School improvement, regions and the principal somewhere in between. Part 2.

'Get this region out of the Herald Sun.' These were Minister Lynne Kosky's pleas to newly-appointed Northern Metropolitan Regional Director, Wayne Craig.  What happened during the next eight years involved developing and implementing a courageous narrative of school regeneration and school improvement. 

Transcript

Loretta  00:03

You're listening to Loretta Piazza experienced school principal, mentor, and coach. And together were talking out at school. You will hear from leaders who have lived and breathed so many experiences good and bad, agonized over decisions, and tossed and turned through countless sleepless nights. These are the people who will help you stay ahead of the game.  

As we journey through the north, it doesn't take long to realize that back in 2006, the landscape was bare and bleak. If the western region was termed the basket case, then there are no words to describe the northern region when Wayne Craig became regional director. The Achievement Improvement Zones or the AIZ, also known as powerful learning, took educational reform to scale. It was essentially a subset of the efforts to lift achievement across all of Victoria at that time. Even to this day, I still recall Wayne's mantra about moral purpose and postcode not defining destiny. Wayne doesn't make this story about himself. And he tells of the collective efforts of all the academic experts, the principals, and the teachers who worked alongside him. His story is more than just school reform at scale. It's really about changing the hearts and minds of the people doing the work. I know this for a fact. I was one of those people.  Hello, Wayne, welcome to Talking out of school.

Wayne  01:48

Thanks, Loretta, nice to be here.

Loretta  01:50

Well, I think we've got quite a few things that we can talk about, given that you were my Regional Director between the years of 2005 and 12. So prior to that, what was your role?

Wayne  02:08

I was the principal at Box Hill, Senior Secondary, from about 94, I think it was. And that was an interesting place because it had been a merger of a boys Technical School and a girls technical school, but in the round of closures under Jeff Kennett, they chopped out a junior part of the school. So half the staff lost their job. When I went there, it was its first year of operation. So it had no feeder schools at all. You didn't know whether you had an enrollment or not. It was in fair state of disarray when I got there. In fact, I would have walked out the door for the first six months if I'd had an opportunity. But it turned around, it was actually a fantastic place to work and a great experience.

Loretta  02:53

Okay, so you mentioned that there were a few challenges. So what were the highlights then?

Wayne  02:58

The highlight, I guess, was turning it around. So it had been a school of last resort for a lot of kids, which was fine. But it became kind of a school of first choice for lots of kids. And they were different kids. So some are academics. But we developed sport programs so that kids who went on to be seriously good athletes or develop careers around sport. Introduced probably the first online roll marking and progress reporting system, had laptops for teachers years before the department ever thought about it. So I was just a really good place to work. And, you know, I had sort of strong relationships with other schools in the area over time as well.

Loretta  03:47

You're talking about that technical aspect, you know, introducing laptops and so on. Were those ideas from you?

Wayne  03:56

Yeah, yeah. The roll marking was basically out of necessity, because it wasn't done well. And it was a very complex place in terms of timetabling. And we had an enrollment audit one year where they took a number of kids off me, which was fair enough, but I vowed and declared that would never happen again. So we looked at, we actually introduced a roll marking system using palm pilots, no one actually knows what they are anymore. But that got us on top of the enrollment of the attendance issues straightaway. And then in maybe 2000, or a bit after we went to online roll marking so parents could check in on the kids at any time, and we could do the same. And then we put in a progress reporting system that the kids loved and we actually attached grade point averages to the progress reports which kids also loved. So that was a long way ahead of its time. And in fact, the guy who developed it with us if he had any business acumen at all, he could have made a fortune out of it as, as Compass John de la Motte and Lucas Filer . So yeah.

Loretta  05:13

Turninh things around. That wasn't the first time. Well, that was the first time that you did it. But you actually did it again, when you became regional director of our northern region. How did that come about?

Wayne  05:27

It was an accident, like most of my career, I was contacted.....

Loretta  05:33

I think you're being very modest.

