Education Innovation

Professional Learning Communities: 10 Conditions to Achieve "Group Flow"

In his book Group Genius, Keith Sawyer describes 10 conditions that must exist for "group flow" to emerge in Professional Learning Communities. 

1. The Groups Goal
“One study of more than five hundred professionals and managers in thirty companies found that unclear objectives became the biggest barrier to effective team performance.”

If you grade level teams, departments, or PLC’s don’t know what they are meeting about and what they are expected to achieve, results are going to be poor.

The principal or chair of the group needs to manage what I call the Innovative Goal Paradox. That is, you want to be clear on the objective that must be achieved or the product produced, but flexible on the means the group achieves it. It’s like telling them the destination on a map, but leaving it up to the group to determine the route, time of travel, method of travel, etc.

2. Close Listening
Are your PLC teams listening to each other?

“Group flow is more likely to emerge when everyone is full engaged—what improvisers call ‘deep listening,’ in which member of the group don’t plan ahead what they’re going to say, but their statements are genuinely unplanned responses to what they hear.”

Let the student work, data, etc. drive the dialogue. Don’t come in with preconceived ideas.

“Innovation is blocked when one (or more) of the participants already has a preconceived idea of how to reach the goal…”

3. Complete Concentration
Time is valuable, especially when you are taking time from the teachers to have them meet in their PLC groups. You want to maximize the use of the time to honor the participants and the process.

Deadlines are not a productive tool for developing innovative ideas. Similarly, keep distractions away from meetings.

“Group flow is more likely when a group can draw a boundary, however temporary or virtual, between the group’s activity and everything else.”

4.  Being In Control
“Many studies have found that team autonomy is the top predictor of team performance. But in group flow, unlike solo flow, control results in a paradox because participants must feel in control, yet at the same time they must remain flexible, listen closely, and always be willing to defer to the emergent flow of the group. The most innovative teams are the ones that can manage the paradox.” 

This is one of the toughest to get for teachers because they work in isolation and have much autonomy and control of what they want to do. In the PLC, teachers will need practice letting go of control individually, while being allowed to have control of the process.

5. Blending Egos
“In group flow, each person’s idea builds on those just contributed by his or her colleagues."

In other words, everyone needs to contribute to get the best result or idea for how to meet the needs of students. Everyone!

6. Equal Participation
Group Flow won’t happen if everyone isn’t participating.

“Group flow is more likely to occur when all participants play an equal role in the collective creation of the final performance. Group flow is blocked if anyone’s skill level is below that of the rest of the group’s members; all must have comparable skills.”

Now this presents an interesting question. Do all teachers in your grade level or department PLC’s have comparable skills?  Yes, they all have credentials (or we hope), but there could be varying levels of years of experiences, staff development training, and technology knowledge. Is this a factor?  Maybe, but maybe not.

Group Flow is also blocked when one person dominates the group, believes he or she doesn’t need the group, of looks down on the process.

Another potential block to PLC flow, is the principal sitting in the meeting. If the principal does sit in the meeting it is important to, “…participate in the same way as everyone else by listening closely and granting autonomy and authority to the group’s emergent decision process.”

7. Familiarity
PLC members need to learn to the styles of each of the members because familiarity increases productivity, decision-making effectiveness, and the ability to understand what is happening in classrooms.

“When members of a group have been together for a while, they share a common language and a common set of unspoken understandings. Psychologists call these shared understandings tacit knowledge—and because it’s unspoken, people often don’t even realize why they are able to communicate effectively.”

However, here is an interesting paradox to the point above. Tacit knowledge is a part of group flow, but we don’t want PLC’s made up of people who think so exactly alike that nothing new can come out of the meeting.

This begs the question, how long should a grade level be kept together? Obviously, departments are dependent on credential, but at the elementary level, this isn’t so. Teachers can move grade levels easily. So, how long do you keep your current grade levels together before they become too stagnant?  Principals need to balance the need for familiarity, which allows for good decision-making and creativity, with the need to avoid over familiarity and stagnation.

Another interesting fact is this, familiar groups are great for problem-solving creativity, but unfamiliar groups are better for problem-finding creativity. So PLC’s and the need to examine student work, data, and teaching benefit from familiarity, but school wide problem solving that requires new ideas and innovation might benefit by being made up of teachers and staff from various grade levels and departments.

