NON-DOING SPACE

Last June, Steve was sitting in the back of a crowded room. It was the end of a long day and he had been called back to this room by a slightly inexplicable item on an agenda. Laptop on lap, he typed next to several other people who were also typing into some device or other. No one noticed the tall, lanky man walk into the center of the room until he cleared his throat and called the room to attention. It soon became clear that he would lead the final session of the day's meeting. Also, it soon became clear that the purpose of the activity he would be leading would be extremely unclear for most of the audience. His subject was the ancient practice of paying attention to a process that many of us take for granted—our breathing.

“In a few minutes, after some more explanation, I'll ask you to close your eyes—if you're comfortable doing so,” he said. And then he talked to us about how we might sit and what we might do with our mouths (everything was couched in the conditional) and how it might be best to think of our thoughts, upon closing our eyes, if we chose to, as if they were clouds floating by. “You don't judge the clouds, right?” He didn't want us to judge our thoughts; he didn't want us to name our mental clouds “good” or “bad”;” he didn't want us to be hard on ourselves if we could not focus; and he really didn't want us to work on anything. Being. That is what we were supposed to be doing in the non-doing space he had deftly and surprisingly opened up for us that day.

For Steve, this impromptu meditation session was the most surprising thing that had happened all day, all week, and probably all month. He had not signed up for this, and it did not flow logically from the event for which he had signed up. He was at his school's version of a tech conference. He had spent the day learning about Google Tools and backchanneling and Prezi and assessment. He wanted to try out the new tricks he had learned in a session on the latest Mac operating system (OS X Yosemite, at the time). He wanted, too, to respond to some emails that had been piling up. As he tried to settle into the guided meditation, begrudgingly at best, he spotted Reshan, who had engineered not only the tech workshops but also this closing event. He wondered what Reshan was up to. Was this some kind of elaborate hoax? An experiment? As he thought to himself, he heard another voice in his head, chiding him: “You shouldn't be pursuing that, or any, line of thought right now. The purpose is to focus on your breathing. The purpose is to stop focusing on the day's work, the day's screens, the day's technology.” And then Steve knew exactly what was happening.

This meditation session was not solely, or even mostly, about meditation. It was about habits and default settings. It was a forced move away from hardware, software, and the networks that bind computing devices to other computing devices. Reshan wanted us to take a break—and not the kind of break that entails logging in to other social networks or email accounts to catch up on work between formal engagements.

The leader of the guided meditation said, “If your mind is filling up with thoughts, just let them go. Don't chide yourself. Gently return your focus to your breathing.”

Steve agreed—still feeling a bit foolish—to give this a try. When he started to think, he returned his focus to his breathing. A few minutes later, when the leader called the people in the room back to attention, Steve felt refreshed, as if he had just returned from a dip in a cool stream. Maybe there was something to this … maybe.

HIGHWAYS AND OFF-RAMPS

Sometimes the first metaphor that helps you understand a concept frames your understanding of that concept for many years. For Steve and Reshan, one such metaphor is the “information superhighway.” Not coincidentally, its Wikipedia entry identifies its widest usage in the ‘90s, when Steve and Reshan were beginning to hang out in educational technology circles. Listening to some of the ways it was used back then makes it clear why it would have been inspiring—in a “think of the possibilities!” kind of way—when we were in college and graduate school, beginning to inch toward our careers and our adult lives. Here's a definition, cited on the term's Wikipedia page, from an MIT working paper from 1994:

The information superhighway directly connects millions of people, each both a consumer of information and a potential provider. (…) Most predictions about commercial opportunities on the information superhighway focus on the provision of information products, such as video on demand, and on new sales outlets for physical products, as with home shopping. (…) The information superhighway brings together millions of individuals who could exchange information with one another. (Resnik, Zeckhauser, & Avery, 1995)

So, with some sense of nostalgia—and because it has a certain utility to it—we are going to shake the dust off the information superhighway concept to help frame one of our most important beliefs.

