Isobel Stevenson

In class tonight, we played a game.  Great exercise, and I think everyone involved learned a lot.  My favorite part was when someone pointed out to me that you could think of the game as a game, or you could think of it as a simulation, and it would change the way you played it.  Game implies competition, comparison to others, numerical targets, and so on.  Simulation has a different set of connotations, including strategy, and analysis.  I immediately made the connection to what I know about performance goals and learning goals.

You tell people that the goal is to meet a target and they don’t know everything they need to know to meet the goal, and they scrabble around taking shots in the dark to see what works.  You tell them instead that their goal is to learn what strategies are most effective in whatever the purpose of the simulation is, and they are more deliberate, they take their time, they evaluate what strategies work and why they work, and they learn how to be effective.  And of course the irony is that they typically reach a higher performance than the people who were focused on the target.

So one lesson from the game is that learning goals are more powerful than performance goals when you don’t already know how to reach a target.  And then there’s the bigger picture lesson, that they way we conceptualize a situation dictates to a large extent how we behave in that situation.  And we get to choose that.  We get to choose the theory that gives us the most control.  I love it.

In my last post, I wrote about a book about feedback, which includes thoughts about how people receive feedback and put it to use.  Or not.  It’s a subject I think about a lot.

As part of my own exercises in humility and personal growth, I keep track of how long it takes me to see the value of the feedback I have received.  Last January, while I was in Santa Barbara finishing up my coaching certification, I got some feedback and it took me at least a couple of days to figure out my own reaction to the feedback.  But today I understood the validity of some feedback I received in May, and I’m wondering, is this a personal record?  Has it ever taken me five months to sort out why the feedback giver was right?  Because, annoyingly, at some level they are always right.

Do you think that we get increasingly resistant to feedback as we get older?  We’ve been doing something for a while and we think we’ve got it figured out, and we don’t see why we should pay attention to what others think.  Or we trust our own judgment more than we trust others’ (there is research evidence for that) and so we think we always know better.  Or we are simply getting cynical.

Whatever the reason, it was good to be reminded today of the Zen concept of beginner’s mind, to not lose the openness to experience of the novice, and that includes welcoming feedback.  I am appropriately humbled.

Just to be clear, I did actually read some fiction this summer.  Although now I come to think about it, David Lodge’s Thinks, while a novel, is all about cognition and consciousness.  I highly recommend it.  I re-read that while we were traveling.  And of course, I re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Who didn’t?

Below are my synopses of my recent reading that I think everyone in a leadership position should read.

What Did You Say?

This book is a classic among organizational development (OD) consultants.  It was written by three people, two of whom I know personally.  Charlie Seashore is a professor at Fielding, so I know him through that connection.  He is a darling of the students, for his ability to listen avidly and then say just the right thing.  Charlie is Edie Seashore’s husband, and she too is a bit of a legend, having been a pioneer in the OD field, and perhaps the first woman to be influential in the field.  I know Edie through my connection with Charlie, and she too is a very nice person.

The book is a very down-to-earth rendering of how to give and receive, and how NOT to give and receive, feedback.  As they point out, giving feedback seems to be a primal necessity, and there are ways to do it well.

I love the parts about examining the reasons for giving feedback, and how the feedback always has more to do with the giver than the receiver.  I have been working with the principal prep students at DU on mental models, and giving feedback is a clear example of the importance of mental models.  My feedback to you about how you look is based on my mental model of how you should look. My feedback to you about what’s going on in your classroom is based on my mental model of what should be going on in your classroom, and that may or may not match your mental model.

The book doesn’t address the situation where it is the job of the supervisor to give feedback; the supervisor may not have the option to keep quiet.  Nevertheless, it is a practical book, grounded in theory, and charmingly written.

Two books by Gary Klein

I came across Gary Klein’s work while reading about the acquisition of expertise.  His work diverges from the

In that he actually went into the field to study how experts make decisions, and discovered that it has little to do with how decision-making is taught.  People are taught to list all the options and carefully evaluate each of them, and that is appropriate for some situations, such as buying a new refrigerator.  But in many situations, that is not how experts go about their business.  He started by interviewing fire chiefs, and discovered that they do not see themselves as making decisions at all.  They see themselves as evaluating a situation, and once they know what is going on, they know what to do.  In some cases, there is a cascading set of options.  For example, such as a pilot’s attempts to mitigate in some way a crash situation, the most desirable option may be chosen, and if that doesn’t work the next most desirable option is chosen, and so on.  Each time an option doesn’t work, it provides information to the expert about the situation and feeds into the decision-making process.  Sources of Power is mostly about his research among experts, and Streetlights and Shadows is more of a meta-analysis of what we know about decision-making.  But the two books are not distinct from each other in my mind, and the stories in both are compelling and enjoyable.

