Shift to the Future

It is so easy to be busy in our jobs.  You know, doing email, returning phone calls, and having meetings.  Some days on my commute home I wonder what happened during the day.  Busy does not equate to progress and most definitely isn’t strategic.  What does it mean to ‘be strategic’?  Why is this important to making positive progress?  Is strategic planning still a relevant business function in this ever fast changing world? My wife and I visited Greece this past year and saw amazing examples of architecture and focused energy in creating complex structures and infrastructure.  When you think of the resources they had at their disposal, it seems impossible that they could have done the things they did 1000’s of years ago.  Take the Isthmian Canal for example. It was created to replace the more difficult method of rolling ships across land on logs.  But, it took incredible focus and resources to complete.  It was a very strategic goal d...

A recent post, The Secret to Focusing on What Matters by Dan Rockwell talks about choosing One Word to focus your attention.  His statement that “[i]nsignificant leaders focus on trivialities” struck home with me.  I find myself so scattered most of the time trying to take on too much too fast for too many people, often things that really aren’t that important in the big picture.  I know that I need to pick a few priorities and do them well.  In practice that seems to be more ideal than real.  In my work, and I see it for so many of my colleagues and staff, there are simply too many seemingly important things to do.  It is a real challenge to step back and decide what not to do.  So often we, myself included, just work harder and forget to work smarter.  Back to Dan Rockwell’s post… If I were to choose ‘one word’, I think it would be ‘focus’.  I’m not saying I’m willing to commit to this yet (procrastinating), but I’m thinking about it. I...

It’s a short but profound little question, “why?”.  Why influences a persons motivation to choose one path or thing over another.  In the book “ Start with Why ” by Simon Sinek that I’m currently listening to on my commute between Vancouver and Maple Ridge, the author introduces the golden circle ( watch the TEDx video ).  So many companies and individuals are focused on what they do and how they do it but miss the mark of why they are doing it.  In his book, Simon uses an example of when MP3 players came out.  Manufacturers would talk about what these did or had such as how many gigabytes, how long the battery would last, etc.  When Apple produced the iPod, they focused on why you would want one.  They described a lifestyle, talked about why you would want 1000 songs in your pocket, etc.  Once you were hooked, you would ask about what such as how much memory.  Apple wanted to change your life as you experienced music, not just sell you a...

I visited a grade 6 classroom this past week where every student had a personally owned laptop.  The students were learning about basic geometric shapes such as triangles, squares, and others with more sides which I forget the names for (I could Google them if I needed to).  The teacher ask them to create a program using Scratch to prompt for the number of sides, the length of a side, and to calculate the angle between any two sides, and finally to generate and display the shape.  While I was there, the kids were able to complete, to varying degrees, the pieces to prompt and calculate an angle (not necessarily correctly, but).  Some had a display “algorithm” programmed and were generating all sorts of spiral graph type shapes (not the shape intended mind you).  It was exciting to see their engagement, actually total being absorbed, in the learning activity.  For homework, they were to at least have a correctly running program that calculates and displays t...

Over the past couple of years our school district has been working to develop a ‘dream vision’.  We have been fortunate to have a top thought leader, Dr. Andy Hargreaves , working with us to develop an inspiring, inclusive, compelling, learner-centered vision: Learning without Boundaries.  Last week our Design Team met to “clearly define the SD43 dream vision, Learning without Boundaries ”.  This team consisted of students, parents, teachers, principals, managers, superintendents, and trustees. One of the exercises our highly skilled facilitator   Myriam Laberge asked us to do, in advance, was a futurist activity (sure got my attention).  We were asked to (paraphrased): Imagine that it is now 2020. Over the past decade, the Coquitlam School District (SD43) has consistently built on its strong positive foundations to make its inspiring and inclusive dream of “Learning Without Boundaries” come alive through innovative, tangible and effective outcomes. In f...

It is quite profound how over the past 10 years the importance of “the network” has increased.  It used to be that you could happily get a lot of work done or communicate with others, offline or disconnected.  In schools if the network was slow or didn’t work, the teacher had a backup plan.  Often the network wasn’t critical to a lesson the teacher designed.  Today things are rather different… In our School District (Coquitlam, BC) our success in infusing the use of technology for learning, teaching, and administration has now hit the wall so to speak.  The network is our Achilles Heel!  I wrote about this last year in reference to a visit to a Digital Immersion 9 classroom .  Enrolment was forecasted to decline for this innovative school program where all students were expected to bring, rent, or borrow a laptop to use in this class.  I also referred to a consultative process I initiated around Digital Tools and Social Responsibility to uncove...