Are we addicted to failure?
Have we become so obsessed with chasing the "dream" we have forgotten how to enjoy living? Here is what I mean: In education, we demand continuous improvement. In higher education, we demand revisions on writing pieces. In science, and in engineering, a product is never good enough. We want a bigger this, a better phone, and a faster car. Yet what happened? Are we happy? No! We are not! Our family lives are often stressful. At work, the environment is toxic! Mental health is at an all time crisis level. Why does this happen? Why have we allowed others to live rent free in our heads, demand we do more, and give of our time and energy and expertise for compensation. How did this happen? First it started with the belief that the American workforce was and continues to be a disposable commodity. In 2006, Louis Uchitelle published a book called the Disposable American. In his work, he found that companies squeeze short term profits for long term failure by eliminating their workforce so easily. Second, we have seen too many managers and administrators who are good at two skills: hubris & demanding, emerge in positions which need leaders. Leaders are folks with a vision, and a purpose who view their team as skilled people who are talented. Instead, we have managers and administrators who believe that they are best, and have the answer, and no one else is correct (hubris) and demanding, where they do not value a balance between work and life. They want people to work crazy hours, be at their beck and call, and believe unplugging is a sin. The Pandemic has made people rethink their lives, and employers are having a tough time keeping up. I believe that schools and higher ed is way behind, even employers. We lost in higher and elementary and secondary education the real reason for the experience. We forgot how to get kids and young adults ready for the next stage in life. We became to focused on measurable goals, via testing. We reacted as our funding levels were cut back to unconscionable levels and we still continued to "do more with less." As a society, we became okay with the drum beat of "we want our schools to do more with less. We let competition become the watch word, when collaboration is really most important. Instead of hiring solid, certified teachers, we hire the local, or the related, and our schools do not expand their world views. We settle for okay, as long as everyone thinks they are happy. We want conformality and compliance. We want a candidate who is not too strong, or too week, but just okay. We hate evaluations, yet we crave feedback... so we are confused. We want to get better, but its too hard, or we just don't even try. Yet in public, we hear from management and administration we want to get better. But when the plans, and processes are presented, we see …nothing. Maybe education has gotten to big, as a job, for most people. Maybe we need to look at our fundamentals: What do we demand out of our children? What do we want from our schools? I for one believe we must disentangle the "job drift" that has occurred in education in the last thirty years. Like "mission creep" that happens in other organizations, more is piled on, and asked for, if too many stakeholders are involved. My students and I ran through this thought exercise in Inventors Studio: How do you make a single pizza for a village of 100? The correct answer: you don't. You make as many pizzas as needed to keep as many people happy. The rest need specialty pizzas. We need to take this lesson to heart: In higher education, abolish the peer review process, and instead focus on strengths based research and reports for the PUBLIC and not the academy. K-12 education needs to stop making a giant single Pizza. We MUST create multiple alternatives for students if we are to ever hope of fixing what the last 30 years have destroyed. It will take a lot of money, and it will take a huge servant leader with a vision. We need folks who are all in, and we need to stop wasting human resources. If we do not act now, we will have a been there, and I have this tee shirt moment again. 9/11/2022 06:34:26 pm
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AuthorOver 20 years experience in consulting for improvement. Lean and Six Sigma Certified. PhD in Leadership Archives
April 2024
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