How “SUCCESS” can increase your influence

Successful leaders are influential. That means they are able to create energy in the school community around a common set of beliefs, ideas, and practices without directing, threatening, or manipulating others.

A primary quality of those leaders is their intellectual clarity and their ability to communicate that clarity concisely and precisely.

An effective leadership tool for creating and communicating that clarity are the “six principles of sticky ideas” described by Chip Heath and Dan Heath in their book, Made to Stick.

The Heaths use the acronym SUCCESS to capture the six principles:

Simplicty: To find the core of an idea, we must be masters of exclusion, the Heaths say. “Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the idea,” they write. “Proverbs are ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound… a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.”

Unexpectedness: Getting people to pay attention sometimes requires the element of surprise. To that end, “We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive,” they write. In addition, they point out that it’s important to generate interest and curiosity by “…systematically ‘opening gaps’ in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.”

Concreteness: To make ideas clear, the Heaths say, “We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information… Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images… Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.”

Credibility: Credibility is established, the Heaths say, when people can test out the ideas  based on their own experiences. “We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a ‘try before you buy’ philosophy for the world of ideas.”

Emotions: “How do we get people to care about our ideas?,” the Heaths ask. “We make them feel something.”

Stories: Stories are the means by which all of the other elements are tied together in a coherent whole. A story, the Heaths say, “… provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act).”

These six elements are not a formula, but rather factors to consider when seeking to influence.

They remind us that we are most influential when we speak and write with proverb-like clarity; tell stories that illustrate our ideas, elicit emotion, and include the element of surprise; and provide concrete details that describe and pique curiosity.

Leaders may benefit from developing a checklist based on these six principles to help them prepare for important meetings and conversations. I’ll have more to say tomorrow about the value, power, and use of checklists.

My night with Pamela Anderson

 A friend told me that he thought the best way to expand my blog readership would be to more frequently write about celebrities and sex. Hence the title of this post.

Now, technically, I didn’t spend the night with Pamela Anderson. More precisely we shared an airport security line at 6 a.m. for about 10 minutes. And, technically, it wasn’t just me and Pamela. She also had a bodyguard and even at that early hour fans were taking photographs. (That’s the celebrity part.)

But, nonetheless, I could tell that Pamela was attracted to me because every time I smiled she subtly moved in the direction of her bodyguard as a way, I assume, to protect herself against the strong desire she was feeling.  (That’s the sex part.)

If this experimental post attracts fewer readers than normal, I might conclude:

• Pamela Anderson is old news, and/or

• Such an extremely improbable event was of no interest to busy readers.

If this post attracts more readers, I might conclude:

• The improbability of such an event proved irresistible to readers who wanted to know the rest of the story, or

• Educators are indeed more interested in celebrities and sex than blogs titled, for instance, “Doing what we’ve never done,” although some readers might have thought it a better title for this post.

If celebrities and sex proves appealing, I promise that in the not too far distant future I will disclose for the first time the full contents of a personal letter to me from Dolly Parton which she signed,

“Love,

Dolly”

But enough about that for now.

When leaders suffer from the curse of knowledge

I sometimes suffer from the curse of knowledge. I also suffer from the impostor syndrome (more about that tomorrow).

(Based on those two observations you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I also suffer from medical student syndrome, which causes me to believe that I have every illness I read about.)

For the moment, however, I’d like to focus on the challenges posed by knowing too much—otherwise known as “the curse of knowledge,” a term I am borrowing from Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick.

The curse of knowledge is a problem that often besets those who possess deep understanding of a subject – researchers, consultants, and even school leaders, among others.

The problem, though, isn’t the amount of knowledge one possesses, but rather our inability to communicate clearly what we know.

For example, some of the worst teaching I’ve experienced was in advanced graduate courses taught by scholars with deep knowledge of their subject matter. There was no doubt they knew the material. They had literally written the book. But they were unable to structure and explain what they knew in accessible ways.

The curse of knowledge can make it difficult for those who possess it to understand a beginner’s mind. It can make it difficult to distinguish what is central from that which is peripheral and to speak concretely rather than abstractly.