We have celebrated the virtues of connected computers, highlighting and encouraging the way blended leaders travel the information superhighway in search of innovative practice. Along the way, we have tried to help you understand the leadership choices that are available to you. You now know, for example, that you can choose how and where to ask for help in a larger electronic forum and that you have multiple meeting options from which to choose when organizing the work of your teams.

But a truly effective blended leader knows that one of the most important parts of the highway, especially when traveling caravan style with a group, is the off-ramp.

Should you stay online or go offline? Should you take advantage of connected devices or disconnect? When leading others, what's the best way to mobilize them? Should they all be led in the same way? And what kind of moral responsibility do you have to a group of people—faculty and students alike—for whom you have provided technology and Internet access and encouraged robust use of both. If you're feeling as if there are many choices to make, you are on your way to being an effective blended leader… . Blended leadership, after all, is a growing awareness of the choices available to you.

LEADING OTHERS AS YOU WERE LED

Teachers, like all learners, learn in a variety of ways. Some of them like to figure things out on their own. Some of them like to learn by reading or watching. Some of them like to experiment and tinker with or without a “coach” looking on and offering advice. Some of them like to learn socially, in pleasant group situations that allow for them to move in and out of task focus. That this list could go on points to an important principle: If you ultimately want to blend your leadership, because you think that form of leadership is best for your organization or for the task at hand, you have to do whatever it takes to bring people on board. Sometimes this on-boarding is as simple as sending a group of people an email with instructions; sometimes it requires face-to-face work.

This point is not inconsistent with the way in which technology integration has worked in schools over the past fifteen years. Any nontech person who tried to collaborate with a technology department in the late ‘90s knows that the role of school technology departments have evolved quite a bit. As a teacher starting his career back then—if we can call working in a tutoring center at a college “starting his career”—Steve realized that there was a substantial divide between the people who were supposed to use computers to aid or ease instruction and those who were in charge of keeping those computers up and running. Back then, for Steve, tech departments were shadowy presences at best and gruff adversaries at worst.

Now, tech departments are often filled with people who are personable if not downright genial. Also, many folks who work on the technology side of things are often deeply invested in education and educational theory. They often know the language of education as well as, if not better than, most teachers, and they participate passionately in discussions about teaching and professional development. Somewhere along the lines (in the past fifteen years), school technology departments have internalized the idea that if we are to take seriously the concept that “it's not about the device,” then the people who best understand the devices have to be approachable and approach faculties or individuals when need be.

The same holds true when blending leadership: If the device is simply a conduit to leadership, then the leaders who would use the device have to be approachable and approach those they lead when need be.

In our introduction, we urged you to take a step back and think about the first time you used Google Docs to collaborate. And we asked you to take a look at the online space wherein you post your assignments. We could have asked you to think about your initial engagement with Dropbox or Evernote. We could have asked you to think about the first few emails you ever sent in a work environment.

Our point, way back in the opening chapter, was that someone was “behind” those interfaces, those services. Someone outside your school made them possible, and someone inside your school decided to present them as an option.

Most likely, too, someone helped you figure out how to make use of them. He or she led your learning; he or she helped you become a more effective participant in an online world.

It is likely that, at some point, someone said, “Let me show you.” You were in a meeting and the facilitator stopped the meeting to explain the tools the group would be using to collaborate. Maybe she went so far as to bring in members of the tech department to support the people in the room as they waded into an interaction on Google Docs or Moodle or Dropbox.

It is likely that, at another point, someone simply dropped you into a problem-solving context and asked you to figure out something for yourself. You showed up at a meeting and someone asked you to visit a website where the meeting agenda, resources, and notes would, from that point forward, be stored. But you were not totally familiar with the website so, as the facilitator ran the meeting, you had to try to pay attention to the meeting while muddling your way through a new online environment. Then, in between meetings, if you had an action item that required you to return to the meeting resources or notes, you had to figure out how to get back into the website. Slowly, all the clunky, laborious steps became fluid and habitual, so much so that you started running your own meetings through the website, so much so that you started leading the learning of others.