8. Communication
“Group flow requires constant communication.” 

Principals should be talking with their groups frequently. Feedback on how the PLC is doing and fact finding on what the PLC has discovered or decided on is key.

But, group flow can happen outside of the meeting too. Spontaneous conversations allows for group flow. Not every conversation has to take place around the conference table.

9. Moving It Forward
“Yes, and…”

This is a powerful sentence stem for your PLC’s to use in their meeting. When teacher are sharing ideas, members should listen closely, accept it, and build on the idea by using, “Yes, and…” Members validate the ideas of others, while simultaneously building on the idea with other ideas. This is a great way to generate powerful plans for improving student learning.

10. The Potential for Failure
Before lifting weights or going for a run, we should all warm our muscles up. The same could be said for our minds.

“Many groups require a preliminary warm-up period to move into group flow.”

Also, some ideas to improve student learning won’t. It’s just that simple. The principal and the PLC member need to understand that creativity is often accompanied with failure. We must allow our PLC’s to come up with ideas that fail. If we don’t, the quality of ideas and instruction will suffer because they won’t feel the trust they need to innovate.

Creative Tension is the just the right environment. “Group flow happens when many tensions are in perfect balance: the tension between convention and novelty; between structure and improvisation; between the critical, analytic mind and the freewheeling, outside-the-box mind; between listening to the rest of the group and speaking out in individual voices.”

Catalytic Questions

Is the timing right at your school in develop and inculcate these conditions in your PLC’s?

What patterns have you detected in your PLC’s that might prevent or allow for these conditions to flourish in your PLC’s?

In what ways might you loosen your control of PLC’s to give them autonomy in decision making and planning?

How might you challenge the prevailing conditions your PLC’s operate under?

In what ways might you connect what you know about group dynamics and creativity to your PLC’s?

What alternatives might you employ to create the 10 conditions of group flow?

How might these 10 conditions for group flow change the way your teachers think about PLCs?

In what ways might your view of PLC’s change if you viewed it from the perspective of a visiting teacher or visiting administrator?

In what ways might new a new idea for your PLC’s make a positive impact? What might that idea be?

In what ways might technology be used to enhance these 5 conditions?

How might the organization of your school’s PLC need to change to achieve these 5 conditions?

What probing question could you ask of your grade level or department PLC’s to determine the level of these 5 conditions being present?

What is your hunch about these conditions in your PLC’s?

In what ways could you better focus your time and energy to ensure these conditions exist?

How might you question your assumptions about your PLC’s and investigate what is truly happening?

In what ways might you adapt these conditions to your PLC’s?

How might you put existing time for teacher planning, meetings, etc. to better use and increase PLC time?

Recommended Reading:

Keith Sawyer's blog

Defining Professional Learning Communities (PLC)

All Things PLC blog

The Vision-less Learning Community.-Tempered Radical blog

"Emerging Employer Models" For Education: Assumptions and Alternatives

As part of the book The Organization Of The Future, James O’ Toole contributed an essay titled “Free To Choose: How American Managers Can Create Globally Competitive Workplaces” In his essay he describes 3 “Emerging Employer Models.” He describes them as follows:

Low-Cost Companies

• They are paid at (or close to) the minimum wage.
• They receive few if any benefits
• They have no job security
• They are given only the amount of training needed to do jobs that have been designed to be simple  and easy to learn.

Global-Competitor Companies

• Increasingly hire people on a contractual basis and, where possible, outsource and offshore work.
• Offer their “contingent” workers no security beyond the time limits of their contracts, and no promises of a continuing employment relationship.
• Often look outside to hire even permanent and top-level employees, carefully limiting how much they respond on developing managers and professionals, let alone on the training of workers.
• Frequently offer “then new employment contract,” in which they commit to telling employees what their strategy is and where they think future jobs in the organization will be, and workers then are told that their continual employment depends on their performance and the fit between their skills and the needs of the business.
• Are constantly searching for workers with the skills needed for today’s challenges. And although they pay top dollar for that talent, they expect employees to work long hours and, especially, to be productive.

High-Involvement Companies

• Challenging and enriched jobs
• A say in the management of their own tasks
• A commitment to low turnover and few layoffs
• A relatively egalitarian workplace, with few class distinctions between managers and workers and relatively small ratios between the salaries of the CEO and the average worker
• Jobs organized in self-managing teams
• A strong sense that every employee is a member of a supportive community
• Extensive, ongoing training and education to all
• Salaries rather than hourly wages
• Employee participation in company stock ownership and a high share in company profits

O’ Toole advocates for the High-Involvement Company as the model of the future.

