Surviving First Contact With The Enemy

The wise, Jedi-like Colin Jagoe posted a link about how the COVID19 pandemic is very much like being at war.  This got me thinking about how our behind-closed-doors / business-as-usual approach to managing this crisis has been... minimalist.  This shouldn't be about maintaining the organizational status quo, it should be about building a resilient, transparent and responsive approach to dealing with an unprecedented social engineering challenge.

The following reflection highlights how a transparent, communicative, engaged leadership approach helps mitigate one of the truths of fighting a war:  "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy."     In the fluid and rapidly changing situation we find ourselves in, it might be wise to lean on some military wisdom in our response.

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I was an air cadet in the 1980s in Mississauga.  One of the major pillars of that program is teaching leadership.  I took summer courses on it and spent at least dozen hours over and above school each week working through cadet syllabus on it.  It's safe to say air cadets was a seminal experience for me in that it not only showed me how I can best fit into an operational structure, but also how to run one effectively in a changeable environment.

When I was halfway through my cadet career we went up to Base Borden for a March Break training exercise.  Pete Rudin was my flight sergeant and as experienced as a cadet can get being only a couple of months away from retiring.  I was a very keen new corporal.  Our flight consisted of about 35 kids ranging in age from brand new 13 year old recruits up to savvy 18 year old veterans like Pete.  We got put into a capture the flag game against other flights, but Pete did something no one else did.

While all the other flight sergeants split their groups up into the standard squads (one experienced NCO leading 4-5 very excited and inexperienced younger cadets) and ran things top down, Pete differentiated his leadership approach based on the human resources he had at hand.  His plan was to create a massive group of all the new recruits who were anxious and a bit freaked out and move into the exercise with this slow moving but unstoppable unit.  He knew he had a few experienced and gung-ho junior NCOs who wanted to run, so rather than hold them back in the big group he told us to recon where the other teams were and report back.

You can imagine how that felt.  When a senior NCO who you look up to acknowledges your esprit de corps and gifts you with a special assignment, your already gung-ho approach steps up another gear.  Things went as you might imagine.  The other junior NCOs and I ran off into the woods full of adrenaline and immediately began finding those little homogeneous squads.  As soon as we made contact we'd run back to the hive, usually with that squad chasing us thinking we were an easy kill... then they'd come over a hill and find dozens of excited youngsters swarming around our flight sergeant, and get retired from the game.

We began hoovering up squads and about an hour in I stumbled across the other team's flag - the one we had to capture that would end the game.  I barely got out of there alive (if they pulled the flag off your arm you're considered retired), they had two of their most experienced squads on defence.  I managed to get away and ran back breathless to tell Rudin where the flag was.  Ten minutes later it was all over as our hive swarmed over the hill into the dell where their flag was hidden.  The two squads they'd put on defence couldn't believe what was coming at them.  Our youngest, tiniest new cadet took the flag and ended the game (I think Pete made a point of that).

Afterwards, I asked Flight Sergeant Rudin how he came up with this bizarre approach.  He said something I've never forgotten: "I figured if I tried to keep you guys back with the big group you'd be hard to manage and it wouldn't help things.  We'd perform better if I didn't have to micromanage when you wanted to be doing something else that would produce better results for all of us anyway.  The little ones looked terrified, so I wanted to keep them with me and build their confidence."

We were the  younger team in that capture the flag, with less experienced NCOs - the other team was cocky and confident because they had many ringers.  Rather than open up the rule-book and follow homogeneous protocols designed around top-down control that would have ended up with us losing, Pete differentiated his leadership approach and gave each of his people just what they needed to succeed.  He also arranged things so that everyone was in contact with everyone else and made communication easier by giving us a clear focus to return to, it really was a brilliant piece of planning beautifully executed.