It is likely that, at even another point, someone invited you to simply play with something. You were working in your office and you received an email. It did not contain an action item or a complaint. It wasn't trying to drain what Seth Godin calls your “mental bandwidth.” It simply said, “Hey, check this out,” or “I saw this and thought you might like it” and then pointed you to something like Story Builder or Postach.io and you soon found yourself the proud owner of a new Web tool that you later applied to a presentation or a meeting or class.

And it is likely that someone, at some point, said, “Let me help you,” and they came to your office and sat down with you and showed you, then watched you, then coached you, then showed you again … until you had it. And then they answered their phone—cheerfully—when you had a question. They continued to lend their support until you felt empowered to use a new tool on your own.

As you lead the learning of others, as you lead with tech tools and within tech-enhanced networks, it is best to have some examples in your head of your own experiences with similar tools and networks, or even better, online collaboration. It is best to think about how others have led your learning so that you, in turn, can lead the learning of your teams.

To be an effective blended leader, you must make conscious choices. Will my team use Google Docs, Moodle, paper, or some other medium? And does my team need tech support as we attempt to complete a task augmented by technology, or can we muddle through and learn as we go? In fact, would such muddling be most useful to the team, long term? Of course the answers to these questions depend on the tool, depend on the team, and depend on the purposes, both long term and short, of the leader.

Some teams can handle almost 100 percent online interactions and end up with an excellent final product. Some need offline interactions and support. You have to know your audience, drop in when need be, and always include the offer to meet one-on-one whenever something gets digitally ambiguous.

Reshan recently rolled out a new version of Moodle, with some small upgrades, to a large school community. In order to collect appropriate user feedback before pushing out the upgrade, he switched between online and offline leadership, as needed. For example, in a regular face-to-face meeting of his educational technology committee, made up of teachers, administrators, and librarians, he told the group he would be asking for feedback on the new Moodle space. He set the frame for the feedback by explaining some of Moodle's recent history at his school. The school's intranet, Moodle, had been in place for almost seven years with steadily increasing adoption and ongoing use. In the past, changes were made to Moodle in order to improve navigation and organization based on years of user feedback. Though visual design challenges had been addressed, access design was needed to make the entry into this space a cleaner experience. Moodle had been hosted locally at the school, which provided benefits (speed when it was working well, immediate support for teachers when needed, ability to restart the server) but also drawbacks (if complicated backend issues arose, the school did not necessarily have the local expertise such as an SQL database guru, to handle such problems). One possible revision to the access design was to contract a third party to not only host the Moodle environment, but also to maintain and support the back-end. The IT department worked with a company to create a site for testing so that people could see how it would work.

After providing the explanation to his group and taking questions as they arose, Reshan dismissed the group and told them that the rest of the meeting would take place online, and that he would send a prompt for feedback. He sent out the following message after the meeting, directing people to the test site:

Poke around on this site and see how things feel. I wouldn't get too fixated on the speed of things initially. I don't think that it is possible for it to be faster than the local solution, but at least it should be more reliable and not crash.

So, he established the task in person and made sure people in the room understood what he needed. Then, and only then, did he send the digital communication with a restatement of the task and access to the online space. The digital feedback soon started rolling in. One committee member wrote:

I just spent a few minutes giving the new Moodle site a spin. I was surprised to see a few small changes. I don't know if the off-campus service is running a slightly different version of Moodle, but the look is slightly different. There are also two functionality changes that I noticed. 1. You can now drag and drop to upload files—finally! You can drag a file right onto your Moodle page and it will upload and make a title based on the filename. Or, when adding a file using the “add file” option, rather than having to navigate to the file, you can drag and drop it. 2. There is a new editing button next to each file/activity/page etc. that with one click allows you to rename the item (without having to enter the edit resource window). While neither of these is going to directly impact student learning, they will save time. The new Moodle server looks good so far!