According to James O’ Toole, the most successful companies now and of the future will be those that choose to address the deepest needs of their employees.
•    Financial resources and security
•    Meaningful work that offers the opportunity for human development
•    Supportive social relationships

So, to which model would the current system of education belong?

Does the current education model meet the 3 deepest needs of it's employees?

Is education as a governmental organization so unique that none of the models described above apply? Is it a hybrid of one, two, or all of them? Could education improve if it adopted itself to be a "High-Involvement" model?

Assumptions about how to education, school districts, and school sites should be organized control the current organizational face of education. What, however, if those assumptions are wrong? Are there alternatives to our current model?

As O’Toole puts it, “Remember, it was once widely assumed that no airline could trust its employees to decide how best to serve customers—until Southwest did. It one was assumed that no company in the discount retail industry could succeed while paying its employees decent salaries and offering them full benefits—until Costco did. It was assumed that poorly educated blue-collar workers in old-line manufacturing firms could not be taught managerial accounting and then left to be self-managing—until SRC Holdings did. Once the conventional wisdom was that employees must be closely supervised and governed by rules—until W.L. Gore proved otherwise. And it was assumed that the first thing a company must do in a financial crisis is to lay off workers—until Xilinx discovered alternatives.”

Does education have alternatives? Are educational leaders willing to honestly explore them? Will union leaders allow for different assumptions.

As O’ Toole says, “The statement ‘I have no alternative’ is one of the surest indicators of leadership failure.”

10 Rules From The Incompetent Educational Leader's Handbook

10 Rules For Stifling Change

1. Regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it is new and because it is from below.

2. Insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures.

3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other's proposals.

4. Treat problems as a sign of failure.

5. Express your criticisms freely and withhold your praise (that keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time.

6. Control everything carefully. Count anything that can be counted, frequently.

7. Make sure that any request for information is fully justified and that it isn't distributed too freely (you don't want data to fall into the wrong hands).

8. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret and spring them on people unexpectedly (that also keeps people on their toes)

9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off or move people around.

10. Never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

From Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Educational Leadership Paradox: Good Management Leads To Failure

Good educational management is the reason the educational system will not succeed and will result in failure. Why?

Because at the same time you or the educational leaders you work with are being praised for your ideas and decision-making, you could be missing the idea or change that will lead to your downfall. You could miss the idea or ideas that will change the very nature of education.

Splish
Originally uploaded by oybay

Clayton M. Christensen details this paradox in detail in his excellent work, The Innovator’s Dilemma. This well known and oft quoted book details the rise and fall of several industries as they struggle with “disruption.”

For example, he cites the computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Company, who at one time was the dominant force in the computer industry, but ended up failing to meet the challenge of “disruptive technologies.”

“In Digital’s case, as in Sears, the very decisions that led to its decline were made at the time it was so widely regarded as being an astutely managed firm. It was praised as a paragon of managerial excellence at the very time it was ignoring the arrival of the desktop computers that besieged it a few years later.”

It seems clear, that the educational system in the United States, once a “paragon of managerial excellence” has for too long ignored the “disruptive” ideas of teaching and learning that are happening outside its walls. While our principals, superintendents, directors, and secretaries of education seek to improve the current model through their managerial ideas they risk the failure of the very schools, districts, and system that they intend to manage back to excellence.

Our educational leaders and managers are highly educated and considered excellent, knowledgeable, and capable. But there is a paradox. It is the decisions that our educational leaders make now that could be creating the circumstances of failure. Christensen’s research clearly demonstrates this fact.

“One theme common to all these failures however is the decisions that lead to failure were made when the leaders in question were widely regarded as among the best companies in the world.”

So a key paradox exists. Education, like any other system or organization is subject to the effects of this paradox.

“…--but that there is something about the way decisions get made in successful organizations that sows the seeds of eventual failure.”

Good management is the problem. Read it again. Good management is the problem. Good management does what is best for the organization based on past history and performance and what is best for the career track of managers.

It is because of this “good management” that schools, districts, and the education system as whole is not going to be able to react to the disruptive ideas occurring outside of the classroom wall and the educational system.

“…principles of disruptive innovation, show that when good companies fail, it often has been because their managers either ignored these principles of chose to fight them.”

