S1 E2 - How to Steer Clear of Bright and Shiny Things

In this second episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, Jocelyn explores how school leaders can avoid the trap of chasing every new initiative and instead make strategic, high-impact decisions. 

Drawing on Jim Collins' Hedgehog Principle from Good to Great, she introduces the NICE framework a practical four-part test to help leaders evaluate new work before committing to it. 

Whether you're weighing a new program, platform, or approach, NICE gives you the discipline to say no to the bright and shiny so you can say yes to what genuinely moves the needle for students. 

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast. I'm Jocelyn Seamer. I want to start today with an image. Picture a maze. Tall walls, dim light. The kind of maze we've seen in films where someone's trying to find their way through and not quite succeeding. Now, picture a leader standing at the entrance of this maze. That's you. And every time you turn a corner, a fox jumps out. A bright, fast, clever fox holding a sign that says things like,

Speaker 0:32

Have you tried this new program?

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Have you seen what they're doing in the school down the road?

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Did you know there's a new framework?

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Did you know there's a conference next month?

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Did you see the email from the department about this new initiative?

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Have you considered restructuring your timetable?

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Every fox is interesting. Every fox is plausible. Every fox is moving fast. And if you chase the foxes, you spend your year sprinting through a maze, getting nowhere in particular, and arriving at December exhausted, with not very much to show for all of the effort. This image is going to do something special for us today, because I want to talk about how leaders make decisions, and specifically how leaders avoid the trap of mistaking activity for impact.

Speaker 1:20

You may have heard me talk about Jim Collins' book Good to Great, and if you attended the Literacy Guarantee Unit conference a couple of years ago in Adelaide, I included this as part of my keynote. If you haven't, it's worth a read or a listen, and you can find it on podcast on Spotify. Collins did years of research into what separates merely good companies from genuinely great ones. He wasn't just looking at business decisions and profit, although that was a huge part of the work. He was also looking at the kinds of leadership profiles and actions that led companies to perform at above average rates of success for 15 years or longer. There are so many great takeaways from this book, but one of the ideas that has stayed with me is what Jim Collins calls the Hedgehog Principle. Now, before you discount this book as not being for you as a school leader, just know that Jim Collins' work has been used in the social services sector, including schools as well as in business. This image of the hedgehog comes from an old fable. The fox is clever, fast, and creative, and every day he dreams up new strategies to catch the hedgehog. He tries a sneak attack, an ambush, lots of tricks, disguises. And despite all of that, the hedgehog wins every day. The fox is endlessly inventive. The hedgehog, by contrast, is slow, plain looking, not especially imaginative. The hedgehog has one move. When threatened, it rolls into a ball with its spikes pointing out. No variation, no cleverness. And every single time it does that, the fox slinks away defeated. Now the fox knows lots of things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing, and that one big thing wins.

Speaker 3:27

So Collins points out that great organisations operate more like hedgehogs and less like foxes. They aren't seduced by every clever new idea. They have a clear, disciplined sense about what they're about, and they keep coming back to it again and again, while everyone else around them is chasing the next shiny thing.

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Collins describes the hedgehog as the place where three things intersect. What you can be the best at, what drives your engine, and what you're deeply passionate about. The hedgehog lives at the centre of those three circles. So today I want to give you a school leader's version of this principle. Three circles that intersect to mark the work that genuinely deserves your school's attention. And then I want to give you the disciplined practice that holds the three together so that you can stop chasing foxes and start making decisions that actually move the needle for students. That practice is a framework that I call NICE, that is all capitals N-I-C-E. If you're a longtime listener of the Structured Literacy podcast, you may remember that I introduced NICE in a literacy context. Today I want to lift it up out of literacy and put it where it really belongs, which is squarely in the lap of school improvement. And I want to update one of the letters because the way that I think about this framework has sharpened in the years since I first shared it.

Speaker 5:06

So let's have a talk about those three circles that lead us to our hedgehog. And here's the school leader's hedgehog as I think about it. The first circle is need, the genuine evidenced need your school is trying to address. Not the urgent thing, not the loud thing, not the politically convenient thing. The thing that your data and your honest professional judgement tells you actually matters most for your students right now.