I never forgot that lesson.  In retrospect, it was the centralization of resources, clarity of the planning (it was all done out loud with us all standing around Pete as he elicited ideas and worked out what we were going to do), and the focus on communication that allowed it to succeed like it did.  Everyone knew what we were doing, why we were doing it and how to let the group know if it was or wasn't working.  When we caught the fourth squad who had no idea that three others had been caught by our big hive, I began to realize what that lack of communication was doing to the other teams.  No battle plan may survive first contact with the enemy, but designing a plan transparently and reflexively with clear communications channels allows your organization to respond to surprises quickly and effectively.


I ended up retiring a sergeant in cadets.  Others have suggested that only making it half way up the command structure is somehow a failure, but I don't see it that way.  I finished my career as Rifle Guard Commander and Colour Party Commander and occupied a specialist role in our large organization.  The metacognitive awareness of how I can operate most effectively in a large organizational structure was another invaluable result of my time in cadets.  I'm very much a sergeant - good at dealing with tangible, immediate issues in small groups collaboratively and imaginatively (handy classroom teacher skills, eh?).  Given latitude I liked to exercise initiative and move quickly - did this sometimes get me into trouble?  Yep, but the leaders I had recognized those skills and made a point of leveraging them.  That made me feel like a valued member of the organization, rank wasn't the only thing that defined me.

I was good friends with many of the younger cadets who ended up in charge of our squadron - many of them attended my 50th birthday party last year (we're all old now, so those year or two differences don't matter any more - but then they didn't back then either).  They didn't make rank about exclusion, privilege and control and they acknowledged their cadets' expertise and experience by making productive use of them by differentiating the roles they assigned.

This collegial and transparent approach to leadership allowed us to execute the cadet syllabus with precision and flair.  It also allowed us to revise and respond to the unknown quickly and effectively when on exercises, contact with the enemy be damned.  I'm really proud of the things we learned and work we did.  This experience has aided us all in our professional lives as adults.  This transparent, communicative approach has informed much of my teaching practice.  If you asked my students what they find most compelling about my classes, I think many would say that sense of agency - I acknowledge their strengths and honour them by differentiating their work.

I'm missing that transparency, clarity of purpose and engagement now, even though not one of the teens I just described had a post graduate degree in leadership.  If we are indeed at war as Colin suggests, then we need to quickly engage and develop effective communications and a clarity of common purpose, or all of those secret plans being developed behind closed doors won't survive first contact with an enemy we've too often underestimated.  Initiative is lost, but it's never too late to try and get it back.

Leadership is Exhausting #1: headships & heirarchies

Some people make leadership their life's work, but I'm not one of them.  I find managing other people tiresome and tedious.  The only time I pursue leadership is if I feel it's the only way to get things done.  Getting things done is what I'm all about and with a few exceptions I prefer to do it without management hierarchy.  I greatly enjoy collaborating and find few things more satisfying than a team working well together, but those teams are best when populated with experts pursuing their expertise, not when dictated to by a hands-off management expert.

I just completed a two year term as co-head of technology at my school.  The only thing worse than leading is having to go to committee every time a decision has to be made, which is what the co-head structure was designed to do.  Rather than get tangled up in that nonsense I focused on the things my co-head wasn't conversant in, like communication and encouraging department improving extracurriculars.  At no point was I embroiled in co-head who's-the-boss arguments (as others were) or telling anyone what to do, though this approached baffled many of the other people on the leadership team.  My co-head took care of safety and hard-tech shop requirements, I did the other things.  We collaborated on things like sectioning, though even here there was sometimes friction.  I wouldn't recommend co-headships.  At their best they are a compromise.

At the end of my tenure our department had re-established itself as one of the leaders in the board in Skills Canada participation, re-connected with board funding for technology and had become used to actually knowing what happens in leadership team meetings thanks to my detailed, live and often colourful note taking.  I think I left the department in a more aware and positively engaged extracurricular place than I found it.

I've been a drill sergeant, I know how to bark orders and expect them to be obeyed.  It is only in very hierarchical situations that a dominating leader can operate effectively.  The punishments have to be immediate and the focus razor sharp.  Everybody involved is usually willing to do this because you're training for a life and death situation so you need to have your shit together.  I enjoyed operating in an environment like that because expectations were clear and the efficiencies were obvious, but leadership in education is anything but clear on objectives and expectations (it's managed by politicians).

