Every Thursday evening during my year-long Master’s program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, our cohort of 42 aspiring principals gathered to interact with a guest speaker.  Our first speaker was Richard Elmore, one of the gurus of school improvement.  You can imagine our collective excitement, and perhaps a little sense of entitlement, as we gathered that first week to engage in a discussion with such a well-known scholar.

Elmore’s first statement revealed he wasn’t quite as impressed with us as we seemed to be with ourselves.

“I think it’s important to start by acknowledging the fact that there have been a lot more talented educators than you all who had the intention of improving public education who have ultimately failed in their effort.”

The moment was almost cliché.  Here we were at one of the great institutions of higher education, being told that we likely would fail in what we had come hoping to accomplish. That evening with Elmore became an ongoing point of reference for our cohort – it was a testy interaction from start to finish.

What seems clear to me now, is that we all arrived with a bloated sense of our own potential for effectiveness.  All administrators seem to have an effectiveness bias, assuming that their ideas are the ones that will garner results – and you can imagine the implicit bias lurking for a cohort of Harvard-trained school leaders.

In that context, it’s clear why an attribute such as humility is so crucial.  Yes, we need confidence to move a vision forward, but we also need a healthy dose of self-skepticism and an openness to exploring our our weaknesses and blind spots.  We need to recognize our inability to control all of the variables, and embrace all the different actors in the system who ultimately determine the fate of our leadership initiatives.  We need humility.

I was reminded of that in a powerful way last Friday.  We’ve had a shortage of substitute teachers in our district for several years now, and the challenge is never more acute than on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend.  Several principals reached out to district office staff in hopes of enlisting additional classroom support.  I elected to run over to one of our intermediate schools for a few hours to help out.

I was excited to spend a few hours in the classroom.  I felt a little like Superman – coming over to save the day.  I genuinely love teaching and interacting with students in the classroom, and I thought this would be just another successful opportunity to build relationships with students and help them learn.  I would be the sub they wouldn’t forget.

I was very wrong.

I guess perhaps it might be accurate to say that my little tribe of 6th graders that day had an experience they would not forget.  Honestly, I got my butt kicked.  Luckily, there weren’t any major incidents.  Nobody got in a fight or cursed me out.  Our kids are far too respectful for that.  But I absolutely could not get them to 1) stay in their seats and 2) focus on the academic task.  It was like I wasn’t there.  I’m definitely not an invisible presence.  I’m 6’2” and I was absolutely assertive in the instructional strategies I attempted to employ.  I’m also a fluent Spanish speaker, and made it clear that I was as “with-it” a substitute as they would experience.

I think I lost them the moment I wrote my name on the front board.  “Dr. Allen.”  Perhaps I was a little hasty in putting my freshly minted new title to use.  They were a little confused.  “So, you’re a doctor? Why are you a substitute teacher then?”  I tried to explain, but they’d moved on.

It became clear, very quickly, that keeping my new friends in their seats for the next 2 hours was going to be a challenge.  I reminded them that they needed to ask permission to leave their seat.  30 seconds later, four students were up and about – all with legitimate excuses – sharpening pencils, getting tissues, putting marbles in the class jar.  It was like keeping water in a cup full of holes.  It was also obvious that I had no idea how the classroom systems worked, and my students were more than happy to take advantage of my ignorance.  At one point with a few minutes left in class, I paused and realized I didn’t know what to do.

Humility is about framing challenges with a sense of curiosity, as opposed to assuming we’ve already got things figured out.  It helps us look inward, instead of externalizing our problems to the people around us.  It keeps us teachable – which ironically, can be a hard characteristic to embrace for educators.  We fain expertise as a hedge against the things we can’t quite explain or the challenges we can’t quite overcome.  We have to always appear competent, especially to those who would judge our work without having much idea of the challenge of classroom teaching.  It’s easy to get defensive.

Last week provided me with an unexpected reminder that we can’t expect those around us to learn if we aren’t teachable and open to learning ourselves.  And that takes humility.

When I was accepted into my doctorate program at Berkeley, my faculty advisor gave me two pieces of advice:

Don’t change jobs.  Don’t have any children.

In the second year of coursework, my wife gave birth to twins, doubling our number of kids.  Once my coursework was completed, I switched jobs and left the Bay Area for Southern California.  And then, just for good measure, we added baby #5 this past year.  When I look back over the past four years, the immensity of the work starts to stare back at me.

I think about being the principal of a high school while simultaneously taking courses every other Friday night and all-day Saturday for the first two years of the program.  The greatest part of the sacrifice was shouldered by my wife, Lynzie, whose already long weeks of me leading a high school morphed into weekends of graduate school.  The “slow” days of summer turned into three full days of classes each week.  I religiously used the 45-minute BART ride back and forth from San Francisco across the Bay to Berkeley to do my readings and pound out my papers.  One Friday evening, I made half the journey to class in the back of an ambulance with one of my students.  On several occasions, I found myself on the bus at 11 pm after Friday night class, going back up the hill to chaperone a school dance.  And then the twins came.  Honestly, it’s all a little hazy.

Despite the very real time challenges – the experience of doctorate coursework was absolutely exhilarating.  The readings, the discussions, the arguments.  The learning was intense, all-encompassing, and exactly what I was hoping for when I started the program.  I’m deeply grateful, to my advisor, to the professors, and to my fellow students, for creating such a fabulous and challenging learning experience and opportunity.

And then we moved to Southern California and I started a new job.  We were excited for a new adventure, but mourned leaving San Francisco and the friends we came to treasure there.  On more than one occasion during those first weeks, Lynzie and I cried together – a combination of our exhaustion and perhaps even a little fear.  All the while, the dissertation timeline marched on.  Orals examinations, proposal hearings, bimonthly check-ins via Skype, and in-person consultations with my advisor any time I could get myself up to campus.   Nights, mornings, weekends – whenever a spare moment presented itself.