The Social Animal

I was given this book, otherwise I may not have read it, as Brooks’ writing style is often glib and sometimes abrasive.  He makes remarks that would be funny if the intent were to write humorous social commentary, but in a book that is ostensibly a summary of research, the effect is jarring and unkind.

Nevertheless, his trope of using the lives of a mythical couple to illustrate his take on research about the role of the subconscious is actually quite engaging. His major point is that we are not as rational as we like to think, and emotion, rather than being a hindrance that interferes with our logical capacity, is actually essential. He takes us through a wide range of settings, including childhood development, school, falling in love, the ups and downs of adult life, and retirement.  This is like Malcolm Gladwell meets George Carlin.  I know, that’s a little mind-boggling, but it’s a pretty fair assessment of the book, I think.  And funnily enough, I found I was really interested in what happens next to Harold and Erica.

Why Everyone (else) is a Hypocrite

This was the most challenging of the books on this list, because it was most at odds with my schema for not only how the mind works (actually, that part made total sense) but other of his related propositions.

The author is an evolutionary psychologist.  This was a new one on me, but apparently that’s the subfield of psychology that considers the brain in terms of what makes sense from the perspective of survival and success of the species.  He looks at questions like why it would be the case that we would both want to lose weight and want another serving of penne alfredo.  If we want to lose weight, why would we sabotage our own efforts by doing something that conflicts with that goal?

His answer is that it is a mistake to think of our minds as a singular entity.  Instead, it is more accurate to employ the metaphor of a smartphone, which runs many different apps, all of which have a different purpose, and do not necessarily communicate with each other.

He disagrees with some big ideas that I have always relied on, like self-efficacy, psychological defense mechanisms, and positive psychology.  I had to really think about how to reconcile his argument with my reasons for believing these ideas to be important, and I think I may have figured out a couple of things, but more of those later…

Happy reading.

The books

Brooks, D. (2011). The Social Animal. New York, NY: Random House.

Klein, G. A. (1999). Sources of power: How people make decisions: MIT Press.

Klein, G. A. (2009). Streetlights and shadows: searching for the keys to adaptive decision making: MIT Press.

Kurzban, R. (2011). Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: Evolution and the modular mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lodge, D. (2002). Thinks. Harmondsworth,UK: Penguin.

Rowling, J. K. (2007). Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Scholastic.

Seashore, C. N., Seashore, E. W., & Weinberg, G. M. (1997). What did you say?: The art of giving and receiving feedback. Columbia, MD: Bingham House Books

What a wonderful summer for movies: KFP 2, Cars 2, Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer, the final Harry Potter (a bittersweet event), Mr. Popper’s Penguins, the third Transformers… How fabulous.

Kung Fu Panda is one of my favorite movies (see this post) and the boys and I went to see the sequel on Sunday.  What a great sequel.  It had parts that made me cry (hmm, should I say which ones, or would that be giving away too much?) and parts that made me laugh (not the visual gags so much, although there are many, but some of the dialog).

And just like the last movie, it contains great messages.  Or maybe one big message: where you came from is not who you are; what happens to you is your past, not your future; knowledge will not heal you; you get to choose who you want to be.

It is very interesting to me that I should be moved by deep thoughts delivered by Jack Black, when typically I am so skeptical of even the best self-help books.  I think the fact that the movie doesn’t take itself so terribly seriously is a big part of its effectiveness; there is plenty of bathos.  And ultimately the panda is a very appealing character; his big talk masks a great deal of self-doubt, his defenses start out strong but crumble quickly, and despite his success he has not lost his humility.

And the climactic scene is such a great visual metaphor: taking the negative energy and figuring out how not to be destroyed by it, and instead using it as a weapon against its creator.  And still being willing to forgive.

You must see this movie.

Here is a link to Sarah Sparks’ Education Week blog, talking about the report that’s just been issued by the Census Bureau on education spending in the US in 2009.  These reports have a time lag because of the collection and analysis of the data.  And here’s the link to the report itself.

