Anti-Initiatives

Summer is a time for trips to the beach, grilling in the backyard, and hitting the pool. It’s also time for teachers and school leaders to reflect on the previous year and plan for the upcoming one. As a school leader, this means focusing on projects and initiatives that I want us to do better next year, or maybe do for the first time. Things like tighten our dismissal routine, adjust our teacher coaching structure, or use our older students as leaders for our younger students. The list could go, and frequently does, go on and on. This cycle of reflection, planning, and action is one of my favorite parts of being a teacher and school leader.

But what if besides thinking of new areas to focus on, we thought about what we can cut/trim/reduce? I got to thinking about this while reading an article in The New York Times Magazine about the tech company Tumblr and its founder, David Karp. One of Tumblr’s funder’s says this, “it is “normal behavior” for a founder to be excited about adding new bells and whistles, but Karp seems excited about doing the opposite: “He’ll tell us, ‘Hey, got a new version coming up — and I took four features out!’”

As an organization grows, the temptation is to do more and more, and schools are no different. While we need to take on new ideas and focus on different projects each year, we should be better and more efficient than in prior years because we’ve done this already. As a result we should be looking for things to cut and what to make easier. In other words, we should not only be thinking about initiatives, but anti-initiatives.

At KPEA, we’re reducing the number of meetings we have this year because we should have less to decide in our third year than we had in our first. The amount of time it takes to plan for special events like Report Card conferences or the kindergarten Moving Up ceremony is a fraction of what it took two years ago. Our kindergarten curriculum is in such a good place that teachers are merely adjusting plans from previous years instead of creating everything from scratch.  

In Covey-speak, we can only have so many big rocks in our cup. If we’re going to put new ones in every year (and have them fit!), we need to turn the previous year’s big rocks into pebbles first.