My wife Christine and I took last week off to play with our kids because it was their Spring Break. Oh my goodness – that was really fun and really tiring!! Whatever you are up to this spring, I hope this finds you well and thriving.
Guess what I have playing on my itunes on repeat right now? “What the World Needs Now is Love” from Broadway for Orlando. This was made by a bunch of broadway artists who came together after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub. They wanted to bring a little love and light to us all back in 2016. I’m embarrassed to admit how many times I’ve belted out this song while I’m driving in our red station wagon to pick up our kids from pre-school. Please tell me I’m not the only one…and feel free to play the song and sing-along as you read along here.
We launched our Unleashing 101 workshop two weeks ago and we had 24 folks spend two days exploring the overlap between what the world needs and what they’re uniquely here to do. The photo up top is from the training: one stickie per person of what they discovered when they leaned into that question. It’s worth a closer look. This photo gives me hope for our future!
In the workshop we explored areas of genius, excellence, competence, and incompetence, using the Hendricks Institute’s framework around Genius largely captured in The Big Leap. Whenever I work with folks on this topic, I have to confess I am mostly concerned with genius. What’s the thing that lights you up – that doesn’t feel like work – that you’re really awesome at? Do more of THAT!
One of the people I was thrilled to meet at that workshop was Susan X Jane. Something she said profoundly impacted me and I wanted to share it with you. As we sat in a circle and de-briefed our discoveries, Susan said, “I realized my areas of incompetence are where I need community.”
**ding ding ding ding** OMG Yes!!
I had never thought about it that way. In fact, generally I try NOT to think about my zones of incompetence and mostly I just wish they’d go away. There’s a humility to saying, “this is what I can do, and this is where I need other people.” And my goodness do we need one another.
As a result of Susan’s question, I got curious about the places where I’m over my head and realized that I would like some more help in getting really good at seeing and interrupting oppression in any of the spaces where I show up. So I reached out for help to some folks who I know and trust in this area (including Susan). My life is richer already for having faced into my own limitations and reached out to my community and I intend to continue doing so. I am feeling humble and grateful for the gifts that others bring into my life and the power of community.
So my question for you is where could you benefit from the wisdom of others? Where do you need community? Where could you be a little more humble? Are you willing to ask for help?
Our fellows met in Los Angeles last week to do some advanced explorations around integrity, justice, and self-care as leaders of large-scale change. Many of you know that we do an introductory investigation of the “hero” at the Skid Row School. The hero includes the parts of yourself that are uncomfortable with making anyone feel uncomfortable, so you take on too much and bite your tongue and nothing ever changes other than you’re on the fast track to burnout. That kind of hero that’s widespread in the social sector.
This week we looked more deeply into another way that I’ve seen large-scale change leaders burnout: the villain. The villain is really good at criticizing and assigning blame. Some of us have more access to this part of ourselves than others. Take me, for example: I have easy access to my inner-villain! The villain has strong opinions about the way things “ought to be.” I assume many of you are asking, “what’s wrong with that?” Well, nothing if you want to be on the right side of history. It’s actually quite satisfying know you’re right and experience the surge of adrenaline that comes with a good dose of righteous indignation.
The problem is…our villains might be on the right side of history, but our challengers are the one’s who make history. Challengers create loving pressure for change by being deeply present with someone who sees or thinks differently than we do. Challengers are able to stay grounded in our own discomfort and through our full presence, ask questions like:
How are you keeping this going?
How is this costing others around you?
Are you willing to stop this now?
What truths have you not told?
What have you not been willing to face about this issue?
What boundaries have you not created or have you broken?
Just to ground this in practical reality – imagine watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings last week and taking on your best villain pose for how things ought to be and lecturing anyone who saw things different from how you did about just how wrong they are. You might end up being on the right side of history, but it’s unlikely that you created an authentic connection that opened up the possibility for creating something different going forward.
Another possibility in light of last week’s events would be to start wondering out loud some variations of the challenger questions above. Hmmmm….I wonder what truths have not yet been told. I wonder what we, collectively, have not been willing to face about sexual assault. I wonder what I have not faced personally about any of the trauma I’ve experienced in my lifetime. I wonder how I am contributing to keeping this whole culture going. These questions open the door for deeper personal explorations as well as increase the likelihood of a person to person dialogue that results in transformation versus being right or wrong. My invitation to you is to try some of these on for size and see how they work for you.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to our new fellows: Mari Jones, Michelle Pledger, and Wendy Loloff-Cooper (clockwise from top left).
