NoTosh

How do you make better use of your incredible middle leaders? And how can you, as a middle leader, step up your practice? Next Thursday I'm co-hosting a FREE WEBINAR with practical takeaways and frameworks, many of which are part of our 3-month Leading from the Middle course. I'll be joined by Jeremy Weinstein, PhD, who helped develop the course, and Kate Wadsworth who will bring a fresh dynamic to the course in 2025. Sign up to get the details and join us, or to get the recording afterwards. https://lnkd.in/e8th3n3k

Ask the wrong question and you'll get the wrong data. Some people even ask the wrong questions on purpose: it lets them carry on with pruning around the edges instead of asking the harder questions with even harder answers. Our team does strategy with schools and governments, in over 70 countries, in hundreds of different contexts. Data is something everyone wants. It makes them feel that the decisions they take later will be right. And the focus on data tends to be at the start. People want to use data to find out how good they really are. They want to find out where they’ve let things slip. They want to have data on how well they’re spending their money. They want data on how happy people are. There’s so much emphasis on gathering data, that I wonder if people are simply too tired to do the thing that matters most: to take some brave decisions on the back of it. When we gather data, it comes in all shapes and sizes. Numerical, financial, and my favourite: anecdotal evidence. Whatever data you're gathering, if you ask stupid questions, you’ll get stupid data. Ask the right kind of open question, and you’ll get data you didn’t even know you wanted to ask about. And that data is what leads us to creating better choices. Strategy is all about making choices. Real choices involve charting one path, in the knowledge that the opposite of that path is equally valid - but a valid choice for someone else, not for you. Stats, spreadsheets and even satisfaction surveys tend to give data that reinforces the blindingly obvious, the existing bias. Improving literacy? Of course! Working on numeracy skills? Why not? Who wouldn’t? Too much school and Government strategy isn’t strategy that really advances things. Why? Because it relies on the wrong data to pursue things that should just be business-as-usual. Creating a safe school. Valuing diversity. Being equitable and inclusive. Pursuing excellence. All great schools and systems do these things - and more. Real choices based on unexpected data tend to pass the ‘even if...’ test: We aim for every child to find their type of book and gain a love of reading, even if it means we spend more time on reading than we do on classroom language work. We don’t give students grades because they do better without them - we only give quality feedback even if parents scream and bawl for a number to compare their kid. We don’t lecture kids for more time than they put their learning to work for themselves, even if we think we teach in a subject that needs to be taught from the front to be learned. So my question to everyone is this: Is the data you’re gathering going to lead to great choices, or just confirm what you already knew? And when you’re using your data to create strategy, do your choices stand up to the even if test? This was some thinking I created a month ago for the International Data in Schools Conference, that I wanted to share with more people. https://lnkd.in/ecqfkzXb

When is confident too confident? Leland Sklar gets the balance just right (https://lnkd.in/eUTXD-bz). One of the first stories we share on our middle leader course is this one: One study of doctors showed that they were entirely confident of a particular diagnosis. They were actually wrong 40% of the time. In another survey, 87% decided they would be the most likely to get into Heaven when compared to Michael Jordan and Mother Teresa. Decision-making is closer to madness than logic. No matter how thought-through you think your ideas might be, in general, humans are over-confident, emotional and irrational. They expect that the decisions they make are the right ones, every time. They have great confidence that their view on your idea is the right one. Leaders would be better equipped if they entered every conversation about a new idea assuming they are probably wrong, because then: You’re listening, not selling. You’re looking for ideas, not seeing them as a distraction from your goal. You’re looking for a ‘no’, not a ‘yes’. You want to build something together rather than pushing your idea on everyone else. (PS: Our new course Leading from the Middle is open for participants to sign up right now. It’s all about increasing the confidence of leaders by giving them concrete tools, skills and frameworks they can use and reuse, with success: https://lnkd.in/dB39MaM) Of course, in some instances, you’ll be right first time around. Legendary session guitarist Leland Sklar knows what he’s doing. James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Phil Collins, Linda Rondstadt, Lyle Lovett, Dolly Parton and so many other greats in so many different genres have wanted him on their albums and their tours. They all agree: he knows what he’s doing. But Sklar got fed up with producers behind the studio glass who didn’t like the way he played on the tracks they were recording. So he went home one day and drilled a hole in his guitar. And he inserted the Producer Switch. It’s connected to nothing, it does nothing. But when a producer now asks for a little more brightness, or a bit more grunge, Sklar launches into action. He makes sure the producer sees him move his hand to the switch, make a change, adjust his hands a little and he then plays again. And the producer will always love the ‘new’ sound: That kind of confidence comes from practice over his 77 years. But you can gain that same confidence quicker by using the frameworks and developing the skills that others have spent the time working out. That’s what Leading from the Middle does for aspiring and current middle leaders, and their bosses. There’s only one cohort for 2025, at noon UK time every day. We’re going to get you to the stage of having confidence backed up with knowledge and skills faster than doing it on your own. On you go. See you there. https://lnkd.in/eUTXD-bz