Speaker 5:39

The second circle is impact. What is the shift you're looking for that, if you pulled it off, would genuinely move the needle? We're looking for real change in student learning as a result of real refinement of teacher practice and team capability. We are not looking for PL hours, although that may be a part of the plan. We're not looking for massive activity. We're also not looking for box ticking. We're talking about what are the outcomes we can name in advance and check in on as we go with real data.

Speaker 6:18

The third circle is all about capability building, whether the work in front of you grows your team's ability to keep doing this kind of work even after the formal initiative ends. We're talking about whether it makes your teachers and leaders more knowledgeable, more skilled, and more confident in their own judgement to respond to the needs of students. This is in contrast to whether the work we're about to do just installs someone else's product or program in your school for as long as you can afford to keep paying for it.

Speaker 6:56

Now, where those three circles intersect is your hedgehog. Work that represents and responds to a real need that you have good reason to believe will produce meaningful impact and that builds your team's enduring capability to lead and teach well. Decisions made that sit at that intersection are the ones worth saying yes to. And the NICE framework, which I'm going to run through in a moment, is the disciplined test you run in your leadership meetings and with your staff that keeps you at that intersection. N is for need, I is for impact, C is for capability, and E is for ease. The first three circles describe the hedgehog. The E is what holds it all together in the real world of busy schools and finite budgets. So let's walk through them.

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The N, as I said, stands for need. The question is simple. Do we actually need this? And how do we know? When I was a kid, if I asked my mum for something at the shop, she would say, "Do you need it or do you want it?" I hated that question because most of the time I just wanted it, iIt was bright and shiny, and someone else had one, and the honest answer was rarely that I needed it. Schools, if we're being truthful, are not always that different. New programs, platforms, frameworks, and acronyms all have a way of arriving on the agenda because someone read about them, someone saw them at a conference, or someone above us mentioned it in a meeting. Not because we sat down with our data and our team and said, this is the gap we need to close, and here is why. And this, my friends, is where the foxes get us. A fox jumps up with a sign that says, "You really should be doing this," and it sounds compelling. And we forget to ask whether the thing on the sign actually matches a need we have evidence for. So the leadership version of the N question is this: What is the actual problem we are trying to solve? And what evidence do we have that this is the problem?

Speaker 9:17

The second part is where most improvement agendas come unstuck. We're usually pretty good at naming the problem. We are less good at understanding the problem and showing the evidence for it. As a leader, when you're considering a new piece of work, push yourself and your team on questions like what does our data tell us about this area? Not just one data source, but a range. Are we using assessment tools that actually give us the picture we need, or are we relying on tools that mostly tell us what we already think? Have we drilled down into specifics, or are we operating on a vague sense that things aren't quite right? Are we sure the gap is in this area, or could it actually be somewhere else? And whose problem is this? Is this a whole school problem, a year-level problem, a one-classroom problem? And if we can't answer those questions before we commit to a piece of work, we are firing arrows into the dark. You might hit something, but you probably won't hit the thing that you needed to. And in six months, when the data hasn't shifted, you'll be asking yourself, why? So the answer will be that the work was never anchored in a real evidence need in the first place.

Speaker 10:40

And one quick caution before we move on. Need is not the same as urgency. There will always be something urgent. The phone calls, the emails, the parent meetings, the system mandate that landed yesterday that you're expected to implement by tomorrow. Urgency hijacks the agenda if you let it. The N in NICE is asking us to be more disciplined. It's asking us to be strategic in this season of our school's journey and what our students actually need to get better at. That question and looking at things through that lens is harder for sure, but it's also going to get us more impact, which is where we come to our second letter in our framework.

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The I is for impact. Once you've established that there is a real evidence need, the next question is: what change are we expecting? What does success actually look like? And how will we know whether we're getting it? Now this sounds really obvious, but it's actually not obvious in practice. So many initiatives are launched with verbs like introduce, implement, embed, roll out, improve. Almost none are launched with a sentence that says, by the end of this year, we expect to see this specific shift in this specific area measured in this specific way. And that matters because activity on its own is not impact. School could be really busy and going nowhere. So the question is whether busyness is moving the needle on something that actually matters for students.

