BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly Update

July 8, 02024, No. 176 (Read online)

Can You Prepare for the Unimaginable?

Hey,

As many of you settle into your holiday (during northern hemisphere summer) around this time of year, we offer a hearty CONGRATULATIONS! You made it through another year. We’ve had the added benefit of leading and participating in a number of summer professional development experiences (like the Leadership Seminar for Overseas Principals (LSOP) already this summer, which helped us reflect on the vital leadership skills educators need to navigate through uncertain times.

For many of the leaders we work with, beyond the usual joys and challenges involving what’s in their job description - which is quite enough to feel pretty overwhelming on its own - 2023-24 included an additional, completely unexpected, polarizing in unpredictable ways, all-out crisis.

This lead-up could very well have described the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of the 2019-2020 school year. For this past year, the upheaval with tragic consequences, which most school leaders also had no professional preparation for, was triggered by the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, the ongoing hostage crisis, and the subsequent violent retaliation by Israel on Palestinian territories and population.

Our intent here is not to debate the horrors of the chain of events set off since October 7. We bring it up now because it would be hard to reflect on the past academic year without acknowledging the profound impact it has had on the diverse communities we work with around the world. As one of our year-end reflections, we are struck by some of the key leadership lessons we have witnessed and learned ourselves (and can be applied to a range of challenges that might polarize a school community):

Expect the unexpected. Relax and take a break that you made it through this year, but don’t expect to put crises behind you. Between natural disasters, pandemics, political tensions, elections, “tribal” hostilities, and more, “macro” or external volatilities impact even the cushiest school bubbles. The “unimaginable” hasn’t been imagined. Increasingly, leadership must be about stronger anticipation, unleashing imagination, and exploring possibilities in multiple futures - even the ones that are hard to face. Such “future seriousness” represents an important learning disposition and skill that will distinguish the “best” leaders.
Prepare for the unexpected. Even if you “put a crisis behind you,” consider other scenarios that might be waiting in the wings and work through those situations with your leadership team, Board, and possibly other key stakeholders. Like training for a marathon (that you don’t want to run), this can feel exhausting and unpleasant to confront, but preparation is essential - even if the actual next crisis was not on your radar. Remember the adage Oprah made famous: “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” Do you want your school to seem lucky? Prepare for it!
Build trust before you need it. To weather unexpected sources of conflict, leaders need to have banked trust from diverse members of their community (note: diverse members of the community is key - it can’t be concentrated among the usual promoters and inner circle), and built deeper and wider relationships across constituencies. During good times, this might mean that you simply learn more peoples’ names, spend more time getting to know various members of the community, greet students arriving at school, and share your stories. These deceptively simple acts create bonds that deepen trust and empathy so that when emotions are high, compassion has a greater chance of prevailing than conflict.
Make school values visible, especially through story-telling. Posters listing school values on the walls have limited impact if they don’t feel like they are actually being lived. Before the next local or global crisis breaks out, collect a broad range of authentic stories of how your school values have been lived out and communicate these through videos, your website, or other means. Try to incorporate the values and stories frequently into regular communications and, ultimately, the natural culture of your school. This way, when you call on your values during difficult times, there will be a shared vision and starting point. Things won’t feel forced or panicked.
Think clearly about how you might solve conflict-ridden situations without escalating tensions. Your K-12 campus likely hasn’t experienced the level of tension anywhere near what Columbia University, Dartmouth, USC, UCLA (and many other universities) did, but it’s worth following the playbooks of how another group of universities avoided escalation, like Brown, Northwestern, Kenyon (and more). What’s the difference between these groups? In most cases, they called people in (i.e., didn’t start from a place of suspicion and labeling, but invited folks to come forward with genuine concerns, have a conversation, and genuinely learn from one another), actively listened, and looked for creative solutions through a respectful lens instead of “othering,” and going straight to law enforcement or pursuing formal procedures. Create space for meaningful conversations across different perspectives before crisis visits; and if you are already in a polarized state, gently, with careful facilitation, invite small groups for conversations that begin with shared values and experiences before speeding ahead to conflict-based themes.

One K-12 school leader we knew personally called every family at his school that was impacted by October 7 and its immediate aftermath (Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian Christians, and many others) to offer them a chance to share their concerns personally and to invite a constructive discussion with him. While his school has an extremely diverse population, small steps like a visit or personal phone call that demonstrate the commitment to every child and family at school have been able to maintain somewhat of an “island of sanity” even as the outside world feels more unmoored.

Putting all these steps together might feel awkward or difficult if this isn’t how you’re accustomed to leading. We think of this as anticipatory, relational, and futures responsive leadership. It represents a leadership posture that’s pro-active and hopeful, caring and courageous.

If you’ve experienced a positive response to polarization, we’d love to hear from you.

In Peace,

Homa and WIll

Announcing New Members of the BQI Team!

Big Questions Institute and our clients have been fortunate to partner with a dedicated team (learn about them here) and now we are very excited to share the addition of two highly respected international school leaders to our collaborators’ roster, reflecting the growing demand for building skills and capacities in school leaders and Board members to navigate volatile and uncertain times.

Rami Madani is the Head of the International School of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Together with Homa, he will co-facilitate the upcoming Governance as Leadership Training Institute at the UN International School (UNIS) for international schools based across Asia. Rami has also worked in schools in Yemen, UK, Zambia, and India; he presents at conferences and works with schools on areas related to strategic planning, leadership, growth & evaluation, curriculum, assessment, and instruction. His primary focus is on nurturing minds, empowering everyone, and refining systems and tools to support student and adult holistic growth.

