[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program David Price. David Price, OBE, is an international expert in how organizations of all types learn, innovate, and make themselves fit for the future. He's a highly sought-after public speaker, and his work has been praised by countless organizational clients, as well as Sir Ken Robinson and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. He is the author of two best-selling books, Open, How We'll Work, Live, and Learn in the Future, and The Power of Us, How We Connect, Act, and Innovate Together, which we're here to talk about today.
[00:46] Announcer:
And now our feature presentation.
[00:48] SPEAKER_01:
David, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thanks, Justin. Well, I'm excited to get into the power of us because I think over the past couple of years, we have realized just how important it is to think about how we work together and in education in particular. We've long paid lip service to the idea of collaboration. We've set aside time for collaboration. We do professional development, but often we don't really think too much about how we work together.
[01:13]
We set aside the time, we make an agenda, but we're missing a lot of maybe the context and the skills that we need to do that effectively. So very excited to speak about your book today. Set that up for us a little bit.
[01:24] SPEAKER_00:
It reminds me of my favorite quote about collaboration. I think it was a US general who once described it as an unnatural act between non-consenting adults, which is kind of, you know, we say it's really good for the kids to be collaborating, you know, the workplace of the future demands that they do all that. But as educators, quite often we enjoy being the kind of What I was trying to do within the book was to say, what is it about those really innovative communities that makes them so collaborative and so productive? and such engaging places in which to work and i use that the term communities in the broadest possible sense so i looked at everything from wd-40 you know the lubricant manufacturers through to patagonia as well as a whole bunch of schools but i also looked outside of that at the people who are
[02:21]
i guess i'd call them user innovators eric von hippel who's a professor at mit was the first one who coined that term and it seems to me that user innovators have risen to the fore in the last certainly the last 10 years which is these groups of people who get together and they will either create products or services from scratch or they'll take existing products and services and they will hack them into something that better suits their needs. The whole idea of the hackathon, if you think about all of the incredible inventions of the 20th and now I guess 21st century, Many of them have come from these kind of communities of user innovators. The personal laptop was one such. The World Wide Web is another. So what I wanted to do was to find out what are the characteristics of these and how can we bring them in to the more formal organization?
[03:18]
So that's kind of at the heart of the book.
[03:21] SPEAKER_01:
It's one of those things that it feels like we know it when we see it, when we see an innovative professional environment. We want to work there. We like what they're doing, but we have difficulty copying or imitating what they're doing. And sometimes our takeaway is, well, we need to have more meetings. And then everybody realizes, well, we don't necessarily want more meetings. So take us into some of the heart of that innovative culture.
[03:41]
What are some of the things that we might miss if we just try to copy the surface features that really allow innovation to thrive?
[03:47] SPEAKER_00:
I probably studied about 40 organizations and I looked as well at my own experiences. And for a long time, I was asked to go into organizations, both education and outside of the educational sphere. And in inverted commas, asked to make them more creative, as if there was something dysfunctional about them. you know i would do the typical things and by the end of a couple of days you'd have the wall full of post-it notes and then you'd get to it you'd have to get to it so i'd say to people what's going on here because you seem to be really creative you've got tons of great ideas so what's holding you back and then it would always come out you know and it was things like oh the executive won't let us get access to the internet or they have their own canteen, they got their own parking spaces. They were all cultural issues. I realized that you could spend as much time as you like on creativity and collaboration.
[04:44]
If you didn't get the culture right within the organization, you're just going to be spinning your wheels. So that's what I kind of was looking for was to say, are there any kind of common characteristics between let's take a school like New Road School in Santa Monica, which is an incredible school. What are the elements of the culture there that would also be seen in somewhere like WD-40 or some of the NGOs that I looked at? And over the course of kind of three years, I narrowed it down to about eight factors. I'm getting old now, so I have to find ways to remember all this. So if you think of the acronym TEAM, the T stands for trust and transparency.