Because communicating clearly and concisely with others is an essential leadership skill, it’s important that principals and teacher leaders are aware of and address the curse of knowledge as it infects their work.

Here are a few things that school leaders can do:

1. Spend a few minutes writing about what you would like to communicate, separating what is primary from that which is of secondary importance. Engage in conversations to help you further develop your clarity.

2. Hone in on a big idea or two. Organize two or three subordinate points around each big idea. Polish each of those points to proverb-like compactness.

3. Provide concrete examples and/or offer stories to illustrate those points.

In a recent blog post, Ann Murphy Paul uses the term “curse of expertise” to discuss the same phenomenon and offers some suggestions for addressing it.

Question: In what areas do you or others on your leadership team experience the curse of knowledge? What have you done or could you do to address it to enable you to communicate or teach more effectively?

Readers comment on my recent post regarding the destruction of public education

In a recent blog post I described the basic elements of what I believe is an insidious, carefully-constructed narrative that threatens to destroy public education in this country.

Yesterday Diane Ravitch mentioned my essay in her influential blog, and I thought you might enjoy perusing the varied and lively conversation among readers that ensued.

I encourage you to add your comments regarding my original essay on this critically important subject and to join the comment threads that follow it.

 

 

The storyline used by those who seek to destroy public education

Just as stories can instruct, provide guidance, energize, and help create a desired future, they can also provide a rationale for destruction that becomes so broadly accepted that it is viewed as an unquestioned truth. Here’s an example that is having a profound effect on public education in the United States.

The prequel:

A few enormously wealthy individuals and organizations such as ALEC that are ideologically opposed to government services and/or who see the privatization of government functions as an essentially untapped profit center focus their resources and efforts on remaking public education for their benefit.

Through an unrelenting litany of criticism they have convinced many Americans that their public schools are failing and that they must be radically changed. If these “reforms” are not implemented with urgency, these ideologues say, the United States’ world dominance will fade as “government schools” deprive American’s of their freedom.

The storyline and the plan:

1. What business does is good. It is efficient and effective. What government does is bad. It is inefficient and ineffective. With a small number of exceptions, everything government does can be better done by private enterprise.

2. Public schools are government schools, which means they are inefficient and ineffective.

3. Exploit this country’s financial crisis by blaming public education for economic problems, including the outsourcing of jobs.

4. Blame the  alleged failures of public education on teachers and teacher unions.

5. Use the imprimatur of “reform” to shift public resources to for-profit companies who run charter schools and are online providers.

6. Begin “reform” with historically low-performing schools because of the long-standing challenges they face, which are closely linked to poverty and discrimination. Then expand “reform” to suburban schools using the results of new standardized tests and systems of teacher evaluation as evidence of their ineffectiveness.

7. Transfer public money with minimal oversight and accountability to companies that manage for-profit schools and provide other services.

8. Consign to “traditional public schools” students whose high-cost special needs make them less profitable. Then blame resource-starved schools for not succeeding with those students and begin anew to find new ways to drain those schools of their remaining resources.

The consequence:

• Money that would benefit students is siphoned off as corporate profit.

• Public money is spent to serve non-public purposes (for instance, schools that promote an ideologically-driven form of science education) without transparency and public accountability.

• The “traditional” schools that remain continue to serve the neediest students, and they do so with even fewer resources.

The narrative I’ve outlined is the rationale for a wholesale, ideologically-driven assault on public education that will affect a generation or more of students in virtually every school system.

It remains to be seen whether the forces that are beginning to coalesce in response to this threat can gain traction before irreparable harm is done. The stakes are high, and I remain hopeful.

The power of stories to create a desired future

Human beings seem to be hardwired to tell, listen to, and learn from stories.

Stories help us understand our past, make sense of the present, and anticipate or even create the future. Our stories convey our history, explain our values, and can touch the heart in special ways.

Attempting to persuade people through logic and evidence that our view is right—particularly if that means they are wrong—often causes our audience to lean away and literally or metaphorically cross their arms.

“Let me tell you story” is a way to invite people to lean toward you and to open their minds.