Interestingly, Steve wrote this description of the Moodle testing in the previous paragraphs but was not at the original meeting. Reshan allowed him to participate by copying him on all meeting correspondences and all the feedback that came in. As an administrator, Steve was able to see the multiple layers that went into the unrolling of the next Moodle cycle, commenting if necessary. Because of Reshan's passive sharing, and Steve's willingness to engage completely online, Steve carried with him an enhanced understanding of the new Moodle interface—the ever-important backstory of the decision—when it appeared to the faculty and students. So, Reshan led Steve's learning in an entirely online way while leading the learning of his team in both online and offline ways.

If you spend all your time online, you will not lead as well as you could. And if you never pull back, and stay too involved, and never let the online tools take hold, you also will not lead as well as you could. To succeed as a leader with a blended practice, you must build the capacity for online–offline shifting.

THE HABIT OF WEARING YOUR HABITS LIGHTLY

And how do you do that? How do you know when to move a conversation or collaboration online or keep it offline?

Partially, the answer is obvious and intuitive: Do the obvious and intuitive work well. That is, as you lead, think about your teams and the individuals they comprise, keep your objectives front and center, consider the potential residual effects of any leadership tool or leadership path that you choose, and then make a decision about how you will lead.

But … the trick to doing that work well is to avoid rushing through it. If you always follow the same process, at the same time, in the same order, you are not deciding if that process is best. You are on autopilot, cruise control (on the superhighway). If you always meet with a team offline, for example, you could run into the problems detailed in Belief 4. Some members of that group will wonder why you never use the robust—and often free—tech tools at your fingertips to shorten meetings or cut out some face-to-face meetings altogether. At the same time, moving too much—or too quickly—into online spaces could alienate or isolate members of the team who are not comfortable working that way.

Being clear about your expectations while being flexible about the way you support others in their efforts to meet those expectations seems, to us, to be the best way to arrive at a situation that works. If you expect your teams to be able to use Google Docs in order to collaborate, you should be willing to say (1) Google Docs are now required and (2) I will offer you a menu of training options to help you feel comfortable using them. In order to make the right choice about whether to use the information superhighway or the off-ramp to accomplish your leadership goals, then, you have to develop the habit of wearing your own leadership habits lightly.

Habits are a vital aspect of technology use—beneficial when they create effective routines and dangerous when they reduce critical thought. When it comes to interactions with computing devices, everyone has habits and routines that guide their work, positively or negatively. Some people read the same websites, in the same order, every morning. Some people cannot walk past their smartphones without touching them. Some people read email continually during the workday. Some people need to be reminded to check their email (what they do with their time we will never know). Some people pick up the phone when others would walk down the hall, and still others would send a text or email. Some of these behaviors are useful; some are not. Additionally, habits are considered critical battleground states for technology companies hoping to be elected president of the world's attention. In an analysis on the blog “Nir & Far,” Nir Eyal, author, consultant, and investor, says the “best product does not always win.” To win, products have to “crowbar the competition's users' habits” (Eyal, 2015). Once a company has access to the habits of users, they have protected themselves, at least temporarily, against the advances of their competitors. This logic makes sense when you consider his examples. Netflix changed the habits of the Blockbuster customers who used to drive to the “video store” and even pay late fees when they forgot to return a DVD; Amazon put “the store inside the customer's home via the Internet,” changing the shopping habits of millions of people.

Leadership habits around technology are just like all habits around technology. They evolve “slowly, then all at once” from personal experience (from inside of us) and from our environments (from outside of us). Some we intentionally build (the habit of exercising, for example) and some happen as a result of our crowded lives (the habit of not exercising, for example). To lead well, you have to ask yourself, are my online and offline habits optimized for the kind of leadership I wish to provide? Are they habits that I chose for myself, habits I stumbled into by throwing myself into my work without much thought, or habits that a technology company engineered for me?