[05:26]
The E is for engagement and equity. And I think equity became a big thing during the period when I was researching the book. You know, the George Floyd murders happened, Me Too movement. A lot of things brought it to the surface. But also autonomy, which we know from Dan Pink's work anyway. Agency engagement.
[05:44]
and then mastery and meaning and by meaning i don't just mean does an organization have a clear purpose what i mean by that is innovative healthy cultures it seems to me that people actually learn to understand themselves better they understand why they're here and what it is that they want to do with their lives i think really good organizations help them do that So those are eight kind of characteristics put together. And sure enough, you know, most of the organizations had them in abundance. What was fascinating, of course, was I finished the book on around about February 2020, sent it off to the publishers. And then by March 2020, of course, COVID hit. And I contacted the publisher. My editor just said, you're going to have to rewrite it, aren't you?
[06:36]
And I said, yeah. You know, it would be like writing a book about World War II and not mentioning it. So I rewrote it. She gave me three weeks to completely rewrite the book. But the beauty about that experience was I was able to kind of test some of the theories in the book in the light of probably one of the biggest challenges we'd faced as a planet and the organizations in the main that i'd highlighted did incredibly well they responded even if it meant that they completely shifted their focus and what it is that they were there to do but they rallied around they got people together they found really ingenious ways you know you had the mercedes formula one car team who were collaborating with the University College Hospital in London to create continuous breathing machines.
[07:28]
There were all these amazing examples, but also things that were happening in the community when, you know, in the UK here, we couldn't get enough of the personal equipment stuff. So we had user groups, we had kids making 3D printed face shields. And so you had this, I called it mass ingenuity, which was taking place at scale and for me as an educator I just thought this is an incredible opportunity because I saw educators who many of whom had shied away from the notion of online learning and saying that we couldn't possibly do that or we could do it but it would take too long and suddenly they had to do it in two weeks and they did it and so for me it was then a question of how much of this is going to survive
[08:19]
covered when it's over, you know, and it's still not over, but I guess, you know, it's receded into the background. And how much of it will be driven by this desire just to get back to how we were? Because, you know, I understand it. School leaders are just exhausted. It's been an exhausting couple of years. You know, although this was too late to be included in the book, it just seems to me to be ironic that even a global pandemic which did have an impact on people's level of ingenuity.
[08:49]
It seems to me has not been the game changer that I thought it would be. And yet this tiny little chat bot that comes out in December suddenly changes the whole game for everyone. And I don't know what kind of discussions you're having in the US, but I know certainly here in the uk and in australia it's the only thing that people are talking about and for good reason and i think depending upon how you see yourself it's either an aid to that collaboration and ingenuity or it's the devil incarnate you know i i make no bones about it i i sit in the former camp i think it's just inevitable and it's a great opportunity for educators and i don't think this time they have any choice
[09:35] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, you know, probably even between editing and publication, the landscape with that will have changed. We've seen over and over again when we're faced with a crisis, a major challenge, a major disruption or upheaval, you know, we recognize that necessity is the mother of invention and people can rally together in truly remarkable ways to adapt to changing circumstances. But I almost want to ask the opposite question as well. So much in education is cyclical. We get new first graders every year, new ninth graders every year. There's an extent to which stability really is much more the norm in education.
[10:10]
And sometimes we feel like we're fighting the inertia of an overly stable system. But as you have studied organizations like WD-40, to all external... assessments. WD-40 is kind of a boring sounding company.
[10:23]
You know, they've made one product for decades and decades and decades. What could be more stable than that? So what does innovation even look like in the context of stability? You know, we're not, for the most part, starting new companies, new schools. You know, my school, I think, was decades or maybe even 100 years. old at some point, and we're stepping into leadership roles in many cases where we've had many, many predecessors.
[10:46]
We are not hiring all new staff. Take us into some of that tension between continuity and stability and innovation.