Mari Jones is the Project Co-director of the Deeper Learning Hub, a national practitioner hub whose mission is to spread deeper learning practices and ensure that more students across the country are achieving deeper learning outcomes. With Michelle Pledger, she co-leads the Share Your Learning Campaign which aims to focus on spreading a small set of practices (exhibition, student-led conferences, and presentations of learning), to 5 million students by 2020. She is also an Improvement Facilitator for the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation at High Tech High Graduate School of Education, and a course instructor for the Teaching Apprenticeship Program at High Tech High Graduate School of Education. Previously, Mari was an elementary teacher for fourteen years and has always felt that education is a form of activism, and she is passionate about promoting social change and equity by empowering youth.
Michelle Sadrena Pledger is the Project Co-Director for the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation and teaches at High Tech High’s Graduate School of Education. With Mari Jones, she co-leads the Share Your Learning Campaign which aims to focus on spreading a small set of practices (exhibition, student-led conferences, and presentations of learning), to 5 million students by 2020. With a dual passion for education and dance, she embraces an energetic teaching and coaching style. Proficient in Spanish and conversational Japanese, Michelle enjoys international travel and leaves the country at least twice a year. As a former member of the renowned public speaking organization, Toastmaster’s International, Michelle has won numerous accolades for competitive public speaking.
Wendy Loloff Cooper is the CEO of Generation Schools Network. She brings extensive experience in the non-profit and education sectors, especially in the areas of network and collaborative development, replication and innovative educational models. She has worked in higher education (Northwest College, Colorado Christian University & Harvard University) and co-founded the StreetSchool Network, which grew to include more than 50 schools in 27 cities under her leadership. Since taking the reins at Generation Schools, Wendy has grown the organization from serving a handful of schools each year to serving more than 60 schools in multiple states and founding a 56 district rural collaborative as a unit of change.
We still have four spots open up at the October 23rd – 26th Skid Row School and we are currently accepting applications for all of our 2019 offerings.
Graduates of the Skid Row School are invited to apply for one of the seven spots available in 2019 for our fellowship. We meet three times a year for three days at a time and deeply explore the adaptive challenges almost everyone leading large-scale change faces.
The next meeting of the fellows is February 5th – 7th, 2019, and will take place outside Atlanta, Georgia.It will include a tour of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
We offer scholarships to those who need financial assistance for both our Skid Row School and our fellowship. Give a shout if that’s you.
I hope all of you are safe and sound in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence.
This month I have been deeply immersed in our work to support two clients who are advancing racial equity in the US education system: The Raikes Foundation’s Building Equitable Learning Environments Network and the Sonoma County Office of Education’s Empathy, Equity, and Engagement Project aka the “Rooster Fellowship.”
For the Raikes Foundation, I am interviewing 36 experts in the fields of equity and education to capture their best ideas about what the purpose and function of the US education system would ideally be, why it’s not currently like that, and what needs to be done to move things in the right direction. Later this year, I’ll have the privilege of facilitating key stakeholders in learning from these 36 interviews and crafting strategies for what’s next. I promise you this: I am glued to the zoom on my computer screen for every one of these interviews. I am committed to keeping an open mind and being deeply present with these luminaries as they share their wisdom and insights.
As a parent and someone who cares deeply about education and justice, I wish everyone could hear what is being shared with me. Please know there is zero debate among any of these experts I’m interviewing that our current education system is out of date and reproducing oppression, right now, at a school down the street from each of us. Their consensus on this is sobering and a real wake up call for me personally.
One of the people I will interview – haven’t quite gotten to him yet – is Jeff Duncan Andrade. In my research I discovered the Deeper Learning conference. I heard from friends who were in the audience that it was scheduled to last 45 minutes. It’s an hour and fifteen. I also heard that not a person budged from their seats the entire time. Since it was the last keynote of the conference many people missed their flights, and I don’t think a single person regretted it. Christine and I watched this together the other night the same way you would watch a TV show. Absolutely gripping and important. She sat across from me on the couch, scribbling down notes, and she doesn’t even work in the education field. It is that good. I had the thought that everyone I know needs to see this keynote. Even if you’re not in education. It’s that good.