It is such a relief to put that headship down.  The lack of focus or clarity of purpose makes for a very murky operating environment.  Everyone's opinion is carefully listened to and then decisions happen seemingly of their own accord.  Having to listen to people who think everyone should do what they tell them for hours at a time in Head's meetings is one of my least favourite things to do.  Trying to find quorum in a crowded room of conflicting self interests led to never ending discussions that never produced conclusions.  A room where less was said for longer amounts of time I don't think I've ever sat in.

Now that I'm free from the yoke of leadership I'm doing what I do best and doubling down my energy on research and development.  I voluntarily took on too many sections of teaching again just to give my students opportunities to explore the technology they want to make their life's work.  We're taking a run at cyber-security competition for the first time with ICTC's Cyber Titan program.  We've already put together a powerful roster of Skills Ontario competitors, and I'm pursuing half a dozen emerging technology initiatives.  My seniors are building VR ready computers for schools across the board and we're developing ipad based software for DD students to better understand emotional expression.  We've repaired dozens of Chromebooks and other school hardware, installed software and enabled technology across the school.  We're also in the process of working out how to create immersive 360° video as an introduction to the school so that students can become familiar with the layout before they arrive.  All that's happening while I'm teaching five sections in three classes.

It's my kind of work; it's wide ranging, there are no right answers, there are no instructions because no one really knows how to do a lot of it, and it demands a real sense of discovery.  Isn't this just another form of leadership you ask?  I'm certainly managing a lot of activity, but I'm back to my flat hierarchy where I work to develop expertise in my students so that they can self-govern their work (an expert is defined by how they design their work space in order to display their expertise).  I don't want a production line, or even submission to hierarchy, I want experts I can collaborate with in pursuing solutions to challenging, non-linear, real-world engineering problems.  That might be the worst definition of leadership ever devised, but it's what I value, and it's the opposite of exhausting.

Instructional Leadership: the comeback

Our new admin just arranged our first head's retreat.  As a forum for clarifying what the department heads in the school want, I'd call it a resounding success.  Toward the end of the day we had a small group discussion on instructional leadership.  The idea was to define it and clarify what we need to do it.

I've had a long and complicated relationship with leadership and leaders.  Much of my time in air cadets as a teen was spent studying leadership techniques.  My experiences there suggest I'm an atypical team member.  At one point we were playing a massive capture the flag game in the woods at Camp Borden.  My Flight Sergeant picked out myself and a few other NCOs.  We were told to locate the flag and harass the enemy, that's it.  The vast majority of our flight were younger cadets in their first exercise.  The Flight Sergeant kept them all with him and they moved in a large group (like locusts), capturing everyone they saw by sheer force of numbers.

I eventually found the flag after working loosely with the other rangers, but mainly on my own.  I had someone relay back to the large group where the flag was and we ended up winning with this very unorthodox approach.  The other team did what was normally done - everyone had similar jobs in squads.  Afterwards my Flight Sergeant said, "I knew if I kept the keeners in the big group they wouldn't enjoy it, so I set you all loose and looked after the young ones."

That lesson in differentiating how you lead has always stuck with me, but my focus when leadership lands on me (I seldom go seeking it) goes beyond catering to helplessness.  I want self determination and personal empowerment in my team, and I expect team members to acknowledge that empowerment with engagement.  I don't want them to ever feel like they are being dictated to, or are being forced to accept ideas that run contrary to their own best practices.  The leadership structure should exist to empower and encourage self determination in the professionals it manages.

It's a tough, results orientated  job (like pro baseball),
and you've got to find ways to handle the pressure.
Leading people who do this everyday is a challenge.
Talking down to them doesn't work.

Of course, this assumes that you're dealing with professionals.  If you've got teachers who aren't willing or able to be competent professionals then I would be looking to teacher training and board hiring practices to weed them, not detuning the entire educational leadership apparatus to cater to a tiny percentage of incompetents. 