When leaders acquire firm habits around the technology they use for leadership, they can speed through decisions, making their work seem effortless and decisive. Also, they can make mistakes. They might email an emotionally fraught message to a team—out of habit—instead of presenting the news in person. They might use old-fashioned, that is, slow, media to share news instead of social media, thus missing out on the chance to build momentum around an event as it is unfolding. They might reserve professional development for special speakers or summer workshops instead of trying just-in-time, peer-to-peer training or newer models like an “unconference.” By developing habits and allowing them to continue unchecked, by developing go-to routines for solving problems or communicating, leaders can lose the power of conscious thought—they can lose the opportunity to exhibit judgment, to engender trust, and to build the capacity of their followers.

One way to avoid such a fate, and to wear your habits lightly, is to pay attention when someone starts talking about meditation and mindfulness (unlike Steve in the opening anecdote of this chapter). Google's Chade-Meng Tan's book Search inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) chronicles the way an engineer brought meditation and mindfulness principles to Google. Tan's in-house Google course, according to a Business Insider report, has a six-month waiting list within the company. He teaches people—in the book and in real life—how to pay attention to their breathing. Also, and more important for a work setting, he teaches people how to process their emotions without acting on them in harmful ways. “We create problems,” he writes, “when we are compelled by emotions to act one way or another, but if we become so skillful with our emotions that we are no longer compelled, we can act in rational ways that are best for ourselves and everybody else” (Tan, 2012, p. 18). What he calls “response flexibility” or “the ability to pause before you act” is similar to what we have called the “design pause” or “designing against the default.”

As Tan teaches meditation to beginners, he offers subtle, easily generalizable counsel about what to do when you are meditating and you feel distracted. “If you have to react (for example, you really have to scratch),” he writes, “try to take five breaths before reacting. The reason to do this is to practice creating space between stimulus and reaction” (p. 42). We would say the same thing about the technologies that you habitually reach for and use as you seek to lead your organization. When you receive an input—that is, feel an itch to reach for your typical technological fix—take a few breaths; acknowledge what you are doing; open up a space, however small it may be, to choose either the typical, habitual path or something different, something potentially better or more human, given the context. Our leadership habits and default settings are too important to be taken for granted. They are too important to be set and forgotten. They are too important to be left to tech companies wielding better and better “crowbars” to loosen and grab our attention.

Boudett and City (we met them in our earlier chapter about meetings) help us understand what unexamined offline habits can cost us:

Our colleague Richard Elmore refers to time as “money you've already spent,” which acknowledges that when you're paying people salaries, you're essentially paying them for their time. If you think about a meeting not as “60 minutes, but as $1,000” (for example, 25 people X 1 hour X $40/hour), all of a sudden the meeting feels a little different. (Boudett & City, 2014, p. 10)

In his book on email, Mac expert David Sparks (2013) couches similar arithmetic in his typically lively repartee to measures the cost of an institutional online habit almost as common as the institutional offline habit of meetings:

Stop and think about it for a minute. Every time you get any type of momentum going with your work or, even worse, at play, that Ding goes off. What is the result? A rebellious piece of your brain disengages from whatever real work you are doing and thinks that it may be the most important email in the world. Like some Pavlovian dog, you then pull your phone out of your pocket or switch windows on your Mac to your mail application to find out that you've been made an unbelievable offer for Dr. Funkenstein's Fancy Hair Tonic. At that point, you've successfully enabled someone creating spam on the other end of the planet to interrupt your work or play. Here's the corker: in five minutes it is going to happen again.