Another big adventure I’m on: Last week I traveled to Sonoma County to kick off a second year of working with Chuck Wade, Jessica Progulske (the dynamic duo otherwise known as “Chuckica”) and Elizabeth Najmabadi, and Amanda Snook. We’re doing a “wedge and spread” initiative to improve equity and engagement. The “wedge” teams from seven of the forty districts in the county. Each team is comprised of a superintendent, a principal, a teacher, and a classified person like a school counselor or special ed teacher. Each of the seven teams will be working to measurably improve student responses – across all demographic sub-populations – to these three questions:
What we worked on in class is important to me.
Class today was so interesting that I didn’t want to leave.
My teacher thinks I can succeed.
I don’t know about you, but as a parent I care way more about what my kids answer to those questions than I do about any test score. I want them to love their teachers, their classmates, their community, their school. I want them to love learning and love learning how to learn. Because someday they will be all grown up and inherit some really gnarly problems our generations are going to dump on them, and we will look to them to solve them. And we need all the talent of all the kids to do that.
Here’s the kicker, though: As a result of these conversations I’m having and the work I’m doing, I’m clear that I want that for every kid, not just our own.
If I could share one big takeaway from all my work in education and equity it is this: we must show up for all the babies. Not just our own. I do believe that is the challenge in front of us and that it’s way easier said than done.
And I wonder for other large-scale change initiatives in other sectors – how much that mindset shift – from “mine/me” to “ours/we” – is essential for creating the change we seek.
Yours Truly,
Becky
P.s. If all of this interests you, you simply must subscribe to STARZ for a month and watch all 10 episodes of America to Me. Then we can talk some more. It highlights the vastly different experiences that kids have in the same school. Eye opening.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this notion that there might be two primary ways to go about accomplishing spread/scale in the social sector: broad and deep.
When I think about broad I think about getting an intervention to everyone who might benefit as quickly as possible, and doing so as a matter of justice. I think about Rotary Clubs (among many others like the World Health Organization, the US CDC and UNICEF) pulling together to ensure that every single child on the planet receives the polio vaccine. They helped the world go from 350,000 cases of polio in 1988 to 22 in 2017. I even read that they stopped the Civil War in Sudan for four days so that every child in that country could be immunized. Now that’s getting an intervention to everyone who might benefit!
Broad is often good and I think it’s often the default mindset of many foundations and non-profits seeking to scale when they come to the Skid Row School. My only caveat to going broad is be sure your intervention is truly “read for prime time” by being attentive to any unintended consequences that might actually cause harm. Otherwise – get to it!
Then there’s deep. Deep doesn’t always get the respect it deserves, especially in a culture where more + bigger + faster = better. I want to put deep out there as equally valid with broad as a scaling objective. By scaling “deep” I mean fully transforming an existing system. This is not something I have as much experience with, but my hunch is going deep and broad can be complementary strategies.
A friend at the National Equity Project recommended this article to me: “Seven Lessons for Leaders in Systems Change” written by the folks at the Center for Ecoliteracy and I’m happy to share it with you. Cliff’s notes version – the lessons are:
To promote systems change, foster community and cultivate networks.
Work at multiple levels of scale
Make space for self-organization
Seize breakthrough opportunities when they arise
Facilitate – but give up the illusion that you can direct – change
Assume that change is going to take time
Be prepared to be surprised
Alumni of the Skid Row School will note some similarities with this and our Model for Unleashing 1.0 (yes, we have a MFU 2.0 now) in that #4 and #7 map to “play jazz” and #5 maps to “lose control.”
This week I’ve been focusing in on Lesson #5: “Facilitate – but give up the illusion that you can direct – change.” I want to share their instructions on #5 directly:
“So what can you do? In the provocative maxim of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, “You can never direct a living system. You can only disturb it.” How do you disturb a system? By introducing information that contradicts old assumptions. By demonstrating that things people believe they can’t do are already being accomplished somewhere. By inviting new people into the conversation. By rearranging structures so that people relate in ways they’re not used to. By presenting issues from different perspectives.”