If you are an educational leader, and if you are honest with yourself, you are most likely making decisions based on past history, past performance, and past expectations, and factoring in what you need to do to keep your career track headed in the right direction. And, I am sure most of your educational managerial colleagues are doing the same thing.

This is why it won’t work. Our system will fail, because this is not the type of management necessary for dealing with and adapting to the current and coming disruption.

So, what to do?

The Great 8 Catalytic Questions

1. How can you view the “paradox” as a positive? What can you learn from it?

2. What patterns do you see in education’s current direction or environment that can better help you understand the current situation?

3. Do you feel a sense of urgency? How can you turn this urgency into action?

4. How can you combine your experience, position, and authority to address “disruption” and the “paradox” of good management?

5. What might your school, your district, or your system look if you had more authority and control over decision making and resources? What if you had less, what would you do?

6. How might you change the organizational structure or layout of your school or district to meet the needs of “disruption” or the “paradox?”

7.  What further information would you need in your current position or situation? How does the information you don’t have shed light on the situation your school or district faces?

8. How is your past experiences, training, and performance adversely affecting your judgment and perspective on “disruption” and the “paradox?”

One Man, In The Name Of Love

Playing Educational Substitution With Peter Drucker

What follows is a quote from Peter Drucker, but with an Education Innovation twist. I have removed words like business, company, executive, and economics; and replaced them with school(s), education, and principal.

“Schools prefer not to abandon the old, the obsolescent, the no-longer-productive; they’d rather hang on to it and keep on pouring money into it. Worse still, they then assign their most capable people ‘defending’ the outworn in a massive misallocation of the scarcest and most valuable resource—the human resource that needs to be allocated to making tomorrow, if the school is to have a tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow always arrives…It is always different. And then even the mightiest school is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. It will have lost distinction and leadership—all that will remain is big-education overhead…Not having dared to take of making the new happen, it perforce took the much greater risk of being surprised by what did happen…And this is a risk that even the largest and richest school cannot afford and that even the smallest school need not run.”

“The principal has to accept responsibility for making the future happen…It is the willingness to tackle purposefully this, the last of the educational tasks in education that distinguishes the great schools from the merely competent one, and education builder from school principal’s office occupant.”

Seth Godin and Educational Leadership: Are You Leading or Managing?

What do you provide to your school, educational leadership or management? Seth Godin believes you need to be a leader. You need to lead your school, your district, and your “tribe.”

“You can’t have tribe without a leader-and you can’t be a leader without a tribe.”

Your school, your district, your “tribe” is waiting for you to lead.

“Tribes need leadership. Sometimes one person leads, sometimes more. People want connection and growth and something new. They want change.”

A leader is someone people will want to connect to because they know that it is the leaders who can bring change. And they want change.

Notice Seth didn’t say, “manage.” Management is not leadership.

“Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done. Burger King franchises hire managers. They know exactly what they need to deliver and they are given resources to do it at low cost. Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and the react to the outside world striving to make process as fast and as cheap as possible.”

Managers do thing right.

Leaders, however do the right things, including bringing change to the tribe.

“Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in.”

How can you tell the difference?

“Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.”

“Managers make widgets. Leaders make change.”

What are you doing at your school, making widgets or making change?

“Managers manage by using the authority the factory gives them. You listen to your manager or your boss or you lose your job. A manager can’t make change because that’s not his job. His job is to complete tasks assigned to him by someone else in the factory.”

District wants their budgets, reports, plans, evaluations, paper work, and emails; does this sound like your job? Is that management or leadership?

“Leaders, on the other hand, don’t care very much for the organizational structure or the official blessing of whatever factory they work for. The use passion and ideas to lead people, as opposed to using threats and bureaucracy to manage them.”

That’s leadership, and you don’t need the title to be one.

“Management often works to maintain the status quo, to deliver average products to average people”

Is this what your school or district expects from you?

Are maybe your principal, or director, or superintendent is too busy managing to notice.

“…many people (many really good people) spend all day trying to defend what they do, trying to sell what they’ve always sold, and trying to prevent their organizations from being devoured by the forces of the new.”

“The forces of the new.” Does that sound like life in the 21st century? How is education doing adapting to life in the 21st century? How are we doing with teaching the 21st century student?  Are educational leaders looking tired these days? Are we spending all our time fighting disruption, instability, and mediocrity?

“Defending mediocrity is exhausting.”