Now think about the number of times that can happen in a day. By default on the Mac, Apple Mail checks your email every five minutes. On your phone, push notifications will do it more frequently, indeed with every new email. Let's just stick with five minutes to be conservative. A notification every five minutes means 12 interruptions an hour. Assuming that you are around computers or cell phones 12 hours a day, that is 144 interruptions a day. It gets worse when you start thinking in terms of weeks, months, and years. (Sparks, 2013)

Sparks goes on to ask how one can get anything done or find time for enjoyment when there are so many interruptions per day, per week, per month, per year, and so on.

Steve and Reshan have had plenty of people in their lives make the exact opposite arguments about meetings and email notifications. Many of the best leaders they know would rather run a bad face-to-face meeting than a crisp online meeting. They believe that teams build culture best when they share physical space consistently. And many of the tech leaders they know feel that leaders who turn off notifications are taking the unnecessary risk of not seeing important and urgent emails as soon as they arrive.

We are not sure there's a right answer, a correct way, in either case, but we believe strongly that there is a wrong answer, an incorrect way, in both cases: avoiding choice or pretending it does not exist. Leaving on your email notification system when you are trying to do deep, thoughtful work is an invitation to being distracted from that work. That's a choice. Turning off your email notification system will mean that your email system is less airtight, less dependable to others. That's a choice, too. Habits and routines can save you, and your institution, time. Just don't set them and forget them.

TEACH OTHERS TO WEAR THEIR HABITS LIGHTLY, TOO

Many schools like to describe their employees as lifelong learners. Technology, moving forward, will test this assertion continually and thoroughly, but not only in the ways you might guess. Sure, when forward-thinking instructional leadership meets effective and capable technology leadership, the presentation of new tech tools for teacher use and student use will rarely cease.

But this chapter isn't about the way we market new tech tools to our faculties and students or how ready they are to adopt those technologies. It is not about tech integration or training, because that is not the focus of this book. Instead, we turn our attention to tech integration's unruly cousin: obsolescence. Though it is true that there are always new tools emerging, it is also true that some of the tools upon which we come to depend—habitually—change continually or even disappear completely. Blended leaders must be prepared to grapple with the effects of obsolescence on communities of practice; they must be prepared to think about and manage through the demise of those online applications and services that have gained a user base within their schools. Sometimes you spend a lot of time getting people online, into a space, only to have to move all of them off.

Let us take an example that touches most educators. As adults, we have adopted email utterly and completely. We send each other notes, make requests, share pictures, organize events—all through email. We have bought into the system wholeheartedly and, in some cases, overwhelmingly. Our students, in contrast, have lost interest in this medium. They have email addresses, but that is not where they transact most of their business. When they want to communicate with someone, they text him or direct message her. When they want to organize a group, they do so via Facebook. Sometimes they give up on words altogether, opting to simply share photographs via Instagram or Snapchat. Blended leaders notice the possible disconnect here and begin to ask questions about the ways in which teachers and students can best communicate in order to spur student learning. Should the adults alter their communication patterns, or should the students be encouraged to build a habit of checking their email accounts at least once a day? Who should give up ground here? Which highway are we even on? Which one do we want to be on? What is the best way to form an effective learning partnership between students and teachers? The blended leader has to stir this pot, has to raise awareness about conditions affecting online interactions, and has to plan for the fact that even a communication platform as seemingly solid and ingrained as email could one day crumble.

In watching leadership and “follower-ship” in online spaces, we have seen people move through a variety of stances when obsolescence rears its head and people are forced to work in its wake.

SAMR AS THE ANTI-HABIT HABIT

Generally, we think that it is better to avoid quick adoption of acronym-based learning frameworks and pedagogical theories. Recently, however, the SAMR model has been making the rounds in educational technology, and its simple presentation makes it seem accessible, sensible, and at the very least worth a look. It is not a brand-new approach to examining technology integration—there are many parallels to earlier work of Susan Loucks and Mark Prensky. Developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, it describes four stages of integration: Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition. A potential misconception is that one somehow has to move through these stages incrementally—that is, work from substitution toward redefinition. However, this model does not have to be used in an integration framework or pedagogical continuum. Instead, it can be used as an assessment lens or grounding diagnostic to define the types of interactions that are happening in a learning, and therefore leading, environment. The SAMR model is certainly useful for tech integration, but it is also useful for blended leaders looking to adopt a .0 mindset.