[10:53] SPEAKER_00:
I've worked with so many really innovative and inspiring leaders, but if they try to change too much too soon, then people just can't cope with it. I'll give you an example. I did a consultancy about 10 years ago for a school in Australia. The principal there said, find out what's holding us back. We're a long established school, very traditional, and I want change to happen. And our people don't seem to be ready to change.
[11:21]
So I spent a couple of days talking to people. It was quite clear where the problem lay. And I had to say it was a very difficult conversation because the principal said to me, what gives? What's going on here? And I said, well, they are really innovative. I said, but unfortunately, the problem's you.
[11:37]
They feel you don't trust them. And so you're trying to get them to innovate, but through a culture of fear. And that will never work. And it's interesting that you talk about WD-40 because that incredible success that they had with that one product, which now has actually diversified slightly, but it's still the flagship product. You know, everybody's got a can of that underneath their sink in the kitchen.
[12:02] SPEAKER_01:
I had mine out the other day because my chair was squeaking and now my chair is not squeaking, so can't do without it.
[12:06] SPEAKER_00:
Many of the 2000 recorded uses for WD-40. When I went over to San Diego at the headquarters, they have these recently stepped down, Gary Ridge, an Australian who, I guess the company changed the culture of the company. And he did it because in a sense, they'd been almost too successful. And I see this all the time in schools. They were sitting on a river of money, basically. That one product was just bringing in so much revenue.
[12:34]
that they were just having to give it back to the shareholders. And there was a fear of trying anything different. And the irony is, I don't know if you know the story behind how WD-40 got its name, but the WD stands for water displacement. So it was put together by a couple of guys who were working. There was a competition that NASA had in the very early days. Could you create a lubricant that would repel water?
[12:56]
And they had 39 attempts at this water dispersal lubricant before they were successful in the 40th. So he was a company that was kind of established through failure. And yet, as Gary said, they were afraid of making mistakes now. Now that they were incredibly successful. And he said he had to change some of the language which was being used within the company. So, for example, when people would come in and they'd say, oh, Gary, I've screwed up.
[13:26]
He'd say, no, you haven't. It's just that you've had a learning moment. He redefined failure as a learning moment. And he said, all I ask you to do is that you share that learning moment with everyone else in the company. And then hopefully we won't make it again. And that still is to this day part of that culture.
[13:44]
There are many, many things that are great about that culture. But that really resonated with me because when you think about it, schools aren't really allowed to fail. Everyone talks about innovation in education, but no one really allows you to take those kinds of risks. So it's understandable that in a compliance culture, it takes a brave leader to say, we're going to do things differently and it might not work. The irony, I think, is as a leader myself, if I was bringing in a new innovation, I'd explain to the kids and I'd explain to the parents what it was that we were trying to do. And they never had a problem.
[14:22]
They understood. In fact, they enjoyed the fact that they were part of this experiment. They understood it might work and it might not work. It was the educators. And it's as if we've been so conditioned to making sure that our kids succeed all the time. That just makes us risk averse.
[14:38] SPEAKER_01:
And especially the profession-wide and nationwide emphasis on accountability where we're held accountable for results and we know that there's opportunity but also risk in innovation that we may stumble into something that's better. But just as likely or perhaps more likely, we will see a dip. We will see things get worse before they get better or... we could be wrong entirely and things could just get worse and then not get better.
[15:03]
And there's a period of uncertainty and fear when we haven't figured that out yet, right? We're kind of in that post-implementation dip. Hopefully this will get better. Hopefully our investment and risk-taking will pay off, but we're not sure. One of the things that we often encounter that with is curriculum. And often when we adopt a new curriculum, we'll keep the old one here just in case we need to pull in some things from the old curriculum.