Wayne  05:35

No, no, I've never, I've never had a planned and you know, when I went to Box Hill, I applied for a few schools, basically, because a couple of principals and told me I should and eventually agreed with it. But I chose Box Hill, because of the what they were doing with curriculum. It looked to me to be interesting, I didn't realize all the other issues. And the Regional Director thing was really I was asked if I'd like to be a regional director. And I had no time at all for regions, I thought they blocked and they focused on trivia. And when I was contacted, I said to the person what, you know, what have I done to offend you? Why would you want me to take on that job? And during the interview process, Grant O'Here was the secretary at the time. And it became clear that if I, if I took this job, I'd be going to the north, because part of it at least, was in a state of disarray. So anyway, in the end, it was time for a change. I've been at Box Hill for nearly a dozen years. And we kind of all knew what we were going to say before we said it. So it was time to move on and do something different. And I don't think I was particularly well prepared for it, I had no idea really of the depth of the issues in some parts. My overall impression was that most schools were reasonably comfortable, you know, if, and particularly the ones in more affluent areas. And unfortunately, in some of the tougher areas, I think people had given up largely like, and government would, or the department come along and sort of point a finger at those people and saying it was not doing a very good job, and here's some money, go and fix it. And then they change again. And there were things like in Broadmeadows on on one side of the railway line, they were using a particular set of approaches to try to improve outcomes. And on the other side, they'd be doing something completely different. So it just seemed really bizarre, basically. But it was, you know, it's challenging. The minister was Lynne Kosky and she made it clear that she just wanted the region off the out of the newspapers, out of the Herald Sun. If there was a bad news story, it was quite often to do with the North.

Loretta  07:47

Poor North. 

Wayne  07:48

Yeah, and it was, it was unfair, in a lot of ways, because there were plenty...and most, no one comes to school to do a bad job. And even in the places where things were really difficult, it was like there wasn't much support, and there wasn't much sense of direction, and there wasn't much optimism or hope. And you could understand, and there was also a culture of blame. So you know, people would blame the kids and blame that.... I remember I went to one school and did a session with the staff. And I had one woman tell me, you don't know what it's like here. We need to teach the parents first. And it was like, Well, hang on, you teach the kids who walk through the door full stop. That's your job. But that kind of attitude wasn't across the board. But even in the affluent areas, most of the schools were doing okay. They kind of, they're all aware, all right, we don't need to worry about this stuff. And the reality was, in most cases, they were doing okay, because of the kids who walked through the door, not because of anything in particular, they were doing. I couldn't say that in many cases, there was much value add going on.

Loretta  08:50

So would it be fair to say that your job was about school improvement?

Wayne  08:56

Yeah. And it was also, I mean, it was the time of the Blueprint. It was time when you had Lynn Kosky saying things like postcode's not destiny. It was time when Darryl Fraser had come in with a focus on school improvement. There was a little bit of money around and there was a bit of flexibility. And there became a little bit more money through national partnerships and so on. But yeah, the focus was very much on school improvement.

Loretta  09:23

So what did that mean to you?

Wayne  09:28

Basically, in the end, it meant getting the best out of every kid in every school. So which was kind of moral purpose, but also meant re culturing the organization. Because, if you looked at I think they were senior education officers, they were responsible for 40 schools, but they were really accountability bookkeepers. So you know, have you filled in this bit of paper, if you've got a performance plan? Have you done this? So it wasn't really about school improvement. It wasn't about working closely with schools to try and get them to improve their outcomes. So the first part was, how do we change the culture of the organization? And how to, you know, how do we reduce the numbers so that they're manageable, because if, if you're responsible for 40 schools, you simply can't do it. So we managed to get the numbers down to 20 to 25. And there was one Darebin, and whatever the inner North one was. Yarra, they'd been, or Darebin had been two networks that had been Preston, and the sort of area around the south around Fairfield and those places, and they didn't talk to each other. And they didn't actually want, they actually, principals came to me and said, We don't want to, particularly the ones down south, we don't, we're not, we don't want to meet with these principals, we've got nothing in common with them. And it was like, Well, bad luck, you know, this is how the world is, and you're going to meet with them. And in the end, when we started off the Achievement Improvement Zone stuff, the Darebin people were the ones who are most keen to be involved. So things changed fairly quickly. But it was, it was almost a cultural look after myself. And there was a degree of.dishonesty is probably a bit strong, but no one actually talked about what their data was like. If you're in a school that was struggling, you didn't talk about it, because there's almost a stigma attached to poor data. And if you're in one of the good schools, you kind of just let people think you are really good school, when in fact, the data might show you're okay. But you weren't a really good place. So there was all that sort of stuff in the background.