My own state of Colorado comes in at #39 among the states, which I think is an improvement from when I got here in 1998; at that time, bumper stickers were popular proclaiming that Colorado was #48 in education funding.

And I confess that it is mind boggling that New York spends $18,000 per pupil.  At 25 kids in a class (and many Colorado classrooms have more than that), that’s a quarter of a million dollars more per classroom.  I can’t even imagine having that amount of money to spend.  Totally incredible.

My friend Leigh writes a very nice blog; here’s her latest posting.  It’s about being a team player, so in the spirit of what she’s written, here’s my first memory of being a team player.

We lived in the Middle East for a while, in Kuwait, which I really liked.  I keep finding friends from that time on Facebook, which makes me very happy.  My dad’s company had a small club, with a swimming pool and a gym and tennis courts.  Very pleasant.

One year (or maybe every year, but I only remember one) there was a swimming tournament, which I entered.  I don’t remember how or why, it’s not typically the kind of thing I would do.  And at some point I tried to get out of it, but my dad wouldn’t let me.

I am not a good swimmer, and I think I faked a couple of cramps to get out of practice.  And I was the only English speaker among the participating kids, so they chatted away in Arabic while looking at me.  Then I started to speak to them in English, which totally stopped them.  I don’t really know why, I wasn’t angry or anything.  But I suspect that English was the language of power and that that was another indication that you can use language to exert rank.

One of the events was a relay.  You had to swim a length of the pool wearing a dishdasha (one of the long cotton garments worn by Arab men), get out, take it off, and get it on the next member of your team, who had to swim back and repeat the exercise until all four of you had swum.  Now, we were not a strong team.  I don’t remember anything about the other kids.  We were not particularly good swimmers.  We did not even speak the same language.  But we figured out how to work together, and we figured out to get the dishdasha on and off quickly, by having someone stand on the diving platform above the swimmer getting out of the water and pulling up on the thing, which was of course wet, heavy and unwieldy.

And we won.  So my lesson was that strategy and teamwork will beat speed and technique.

I have been doing a LOT of research on teacher selection, supervision, and evaluation, and I have learned a lot.  I wish I had more time to write about what I’ve learned on this blog, but alas…

I already knew that Reagan attempted in the early 1980s a clampdown on teachers’ unions much as is going on right now–with little impact, obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t be living through it again now.  And today I’ve been reading studies that were done around the same time, and since, with regard to the selection, supervision, and evaluation of teachers.  And it is remarkable how little has changed.

For example, the finding that principals are not generally held accountable for evaluating teachers, nor do principals tend to work with teachers who are in difficulty.  And that principals typically spend between 2.5% -10% of their time in classrooms.  And that principals are typically not well prepared to supervise teachers.

Just now, I read a report that made me laugh.  The summary starts:

The new concern for the quality of education and of teachers is being translated into merit-pay, career ladder, and master teacher policies that presuppose the existence of effective teacher evaluation systems.

It is funny because it was written in 1984, but it could have been published in this morning’s New York Times.  What is wrong with us, do you think, that one generation doesn’t seem to learn much from the last?  We are currently going through an upheaval in education that we went through 25 years ago to no avail, and I can’t find much indication that we are paying much attention to what happened then.  Who said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it?

I like the Harvard Business Review, although it’s a mystery to me why it’s so expensive.  I would tell you to go out and buy this month’s issue, but I think you’ve already got plans for the $16.95 it would set you back.

Luckily, through the wonders of the internet, you can read most (maybe all) of the magazine: http://hbr.org/magazine.  Please, as a favor to me, please read Amy Edmondson’s article–she writes great stuff on team and organizational learning, which has a lot to do with tacit knowledge and how the team is able to leverage failure.  And if you like that, read the article about why leaders don’t learn from success.  And if that’s just whetting your appetite, you might even try a paper that I wrote about systems and failure (but that’s really dense), or a previous blog post.

All this is to say that I think thinking about failure is really important–to learn, to be humble, to find balance, to grow, too decide what is important.

This is not to say that I have figured out everything I need to about failure.  Sometimes I think I’m talking about personal insight, sometimes about learning, sometimes about competence, and sometimes about forgiveness.  Clearly I have a lot of thinking left to do.