move to the next phase of aligning the team. I hope you'll join me there. Global of Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning. Thanks to my show editor, Pete McGill.

And of course for the original music by Guillermo Silva. And as ever, if we don't speak before, I'll see you here next week. If you want to improve learning in your school, don't forget to check out the ICA at internationalcurriculum.com.