If someone in your community introduces a new tool and people are just using it for substitution, then they can get hooked on it, and when it disappears, they will be lost. Leaders with a blended orientation will remind people to have “one foot out the door” by staying focused on what they are trying to do, rather than on the tools they are using. For if they are using the tools to redesign tasks, then, by definition, they will continually seek a different or better task (and quite possibly, a different or better tool, though the tool won't matter as much).

Collaboration is a good example. In work cultures where people have fully bought into the type of collaboration made possible by connected computers, there is a continual task-shifting based on the goals of the collaboration. If people want to work together in real time, they might opt for Google Docs. If they are archiving the work of a team over a long period of time, they might opt for Evernote shared notebooks. If they need a quick answer to something on which they are working, they might reach out and tap the digital shoulder of a person by texting or IM-ing or calling him or her. The task drives the tool selection, not vice versa. As such, if any of the tools mentioned here were to disappear or change significantly, the collaborators would still have their task in clear sight—they would still be working in ways that they hadn't been a year ago. They would simply find new, and they hope better, tools.

During the final year of his first three-year stint in teaching, Reshan was starting to understand his interest in educational technology and design. It was the 2002–03 school year, and he was excited about creating his own math resource webpage. Using the “Split Design/HTML” view in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, he inserted buttons and animations that he had learned to create in a Macromedia Flash MX workshop. At the time, in order to create a webpage that looked exactly how he wanted it to look and function exactly how he wanted it to function, these were the best tools available for someone with little to no experience working with interactive website coding or programming.

It would seem, then, that for a teacher in 2003 to be able to create a space like this, he or she would need to learn the skills associated with Dreamweaver and Flash. An educational technology integrator at the time might schedule workshops and trainings around the use of these tools, even though the mastery of the tools was not the goal. The savvy tech integrator or online leader would be interested in tools only as a means to create or access something that otherwise could not be created or accessed.

Fast-forward ten years and Reshan is now in the position to teach the younger version of himself, someone looking to present materials online in as vibrant and human a way as possible. The goals are the same, but the number of tools available to reach those goals has grown immensely. Yes, Flash and Dreamweaver still exist (now owned by Adobe, of course), but the younger version of Reshan does not need to know how to use those tools in order to create a custom website. He could use Weebly or WordPress or Wix, three examples of the many great, free website-building platforms currently available. Flash as a platform is becoming obsolete—not only because of the lack of a flash player on Apple iOS devices, but also because of the emergence of HTML5, jQuery, and other streamlined and integrated programming approaches that no longer require third-party plugins in order to view and access content. Flash used to be the gold standard for sophisticated websites. The learning of Flash programming used to be a key offering during tech workshops and conferences. Now a site that requires Flash seems old-fashioned.

The SMART Board is another high-visibility tool that is approaching obsolescence. There was a (recent) time when a SMART Board in every classroom was an indicator of a high-tech environment, even though students were still using the same old paper-and-pencil tools while the teacher wrote on the virtually projected screen. With the recent emergence of tablets (like iPads and Android devices), the touch interaction and direct manipulation afforded by a SMART Board (perhaps the most valuable aspect of this technology) are no longer only available to the person who happens to be next to it. All students can interact with digital content when a multi-touch device is in their hands.

Many tech integration specialists can probably tell stories of spending a lot of time supporting teachers in their use of SMART Boards—but they should not regret that time if they used it to teach teachers that the tools are but a temporary means to create or access something that otherwise could not be created or accessed. The tools will change; the aspiration driving the use of the tools should not. In the case of SMART Boards, that aspiration was to create activities in which students could actively engage, not to simply create opportunities for students to annotate and draw over their notes. Teach teachers to desire the former and they will not feel lost or betrayed if the school decides to stop pouring resources into SMART Boards or if the company disappears due to the emergence of tablets. Rather than the boat, the saying goes, you should dream of the sea. You beat obsolescence by staying focused on the learning objective and simply using the best available tool at the time to support it (wearing your habits lightly).

