Succession Planning

I know a man with a strange quirk. Although capable of fakery, deception, and mismanagement, he was always a good administrator in some ways. These were not the strange quirk. The quirk was an incredible sense of persecution and insecurity.

His latest exercise had the whole earth-and-heaven buzzing. He asked (not for the first time) that each of his staff members name the people that they wanted to have as their leaders in the next era. Of course, each ballot had the name of the writer on it. What an illusion of democracy!

As a previous participant, I have seen the hidden files. This is not about choice; it is about testing the waters of the red ocean for signs of trouble. The results of the poll would never be made public. As usual, it is also about control of information, lack of transparency, and a habit of manipulating people.

The problem he has, as acknowledged by those observing him from above and below, and besides, is that he has no legitimate or competent successors around him because of what he has done in the past. He now has to manufacture a guardian for his legacy; a truly competent successor might erase the memory of his time as dictator, but an incompetent one might sully the sheen.

Analysing Development Fail (Negative Perspective)

So what should you do if you really wanted a proper integrated system of education, without the 'development fail' that afflicts so many? Clearly, you should begin with a vision (what you hope to achieve in the long run), a mission (what it is you're supposed to be doing), and a philosophy (the principles which decide how you do it and why — and how you won't do it).

But that also reveals what the three main errors are in the world of education planning: myopia, mission creep and missing principles. There are ways to reduce these errors or attempt to eliminate them, but in order to do so you first have to identify them.

Myopia strikes first. You can tell myopia is present when you ask this question: "How does what we are doing actually help to make our vision come about in the long run?"

For example, if the vision is 'all our students will be global citizens' then you should ask two versions of the question: i) 'What is the causal link between activities such as overseas awareness/service programmes and becoming a global citizen?' and ii) 'Would the students we have become global citizens without our intervention?'

The former, if it can be shown, would show a true positive or negative in terms of having a functional theory of achieving the vision; the latter would show the danger of false positives or false negatives — i.e. students achieving or failing to achieve but not as the result of the education delivered.

Mission creep, the distortion of a pre-existing mission, is more insidious. For a start, it is very likely that if the students can't say what the mission is, mission creep has already occurred. It's also easy to detect mission creep by linguistic analysis — if the mission statement contains complex arguments or long sentences then it's quite likely not a good mission statement, or mission creep has seeped in.

Missing principles, which render a philosophy of education hollow in the sense that key axioms are lacking, are harder to detect. For religious mission schools, this is easy — if core principles are taken by quoting scriptural verses, it's quite likely that principles are missing. Why? Because Christians, for example, believe in something much more complex than running an entire endeavour based on one or two verses from their Bible. For secular schools, this is not so easy, since it requires line by line analysis to determine if there are missing ideas or not.

There is however a much easier way to detect 'development fail'. After reading about 3500 papers on the subject, I can with some assurance say that if the word 'holistic' crops up anywhere in the documentation, 'development fail' is 100% likely to occur. This is because 'holistic' is a nice ideal, but nobody can define it, and because they can't, they can't work towards it or have a philosophy based on it — not without being terribly dishonest.

Some argue that their holism is limited to things like 'developing multiple intelligences' and they proceed to list them. But if something is really 'holistic' then it surely cannot mean 'limited' or 'listable in a finite list'. Some say that they mean 'developing the whole person'. This is a cute evasion, but if it doesn't mean things like 'teaching people how to groom their fingernails' or 'teaching them how to cook a decent meal' — which are obviously good things — then obviously the system doesn't mean the WHOLE person, but really 'all the parts of the person that we think are good parts, and forget the rest.'

The most rational way to limit holism that I've seen is the 'honest admission' trick: "We would like to provide a truly holistic education but we are limited by material, funds and time." Well, yes, that's true — but then you shouldn't tout 'holistic' should you? Naughty, naughty.

The sad part is that most people are easily taken in. It is like Hitler's big lie — if you say holistic, and genuinely provide a lot more opportunities (the educational equivalent of Lebensraum) than most people would otherwise be exposed to, people will believe that it is holistic, as if you could have 'relatively more holistic' as a meaningful phrase.

But this is what analysis means: we break things apart to see what really is there, and not just have a quick look and give some award for Quality or Class or Something Bigger Than We Thought We'd See.

Strategic Stabilisation

The worst thing a person can do is to enter an environment without any form of stability and no plan for managing the situation. I mean 'manage' in the literal etymological sense — that is, 'take in hand'. If the situation is not brought to some sort of temporal and temporary equilbrium (whether static or dynamic), then the whole idea of leadership is called into question: you cannot lead where management is impossible because a true leader takes things in hand.

