[Guest Blog Post] Re-Organizing School Districts Based on Self-Organization

 "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin

At the dawn of the 20th century, the 'command and control' management system, typified by industrial giants like GM, began to take shape.  When the premium was on maximizing compliance and conformity, this system thrived.

Over the last century, the speed of everything has increased. A message that used to take weeks to transmit through written memo is shared immediately through new platforms.  Instant feedback and discussion through shared documents, Slack, Hipchat, email and other tools have transformed decision making, collaboration and communication.  In line with this, new organizational designs have emerged.

Holacracy is one of those designs, used most notably by Zappos.com.  It transforms the static organizational structure into a dynamic structure that can be updated in real time as new opportunities and challenges emerge. Holacracy features a title and manager-less structure where power is distributed among roles that are executing the work.  Companies like Valve, Spotify and MorningStar have also integrated principles of self-organization into their companies with strong results.  It's no surprise that more agile, self-organized companies are more productive, and ultimately more profitable.

What lessons can we learn and apply to public education?

There is emerging evidence that schools could benefit from a more self-organized learning environment.  Schools at the cutting edge of this movement, like the 2013 Ted Prize winning School in the Cloud, the Ashram college with eduScrum, Blueprint education in Arizona, and ESBZ in Germany have all demonstrated growth and results from innovative organizational models.  Here are two of the self-organization practices that I believe are worth considering for wider adoption across education.

Creating Dynamic Roles - We know that teachers rarely use their job description to get clarity on what they should be doing day-to-day. It's not because job descriptions are inherently bad, but they are static - a picture of what was needed at a particular moment in time -  and state, district and school conditions are constantly changing.  In many districts and schools there is a complete lack of clarity on the role of the teacher. Is the teacher’s job to deliver instruction to the students based upon their knowledge of the subject area and the needs of the students? How much control over this are teachers provided in a school district, when districts implement curriculum adoption and pacing guides? Are we taking away the role of the teacher and giving that authority to someone else? Schools need a way to capture evolving roles and accountabilities as needs change.  Creating dynamic roles allows the day-today to adapt and evolve.

Distributed Decision Making - Moving decision making closer to the roles that are executing the work and encountering new information and data is a critical part of self-organization . Rather than decisions coming top down, practices like the Governance Meeting in Holacracy allow proposals to come from any role holder. This allows role holders to continuously shape and adapt the team structure to the changing conditions they encounter, rather than waiting for a higher up to notice and do something about it.  This shift in decision making supports greater ownership of all role-holders in an organization, and allows teams to adapt quickly to emerging information.

The transition to a more self-organized model in public education will no doubt be a long road. It will take a long time to shift perceptions of authority and ownership. But in a fast changing world, we need organizations like school districts to be more agile and responsive to the dynamic conditions they are faced with, or risk extinction.  Over the next year, CEO of Ed Elements, Anthony Kim and I will be embarking on a learning journey to understand how these principles work in district and school settings.  We plan to capture our findings in a book, tentatively titled,  Responsive Ed: Designing a New Education System.  Want to get involved?  Email anthony@edelements.com to learn more!