Loretta  11:29

Can I let you in on a little secret?  When you started to put the data up for everyone to see, we were all dying a silent death in the hope that it wouldn't be our data

Wayne  11:44

Yeah, sure. Yeah. 

Loretta  11:45

It was so confronting, it had never happened before. We didn't know where to look, didn't know what to say. And then we'd breathe a sigh of relief when we realized it was another school's stuff. And then we'd feel sorry for them. But that changed and I'm really interested in the Achievement Improvement Zones. So it's the AIZ. Where did that come from? The idea behind that?

Wayne  12:13

Again, it was was kind of serendipity. I I knew David Hopkins a bit, I'd done some work in, in the UK for a month or so around 2009. I met David and I got on okay with him. We weren't bosom buddies or anything. But the very first conference they had for the region, which I wasn't involved in organizing, David turned out to be one of the guest speakers. And I can remember very clearly that there was a really bad comedian at dinner; it might have been on a Tuesday, I think, and David had been traveling for, I don't know, 38 hours or something to get there. And when David's tired or angry, or both, he gets a stammer. And he sat down beside me at dinner. And he said, Wayne, if you had been traveling for 36 hours, and you saw this comedian, and this food, what would you think the state of education was in the northern provinces of Melbourne? So Well, David, you'd think it'd be pretty bad. And you know what,  it'd be right. So we had a conversation. And he said, Well, basically, how about we go out for a drive and we go to some of these schools? So we spent a week driving around the region and going to different schools, and he was kind of fishing for a bit of work. He was going to be here for a month at a time three times a year, because he had an HSBC visiting fellow thing at Melbourne Uni, and eventually said, Look, I'll work one week, every time I come out pro bono.  And I said, Well, that's fine, except one week's not going to be enough, we'll need more. And then, he'd been involved in Achievement Improvement Zones in the UK. And that was basically one secondary school with maybe four or five primaries. And anyway, came back with that as a suggestion. I said, well, that's not going to work. You know, the problems much bigger than that. We had a third out of the, the worst 50 worst performing primary schools in the state. 38 of them were in the north. And I said, you know, if we just work with it, you know, four or five or six schools, we're kidding ourselves. And he agreed, and there was also the issue of too many schools. So you know, there are lots of really small schools, which people wanted to hang on to, but it was killing principals. And it was killing teachers. Anyway, we came up with this Achievement Improvement Zones, but then it was, so what are they going to actually do? And I've always had this thing about literate, numerate and curious.  I'd had that for a long time. So we worked on that. And then we, we looked around at who we could get to work with us and I knew John Munro, really well. I'd worked with John a lot and John John had become a personal friend.  Peter, the maths guy whose surname I can't remember, he was at Monash and I kind of knew of him. Ray Lewis on classroom management I knew well and worked with. And I knew Patrick Griffin from Melbourne. So we set up this thing about, let's work on those areas. There was a little bit of money around and you could you could fiddle with money. And it turned out schools were prepared to put some in. And basically, the message was, you know, you can do this, but you don't have to, but you have to do something. So, if you don't want to be involved, that's absolutely fine. But I think I was lucky because that stage, schools wer wanting to do something after they actually saw that wasn't just someone coming around to beat them over the head and tell them they're no good or ignore them. Because most of them, I reckon in the past, just ignored them. There was actually a strategy there to try and do something. And it was.....I remember the first week, I had a meeting at Mill Park at the whatever it is the council center there, that was my first meting. Darrell, I think might have turned up to that. And you could tell people were shocked, you know, we've got a performance that isn't good enough. And we've got too many schools, there was kinda silence. And no one you can tell whether people were in, they just looked the other way. It was like I wasn't there. But the next day, I went out to Broadmeadows, and there was a meeting of 500 staff about what they were going to do in broad Meadows. And it all revolved around refurbishing Upfield High School, which is a school that had been closed, and I sat there and I listened to it all morning, and then in the afternoon starting and it was like, you got to be kidding yourself. And I didn't know one person in the room I don't think, and I said Listen, can I just have a talk for a minute? I said, Look, if you think this is going to solve the problems in Broadmeadows, you're kidding yourself. All you're doing was shuffling the deck chairs, let's stop and have a serious look at what schools should look like, for the 21st century, not what they should have been like 20 years because they were.... Broadmeadows was a disaster. And anyway, that that set the ball rolling in that area for it was eventually to become the Regeneration project. But you know, your had pretty much every primary school in the bottom 10% or so in this state. You had one in five, one in three kids choosing to go from one of the primary schools to one of the local secondaries. And there was one chance in five they'd be there at the end of year 12. So it was just collapsed. And you know, there were 1000 kids a day heading out of Broadmeadows to go to another secondary school because they could, but there was a whole bunch of kids who couldn't do it. So it was kind of a mental mindset, a lot of goodwill eventually. And yeah, people just bought into it because they wanted to do the right thing. I reckon moral purpose is a big driver for lots of people on that that engaged many. And when they realized they weren't going to get beaten up for their data, I think that did that did a similar thing.