Speaker 12:23

As a leader, before you green light a piece of work, get specific on impact. And this is not about making your school an overwhelming place of random assessment. That's not what we're talking about. We are talking about pushing for answers to questions like these. What change in student outcomes are we expecting? And over what time frame? What change in teacher practice should we be seeing along the way? Because student outcomes always lag behind instructional changes. What change in team capability and knowledge are we expecting? Remember, confidence is not a great measure of capability. What will we measure at three months, six months, and twelve months? And how are we going to measure it? Plan for what happens if you don't see the shifts and ask yourself: if we don't see the shifts, what does that tell us? And what will we do about it?

Speaker 13:28

There's a wider impact question that we need to learn to ask beyond the direct target. What else might this work positively affect, and what might it negatively affect? A new instructional approach in one area that sits alongside capability growth in applying principles of explicit instruction might actually lift practice across other areas because once teachers understand the principles, they can learn how to leverage them across the curriculum. That's a really positive flow on, and we've seen that in our schools who've completed Leading Learning Success. But the same initiative might compete for time with something else you're trying to embed, and there's a cost to that. So, as leaders, we need to see both of those things and make decisions accordingly.

Speaker 14:23

The C in NICE stands for capability building. And I want to be really direct here. This letter is one that I've changed the most in my thinking over the years. And I used to ask leaders, how confident are you that this will work? And that's still a useful question. But I came to realise that it wasn't quite the right one. Because confidence can exist without capability. The better question is this: how will this piece of work build our team's capability? Capability can sit on a spectrum. Let me describe the two ends for you. At the surface level, the capability question can be around training. Does this approach come with training? Is the training any good? Will our team understand what they're being asked to do? Can new staff be brought up to speed when they arrive? These are all important questions, but they're not the deepest version of the capability question. At a deeper level, it's about will this tool, resource, and program be structured in a way that helps our team make strong, evidence-informed decisions on their own? Or are we, by going down this track, going to end up simply being deliverers of someone else's lessons and implementers of someone else's decisions? Because that distinction is enormous. And most of us don't really have a clear way to talk about it. Now, of course, there's a point when people are new at things and they're novices, they need a lot of guidance. So the question isn't will this new approach, program or resource provide the guidance that is needed? Well, that is one of the questions, and that has to happen. The next layer of that is as our team grows in fluency and familiarity, is there an opportunity to also build capability for active decision making into the future?

Speaker 16:28

There's a version of school improvement where you adopt a tightly scripted product, you train your teachers in how to deliver it, and you measure their fidelity to the script. The student outcomes might be fine, they might even be good. But three years in, your teachers don't know any more about how learning works than they did when they started. They know how to deliver this product, but they may not know how to pivot strategically when things don't go exactly to plan. And as we all know, when working with a group of children, the plan is often a pipe dream.

Speaker 17:02

On top of that, if the product changes or the company folds or your contract ends, you're kind of back to square one. There's another version, though, where you build your team's understanding of the underlying science of how children learn, the principles of effective instruction, the way to read data and respond to it, the way to design and refine teaching over time. That work is slower. It is more effortful at the start for sure. But the capability you build is permanent. Your team becomes the experts. And that really matters because the next time a fox jumps out of the maze with a clever new something, your team can evaluate it on its merits because they actually understand how instruction and learning interact. So the questions to ask when you're testing the C in NICE are: will our teachers understand the why behind the practice, not just the how? And what does it mean to understand? How will we know? Is capability building taken beyond one and done? How does this support long-term capability building? Will our middle leaders become more capable in making good instructional decisions with their teams at the end of this, and so we can see their growth over time? Will our school be able to sustain this work without the external partner? If we have to flex or adapt this approach to our context, will our team have the underlying knowledge to do that well? And will there be support for us as leaders in our decision making? Or are we honestly just installing someone else's ideas and hoping the user manual is good enough? That last question is not a comfortable one, but it is the right one. Because the difference between a school that is improving and a school that is implementing is, in the end, the difference between a team that is growing and a team that is delivering. And this idea of building capability within the team to be able to design instruction and engineer instruction to give students what they need is at the heart of everything that we do.