[15:25]
And We're not quite sure when to let go of the old, when to really give up on the new, if we're not feeling the results. Talk to us about the leadership that is necessary during that time of uncertainty, because I think you've really hit on something around the fear of changing something that maybe is working to some extent. And we don't want to lose what is working if WD-40 is selling just fine. We don't want to innovate our way out of existence if break what's not broken. So yeah, the leadership side.
[15:52] SPEAKER_00:
That's for sure. And I talk about we have to have a kind of split screen. On the one hand, we're looking on one screen, which is how it has been. But we also have to have the other screen open, which is about how it could be in the future. I think what's been interesting about this whole chat GPT revolution, and I really do think it's not an over-exaggeration to call it that, is that it seems to me that the high stakes accountability has been this dead weight around the necks of educators that has prevented any real innovation at scale. And for a while I thought to myself, you know i've worked trying to bring about innovation kind of top down and i've also spent a lot of time working school by school trying to help them innovate and somewhere you kind of meet in the middle i guess but what i saw on the top down work was that you could encourage people to innovate but really you were at the hands of the powers that be and the powers that be have determined that
[16:53]
Right around the world, for better or for worse, the terminal exam is the thing that should determine our young people's future. I think what's happened over the past 10 years is that they've been a number of voices which have started to say, well, hold on, this doesn't make any sense anymore, because for one thing, it's a very easy system to corrupt. For another, nobody really wants it. The universities aren't happy with it. Employers certainly don't like it because it doesn't really tell you anything about that person and what their skills are. All the things that employers have been talking about for a long time now, you know, leadership skills.
[17:32]
Can students articulate new ideas? Can they work together in teams? None of those things are tested by the high stakes accountability terminal exam. So although there was a recognition, it seemed to me, and I've been advising a thing called the Mastery Transcript Consortium, and it's based in the US, but it's kind of got global reach now. And that was doing quite well. And with COVID, it suddenly got great attraction because, you know, for a couple of years there, no one was taking any exams.
[18:02]
So it had to be another way of judging young people's achievements. But it seems to me now that one of the fascinating things about Chad GPT is that no one will believe that. exams anymore. No one will believe that an essay has been necessarily written by the student. So we are now forced into rethinking assessment. And I think it's kind of like a set of dominoes that once that one falls, once we start thinking differently about assessment, we'll start thinking differently about pedagogy.
[18:35]
And then we'll start thinking differently about curriculum. And it may still take a few years. But for me, I'd welcome the fact that we are now openly now saying, well, how do we judge the qualities of a young person? And is it about whether they can simply regurgitate information when this little chat bot can do it so much better? Or is it going to be about what they can do with that information? And I think we are going to move at speed now, I hope anyway, We're seeing it now in Australia.
[19:07]
The equivalent of the grade point average is a thing called the ATAR scheme. And people are now openly calling for that to be scrapped and for an alternative to be seen. Now, that's been talked about for two decades or more. But now people are really getting serious about it. And so I think we could be at a point where, you know, revolutions always feel like they're never going to happen until they happen. And I think that we could well be at that point.
[19:37] SPEAKER_01:
Well, certainly when we think about the different ways to assess student learning, assess student mastery, but also to engage students in what they're doing, as well as engage employees in what they're doing, you know, the kind of compliance and control and measurement approach has gotten us where it's gotten us, but we get the sense that it might not take us much further. Talk to us a little bit, if you could, about self-determination theory and mastery and the relationship of those experiences, both for students and staff on innovation.
[20:05] SPEAKER_00:
For me, in the course of researching and writing the book, and certainly when COVID happened, there was a really striking example, which was to say that, you know, when certainly in the UK, we were struggling to find anything online that could track the development of COVID. And I know that was the case in the US. And a 17 year old kid in Seattle called Avi Schiffman stayed up three days and three nights and created his COVID tracking website, which still to this day is the thing that Anthony Fauci said was his source of authoritative data. And he did that in three days. In the UK, we spent millions of And the best we could come up with was an app which didn't even work on iPhones or Android phones. So it was useless.