Loretta  17:57

That's an interesting term moral purpose.

Wayne  18:00

Well if you put it really crudely, it's a desire to do good things. But if you if you actually take, you know, Michael Fullan, David Hopkins, Alma Harris, they all put it as critical in in the improvement process. And now they'll talk about David Hopkins, for example, talks about as changing the life scripts of kids, Michael Fullan. It's about you know, raising the bar and narrowing the gap. What it really is, is stable and generalized intention to which to achieve something that's meaningful for the person, but meaningful to the broader world. And if you have a look at TELUS OECD Teaching and Learning survey from 2018, and more than 90% of Australian teachers, become teachers because they want to do something good for kids. And more than 80% believe that teaching was a means of addressing social digital disadvantage. So in essence, it's about doing good work to improve outcomes for kids to help them fulfill their potential.

Loretta  19:13

Okay, so you finished up around 2012? 

Wayne  19:18

Yeah

Loretta  19:19

Given the situation that you inherited, and then what you were able to achieve in your years as Regional Director, and through the AIZ and working with people like David Hopkins and John Munro, and so on. Fast forward to today in 2022. Where, where are we now? What happened? Have we progressed, or have we stagnated or have we gone backwards? How would you compare today to 2012?

Wayne  19:55

I think I think maybe in the North things haven't stagnated quite as much as they have in a lot of other locations. But if you if you look at Tom Bentley, who has been an advisor to people like Julia Gillard, and I think now he's at RMIT. He argues that, basically, there's been no improvement in performance for a very long time, despite significant investments. So you know, if you think back over the last 10 15 years, we've had NAPLAN, we've had My School, we've got a universal year of pre service Ed, we've got Professional Standards for Teachers and Principals, we've had Gonski come along, and there's additional funding, and we've had the AEDI come in. And yet, if you look on every measure virtually no NAPLAN data has improved. Since we started basically, it's reasonably stable. And every now and again, one jurisdiction will go ahead a little bit. But overall, performance has been pretty static, our performance on PISA has been going backwards since 2000. And disturbingly going backwards. And, you know, Patrick Griffin, from Melbourne who worked with us a lot, he would argue that what we've done is miss out on doing the best we can for our most capable kids. So w've made some progress with kids who are at the bottom in terms of their performance. But if you look at the top kids, we don't extend and challenge them enough. And I think that shows up in both NAPLAN and the PISA data, TIM's which is the math science test that is for years 4 and 8, is not quite so bleak. So I think in the last round of TIM's stuff, in a couple of the measures, we were in the top 10 in the world, but in all of the others, all the other measures we've gone backwards consistently. And things like PISA are important because they're not just sort of tests of your capacity to regurgitate they are actually test and be problem solving ability. The fact is we've got an other jurisdictions that have gone ahead. But we've gone backwards in real terms. Our performance has actually declined compared to ourselves. So forget about the rest of the world.  Our performance has actually gone backwards over time.

Loretta  22:32

Well, how does that happen, given the enormous amount of money via equity funding, support from regions, and a whole range of programs that have been introduced?

