Obliquity and Fashioning School Leaders

Obliquity. It's the name of a book I'm currently reading authored by eminent economist, John Kay (2010). A gift from my new best friends at High Point University, the book is a research-based treatise demonstrating why the most important goals in our lives are best achieved without really focusing on the goals at all. The path to success, according to Kay, rarely runs through the bottom line.

Kay cites figures no less-prominent than Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates to present a rival hypothesis to explain why individuals who achieved financial success attained it not because they sought it, but as a by-product in pursuing a passion. Their passion is often manifest as a practice performed as much for the sake of itself as for the result.

Kay argues that the same principle applies to companies who first seek excellence then profitability. Comparing Goldman Sachs, who survived the 2008 financial meltdown, to Lehman who did not, Kay writes, "Lacking a corporate culture that valued the practice, as well as the profits of banking, Lehman fell victim to the profit-seeking it extolled" (p. 44). Apparently, greed is not good; it is cannibalistic.

Understood as problems to be solved, Kay asserts that our goals are subverted by the existence of multiple solutions, real-world complexity, ignorance of the nature of our problems, using models that imperfectly describe reality, and my personal favorite, failing to understand that the outcome of what we do depends on how we do it. Honesty is not the best policy; it's just the right thing to do.

Writing about the book is my oblique way of introducing a topic which increasingly occupies my attention--the newly-designed and implemented approach to principal preparation and licensure in North Carolina. I have come to know it well through both my teaching in the Gardner Webb University Master of Executive Leadership in Schools program and my having served on the program re-design team for North Carolina State University.

The goal of the State Board of Education is laudable--all public school principals prepared to lead schools and increase student achievement. The proposed strategy was to abandon extant, and as critics argued, ineffective, preparation programs, each with its own curriculum, and replace the "let a thousand flowers bloom" philosophy with a unified approach.

The approach involves curricula addressing the seven standards of the North Carolina Standards for School Executives, internship experiences each semester, and student-developed artifacts created in response to on-job-training leadership experiences. Also new is licensure, not by the state as has been historical practice, but by the university and districts. The quality of the university program is subsequently judged based on a sampling of its students' artifacts examined by independent adjudicators.

It is far too soon to pass judgment on the success of the new approach. Indeed my adjunct professor colleagues and I are working hard to ensure its success. I am, however, seeing some red flags that seem to find resonance in John Kay's ideas. This blog is not the venue to share my thoughts in their entirety, but here are a few teasers to keep you reading subsequent entries:

First, how do program participants balance creating point-in-time artifacts with experiencing the dynamic nature of their job, team, school, and principal mentor? Schools have many moving parts that refuse to sit still for a five-semester program. Second, how do program participants in low-performing schools with overwhelming challenges experience parity with participants in more advantaged, well-led schools? Third, how do students tasked with creating artifacts on a near-weekly basis engage in thinking about important educational issues and trends not represented in the artifact?

In the end, however, effective leaders present solutions not excuses. So to my colleagues, I suggest that we continue to teach the big ideas that served us well even as we support student-created artifacts and address problems yet to be discovered. To my students, I urge you to complete your artifacts in good faith but understand that they, like standardized test scores, are a kind of idol, a representation of leadership but not leadership as you will experience it as a principal.

I'll give Kay the final word tonight: "Directness blinds us to new information that contradicts our presumptions, fools us into confusing logic with truth, cuts us off from our intuition, shunts us away from alternative solutions that may be better than the one we're set on, and more." I invite you only to reflect on how, in our regimented approach to developing tomorrow's leaders, we may ultimately miss the mark by aiming too directly at the target. That would be a shame.