I read Tim Hurson’s book Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking and have been dying to have an opportunity to experiment with The Productive Thinking Model that he so skillfully describes in the book.
“One of the problems with problems is that they usually begin with a mess.”
I found a mess to work with.
“But if things weren’t messy or getting messy, there would be no discontent, and there wouldn’t be a need for productive thinking in the first place. The mess comes when we begin to realize that things might be better than the are..”
The mess I found centered around the problem of student discipline. While discipline is not officially a part of my job description, I had spent many months watching staff and students get more and more frustrated at the “mess”, so I volunteered to take the staff through The Productive Thinking Model to see what we might find at the end of the process. I was limited to one staff meeting, so we only able to get through steps 1 and 2 of the process, so we will be re-visiting the rest of the process at another meeting.
Step 1: What is Going On?
Sub-step 1: What’s The Itch?
An Itch is described as the discontent or irritant that compels us to want to change.
Most of the staff had and “itch” to be sure, but we needed to go through the process of discovering all the itches. So I facilitated a listing of all the itches that we could come up. I put no limits on what was considered and itch. If it bothered them it went up.
Some of the itches we listed were:
No system, student behavior, “Broken Windows” theory, paper work, before and after school, parents.
We then tried to makes clusters of itches based on common themes or characteristics.
(picture of our partial list)
Sub-step 2: What’s The Impact?
In this sub-step our goal was to discover what it is about our itches that concerns us. Which itches are a priority? Why?
We again made a list and then selected which seemed to be the most important to work on. What I found interesting was that after just two sub-steps we were talking in a way that was very different from what most of the staff expected and we were discussing ideas that may not have come to fore if we had just a “normal” discussion.
(sample list)
Sub-step 3: What’s The Information?
In this step we tried to understand what we already knew about the issue and what we needed to know about the issue. I used a thinking tool called KnoWonder. Essentially I made a T-chart with the word “Know” one side and the word “Wonder” on the other. For those of you who teach, think of a KWL chart.
We listed things that we knew about the issue and things we wondered about the issue. It is a very useful tool for getting some perspective on the problem. I found that some creative questioning helped to generate a good list. I did my best to ask questions that would generate ideas for the list.
(sample list)
Sub-step 4: Who’s Involved?
The next sub-step was getting a clear idea of all the people involved in this itch.
“How we see things depends on where we stand…”
We generated a list that came up with the typical stakeholders: teachers, students, parents, administrators, support staff, and community.
Sub-step 5: What’s the Vision?
In sub-step 5 we attempted to create a vision for the future or what the model calls the “Target Future.”
“The Target Future is the place you want to get to. It doesn’t tell you how you’ll get there; in other words it is not a solution. Rather it’s a brief description of a future in which your issue is resolved and your Itch no longer irritates you.”
I listed sentence stems on the board that said, “I only we could..”, “I wish…”, and “It would be great if..” I used these sentence stems to facilitate a list of Target Futures. This was one area where I had to be more active in encouraging ideas. Some were hesitant to state their Target Future because the immediately started to think about how it might be accomplished. I reinforced the fact that we are simply stating what we hope for, and not worrying about the details. I think the staff was surprised that what they listed on the board was is some ways very different from what they might have walked into the room initially thinking.
Once we were done generating our list, we then used a thinking tool called I3.
“I3 allows you to determine which items on your list will be useful to work on. I3 stands for the three criteria you use to evaluate the items in your list: Influence, Importance, and Imagination.”
We used symbols (check mark, triangle, and a flower) placed next to the items on our list to get a visual sense of what we had influence over, what we thought was important, and if it would require some imagination.
Some of the Target Futures that seemed to hold a lot of promise was the creation of a flow chart, acknowledging positive behavior more frequently and systematically, and staff training.
(sample list)
After completing all 5 sub-steps of Step 1, we had a great sense of what was going on with our discipline “Itch.”
I will discuss the result of Step 2 in a later post. I might add here that one of the most useful things for me as a facilitator was having some one who would chart the ideas for me. It was hard to do both and stay in the flow.
Coming Up Step 2: What’s Success?
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