Then the data collection began at the beginning of this year.  I had to wait until after my proposal hearing to start the collection, which meant I couldn’t start until mid-September, exactly the same time that Lynzie was due to give birth to Gabriel.  I pushed myself to conduct my baseline interviews.  I was relieved when September 19th rolled around – the day I’d set aside to conduct my interviews – and the baby still hadn’t come.  Of course that changed at 2 pm as I was finishing my final interview, when Lynzie texted me that her water had broke.  Gabriel was born just after 5 pm that same day.

As the Fall morphed into Winter and Spring, the writing intensified.  I set my weekly goals, either coming in early to work to put in an hour a few days a week, or setting aside half a Saturday to focus and make progress. As March and April rolled around, I adopted a new strategy, which was to lock myself away until I had a finished draft each time that I could send back to my advisor for review and feedback.  That ate up two full days of Spring Break, and the bulk of a few weekends.

Through all of this, Lynzie has been my absolute rock.  We are an absolute team and I am deeply grateful that we’ve been able to tackle this opportunity and challenge together.  Her capacity for work is unparalleled, and she helped me keep the faith in the difficult moments.  Each time feedback came back, she was there to help me square my shoulders and figure out where to fit the 15-20 hours of thinking and writing I knew it would take to make my revisions.  Add to her encouragement the ongoing support and encouragement of my family members, friends, and colleagues at work.  Everyone has been deeply supportive, and I’ve relied on that positive feedback when doubts that I’d ever actually finish crept in.

And then, I finally received the email from my advisor that he was satisfied with the work, and that I could send it along to my other committee members for review and revision.  The timeline drew tight, and still I worried whether I could complete everything on time.  A few more late nights and long weekends and somehow, miraculously, I had all 3 required signatures, just 24 hours before the deadline.

Don’t move.  Don’t have (more) children.  It wasn’t necessarily bad advice. But it also didn’t take into consideration the incredible people around me who have made this possible.

People have been asking me how I’m feeling about it all.  Yes, I feel relieved.  Yes, I feel a sense of pride and satisfaction in the work.  But mostly, I feel grateful – for the opportunity and privilege I’ve had to study and learn, and to the incredible people who have rallied around me.

If you find yourself on a quest for maximizing your productivity, you’ll eventually encounter a fundamental paradox: efficiency does not play well with new learning.  We extol the virtue of cutting costs and finding efficiencies.  We similarly describe ourselves as lifelong learners who embrace the opportunity to learn new skills and try on new approaches.  Predictably, we like to see ourselves as deeply committed to both.  But learning, perhaps by definition, is not efficient.

Take driving, for instance.  We all recall the excitement and agony of learning to drive. Some of us, mercifully, escaped our first years of driving without a major accident.  I include myself in that group – plowing into my closed garage door excepted.  Driving is a critical skill in our modern society, and so we persist in our learning, risks notwithstanding.  Efficiency in driving emerges as we practice over and over again.  You’ve probably heard about the 10,000 Hour Rule that Malcolm Gladwell has made common knowledge.  Expertise and efficiency come with lots and lots of practice as skills move into our muscle memory and well worn cognitive tracks.  It’s hard to remember not being able to drive.  It becomes intuitive.

That’s the beauty of efficiency.  We practice something over and over until we internalize it and can perform tasks with less attention and cognitive load.  Our brains love the efficiency.  If you don’t believe me, you should read Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow – perhaps my favorite non-fiction read ever – which outlines just how eager our brains are to take shortcuts to preserve energy.  We actually are predisposed to think less if we can.  We crave cognitive efficiency.

On an individual level, what does it mean to say we are a lifelong learner?  I assume it means we are deliberately choosing, at times and with some regularity, to be uncomfortable and inefficient.  That’s the genius of the “5-hour rule” you may have read about – carving out 5 hours a week dedicated solely to new learning.  That’s the value in reading books that directly challenge your well tread assumptions and experimenting with routines and practices that inevitably feel clumsy at the start.  It means committing your finite resources – time, energy, and money – to activities that you know will be deeply inefficient for some time.   You hope the learning will pay off in new skills and efficiencies later down the road – but often there’s uncertainty involved.

On an institutional level, what does it mean to say we are a learning organization?  It’s not hard to buy-in to the widespread belief that society is accelerating towards ever greater complexity.  We’re living in a moment where the uncertainty feels palpable.  We’re in the age of disruption.  Entire industries seem to be born over the course of a few short years, while others die out just as quickly.  It’s popular to say that the solution is to foster a learning organization – an attribute where new learning is constantly happening across the organization to address the ever-shifting landscape.  As Elmore would put it, we are constantly asking people to do things that they don’t yet know how to do.

But let’s be honest.  Learning is expensive.  Efficiency comes in doing what you already know how to do.  Just do more of it…faster.

In the context of schools, when budgets tighten, often the first thing out the door is a commitment to professional learning and willingness to experiment with new ideas.  We adopt a hunker-down attitude.  We do only what is deemed necessary.  This is a predictable reaction, and in the context of limited resources and resource needy schools and students, perhaps even defensible.

But it’s a devil’s bargain.

Which is why even in the hard times, you need to create spaces where, rather than doubling down on efficiency, you invest in your creative solutions and moonshot ideas. This is what Tushman & O’Reilly call building an “ambidextrous organization,” where you reap the benefits of efficiencies, while simultaneously encouraging and supporting teams within the organization that are deeply immersed in the difficult work of learning and experimenting with new ideas.  You embrace incremental improvement while incubating the possibilities for revolutionary transformation.

Be assured, if you don’t make that investment, there are others out there who will and are, and they will be ready to eat your lunch.