Same questions, different answers

There is a great story about Albert Einstein and his teaching assistant at Princeton University. Einstein was administering a second-year exam when his teaching assistant, in a state of anxiety, informed him that he had administered a paper the group had completed the previous year. Einstein showed little concern for his blunder. “Why,”asked the teaching assistant, “would you do that?” “Because”, Einstein replied, “the answers have changed!”

This story illustrates a powerful lesson for us as leaders; answers change! Just as in physics, new discoveries occur and new knowledge is created so, too, nothing stays static in organisational leadership.

Einstein is widely credited with saying that, “The thinking that got us to where we are is not the thinking that will get us to where we want to be.” In other words, we cannot assume the answers that led to today’s success, will sustain that success, moving forward.

Neuroscience tells us that deep thinking is incredibly energy-intensive and that once we have an answer to a question our preference is to continue using the same answer when we encounter similar situations, rather than assessing each situation on its own merits. As an executive coach my experience is that the biggest barrier to people reaching goals and resolving problems is often not their ability, but an unwillingness to think differently and generate different answers.

When asked how they might approach an issue it is not unusual for clients to give a single answer, where multiple answers exist. One of my favourite questions when coaching is, ‘What else?’

This challenges clients to move beyond the first answer and suggest multiple ways forward.

Some people reading this article may remember video rental store operator Blockbuster. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, if you wanted to watch a movie, you went to a Blockbuster store to rent a physical copy. In 2004, Blockbuster was a multi-billionpound business; just six years later it was bankrupt. In 2000, Netflix offered to sell Blockbuster their business for just $50m. Their offer was rejected because Blockbuster’s CEO believed that Netflix was a ‘very small niche business’. Had they taken up the offer, Blockbuster would have survived and now have a $125bn company, with 150m subscribers worldwide. Blockbuster believed the answer to renting a movie would always be to rent a physical copy - and that belief killed their business.

As leaders it is wise to recognise that there is rarely a single answer which will last forever. Here are some ways we can guard against this type of thinking.

To some extent, all of us are a sum of our experiences - and, usually, wisdom comes from experience. Often we take what we learnt in one role or situation and use that to inform strategy in another. However, we need to ensure that, in doing so, we are not just sticking with what is comfortable for us as leaders at the expense of what is right for the organisation. Our experience is why we are appointed as leader but it should not be a limit which we are not prepared to grow beyond. Being open to adopting different solutions, and ways or working, depending on the context helps ensure that our experiences enhance, rather than constrain, our ability to generate innovative answers.

Many organisations assume that the same systems and style of leadership can be maintained regardless of scale or maturity level. Leaders who have been hands-on, and had a good personal grasp of every issue when their organisation was expanding, are likely to have to take a step back, become systems leaders and rely on professional management as their organisations grow. As organisations mature, their leaders often need to move from a ‘directing’ to a ‘coaching’ style of leadership, giving others greater autonomy. As our organisations change, as leaders our role is to change with them.

Peter Drucker, the ‘management guru’, once said, “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” I am a big advocate for collective wisdom and borrowing the best ideas from others but leaders also need to push the boundaries and challenge conventional approaches. Within appropriate limits, our thinking and action needs to rise above what everyone else does, and to constantly question ‘Why?’ it is done that way and ‘How’ could it be done better.

John Kotter once said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” His research indicates that successful organisations tend to focus on themselves and ignore contra-indicative evidence about their success. Seeking out this counter-evidence is, arguably, more important than seeking supportive evidence for our strategies, as is ensuring that evidence is being correctly and objectively interpreted, rather than being made to fit what makes us feel good.

One of the risks of listening is that you may hear things you do not like. However, often the less you like what you hear, the more powerful the potential lesson - if you are willing to take it on board. As leaders, we must have conviction in our ideas, but also be open to the possibility that we are wrong. Listening to others openly can be a powerful way to avoid mistakes; often people have insight we lack, or perspectives to which we have been blind.

We use the expression, ‘pride comes before a fall’ and, all too often, complacency is the enemy of success. Decline often happens rapidly and current results are a poor proxy for successful strategy. Today’s results are a result of yesterday’s strategy, but future results will be a consequence of today’s. As leaders our role is to treat today’s results with extreme caution and suspicion, and to keep focused on today and the future, not the past.