22:46

Well, I think none of it sustained for a start. So you, you get a change of government, and you get a change of narrative. And so when Martin Dixon and the Liberals, Martin Dixon, my experience, you know, he'd been a teacher and a principal, and he actually understood what a good school was, and stuff he tried to do, which I can't even remember what it was now, even though I was involved in it, but it was a twist and a different approach. And now, you know, we've got this government that their focus is actually on improving NAPLAN. And what we want to do is improve kids learning ability, and we want to teach as well as we can. And things like NAPLAN will take care of themselves. It's interesting. I'm, I'm doing through Melbourne Uni, some work with South Australia's Leadership Institute. And they've got a target to be a great system by 2028. And you look and think, well, that's a big ask, because the rest of the country is not going forward, particularly here, you are looking to move yourself from where you are when they started in 2015, I think, but they've got a long way to go. But they actually, the targets are not. It's a it's a basket of targets. And they're not being specific about how we want to be here on Pisa, or we want to be here on NAPLAN. But then when you look at, okay, if we're going to do that, we're not going to be teaching the test. We're going to teach kids, we're gonna teach them well. And we'll teach them that how to learn how to think, how to ask questions, teach them how to manage their own learning, that kind of thing. And we, we tend not to do that or have the support from regions. I reckon we've gone back to where we were when I first started.  The people who are the link between the Regions and the schools, the SEILs, they're just bookkeepers. They're not necessarily deeply skilled in school improvement and they're not expected I don't think to really be involved and get their hands dirty. They go around checking up and making sure things have been done. And I think if you look at well, even if you look within the bureaucracy, there's not much in terms of knowledge about school improvement. And so, you know, none of it makes sense. And then the other thing I reckon is, for most bureaucrats, schools are pretty much the same thing. And I've had senior bureaucrats say to me, oh, you know, teaching this Groundhog Day, you do the same thing every year, and they don't understand you're actually dealing with different kids all the time, in school, each school's unique, unique combination of personalities, dispositions and knowledge. And they change every year, at least, because 20% or more of the kids are new, and 20% have gone, then you have a turnover of teaching staff. But there's no real attempt to focus or allow schools to do the work I'm doing at the moment, I think there are schools that know how to take what systems have on offer, and tailor them, tailor those offerings. So they actually meet what they need to do in their school to improve outcomes for their kids. And that was kind of what we did.

Loretta  26:00

Okay, if you were to walk into a room, and sit down with a dozen principals who were genuinely keen to bring about improvement in their school, regardless of whether they're high socio economic or low, what  would you say are the most critical factors that they need to focus on to get things happening? 

Wayne  26:25

Ah, yeah, it's interesting. I think....

Loretta  26:29

it's a bit like solving world hunger, isn't it? 

Wayne  26:33

Yeah, it is. But there's some, well, firstly, focus on teaching and learning. So that would be the, you know, you go straight back to what's instructional leadership. And so the first thing is to develop the schools of purposeful community. So be really clear on what it is we're here for. And we're here, in the end, to improve the learning from our students. The second thing I would look at is guiding change and developing people. So we're going to work if you're not, if you're not changing and trying to do things better, you're actually falling behind. So what do we do there? Well, if we want to develop people, we need kind of intellectual stimulation. So we need to engage them in the work, they need individual support. And we need to be able to model what it is we're trying to achieve. If we're talking about guiding change, we want to strengthen the school culture, we need to modify the organizational structures to manage the new work, and we need to manage the environment. And then the focus on teaching and learning would be about a high degree of consistency, kind of strengthening teachers skills and expanding their repertoire of practice. And I think, you know, the the work itself, David and I have argued this for years, the work itself is technically simple, we pretty much know what to do to boost student learning. And the HITS from the department would be an example of you know, that's technically simple, although they've made it look complex. But it's the challenges the social complexity, how do you overcome individual practice? And then, in terms of what would you do? Well, your work on the right thing. So the right things are things probably that are going to fulfill your moral purpose. So it's about what's in the best interest of kids in our schools. We implement evidence based practice, we improve learning and achievement by becoming more precise with our teaching. We work in teams, and we probably use moral purpose and intrinsic motivation as the drivers for change. And then we're rigorous about whether we're actually achieving what we set out to, so that they're the thing and I'd be saying, well, firstly, you know, you've, you've got to get this vision of what we're going to look like, how will kids benefit? And what will teachers do to achieve this, select the teaching strategies are the pedagogic strategies, put in place professional learning structures that will support teachers to develop those skills. And make sure that what you're doing is consistent, and then check to see whether the culture is changing. And it will be because if culture is what we do around here, if you're improving how you teach, you're actually changing the way you teach. So you're changing the culture of the school, and there's a whole lot of things that sit beside that are part of the equation. But the important thing I reckon, is doing the right work. And I think we get distracted by doing the bureaucracy's work. And you can do both. But I think that pendulum, important swings too much towards the clerical and accountability side and it's not intelligent accountability either. Not sure whether that answers the question or not.....