Are you tired? Are they tired? Are we all tired? Is mediocrity, an average product what we want for our students? We need some tribal leadership.

“In unstable times, growth comes from leaders who create change and engage their organizations, instead of managers who push their employees to do more for less.”

Is your school, your district, or your state asking you to do more with less?

Tribes need leadership, often, though we are simply asked to manage. We are asked to complete our paperwork on time, attend our meeting on time, and answer our emails on time. Managers do things right. Education likes when we do thing right.

Maybe it is time for us to become leaders and do the right thing. What do you want to do?

Disrupt? Change? Destroy? Renew? Connect? Create? Innovate? Yes. The you want to lead! You want Education Innovation.

Getting Stuck On "The New Stupid"

Frederick M. Hess had an article in the recent edition of ASCD’s Educational Leadership. The article titled  “The New Stupid” discusses how many leaders in education are making mistakes in how they use and apply student achievement data and systematic research.

The “old stupid” was failing to use or dismissing data and research as having little value. Now, though, we live in the era of data directed decision-making. The problem is we are not carefully considering the type of data or research without asking common sense questions. According to Hess, the “new stupid” has 3 key elements.

1. Using Data in Half-Baked Ways
Many educational leaders fail to ask simple questions about the effect or impact of using data or research. For example, educational leaders who were quick to move high performing teacher to low performing schools without asking questions about the effectiveness of moving teachers, the practicality of the idea, and if there might be other ways of encouraging quality teachers to move without forced relocation.

“Then as now, the key is not to retreat from data but to truly embrace the data by asking hard questions, considering organizational realities, and contemplating unintended consequences. Absent sensible restraint, it is not difficult to envision a raft of poor judgments governing staffing, operations, and instruction—all in the name of "data-driven decision making."

2. Translating Research Simplistically
One study in one specific situation shows a promising result and educational leaders jump on the data or results and use it to put entirely new programs in place. For example, taking the STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio) Program’s results (showed positive achievement for small class sizes in kindergarten and first grade) and using it as a basis to implement programs state, county, district, or school-wide.

California implemented a class size reduction program through the entire state for every school. That data it was based on did not support such a move, and student achievement was not raised in significant ways. Again, educational leaders failed to ask some probing questions about the data such as, “What would be the impact of hiring thousands of new teachers?” or “Can this data be extrapolated to mean that all students in all situation will benefit from lower class sizes?”  The result in California is billions spent with very little in return.

3. Giving Short Shrift to Management Data
Educational leaders have not spent much energy or effort using data or research and applying it to the functions of the school or district. Most school district employees work outside the classroom, yet data is not collected about their performance.

“Data-driven management should not simply identify effective teachers or struggling students but should also help render schools and school systems more supportive of effective teaching and learning. Doing so requires tracking an array of indicators, such as how long it takes books and materials to be shipped to classrooms, whether schools provide students with accurate and appropriate schedules in a timely fashion, how quickly assessment data are returned to schools, and how often the data are used. A system in which leaders possess that kind of data is far better equipped to boost school performance than one in which leaders have a pallette of achievement data and little else.”

How do we avoid the “New Stupid?” Hess has some advice.

1. Good Judgment
“…educators should be wary of allowing data or research to substitute for good judgment. When presented with persuasive findings or promising new programs, it is still vital to ask the simple questions: What are the presumed benefits of adopting this program or reform? What are the costs? How confident are we that the promised results are replicable? What contextual factors might complicate projections? Data-driven decision making does not simply require good data; it also requires good decisions.”

2. The Data You Need and The Data They Need
“…schools must actively seek out the kind of data they need as well as the achievement data external stakeholders need. Despite quantum leaps in state assessment systems and continuing investment in longitudinal data systems, school and district leaders are a long way from having the data they require. Creating the conditions for high-performing schools and systems requires operational metrics beyond student achievement. In practice, there is a rarely acknowledged tension between collecting data with an eye toward external accountability (measurement of performance) and doing so for internal management (measurement for performance).

“The data most useful to parents and policymakers focus on how well students and schools are doing; this is the kind of data required by No Child Left Behind and collected by state accountability systems. Although enormously useful, these assessments have also exacerbated a tendency of school and district leaders to focus on the data they have rather than on the data they need.”