Skillful leaders use stories to provide a sense of direction, explain how a desired future will be created, and to sustain the energy that continuous improvement requires.

Fortunately, schools and classrooms abound with stories that illustrate human resilience in the face of adversity, the effectiveness of new teaching strategies, the power of collaboration to solve seemingly intractable problems, and the progress the school community is making in achieving important goals.

Teacher leaders and administrators only need to pay attention to the sea of stories in which they swim, take note, and be mindful of opportunities to use stories to teach, guide, and inspire.

The power of stories to teach, guide, and inspire

 

As I awaited my flight from Vancouver to Toronto I fell into conversation with a Canadian man sitting near me who told me a fascinating story about a half brother from Australia who until recently he did not even know existed. The discovery of his brother was due to diligent detective work done by his daughter, and culminated a month before in a heartfelt reunion in Toronto. As we parted company we introduced ourselves and he gave me the name of a Toronto newspaper in which I could read more about his story.

As I settled into my next flight—this one from Toronto to Detroit—I again fell into another unexpected conversation, this one with my twenty-something year-old seat mate, who I noticed was reading a book on his iPhone. He said he had just begun The Count of Monte Cristo, and I shared my enthusiasm for it. We talked for some time about our interest in reading classic novels by authors such as Austen, Dickens, and Tolstoy.

My seat mate said he was a medical student in Arizona, and I told him of my hospice volunteer work. He said that he was also a hospice volunteer, and that that experience had shaped his decision to go into primary care medicine. He listened with great interest as I described the work I was doing in helping hospice patients and their families capture on video their life stories to be shared with future generations. We agreed that we have been touched and enriched by the stories of the hospice patients we had come to know.

Stories are powerful and can change lives—whether they are the stories told in blogs or novels, shared at airport gates or on airplanes, or offered by families who fully understand the finiteness of life and appreciate the importance of capturing those stories before they disappear forever.

My experience has taught me that everyone has an important story to tell, stories that define and explain their lives.

In addition, stories can persuade and influence people in ways that logical arguments and research often cannot. They can touch the human heart in ways that overcome intellectual defenses to new ideas and practices and that replace resignation with a sense of possibility and hopefulness.

Carefully-selected and well-told stories enable administrators and teachers to deepen understanding, create empathy, share values, describe a course of action, shape culture, build community, and motivate action.

What’s on your mind?

• What’s your experience with the power of stories as a teaching tool and as a means of influence, both as a storyteller and a listener?

Everyone has an important story to tell

Everyone has a story to tell, and, given an opportunity, we all want to tell the important stories of our lives— stories that explain who we are and where we came from, stories that prove we existed and mattered, stories about the people and events that affected our lives. And we can all learn from one another’s stories.

There is no day more appropriate to invite that storytelling than today, which is the 5th anniversary of the “National Day of Listening.”

“On the day after Thanksgiving, StoryCorps asks everyone to take a few minutes to record an interview with a loved one,” the web site of the National Day of Listening recommends.

“You can use recording equipment that is readily available to you, such as computers, iPhones, and tape recorders, along with StoryCorps’ free Do It-Yourself Instruction Guide.”

The lesson that everyone has an important story to tell has been reinforced time and again for me as a hospice volunteer who is privileged to videotape hospice patients talking about their lives in conversation with family members.

All that is required of us is to extend the invitation and to listen deeply without interruption to those stories. Once the conversation begins, it’s likely to proceed almost effortlessly, at least in my experience.

Some possible questions include:

• What elders or events influenced the person you’ve become?
• How would you like to be remembered?
• What advice would you like to pass along to your children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, or others in your life?

There’s no gift more important and precious that human beings can give one another than our undivided attention and genuine interest in the stories we all have to tell. When that attention promotes storytelling across generations, it is a gift that benefits its recipients for decades to come, particularly when those stories are preserved on video or with voice recordings.

What’s on your mind?

• How have stories and storytelling shaped your life?

• To whom would you like to reach out—an elder, a family member or friend, a veteran or active duty military (a special StoryCorps focus this year), a colleague, or a neighbor, for example—to invite his or her storytelling?