In discussing leadership with other department heads at my school I was struck with just how different their idea of leadership is from my own.  I not only step lightly around teachers who don't like or need to be told what to think, but I also expect competence when it comes to internal communication.  After saying this I was told by another head (in front of many others) that my department has terrible communication.  She said we need to have many meetings where I drill home information, but I should also present it in a way that makes them accept it.  My job isn't just to inform, it's to indoctrinate.

Absolutist thinking feels lazy to me, the result of trying to
look for an easy way out of a complex situation.

I couldn't imagine criticizing another leader like this, let alone in front of a large number of colleagues.  I became angry at her ignorant and callous disregard for my place in this group, so I walked away rather than firing back.  That someone would have this approach to management in my building makes me uneasy (it also explains why the iconoclastic tech teachers in my department would take great pleasure in telling her exactly what she wouldn't want to hear just to make her angry).  It took me a few days to realize that those comments say much more about her approach to management than it does about the colleagues I speak for at heads.

I was having Costanza moments after this altercation.

Instead of not being able to think of something

I tend to be overly vicious in my comebacks. 

Walking away is a learned response.

In my mind a micro manager is the worst kind of leader.  They constantly interfere and demand consistency with inane details rather than focusing on a goal; they want conformity to process rather than results orientated flexibility.  Some people need that kind of micromanagement but I'm not interested in managing them, or being one, or having much to do with that process.  If you want to alienate the most capable people in your organization, this is a great way to do it.

Another head who had overheard all of this had a chat with me and went back with this idea, "leaders should also include outliers who question and prompt revision in leadership practices."   The head with whom I seem diametrically opposed thought this a ridiculous idea.  Leadership is about forcing compliance.  Meetings are about beating down resistance and creating that compliance.  Ever hear teachers complain about meetings and wonder why they are so negative about them?  I don't, anymore.

True Colors helps clarify your social approach to leadership.
I'm a strong green/bit of blue - I've got no sense of gold...

There are many different types of leaders all with their own strengths and weaknesses.  My thing is exploring the edges, and I look for highly capable people to share that project with.  If experimentation with pedagogy or learning tools is your thing, then I'm your department head.  It's why technological change and the social upheaval it causes interest me.

My ideal department is staffed with people who need me to support them without constantly questioning them as they improve the state of the art of teaching.  Put me in an administrative role where I'm supposed to enforce conformity and I'm a disaster.  If that's what we're looking for in instructional leadership, I'm ready to step down immediately.  You're also going to find it difficult to get me into lockstep with everyone around me whether I'm a leader or a follower.

Consensus building is something that I'm terrible at but greatly admire.  Those leaders who can create a sense of direction in a group without alienating anyone are magic.  Whereas I get passionately angry about the asinine people I'm supposed to direct, these patient consensus builders are able to gently take them in hand and find a way through to them. I can appreciate the efficiency they bring to group work and admire them for a skill I lack.

The bureaucratic pencil pusher who holds the-way-it's-always-been as sacred is the antithesis of everything I consider important, but those people play a vital role in creating consistency and order in an organization.  As leaders I can't really see the value in them, but I'm sure a consensus builder somewhere could help me with that.

A good bit of reflection here, I think.  I'm no longer angry about the altercation we had and I'm trying to see the value of diverse voices in leadership positions.  If the goal is all of us in lockstep as we produce the same narrow goals in the same way then I'm in the wrong place.  I only hope that people higher up the org-chart recognize the value of diversification in instructional leadership or, as an outlier, I'm in real trouble.

Death of Vision

I was listening to CBC radio the other day and Ideas had a review of the repatriation of the Canadian Charter.  One of the people pondering the politics of the day noted that modern politicians don't stand for anything.  They remorselessly chase poll numbers, trying to place themselves in front of whatever the herd currently believes is worthwhile (itself dictated by big media interests).  McGuinty's shameless chasing of right wing votes while throwing teachers under the bus this summer is a fine example of that approach.

Don't look for moral standards, or even any kind of consistency in modern politicians.  As the radio interviewer suggested, we look back on our political leaders as giants and see the modern ones as dwarfs.  The old ones would push for a vision based on belief, even if it wasn't always rational.  The current ones shamelessly chase data in hopes of power.  It makes the business of politics very economical (and I don't mean that in a flattering way).