What a breath of fresh air. This is a direct challenge to all of our inner control freaks, right? It’s true – we can’t control a system, but we sure can disrupt it – and they offer five concrete tactics ready for us to try today. I can think of a lot of systems and structures that could benefit from disruption, and this is useful for everything from our current (in)justice system to our organizations, no matter how big or small.
Whether you’re wanting to create change broad or deep, or both, I’m happy to share these five tactics as inspiration and provocation. I’m curious if any of these resonate for you and how it’s working out for you as you apply them.
I just got up from a nap. And I had a bunch of other things to tell you about, but I realized what I most want to tell you today is the subject of today’s email: it’s OK to take a nap.
It really is. I know the world is falling apart. I know you are a critical member of an essential team doing very important things in the world. And…it’s OK to take a nap. Or go for a mid-day walk in the park. Or leave early to take your kid to soccer practice. Or whatever, so long as it’s something that nurtures you.
One of my all time favorite quotes is from EB White (yeah – Charlotte’s Web dude). He said, “I arise in the morning and am torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor it. This makes it hard to plan my day.”
I totally get it, EB. Me, too. And sometimes, I notice folks get so busy saving the world that they put savoring way on the back burner.
Here’s the deal. Summer is almost over. Pretty soon we’ll all return to the hustle and bustle of fall and get busy squirreling away nuts for the winter. So now’s your chance!
Sometime over the next week, I encourage you to give yourself the gift of at least one hour that’s luxuriously nurturing for you.
Because, you know…we need you out there. You are saving the world. And this is a marathon, not a sprint.
In keeping with this week’s theme, Nicole Taylor – Skid Row School alum and faculty member for our fellowship, just released her first book A Joyful Pause: 52 Ways to Love Life. I am so looking forward to receiving my copy this weekend!
Many of you met one of our fellows, Michelle Molitor, when she was on the faculty at the Skid Row School. She is the founder of The Equity Lab and they are now accepting applications for the Nexus Fellowship. Organizations are asked to identify two representatives for a year-long experience to strengthen skills in race, equity, diversity, and inclusion, especially in the k-12.
The Brookings Institute is hiring four positions related to scaling – a scaling lab researcher and a scaling lab facilitator each – for their work in Côte d’Ivoire and Jordan.
With the school year starting up and all the new beginnings associated with it, I think this is as good a time as any to ask yourself, “What am I committed to?”
It sounds simple enough, but my experience has been that the answer to that question – and what I do about it day to day – makes a huge difference in my effectiveness as a change leader. I’ve also found that actively making a new commitment, as in, “I commit to…” is a great catalyst to jump-start something new in my life.
One of the things we do at the Skid Row School is encourage leaders to commit to bringing their aim to fruition over the next 18 to 36 months. It’s one thing to “have” an aim – it’s another thing entirely to commit to it. I notice in myself there’s an energetic shift that occurs once I commit to something, whether I scribble it into a journal, or write it in big letters on a piece of flip chart paper or say it silently to myself.
On my staycation I had some time to reflect on what I am committed to and I arrived at a new commitment that I want to share with you here. By way of background, I grew up Catholic and one of the songs that I heard in my childhood had a line that went, “The wilderness will lead you to your heart where I will speak. Integrity and justice with tenderness you shall know.” If I close my eyes I can hear my Aunt Sharon singing that verse and if my heart could speak it would say, “Yeah. That.”
To unpack that a little I will share that I very much enjoy backpacking. When I go deep in the wilderness all that seems to be left of me is my truest self. When I think of integrity I think of the practices that I learned from the Hendricks Institute – reliable tools for returning to my own sense of wholeness. When I think of justice, I think of how can I take responsibility in my day-to-day for creating a world in which everyone gets what they need. When I think of tenderness, my judgement of myself is that I fall way short. I can do the fierce Mama Bear thing, and my kids do a great job of bringing forth my tenderness, but sometimes as I navigate the world sometimes I have some sharp elbows, and I feel sad about that.
All this to say – ahem – I feel excited to share my new commitment with you: I commit to grounding my life and my work in integrity, justice, and tenderness.
Now it’s your turn – what are you committed to? Or stated another way – what are you willing to commit to now? I’d love to hear your answers.