[20:53]
It was just wasted money. But at the time, I contacted Avi and I said, talk to me about what you want to do in the future. And he said, well... You know, I guess I'll be applying for college.
[21:05]
He said, I don't really know what I want to do. And he said, I'm pretty sure I won't get in anyway. And I said, why? And he said, because my GPA is 1.7. And I said, but surely, Abby, you only want to go to a college that wouldn't be interested in your GPA.
[21:21]
You've just won the Webby Young Person of the Year. Because not only had he invented that, he'd also created this George Floyd protest tracking system. website and since then since the ukraine war he has created a thing called ukraine take shelter which enabled people like me and we've got a ukrainian refugee staying with us and we were able to be placed in contact through avi's website so he's done incredible things and you know there is no question his level of engagement when he's deeply interested in something But I said, you know, you are surely going to get in to the kind of college that recognizes that. As it turned out, he got offered a place at Harvard. So it kind of worked out OK for him. But I did think afterwards, what about the kids who were maybe not quite as creative as Abby, but still had a lousy GPA?
[22:15]
You know, what about them? their skills and talents that we're just not recognizing because frankly they're just bored and they sit there and we know from all the evidence around engagement from self-determination theory that if students have a degree of autonomy in what they're learning and if they can study stuff that they're engaged in The academic achievement is going to be higher anyway. So I think there is more than enough evidence for us to say, let's start to make some changes. And of course, some of the more innovative schools are already doing that. And it's fantastic to see. But it just feels like it's taking a long time.
[22:55]
You know, I always liken it to turning an oil tanker around. It takes a very long time to get that innovation to start to happen.
[23:03] SPEAKER_01:
I'm a big fan of Everett Rogers' diffusion of innovations model and the idea that people follow kind of a bell curve distribution as to when they adopt change relative to other people. And we probably, as a profession, are a little bit more conservative. We're not always on the leading edge of innovation, but we do have people who love to play that role, who love to be way out in front, inventing things, trying things. When we see people like that in our organizations...
[23:28]
As leaders, what do we get wrong about them and what can we do to put them to good use, to give them the space to do their work and to reap the rewards of that as organizations rather than just kind of shut them down and say, no, get in line, do what everybody else is doing?
[23:41] SPEAKER_00:
That's such a great question, because, again, it goes to the kind of cultural aspect of this. And I look back on my time as a leader. For a while, I was director of learning at a tertiary performing arts college. And you know, the one thing about performing arts educators is that they're really passionate about what they're doing. They're also highly creative and they argue vehemently for their discipline. And I often used to have meetings where I'd end up saying, guys, we're not curing cancer here.
[24:11]
We're just encouraging kids to show off. Let's just keep this in perspective if we can. As frustrating as that sometimes was as the person trying to herd these particular cats together, I really valued that diversity of thought that used to go on. And I think it's only been relatively recently that we've seen the evidence that says diverse teams are more innovative. We're now starting to talk about neurodiversity not just within our students, and how we can make that work to the students' best advantage. But it seems to me within the staff, and, you know, I mentioned New Road School in Santa Monica.
[24:51]
One of the things that strikes you when you go there is that they have an incredibly diverse set of staff who work there. And Lutheran Williams, the principal, and this is a school that... produced Amanda Gorman, you know, spoke at Joe Biden's inauguration, The Hill We Climb. And it seemed to me that they were a bunch of, frankly, misfits that wouldn't get a job in many places, wouldn't get a job in many of the high schools because they were so different.
[25:20]
And I said to Lutheran one day, you know, what? have you deliberately put this together do you deliberately look for these kind of mavericks and he said well yeah because how can we expect our kids to be diverse thinkers if we aren't you know if there's just a kind of uniform line which comes from ourselves that to me is inspirational leadership. I think now we're moving away from, it's true what you say that, you know, particularly I think in terms of leadership, schools are fairly slow to change. One of the things that COVID has rapidly changed is that the kind of leader that And I don't just mean this in education terms. I mean this right across the board. The kind of heroic leader who would come into an organisation and everything would get thrown up in the air.
