A lot of the organizational and school leadership literature I read starts out with the premise that we live in an increasingly complex world, and that the degree of complexity is increasing exponentially.  In other words, the future is a bully who is coming to steal your lunch.

That’s why when I saw the workshop title “Unleashing Large-Scale Social Change” at this week’s Carnegie Summit, I immediately registered.  The session was led by Becky Margiotta and Joe McCannon from the Billions Institute.  I was drawn to the audacious belief that as individuals and organizations, we can influence and shape aspects of the increasingly complex world we all live in.  Perhaps we can even be strategic about how we shape our broader environment.

So, here are 3 major takeaways from my learning today about how to unleash large-scale social change.

Get out of your sector 

Most of us like to talk to people who think like we do.  When we are talking with likeminded professionals whose expertise is similar to ours, we often default to communication shorthand that draws on shared heuristics and  jargon.  It feels good to speak the language.  It feels efficient and reinforces our own sense of expertise and belonging.

That all comes to a screeching halt when you add people to the conversation who don’t necessarily speak your language.  It slows down communication and forces you to explain yourself.  It lends itself to a fresh reflection on your work.

One of the welcome surprises in my session today was the opportunity to interact and learn from non K-12 educators and administrators.  At one point we engaged in a problem solving activity where we formed small groups to give us feedback on challenges we’re facing in moving our work forward.  My small group had a researcher from a for-profit organization, a higher education administrator, and an HR director from a philanthropic foundation.  The group’s collective feedback was insightful and sometimes surprising.

Large scale social change, by definition, engages broader groups and coalitions of people.  We are hoping to connect and impact people whose worldview and expertise don’t match our own.  That suggests we assemble diverse, multidisciplinary teams and embrace the opportunity for our ideas to be analyzed, contested, and refined.

Change happens in the field

 Stop perseverating on planning.  Stop strategizing all day.  Get in the field and test your ideas.  Creating a culture of change and improvement happens when leadership adopts an obsession with what is happening in the field.  Then lead from the field.  It’s Seth Godin’s invitation to “ship it.”  It’s Nike’s invocation to “just do it.”

One of the most powerful ideas that struck me hard was something I already knew. Improvement happens when you are out there doing the work, collecting data about the work you are doing, reflecting on that data, and iterating towards the final goal.  It’s the cycle of inquiry.  It’s improvement science 101.

Being in the field can speed up our iteration cycle.  We’re there when the work is happening.  We’re there with the practitioners.  When the cycle has to filter back through a dense bureaucracy – organizational hierarchies, governing boards, standing committees – it slows down.

Instead of sitting back, receiving reports and making judgements about the work, we should be where the work is happening – identifying, documenting, and celebrating success stories.  Large scale change is unleashed when the potential for success becomes tangible.

Losing Control

So much of the conversation today can be distilled down to one word.  Fear.  Fear of public failure.  Fear of disappointing people we care about.  Perhaps the most pernicious fear we discussed was the fear of losing control.  Bureaucracies are designed to exercise control – we want to maintain our aura of expertise, minimize liability, and guarantee outcomes.

There’s a problem, however.  To keep up with the broader demands of our shifting world, we have to do things we don’t yet know how to do.  That means we would have to acknowledge that our expertise is limited.  We would have to risk trying new things, and we wouldn’t know for certain if we’d get it right.  We have to learn.

The challenge gets even more acute when we are trying to move from organizational responses to external stimuli, to an organization trying to shape the external context.   Our risk of losing control goes up as more stakeholders engage the issue.  Public failure is now a strong possibility.  So we back off.  We decide it’s better to play it safe.

“Write down up to three words that best describe your experience with math in school.”  That was the opening prompt for my day of professional development last Friday.  Somehow, I found myself at a table of math lovers, but around the room the immediate reaction was much more visceral.  “I try to block that part of school out of my mind,” was one impromptu response.  Then we stood and grouped ourselves into one of three affinity groups – whether our math experiences had generally been negative, mixed, or positive.  The groups were pretty evenly divided.  Insulted.  Confused.  Frustrating.  Those were just a few words people in the negative group used to describe their math experience in school.  That didn’t reflect my experience at all, and I wasn’t the only member of my group to use words like fun and satisfying.

What in the world happened here?  We went around the circle, and participants did a little self-analysis to determine how we could come to such disparate conclusions.

A few interesting patterns started to surface.  One was that many of the members of our class described having had a generally positive experience “until that one class…”  That’s the class when they started to struggle, and then, to seal the deal, they were basically told directly by a teacher that they weren’t cut out for math.  One participant reported that he was told in no uncertain terms that he was dumb.  The lingering pain associated with these stories was tangible.

The entire time I was listening to these accounts, I was thinking hard about why my experiences had been so different.  Now, by 2nd grade I had been told I wasn’t gifted (I don’t believe gifted programs are typically designed to serve truly gifted students, but that’s a conversation for a different post).  I had received my share of “Needs improvement” on my elementary report cards.  Average is probably the best word to describe my performance.

Despite my ordinariness as a student, I developed a love of math.  But why?  Well, this is hardly a scientific study that can isolate the significant variables in my life that led me to love math.  Yet as I stood in the circle, something jumped out at me that I hadn’t really ever considered.

Some of my earliest memories as a child are of our annual visits to my great grandparents’ house.  We lived in Arizona, and their double-wide trailer in Laguna Beach, CA was a magical place.  Amongst the many wonders of their little home, was my great grandpa’s puzzle closet.  My great grandpa Hind loved puzzles, and he had a wonderful collection of math games and mind teasers.  I spent countless hours trying to match numbers, arrange colors, untie knots, and unlock boxes.  Sometimes great grandpa helped me pick out a puzzle that matched my very basic skill level.  Sometimes I was informed a puzzle was off limits – I was simply not prepared and needed more practice before attempting to solve.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve always approached math as a game.  A puzzle that has a solution. When I couldn’t solve a problem, it just meant I wasn’t ready yet, or needed more guidance.  I didn’t have any problem when a problem required additional time – it just meant the puzzle was harder to solve.  I never took it personally.

My absolute favorite math activities were often complicated word problems, or even better, logic puzzles.  My 5th grade math teacher, Mr. Christensen, took notice of this interest, and started feeding me lots of logic puzzles.  I gobbled them up.  Then he chose me to represent the school at Math Challenge Day – a district-wide math competition.  I still remember how proud and excited I felt to participate.

Math instruction is a tough nut to crack, and certainly my over-simplified explanation here does not adequately capture the complexity of our math challenges in schools.  Yet I can’t help but think that my great grandpa’s collection of mind teasers, together with the encouragement of a few observant teachers, had an outsize influence on my relationship with math.