Kathleen Naglee is an award-winning educational leader of innovative and inclusive practices advising national systems, individual schools, international projects, ed-tech start-ups, and early career leaders. She promotes learner-centered identity, student agency, diversity, equity, and visionary projects on the future of learning. Most recently, she served as Head of School and CEO at the International School of Helsinki, Finland. She will collaborate with us on strengthening school culture and building skills and capacities of school Senior Leadership Teams, among other projects.

What We're Reading

A few links to fuel your inquiry:

Words are Deeds by Rebecca Solnit

"When you assert that the future is already decided, you undermine the motivation to participate in shaping that future—which seems ridiculously obvious as I type these words, but doesn’t seem like it’s considered by these prophets of doom. Also when you turn your feelings into facts, you turn truth into fiction. Accepting defeat in advance is a curious form of self-protection. I want to see people protect the cause by distinguishing between these two things and maybe realizing that you protect the self by protecting the cause and the possibilities.

This is not an argument against fear. It’s an argument for clarity about what’s a feeling and what’s a fact and a contemplation of how our words shape our world. I’ve been saying for the last few years, in regard to climate, “I respect despair as an emotion but don’t confuse it with an analysis.” You can feel fear, despair, sorrow, anxiety without surrender; history is full of countless people who persevered under the grimmest circumstances, often with heavy hearts and no victory visible on the horizon, or success a wild unlikelihood. Sometimes they lost, but the only ones who won were the ones who stuck with it (or who benefited from someone else doing the work).”

Democracy in the age of AI by Audrey Tang

"With India and the US, the world’s largest democracy and economy, respectively, going to the polls in 2024 — along with nearly 40 other countries such as Taiwan, Indonesia, Mexico and Pakistan — there is not a moment to waste in recognising the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) in amplifying election-related risks via deepfake videos, echo chambers, micro-targeting and undermining information integrity. Indeed, these tools and tactics are already being used in attempts to sway opinions and create confusion.

What is needed is the collective courage to wrest back control of the narrative by reinvigorating democracy, as well as restoring faith in our democratic institutions and rules-based order. Co-creation is increasingly seen by the public, private and civic sectors as the best means of paving the way for humankind through the 21st century and beyond.

The people must be given a fighting chance to understand how AI systems reply to political questions, the role of model developers in shaping replies, whether models are biased and the meaning of outputs. We cannot ignore the fact that lowering the cost of political persuasion threatens to negatively impact the electoral landscape, exacerbating existing divides and creating different information ecosystems.”

Doing Nothing Has Never Been More Important by Kate Neville

"Work and idleness are neither as antonymous nor as dichotomous as they might at first glance seem. We are quite comfortable acknowledging the politics of work, even if debates rage about productive and reproductive work, forms of labour relations, supply chains and financial models and economic transitions. The interrogation of idleness must likewise be seen as a serious political undertaking, embedded in the study of work. We need to think about both what kinds of work and what kinds of suspensions of work are needed moving forward. More boldly, we must search for a more creative and expansive vocabulary that lets us imagine and articulate a radically different world. A less restrictive understanding of how we might spend our time. A more sweeping account of not only the activities of humans, our labour and our rest, but also of those around us, whose lives on this planet are so often shaped by our own."

Learn With BQI

Will We Be in Your Neighborhood?

Homa and Will would love to connect at any of the upcoming events they're speaking at:

August 1 - Student Agency Summit, Olentangy (OH) Schools (Will)

August 21 - Chilliwack (BC) School District Leadership Retreat (Will)

August 22 - SD67 Leadership Retreat, Penticon, BC (Will)

September 3 - Nanuet (NY) School District Open Day (Will)

September 6-8 - United Nations International School (UNIS), Hanoi, Vietnam Governance as Leadership Training Institute: “Charting Tomorrow - Board Governance, Big Questions and the Future of Education”(Homa)

October 25-27 - Tri-Association Conference, Mexico City, MX (Homa and Will)

October 31- Nov 3 - Cape Town, South Africa: Association of International Schools in Africa annual conference (Homa)

WORK WITH US!

Let BQI help you unlock the opportunities that are rapidly unfolding in education and the wider contexts. Everyone is talking about the challenges and the difficulties that are breaking systems and people. Leadership navigates change with fearless inquiry, futures thinking, imagination, and diverse relationships. That takes new skills, lenses, and dispositions and we are here for it.

We help school communities:

create new strategic plans
articulate or update their school community's definition of learning
revisit their mission, vision, and values
prepare for accreditation
build the capacity of their boards and communities to navigate more effective and inclusive pathways into the future
plan engaging professional development for their staff

Why not think about having us work with your staff, leadership team, or board on some BIG Questions worth pursuing?

We're working to design healthier, more just, more relevant, and more sustainable futures for school communities. Get all the details here.

Onward with hope,

Homa and Will

Big Questions Institute Newsletter

Can You Prepare for the Unimaginable?

BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly Update

Can You Prepare for the Unimaginable?

Announcing New Members of the BQI Team!

What We're Reading

Learn With BQI

Will We Be in Your Neighborhood?

WORK WITH US!

What Happens When We Imagine Together?

Big Questions #1: What is Sacred?

Follow-Up Resources to the 10 Principles for School Leaders When DEI + Belonging Are Attacked