[26:10]
Some people would have to go. He'd bring in others. Quite often he, because of the kind of macho sort of culture that was encouraged there. And things would often change and results would rise. But the evidence shows that that's not sustainable and that the kind of leaders who...
[26:28]
achieve long lasting, albeit incremental improvement on what I call the architects. But I think what's also changed now is that you kind of tell people how they are to behave anymore. You know, because this resignation wave is real. It's a real thing. It's real in education. So I describe the cultural leaders of the future as being cultural architects.
[26:55]
That's what the CEOs of the future need to be. They can't just come in and say, this is the kind of culture that we need to see around this place. But they need to be there kind of nurturing it, setting an example. It's exhausting work. But I think when you get it right, then the place kind of runs without you. And you don't have to be the person who's the center of attention all of the time, which of course is not good for the ego-driven CEO.
[27:24] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, it's a different role to be not just someone who gets results, but to be someone who other people want to work for, to create an environment where people want to work. Now that we realize the extent to which they have a choice over where they work. You mentioned New Road School and Lutheran Williams. He actually has been on Principal Center Radio. So if anybody wants to know more about his work and that school, just go on our website and look for Lutheran Williams New Road School. You'll find that interview there.
[27:49]
David, one other thing I wanted to ask about, if I could, is the initials OBE. I read that in our introduction and our American listeners may have less of a sense of what that means. I get the sense it's in between kind of David Attenborough and Ed Sheeran, somewhere in there. What did Queen Elizabeth cite in recognizing you with that honor?
[28:07] SPEAKER_00:
Well, it was a very funny story that we had. First of all, everyone always says, what does it stand for? And if you'll pardon my French, my sister, and you can always bleep this out if you like, my sister said, you know what OBE stands for, don't you? And actually, when I got the letter to say I was getting it, I said, no, I don't. She says, it stands for Other Buggers Effort. And I thought, yeah, that's pretty much it.
[28:29]
And when I went along on the day to collect it, I had met the Queen a couple of times because this college that I mentioned, she'd come in and opened it. And she said to me, oh, so you've got this for services to education. She said, what was it that you did? It's just one of those things that, you know, it comes out of your mouth and then you think, I shouldn't have said that. But I said, well...
[28:51]
Surely you would know. You're the one who was giving it to me, which was like, no, not the right thing to do, which she always liked the joke. And then we talked about how I'd helped set up that college. But I also led a really innovative music education project, which is still going to this day called Musical Features. and i suspect there was more to do with the latter it's a very cloak and dagger thing they have committees who never tell you why you've got it what it is that you did to get it they just say it's for services too dot dot dot so to this day i still don't know it's completely unfair in the sense that there are you know school principals that i've met who will never get the kind of recognition that i got and deserve it a lot more but You know, it felt churlish to turn it down.
[29:39] SPEAKER_01:
Any educator will recognize that experience of having a student come back to you years or decades later, you know, as an adult and say, you know what you did for me that made a difference. And the whole time we didn't know, you know, we didn't know the impact we were having. And often we never find out the impact that we're having on people that we work with.
[29:58] SPEAKER_00:
It's funny you say that Justin because I was having this conversation with someone just the other day and we're saying you know in most lines of work there's a sense of immediate gratification you kind of know if what you've done has worked in education you've got to wait 10-15 years and even then you still might never know that student might never get in touch with you but It is the greatest thing that can happen to you as an educator when someone, an adult comes up and says, you changed the course of my life. What could be better than that?
[30:29] SPEAKER_01:
So the book is The Power of Us, How We Connect, Act, and Innovate Together. David Price, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.
[30:36] SPEAKER_00:
It's been great. Thanks for having me.
[30:38] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
