Strategic Schools

Ep. 21: The Additive Trap

• Season 1 • Episode 21

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Explore the idea of "frenzied stagnation" - the state where educators are busier than ever but making little meaningful progress. In this episode, Simon unpacks the "additive trap" in schools: the relentless habit of doing more without letting anything go. Tune in to reflect on your own context and begin noticing where subtraction might unlock greater clarity, impact, and sustainability in your work.

Explore the Book and Resources

📘 Get The Pruning Principle book - https://simonbreakspear.com/pruningbook/

🔧 Download free tools - https://simonbreakspear.com/pruningprinciple/



Simon Breakspear:

Well, hello and welcome to the Strategic Schools podcast, the show designed to give busy educational leaders the most practical value in the least time. I'm your host, dr Simon Breakspear, and in each episode I unpack one key idea or tool and outline practical steps you can apply with your team, all in under 20 minutes. Well, welcome back to the podcast. And, as many of you would know, back at the end of 2024, I released a new book with my friend and colleague, michael Rosenbrock on the pruning principle new book with my friend and colleague, michael Rosenbrook on the pruning principle and over the last couple of months I've been teaching the core ideas of that book, sharing some of our core tools of processes in different places around Australia and indeed online around the world. And I thought I might do in a couple of the next podcasts is just give you little snippets from the core book, is just give you little snippets from the core book. This way you might be able to tune in to some of the core ideas, maybe use these as a starting point for sharing some of these ideas with members of your team and reflecting on the way things are currently and how pruning might actually help you make some progress. So today.

Simon Breakspear:

I'm going to kick off by getting into a little bit of the content we capture in Chapter 1, that I call the additive trap, a state of frenzied stagnation. Are you busier than you were three years ago? For how many years would you say? This has been true. When we examine the sheer number of programs, projects and commitments we find ourselves tied to in our schools, it's easy to see why the overload is real. We found ourselves in a state of frenzied stagnation when doing more is the default, yet it's not having the impact we hope that it will. Stagnation is defined as a prolonged period of little or no progress. Stagnation is defined as a prolonged period of little or no progress, and it's ironic that we've found ourselves here, given the maddening pace most of us face in our roles. When we walk into a school and ask educators we're working with how everyone's going, someone will invariably reply with something like oh, crazy busy. And I'll say something like extra crazy busy or normal crazy busy. They say, oh, just normal crazy busy. The reality is being overloaded, exhausted and depleted is the new normal, and we've rewired our brains to accept this and believe that this is how it's going to be. As one educational leader in my local system said to me recently I've been flat out all week, I'm exhausted and I don't think I've even achieved anything. We know he's not alone.

Simon Breakspear:

We fail to understand the true impact of overload on our organisation and the overall quality of our working lives. Schools, teams and system teams have all become like a laptop that's been on for weeks or even a couple of months without being switched off, running slow, with too many applications going on in the background and 34 tabs open from articles we promised ourselves we'd get to at some point. Still, we don't feel like we can risk turning it off. To begin again feels risky in case we lose something important, so we keep it all open. It feels like we are always out of time and before we're out of time we're out of cognitive and emotional energy. We find ourselves jumping from one thing to another and never feeling we're making meaningful progress, all whilst running at a steady state of using 120% of our available capacity. So how did we get ourselves into this state? We're dealing with the additive trap.

Simon Breakspear:

The additive trap in education refers to a tendency to engage in improvement by defaulting to adding one more thing. We're like a calculator with only one function addition, our individual and team rhythms, tools, templates, protocols and conversational norms are focused on how best to improve our schools through additive actions. The default assumption is that pursuing improvement for our students, staff and systems implicitly means doing more. We all know what it feels like to fall into the trap of spending all of our time in meetings or coordinating, emailing, checking in, following up, completing a template, having a one-on-one conversation, whatever it may be About the work, but not feeling like we can progress the things that we need to do. It's as if we've declared inbox and calendar bankruptcy and proceed to just add more anyway. We're in an additive trap in education. It's not sustainable and it's self-defeating.

Simon Breakspear:

Schools are long-term institutions, which means there's no point in having a good term or quarter. Effective leadership is about focusing on how best to set up our schools to really thrive for the long term and for us and our teams to thrive in our roles while we're at it. So why do we, as educators, tend to fall into the additive trap and land ourselves in a state of frenzied stagnation? Every day, we need to make trade-offs. The concept of trade-offs, as we know, is a fundamental principle in economics, decision-making and everyday life. It's about making decisions that require us to balance competing outcomes, benefits or costs. Having a deep understanding of the trade-offs we are making is essential for effective decision-making and allocating our resources wisely.

Simon Breakspear:

For those of us in education, making trade-offs means acknowledging that any additional activities or commitments that we add on have to come out of somewhere else Existing time, resources and energy that would have otherwise gone towards other things. This is crucial, and it's something we tend to forget. With each new thing we add over time, we're asking ourselves to do more things with the same amount of resources. This is the nature of the beast, and it's a way of working that's simply not sustainable nor effective. We've paired caring with doing more.

Simon Breakspear:

In our vocation as educators, we care deeply about our students, about our schools and about the uniquely powerful place we know our schools hold in shaping the next generation. The stakes of getting education right couldn't be higher for our students and broader society. We don't take this lightly, so we contend with a gnawing sense of false guilt over needing to do more for our students and more for our schools. We've bought into a misguided belief that more is always better, even when this results in highly fragmented energy and focus. We tell ourselves that to pull back on activity is akin to giving up, that it proves we can't or are unwilling to do what it takes. The irony of this is that the very attitude that has led us to do so well in improving our schools thus far caring deeply has gotten us to the point where we are constantly adding new things at the expense of the productivity and effectiveness of those that we've already committed to.

Simon Breakspear:

Well, what do you reckon? How are you experiencing the additive trap in your context? Are you experiencing a state of frenzied stagnation? One of the first things to do in taking seriously the ideas that I capture in the pruning principle is just to observe and to notice. So, over the next week, why don't you just keep a little log in each team meeting, one-on-one conversation? How often are you having additive conversations? How regularly are there opportunities to subtract? If you continue to make addition the default of every meeting, every email, every school improvement plan, where will the resources and the human capacity come from?

Simon Breakspear:

We need to take seriously the idea that we're stuck in an additive trap and, even though systems often do continue to push things on us, we ourselves are often complicit in creating these conditions of frenzied stagnation. We'll see you next time. Well, thanks for joining me. I hope you're getting a huge amount of value out of these ideas. One last request before you go I genuinely appreciate it if you could subscribe, rate and review this show. It's one of the easiest ways for us to get these ideas into the hands of even more educational leaders.