The problem is that in any situation, the new leader (or the impulsive or choleric one) will find internal psychological and external not-so-psychological pressure to do something, anything. Most of the time, this is silly if the thing to be done is not an attempt to create a stable basis for future doings. Some leaders lurch from crisis to crisis, blaming the crises for their own incapability and inability to manage. Some leaders try to make everything look good with whitewash, much as the white lead on an Elizabethan lady's face would have made her look good until the flesh was finally eaten away.

I remember my first major appointment and the silly set of advice I was given: eat with the right people, say the right things, appease the parents, don't be too adventurous, be more adventurous, don't offend people, don't give in to the wrong people. The set taken as a whole, without a stable and rational basis, was silly; the individual pieces of advice may have been of use if a context or framework had been supplied.

In my first year, I took standardised test results in my department to a place above the national average for the first time in a few years. It was not very far above the national average, but it was a good place to seek temporary (and temporal) stability. Subsequently, I found that the person ostensibly directing me did not know that we had been below the national average in the first place, and was goading me into aiming even higher.

Of course, higher was plausibly a better place to be. But what irked me was that this person didn't know anything about the statistical situation at a national level, and seemed not to care for whether a good education was being provided except in the most general and platitudinous terms.

In fact, there was no strategy of in-house stabilisation, and apart from standardised test results, there was not much analysis. I was astounded to realise that there were committees and officers which submitted no reports at all, except the occasional verbal report without hard data (or even soft data). Because of this lack of information, a deliberate process of strategic stabilisation was an impossibility, since nobody knew whether we were anywhere near a state of stability or not.

I realised quickly that what was in effect was either a bicycle or a helicopter paradigm; that is, as long as we were moving, we were all right. The metaphor also meant that if we suddenly found ourselves moving in a disastrous direction, the likelihood of correcting our trajectory would begin slim and head towards tenuous before hitting non-existent. Fortunately, the density of the medium helped to correct by providing a modicum of inertia, and we survived quite a long while by general flailing.

Strategic Direction

You can be a policeman at a busy street junction where the traffic lights are down. This means you direct traffic, but this is only tactical direction. It is a coping strategy. You just try to make sure the intersection doesn't get totally blocked, that gridlock is not an option under your watch. This is what most people are doing in today's knowledge economy (and yes, the 'real' economy too).

But quite often, a strategic vision is needed: not just a list of fancy-sounding bullet points cobbled together after lunch in your office, but a genuine plan for making sure traffic is always smooth (and indeed, even better) when you're the officer in charge. This is true for every part of life. Otherwise, your resource expenditure, since it is based on short-term goals, becomes wasteful. It becomes drudgery, slavery to the mundane and quotidian.

Good strategic direction is normally resented by about 20% of the people. This is because that's the fraction who understand that a) you're doing something they're not, b) you're doing something they can't, c) you're doing something they don't understand, and d) it's something they don't know about but know they won't like it.

A lot of management books say you have to bring people on board, enthuse them, and so on. Yes, you can do all of that. There will always be that 20%. Just neutralise them and get on with it, or get on with it and ignore them. And in the end, if that 20% causes you problems, you just have to remember that good strategic direction sometimes won't win either. Heh.

Career Guidance

It seems like only two years ago that I sat with friends and discussed what to do about career guidance for teenagers. The plan was this:

• two years of career awareness (what is a career, what in one's life prepares one for a career etc)
• two years of career guidance (these are the skills one needs to pick up as one starts working on career fundamentals, this is how to write a proper targeted CV, this is how one prepares for an interview etc)
• two years of career counselling (sessions with a dedicated specialist career counsellor, discussions on picking an appropriate university, planning a trajectory towards one's ideals and aspirations being fulfilled etc)

I must say I was rather surprised to receive no feedback at all when I first submitted this plan.

About three months later, I received a couple of salutory (as in shots fired across one's bow are salutory) pieces of advice. The first came from the Grey Men, who were very happy with The Plan and wanted to appropriate it. The second came from some people who didn't want it, wouldn't use it, and warned me against trying to do things other than what I was told to do. I held off the Grey Men, worried about some people, and in the end decided to put my thoughts down on paper. In the light of subsequent events, I was glad to have documented everything. It was an enlightening experience, one for the books really.

It took more than a year for the chickens to come home to roost. I documented that as well. In fact, by that time, some of the cows had come home, and the foxes had their foxholes too. It was a fantastic time, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I don't know if this enjoyment was universal. In fact, I am quite sure it was not.

So why am I writing about this now? Well, it is time for the books. A new chapter has begun. And as I wander around the Hill, I observe that the pagan tribes have very useful and powerful ideas and practices in this area. Maybe all these explain their success against the Roman legions.