Speaker 19:22

The final letter is E, and E stands for ease. There are two parts to this question. The first is the ease of doing the work in the first place. Is this approach manageable? Will it sit reasonably alongside the other things our team is already doing? If a new approach is so cognitively demanding that teachers will be drowning before they even start, it will not be effective. If nobody has the bandwidth to implement it well, it's doomed from the start. We would rather see schools adopting a slightly ambitious, simpler approach and execute that brilliantly so they can build on it than to aim for the moon and it's just not manageable at all and it goes nowhere. The second part is: is it sustainable? Schools are full of teacher turnover, and that's not changing anytime soon. Every year a percentage of your team will move on, change grade, or take on a new role. Will the approach you're adopting still work in three years when half the staff who've trained in it initially are doing something different or they've left? And can we onboard our new staff effectively? This idea is not glamorous and it is largely about budget and time, but we need to examine this area to make sure that we're setting ourselves as a school community up for success. So the questions to engage with here are, what is the ongoing annual cost? That includes training, replacement resources, licensing, and time release. How much will it cost us to onboard new staff each year? If the answer to that question makes your eyes water, then perhaps reconsider. If a teacher loses a resource or breaks a piece of equipment, what does it cost to replace it? And what will the availability of those resources be? Same goes for as the school enrolment grows. How much would you have to budget? How much time will you need to budget? Now you will need to budget time regardless of what you choose to do because people need to be onboarded properly. But if it's five days out of school, well, that might not be as realistic as three after school meetings. And finally, who in our school owns this work in three years' time? How are we planning for distributed leadership? What are we going to do if the current leadership team looks different? Can this approach be sustained? Who in our school is going to own this work in three years' time and drive the work when the current leadership team may look different?

Speaker 22:13

And I want you to notice how the E and the C, the ease and the capability building work together. A piece of work that builds capability deeply is usually easier to sustain because the team carries the capability with them. They create systems of instruction that will gain momentum and help everybody to stay the course. But a piece of work that depends entirely on external delivery or leadership to do all the heavy lifting is harder to sustain because the moment that external consultant is gone or the leader has other priorities, which is going to happen, then the work will go with it. If we can't distribute leadership through capability building, then we are setting ourselves up for a very, very hard road ahead. So the hedgehog and the practical reality are not intention. They actually line up.

Speaker 23:20

So let's finish off today with a really practical way to use this NICE framework. When the next new piece of work lands on the table before any decisions are made, run it through the four sets of questions aloud with your team and really rumble with the difficult elements of it. You can find, of course, all of these questions on our website at jocelynseamereducation.com. Go to Podcasts and select the Leading Learning Podcast.

Speaker 23:51

Making this the way you do business in deciding on your approach and what you will purchase and what you will implement will do a couple of really exciting things. It will bring you clarity, you will be setting yourself and everybody else up for success. But the other thing it will do is that it'll help your team adopt these strategic thinking practices. Once they see you running this test in public on every decision and see you saying no to bright and shiny things, no matter how fun or good they seem, if we cannot answer them honestly in a way that is going to set us up for success, once they see you do that, then they're going to start doing it too. So when someone comes to you with an idea, they will have already run through the process. Do we need it? What's the impact we hope to have? How will it build capability? And can we do this with relative ease? Everybody's decision making gets sharper, and you'll be building a culture of considered decision making rather than reactive decisions based on bright, shiny foxes.

Speaker 25:06

Leading a school is very often the work of saying no to a lot of good ideas so that you can say yes to the right ones. The hedgehog principle is what reminds us that not every interesting thing belongs in our schools. NICE gives you the discipline to help you tell the difference. If something in this episode has really landed for you, if it's resonated, please take it to the next leadership meeting. Hit forward on the email where you've received a notification about this or share the episode with someone. Decision making that's targeted and strategic is one of the hardest things we do. So share this information with everybody so that everyone's leadership life can be just that little bit easier. I'll see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast. Bye.