You don’t change the system. Nobody does. Nobody can. You can build the first blocks of the new system, though, and see who joins you. Every month I sit down with Mykel and four others to talk about making magic happen for others. We’re both entrepreneurs, people who build stuff and see if anyone else sees what we see. Sometimes they do, and we can put food on the table. Other times the idea fizzles out; they fizzle out like a fire that’s not been stoked enough. In his Do talk, Mykel tells a story from Kimberly country in North West Australia. If you don’t like the atmosphere around the fire you’re sitting at, you don’t have to sit there. And you don’t have to complain about it loudly, either. You don’t change the atmosphere to a positive one by being negative. You can gently walk away and build a different fire. And even if no-one sees you do it at first, if the atmosphere is warm everyone will come to join you. Watch his talk. It’s a warm fire. Express Yo Self | The DO Lectures https://lnkd.in/eYMhzZ2m (PS: I’ll be stealing the story and video clip as an extra on our Leading from the Middle course this February. We need more warm fire-builders in our schools. Sign up is open: https://lnkd.in/dB39MaM)

Writing is thinking. Writing 300 of our Provocation newsletters has been the most powerful culture-building work in our team (you can subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/e3kUZxuj) When people talk about culture-building, the “Netflix Reference Guide on our Freedom and Responsibility Culture” is treated as a go-to. I don’t buy it. Because, on page two, is a cultural note that sours the whole: “Freedom and Responsibility Applies to our Salaried Employees. “Our hourly employees are important, but have more structured job roles.” Gah. What a let-down. “You matter, but your voice matters less.” The people in the organisation who already have the fewest privileges and pay get the least sway, too. Culture isn’t something developed only by people with a particular code on their payslip. Culture isn’t something you write down in a 128-page document, a weighty tome to be thrown down the stairwell from the executive suite to the plebs. Culture comes from your people. It oozes out of them every day. It’s just that most of that culture seeps away through the cracks of management. It takes leaders, not managers, to capture it and amplify it. If you’re going to develop culture, everyone needs to know their voice can contribute to the whole (even if it needs a little edit now and then). So that’s why everyone in our team writes, every week, and everyone contributes at some point to The Provocation. Writing is thinking. So we see each other’s thinking. You might not want everyone to write your school newsletter, but there are other ways to get their voice on paper. Start every boring admin meeting with an inspirational story of how someone saw your team’s purpose lived out vividly that week. A verbal provocation, if you will. Write a manifesto. For your team. For the grade level. For the class. Share stories of what the school means and rewrite your values. Change your mission statement. Nothing is too sacred when it comes to being the best community you can be, for today. But whatever you do, write it down together, regularly. Writing is thinking. I’m determined to show at least 100 more aspiring and current middle leaders how to move from management to leadership. And writing a little every day is a large part of it. Our Leading from the Middle course has already helped 700 of them gain demonstrably more confidence in initiating, collaborating around and landing projects in their schools. We open the doors to 2025’s cohort now: you can get your places before they run out. In every one of the live sessions, and in the drop-ins one-on-one, we ask people to gain clarity by writing, there and then. You create manifestos. You understand your values, and how you might sometimes clash with others’ if you’re not careful about how you frame them. You learn how to use words that get people excited and behind your ideas. Join us: https://lnkd.in/dB39MaM

When was the last time you saw a school newsletter you wanted to subscribe to? I'm on the hunt for schools who are nailing their newsletters. And what is it makes a brilliant school newsletter for you? The last few days I've been preparing for this morning's Brand Strategy for Schools Masterminds group (we'll run a new course and Masterminds in the spring!). There are plenty of newsletters that I cannot live without - they fuel my imagination, inform me on things that matter (and things I didn't know mattered to me until I read about them). But none of them are written by a school. Does anyone have a winning suggestion of schools who are nailing their newsletters? And what is it makes a brilliant school newsletter?