On Leadership: Why schools can’t “fail fast”

Failure in the business world

For the last 20 years, leaders in every sector, public education included, have been bombarded with calls to Disrupt! Innovate! Accelerate! and Fail Fast! Those who choose to lead thoughtfully — rather than charge forward with exclamation points — are often accused of being too timid. For instance, in the two school systems I led, a number of parents who were entrepreneurs or management consultants or Wall Street honchos would show up at public board meetings or community forums and say things like, “In my line of work, when we see a problem, we use a Six Sigma approach…” (or do a Lean Workout, or use design thinking) “to disrupt the status quo!” Presumably, the principles and practices that serve them in business can be applied to the challenges in public schools, and the superintendent should get with the program.

Now that I work outside of a school system, I see some value in the concepts used in business management. Over my 6½ years leading PDK, I’ve learned a lot about organizational leadership that I find helpful. Nowadays, for instance, we talk all the time about our “minimum viable product,” the idea being that we should quickly try out something simple to see if it works. If you need transportation, see if a skateboard will do the job before you invest in a Tesla.

There’s no doubt that failure is tolerated in my world in ways that it would never be in a public school system. We’ve tried things, decided not to do them anymore, and learned about what we could’ve or should’ve done differently. Back in my early days at PDK, for example, we secured grant funding to provide technical support to school system staff who were working on equity-based approaches to district improvement. It was important work, the central office teams benefited from our assistance, and we learned a lot. But when we had to decide whether to continue the program, we realized that a number of other organizations were doing similar work, and it would take a major investment for us to expand it in the way that I had envisioned. So we decided to stop and pour our energies into our Educators Rising program, which inspires high school students to become educators. That decision has worked out so far and will actually enable us to expand our programs and services over the next few years.

So, was it a failure that the initial work with system leaders didn’t pan out the way that I had hoped? Or was it just a good business decision to shift our resources toward something with more potential? As a nonprofit leader, I can shift and pivot according to new demands and changing circumstances. My “failures” are seen as an inevitable aspect of growing and sustaining PDK. I have room to innovate, take stock of things, and change course. Superintendents have no such luxury.

How school systems are different

When a school system leader wants to launch a new program or initiative, they have to reckon with a myriad of formal constraints, including state procurement rules and local purchasing policies that put limits on how much they can spend and how quickly. In many districts, for example, the board of education has to approve any spending that exceeds $20,000 (which, in many school districts, is considered a negligible amount of money). While this fiscal control serves to promote transparency and public accountability, it also means that launching even a very small initiative — paying for a handful of teachers to take advantage of a professional development opportunity, say — can take a year or more, as the board has to put it on the agenda, discuss it, and decide whether to approve it.

Further, system leaders need to be mindful of informal guardrails, as well. For instance, perhaps one school’s long-standing commitment to a certain instructional program will cause resistance to anything new from the central office, or perhaps local parents were under the impression that the first priority for discretionary spending would be to upgrade the school cafeterias. Woe be to the superintendent who rolls out a new initiative without having engaged employees, families, and the community. In some organizations, leaders can make decisive executive decisions. But public schools have many stakeholders, and getting them all on board can be a long and arduous process that makes it impossible to take quick, agile steps.

I’m not arguing that all of these rules and processes should be thrown out. School systems are public entities that must involve their stakeholders in decision making and be transparent and accountable. Rather, my point is that today’s popular mantras about organizational change do not easily apply to school systems. Public schools simply cannot “fail fast” in the way a business can. And when school system leaders do need to make quick decisions — as they’ve often had to do during the pandemic — they have to take careful steps to mitigate the potential for failure.

Managing potential failure

Most important is to be transparent during the decision-making process. District leaders sometimes have to act quickly and with minimal consultation, such as when presented with new public health data. Stakeholders may not agree with the decision, but they do have a right to know who’s making that decision, the information it’s based on, who has what kind of authority, what the expected results are, and what will happen if the intended outcome isn’t achieved. Even in an emergency, leaders must be able to explain the reasoning behind their actions, how they will measure the results, and what success will look like.

Just as important, system leaders should show that in making their decision, they’ve tried to find common ground, rather than take sides. During the pandemic, for instance, the question of whether to keep schools open or closed has caused serious rifts in many school districts. But the most effective leaders haven’t insisted that they know the best way to be proceed — whether to stay open or shut down — so much as they’ve framed the debate around the shared interest of keeping students, teachers, and families healthy. In a tug-of-war between two incompatible positions, some part of the community will be left angry and disappointed. But if the superintendent can show that they’ve tried, in good faith, to balance various needs and concerns, then they’ll stand a better chance, at least, of heading off the familiar firestorm of criticism.

Failure is best managed through trusting, collaborative relationships with engaged stakeholders. Most people don’t expect school superintendents, or any leader for that matter, to never make a mistake and to always get it right. But if they know the leader’s values, trust that their decision-making processes have integrity and are consistent, and see leaders honestly acknowledge what went wrong and what will be different next time, they’re more likely to accept a mistake and move on. The challenge is that too many leaders don’t take the time to invest in both the relationships and the processes during the calm, good times. That may be the biggest leadership failure there is.