3. Know What The Research Can Tell Us and What It Can’t Tell Us
“…we must understand the limitations of research as well as its uses. Especially when crafting policy, we should not expect research to dictate outcomes but should instead ensure that decisions are informed by the facts and insights that science can provide. Researchers can upend conventional wisdom, examine design features, and help gauge the effect of proposed measures. But education leaders should not expect research to ultimately resolve thorny policy disputes over school choice or teacher pay any more than medical research has ended contentious debates over health insurance or tort reform.”

4. Reward Leaders Who Lead With Data
“…school systems should reward education leaders and administrators for pursuing more efficient ways to deliver services. Indeed, superintendents who use data to eliminate personnel or programs—even if these superintendents are successful and vindicated by the results—are often more likely to ignite political conflict than to reap professional rewards. So long as leaders are revered only for their success at consensus building and gathering stakeholder input, moving from the rhetorical embrace of data to truly data-driven decision making will remain an elusive goal in many communities.”

Using data and research are key to improving student achievement and creating high performing schools. But equally key, is asking great questions. It is through great questions that data and research become meaningful to each school district and school. What kinds of questions are you asking?

"Great results begin with great questions."  That is Education Innovation

Guy Kawasaki's Guide To School Plans

Guy Kawasaki's new book Reality Check may be focused on helping entrepreneurs start and manage great organizations, but I found some great advice for writing your school plan.

Write Deliberate, act emergent
"It means that when you write your plan, you act as if you know exactly what you're going to do. You are deliberate. You're probably wrong, but you take your best shot. However, writing deliberate doesn't mean that you adhere to the plan in the face of new information and new opportunities. As you execute the plan, you act emergent--that is, you are flexible and fast moving, changing as you learn more and more about the market."

In other words think, plan, and write exactly what you think you will do-and then change, adjust, and move.

Dwight Eisenhower said, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."

If you are looking for some inspiration for your plans, take a look at this post on School Plans With Soul.

School Leaders Beware the Curse of the Serial Entrepreneur

School leaders meet sharks, Guy Kawasaki, entrepreneurs, No Child Left Behind, and change in the Education Innovation blender.

Educational leaders want success and after a year in which the test scores go up the temptation for educational leaders is to do more of the same. It is natural to think that what worked last year will work this year. It is natural to think, “I got this thing figured out.”

What happens when the rules change and last year’s ideas and methods don’t cut. No Child Left Behind assumes that scores will go up each year. How do you improve each year doing the same thing from year to year?

_{by sujathafan}

Now principals aren’t exactly entrepreneurs, but some principles apply to both. Guy Kawasaki in his new book Reality Check calls entrepreneurs who rely on what they have always done to succeed Serial Entrepreneurs. And principals, you might want to pay attention. Serial Entrepreneurs fail for a number of reasons.

Serial entrepreneurs try to prove that their first success wasn’t a fluke
Principals too try to prove their success last year wasn’t a fluke. The rub is that the goal keeps moving. Hitting the target one year is great, but what happens when the target moves farther away the next year. Do you still do the same thing?

Serial entrepreneurs cannot distinguish between causation and correlation
What if last year’s scores where just a fluke, dumb luck. If you based your instructional program for the next year around a fluke then you are in trouble. Each year the students change, the target changes, the curriculum might change, and your staff might change. Are you sure you know why your test scores went up? Are you willing to do it all again the same way?

Serial entrepreneurs use the same method again.
If is worked once it must work again right? Right?

Serial entrepreneurs use the same people again
Are you sure these are the right people THIS YEAR for THESE KIDS?

Serial entrepreneurs don’t (or can’t) work as hard as before
Unless you can overcome human nature, you have already proven you can be successful so it is only natural to not work as hard. You can rely on the systems, methods, programs people, etc. that you put into place last year. Right?

Serial entrepreneurs don’t get smacked around enough
Why should you get smacked around when the scores went up? You are doing it right, getting it done. People should be asking you how you did it. Right? No need for questions or a devil’s advocate, you know what you are doing.

Serial entrepreneurs fill new roles in their next companies
Principals get promoted to directors, assistant superintendents, coordinators, managers, or superintendents. You have proven you know what you are doing, right up until you are no longer doing what you are good at and doing what you are not good at. Oops! Now what?

Educational leaders need to be like sharks. You see a shark has to keep moving or it will die. If you don’t keep moving, your school and your scores might “die.” Keep moving. Doing the same things, in the same way, with the same people, is going to get you the same results.

_{by Jeff Kubina}

Can you afford to get the same results?