Essentialism
‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.’
- Stephen Covey
We have an awful lot of ‘stuff’ going on in schools that is getting in the way of our core business: teaching and learning. It’s time to take a hard look at this ‘stuff’ and decide whether all of it is really necessary. Take this example from Greg McKeowan:
‘When an executive I work with took on a new senior role in the company, he inherited a process his predecessor had gone to a huge effort to implement: a huge, highly visual report on a myriad of subjects produced for the other executives each week. It consumed enormous energy from his team, and he hypothesised that it was not adding a great deal of value to the company. So to test his hypothesis he ran a reverse pilot. He simply stopped publishing the report and waited to see what the response would be. What he found was that no one seemed to miss it; after several weeks nobody had even mentioned the report. As a result, he concluded that the report was not essential to the business and could be eliminated.’[1]
Getting back to essentials is not easy, it takes real discipline. But it is worth it. There are three strands to getting back to the activities and processes that enhance our main purpose: the first is at organisational level, the second is at a personal level and the third is becoming comfortable with saying no to the activities which do not support the first two.
The first step as an organisation is to go back to first principles: what are we in schools to achieve? We need crystal clarity about what our core purpose is and this takes deep hard work. It means going back to our mission or values statement and to treat it as the solid expression of the school’s purpose. It becomes the criterion by which it is possible to measure everything that goes on within the school. We have to ask ourselves that if our school values state that the ambition is for every child to achieve through a ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum, how does this match with teachers expected to mark every piece of work which means they have little or no time to develop their own subject knowledge, or to source resources that are high quality, or have time to reflect on their practice? There needs to be a thread which connects what we say on our websites with the actual experiences of professionals who want to live up to the aspiration but are bogged down with expectations to perform activities which are not adding value to pupils’ learning.
Then at an individual level, I need to ask myself what is the highest contribution I can make? Where am I going to have most impact and how am I going to direct my energies to that first and foremost? So much of what we do is urgent, but not important. And we need to remind ourselves that ‘What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.’[2] The important versus urgent matrix helps us to clarify those areas where we are likely to have the greatest impact. In order to get there, we need to make sure that we eliminate things which are neither urgent, nor important. There are many school practices that are candidates for this category and examples such as marking, data, production of differentiated worksheets are discussed in section two.
This brings us to tradeoffs. And this is where it gets uncomfortable. In order to keep the main thing, the main thing, it means having to say ‘no’. And often this means to other people. This is why it is important to have real clarity on the first two aspects of essentialism - when we are clear on those the demands on our focus, activity and purpose become easier to justify when we refuse to do them. To do this, we need to find a form of words that makes sure that it is not personal. We need to remind ourselves that we can do anything but not everything. If our focus is going to be on the essentials it means that we simply cannot say ‘yes’ to everything.
Linked to this, is the ability to ask ‘why’? We need to be doing this at the micro and the macro level. Asking ‘why?’ to others’ requests is not rude, it is about gaining clarity. If we are asked to submit detailed plans for lessons for example, then it is reasonable to ask how these are going to be used and for what purpose? If we are being asked to input data, then again it is helpful to ask ‘why’? When we keep asking why, in a pleasant manner, we are seeking justification for processes - and it might turn out that some of these are important, but others are not. And in the latter case, the asking of why is helpful for the wider system. Everyone is entitled to ask ‘why?’ - from trainee teachers, newly qualified and recently qualified teachers, teaching and learning support assistants, classroom teachers, governors, middle leaders. If everyone stops and asks why something is needed, then often we will find that something is not necessary, it’s just that we have grown used to doing things because they have always been done.
As we do this we shift from asking ourselves ‘how can I make this all work to what is the problem that I want to solve right now?’[3] When we do this it shifts the locus of our efforts onto practices and activities that really do make a difference. And this not only produces clarity, it releases energy. Energy is one of the vital factors in moving our work forward. When overloaded with redundant activities we quickly become overwhelmed, we can resort to a place of learned helplessness, of thinking that nothing really makes a difference. By taking a hard prune at the stuff we do, we release new insights, new observations and quickly realise that improving the outcomes of our core business is possible.
One of the things we need to come to terms with, in the early stages of moving to essentialism is that it will feel uncomfortable - as we learn to set boundaries to make our core business more effective and more efficient, we can feel bereft. There is after all, something comforting about routine, about busyness, about feeling we have too much to do. Stripping back to become liberated can open up psychological holes because we can feel exposed. If we are not so overwhelmed, what are we doing instead? To take some examples - if we are in a school where if it moves, we mark it and we shift to an approach of whole class feedback, where we stop marking everything that a child does, then what do we do with the extra time? Well for a start, we use whole class feedback to identity those pupils whose work is worth sharing, we identify common basic errors such as spelling mistakes and more significant misconceptions that need to be addressed. We do more thinking rather than more activity. And at first this can feel uncomfortable . Because one of the downsides of busyness is that it can be comfortable. We go through the motions, we don’t have to think too hard. And we carry on, because that is the way that we have always done things. This is no longer good enough. We need to shift to a place of deeper thought, greater purpose and this comes from our commitment to move away from the marginal, mostly redundant activities which do little to add value to our core business of developing pupils’ learning and focus instead on the actions and activities which will actually make that happen. So, one of the tradeoffs is that decreased activity will create the space for increased deliberate thinking and this won’t always be comfortable.
[1] https://gregmckeown.com/book/