So, what answers are you holding on to, that may have changed?

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ALISON KRIEL, experienced headteacher and CEO, on why schools need to take a more proactive, rather than a reactive, approach to tackle hateful language

Last year racist hate crimes reached over 100,000 for the first time. Social platforms, such as Twitter, have become breeding grounds for radicalised thoughts, and stories such as the backlash faced by Nicola Sturgeon on a visit to a diverse Scottish school show how quickly - and openly - racist sentiment can be shared.

Radicalisation online, whilst often fuelled by the echo chambers of social media, is something that schools are certainly not immune to. We all know how children are quick to pick up things from others, and when language such as ‘invasions’ or ‘illegals’ become normalised, this quickly filters through to the school playground. But for those children who may be refugees, or new arrivals to the country - or even children whose families have been in the UK for much longer - hearing these words, and the wider sentiment around them, is hugely damaging, and that hurt never goes away.

From personal experience, I know how much it can make you feel like an outsider. The way in which migrants are discussed, even by those who are compassionate to the cause, is so negative and perfunctory that we can often feel uncomfortable and unseen, even when we have been here for a long time. It’s also harmful for the children in the class who are not from a migrant backgroundand staff too; exposure to these kinds of attitudes, and this kind of language, can feed directly into the perpetuation of prejudice, as well as risking opening the door to deeper radicalisation. There’s not only the fear that pupils will move into deeper and more active radicalisation, but that these pervasive attitudes will continue to warp the perception of migrants in ways which contribute to further division and day-to-day prejudice.

A report from UCL’s Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research, Addressing Extremism Through the Classroom, found that increasing exposure to radical material online has made the issue worse, whilst lockdown made it much harder to have face-to-face conversations or create safe spaces for discussion – this is why schools must act to both recognise this radicalisation when it happens, and work hard to make sure all children feel welcomed and valued. School leaders need to think about what more they can be doing to ingrain anti-racist action within their school cultures.

In UCL’s report they also found that teaching around extremism was ‘highly variable’ and sometimes ‘tokenistic’, and that a focus around reporting this behaviour, rather than educating against it, does little to address the problem - and can even make educators less likely to act.

It’s not just a case of challenging the language itself; working to simply ‘stop’ the kind of comments being used in school settings, or apologising after the fact, won’t go far enough to tackle the roots of the issue which are already wellembedded. Schools need to take a proactive approach, with clear strategies for supporting pupils who are new arrivals to the UK, or from migrant families.

Organisations like HOPE Not Hate have been able to offer fantastic whole school support, pushing for behavioural change and offering training to enable schools to take an active anti-racist approach. Training plays a dual role in learning how to better tackle prejudice and, perhaps more importantly, in providing the tools needed to spot it in the first place.

Extremism cannot be challenged until it is understood. In teacher and author Jeffrey Boakye’s book, I Heard What You Said , he argues for racism to be seen as a safeguarding issue. “In the same way that you can’t get hired as a teacher until you know the basics of how to keep children safe, perhaps you shouldn’t be allowed to teach in a modern, multicultural society unless you know the basics of racist abuse and how it can harm all children.”

There needs to be greater support for school staff to spot the signs of radicalisation before it’s too late, and resources put in to take the matter seriously. At a much broader level, there are issues that need to be addressed through the curriculum, with considerations of how we frame wider conversations around race. With unparalleled access to hate speech online, and several content-creators producing steady streams of far-right, misogynistic and racist content, the problem will continue to grow exponentially if left unchallenged. Most often, it is the offhand comments, or ‘banter’ that show the signs of radicalisation; these are, too frequently, brushed off, despite the fact that it is these kinds of comments which can spread most quickly.

With last year’s hate crime statistics providing evidence of the rising intolerance in this country, which many - in education and beyond - can easily attest to anecdotally, it’s fundamental that we take the issue more seriously at every level.

It is the role of school leaders to set examples from the top, as well as to dedicate time and resources to providing a meaningful path towards eliminating radicalisation.