CTV is quite excited by this as ads for their Powerplay political commentary show declare, they are all about watching how politicians get and keep power.  I thought politics were about developing visionary leaders who take Canada toward a better version of itself.  It's now all about holding power, and not standing for anything in the process other than a Machiavellian quest for control.

Last summer I was once again listening to CBC, this time Matt Galloway interviewing the CEO of RIM.  As the agonizing interview went on, it became clear that this MBA wasn't put in charge of RIM to lead it, but rather to manage it into successful insolvency.  He shrugged off a question about RIM failing by simply suggesting that investors will make money on the deal because he'll just cut the business into pieces and sell them off.

Can you imagine if Churchill had suggested that?  Instead of we will fight in the fields, we will never surrender, how about we give you Scotland and Wales and call it even?  Everybody ends up happy, and so much more productive.

We value leaders because they stand for something, and never back off it, even (or especially) if it makes them difficult.  Wired did a recent article on Steve Jobs as either angel or demon.  The man was difficult, almost impossible to work with, and the result was market dominance.  He took over from a bumbling committee of MBAs who had discussed Apple into insolvency and took the company from the brink of destruction to an enviable market position before his death.  I have difficulty liking Apple products due to their closed nature and proprietary design, but I have to appreciate the power of a Steve Jobs.  If you want to be a visionary you aren't looking for consensus, you're driving for the best vision even if it seems unattainable; Churchill would have approved.

It's a pity that RIM went to the MBA pool to find another finance monkey to further run the company into the ground.  I'd much rather see a visionary, a true believer, attempt greatness rather than a controlled slide into insolvency all to benefit the moneyed class.  This German jackass they've hired couldn't give a damn what will happen to Waterloo and the many RIM facilities that communities depend on around the world if he manages to successfully dissolve Research In Motion into the highest bidders.

John Ralston Saul talks about the death of leadership and the rise of management in his The Collapse of Globalism.  Using false economics (there is no other kind), Saul cuts apart the chop logic of globalism and how it is used to manage people into a massive mono-culture with no way out.  Globalism comes complete with a data driven wrapper that is self justifying, and that desire to base leadership action on data driven decisions has been conditioned into us for decades now as the only credible justification for planning; it's scientific, logical!

In an age of computing it serves our current mindset to over value the potential of computed statistics

The MBA manager/priest uses incomplete/fictional statistics (are there any other kind?) to manipulate belief, founding all decisions on the inherently logical and statistically valid benefits of globalization, all while ignoring simple truths.  Those truths don't go away.  When you found your system on  the idea of an unlimited, limited resource (cheap oil) the truth will make itself evident.  The problem with globalism (and the politics, media, and education it has infected) is that we have all been conditioned to swallow statistics like they are Truth.

The last half century of post-modernism, globalism and mass media have weaned us from visionaries and simple truths.  These things are now aberration s rather than a cause for celebration; panicky by-products of a lack of control in an era of false computational certainty.

I am NOT a committee!

Next time your data-driven boss/principal/MP tries to base future plans on data that are obviously minimalist,  fictional and/or fabricated (and what facts born of data aren't?), ask yourself where our sense of vision went.

I don't want to base my very important job on data.  I'm not interested in grossly simplifying teaching to suit ease of management for MBAs looking for efficiency.  What I'd like is a leader with vision, maybe even someone who asks for the impossible and leads us on a charge into it.  Even a near miss in that case is better than the best laid plans of a data driven committee, and sometimes the results are revolutionary.  Even the failures are more helpful than statistically supported fictions leading to more data that prove how right everything is; simplifications supporting simplifications.

I'd rather take the road less traveled and risk failure while attempting greatness.  I'd rather fail trying to address hard truths than present false successes best seen in standardized test scores.  Most importantly, I'd rather believe in what I'm doing rather than being told what to think by a spreadsheet.

I guess I'm a man out of my time.