Loretta  29:47

Look, I think in reality there are a whole lot of principals in schools that just feel that they've they've got to get all their technical work done. You know, the occ health and safety. And because it's such a busy work, they don't get into the nitty gritty, what's the most important work, working with the kids in the learning?

Wayne  30:09

Yeah. And I think for some people, I think that's true. But I think there are some people who, who are not confident they have the skills to do that other work, whereas they can do the sort of department's busy work. And there's more challenges in doing the school improvement side of things because you actually need to bring people along. And you've got some people are deeply uncomfortable about being asked to change, not because they're, they're bad people, or you know that they're not willing. They just don't understand really what it is they're supposed to do. And they feel like they're doing it alone. And so I think, but there is, there is also still that argument that technical expectations drown the work you need to do. And I was lucky, because when I, when I was a principal, we didn't have email. And I would just say, I never got that letter or replied to that letter six months ago, what have you lost it? That kind of stuff. So you could, but but I think the other thing in that is principals don't realize how important they are to the system. And if they're doing a good job, if they have the support of their community, they're not easily hit on by the bureaucracy, you know, the bureaucracy can't do that much to them except so listen, can you get on with that stuff we need done. And I think part of the job, as a principal is to prioritize what's most important, and absolutely, there are obligations to the system that you have to fulfill. And some of them need to be done urgently. But there are others that don't. And I think, you know, things like occ health and safety policies, can have a look at those. They're the same in every school. So you don't need to spend years dwelling on what the health and safety policy looks like. Put your energies into the right work, you know, what is the right work? What's the workloads that schools exist, so kids will learn more efficiently and effectively than they would without them? That's the primary focus. So it's the right work, put most of your energies into that.

Loretta  32:18

So what does the future hold for you?

Wayne  32:22

Who knows? Finish off this doctorate. I'm doing what I'm doing a bit of work, which is not really what I intended to be doing. It's quite nice to, as you're finding, just to be able to sort of suit yourself when you do things and don't do things. But I want to finish the doctorate off.  I've just had a conversation with my supervisors and things have slowed down a bit because of COVID. So I'm looking at maybe taking a six month break, so schools can say...... what I'm looking at is workplace curiosity, driving improvements in student learning. And it's impacted by moral purpose on schools' capital. And the main part of it is a survey of teachers and principals, and I've done I've got about 200 responses so far. And it's really interesting. I mean, things like moral purpose do matter for teachers. And if they stay, moral purpose doesn't decrease over time. There's obviously some people who leave, because they just can't do it anymore. But moral purpose matters. Workplace curiosity seems to be important. Intellectual Capital, and social capital are really important, I think, when there's a guide. David Hargraves, who first did that work and I met in the UK a long time ago. And his argument was, if you want to improve student learning, that's improving their intellectual capital, you need to improve the intellectual capital of your staff, your teachers who do the work. I'd argue it's broader. And you need to have strong social capital and social capital has got two parts. One is the levels of trust within an organization. And the other is how efficiently a school can spread knowledge. So as we're learning something new, can we spread that across the whole school? And when you start to think about professional learning like that, it changes the way you go about business? I think. So yeah.

Loretta  34:24

Well, I mean, despite COVID, it sounds like a fabulous project, and it sounds like you're getting lots of support. So I certainly wish you very well in completing your research, because it certainly will have an impact on the way schools move forward and principals think, but I'd like to say thank you for your insights. And I can honestly say having been been in the North for more than 22 years as a principal that your legacy does still live on in many, many ways.  We might not talk about the AIZ, or we might not talk about, say, David Hopkins, but a lot of that learning still does remain in our schools.

Wayne  35:12

Now, that's terrific. I think that's true too. There's a lot of teachers and principals who who know that stuff deeply now.

Loretta  35:21

So wishing you all the best.

Wayne  35:24

 Same to you. Thank you, Loretta.

Loretta  35:27

Thanks for listening to this latest episode of talking out of school, where we cover topics and dilemmas associated with the ups and downs, and even the downright curious of the school leaders job. Want to know more? Then visit me at shaping leaders.com.au But for now, here's to staying ahead of the game.