closingkeynote

Closing General Session

Raymond J. McNulty, Senior Vice President, International Center for Leadership in Education July 3, 2007

Why Aren’t We There Yet? What Will It Take?

We are constantly seeking to improve our schools and our results. Why then is change so difficult and so often met with resistance? What about the need to create a strong and stable environment for our students? Are change and stability in conflict? This presentation will offer some thoughts, strategies, and hopes on how we can help our students achieve their dreams.

School reinvention (work smarter)

Disruptive innovation and the innovator’s dilemma

Disruptive change = creates positive turbulence Innovator’s dilemma = performance drops off before change can be created (a.k.a. implementation dip / possibility curve)

Time frame = 5 +/-2 years to affect chance

Four Leadership Lessons

1. Education institutions tend to be allergic to conflict
 * Conflict is dangerous
 * Conflict is primary engine of creativity and motivation
 * Courage to surface conflicts

2. Communication is in the mind of the recipient
 * People tolerate your ideas, but they act on their own
 * Use emotion as well as logic (limbic system – emotion – is more powerful than neo cortex – logic)

3. Culture of change
 * Detailed complexity – determining all the variables in advance (this is NOT reality)
 * Dynamic complexity – unexpected, unplanned for situations that surface as you implement change effort (this IS reality)

//Peter Senge – unplanned factors are NORMAL//

4. Most leaders die with their mouths open
 * Must want to listen
 * Listening is fueled by curiosity
 * Enemy of curiosity = grandiosity (belief that you have all the answers)

__Next Steps__

Jim Collins – __Good to Great and the Social Sectors__

__Four stages that build a great significant system__

1. Disciplined people
 * Commit to engagement and hard work
 * Attract the best and most committed

2. Disciplined thought
 * Raise different but important questions
 * Make thought leadership a strategic imperative
 * Create and support an internal environment for critical conversations
 * Don’t let the toxic group drive the conversations (or stifle it)

3. Disciplined action
 * Transform strategic planning into strategic thinking and action
 * Ratchet up the effort to grow beyond comfort zone
 * Go to deliberate practice (push beyond level of competence)

4. Building greatness that lasts
 * Find courage to critically evaluate your work and change
 * Be transparent in the process

We can rationalized the failures of the post or we can learn from them and face them