This begs a question. In Reshan's graduate school program, there was a long debate among the faculty and the students: Should introductory computer programming courses be a requirement for master's and doctoral students in a program about educational technology (presumably those training to be at the forefront of school leadership, online or otherwise)?

Reshan believed it should be a requirement only so that all students who are venturing into educational technology understand and experience what it is like to think and work like a programmer, considering that programmers are behind most of the tools that will be crucial to the graduate students' professional or scholarly work.

But when the conversation veers too close to the particulars—Should these students learn Java or HTML or Flash Action Script?—the general point seems to be lost in the scrum. Hidden in that scrum is obsolescence and all the havoc it can wreak if it is not a consideration in our strategic plans. All the languages mentioned here and their associated syntaxes are going to be obsolete at some point in our functional lives. No one who takes two semesters of programming in a graduate program for educators is going to be engineering the next Google just from these courses alone. Short-term thinkers worry about Java or HTML. Long-term thinkers worry about diving in and understanding what computer science affords by engaging as computer scientists. As described earlier in this chapter, when groups of people face obsolescence of a tool and the renewal that comes from it, they generally go through four stances: resistance to enthusiasm to taking for granted to fluidity in the face of continuous change. In the best work cultures, a fifth stance follow the first four.

Stance #5: Followers Become Leaders

Someone in this stance might say, “Things are changing around here, and they are going to continue to change because they are going to continue to get better, and I'm glad I work in a place that allows me to work at the cutting edge of my field.” Once people reach this position, and find joy in the way their online work-life is elevated by continual improvements, they rarely go back to the earlier stances. Their whole approach has shifted.

In the fifth stance, followers become leaders. They are so attuned to what is possible that they begin to ask pointed questions, pushing their de facto leaders. You might hear someone in the fifth stance say, “You know, this program should be able to do more.” Or, “This interface doesn't work as well as it should.” Or, better yet, “I found an application that can replace the application we are currently using.” Or, “Have you seen what this new X can do? Let me show you.”

If leadership is working as it should, follower-ship does not get stuck in the early resistance phase. Change is communicated clearly. Habits are formed and reformed. Obsolescence, and the renewal it can provide, is occasionally contextualized and becomes part of the organization's vocabulary. A flywheel (in the Jim Collins [2016] sense) begins to turn: As your faculty become used to incremental improvements in the online platforms on which they do their work, they begin to expect them. But their expectations are not marked by fear or dread. They look forward to changes, because they know that these changes are designed with their best interests in mind; they know that these changes are being pushed out by people who understand, intimately, how they work and the goals to which they aspire. They begin to ask for changes, in fact. They do not stay content with interfaces that lack elegance or require too many clicks to complete a task. They do not stay content when something does not work as quickly as it should. They understand that the online component of the school is as vital a part of the student experience as a common room or a classroom. They jump in to help train their colleagues, to share their insights, to promote an openness and a willingness to play, to explore, to sometimes fail, to be ever-amateur, in the best sense of that word. As such, by learning so fearlessly, they lead the learning of others.

THE MORAL COMPONENT

There is a moral component underpinning the belief expounded upon in this chapter.

If you are the one leading people into a deep engagement with the online world, you should remind them, from time to time, about the value and necessity of walking away from that world and the devices one has to peer into and bend one's body around in order to enter that world.

If you worked in a gym and noticed that people were overusing a set of weights, you would step in, cautioning them that they were in danger of hurting themselves or overdeveloping a set of muscles.

If you were a physical therapist and you saw people slumping in their chairs at their offices—for eight hours a day—you would warn them that their posture could lead to the deterioration of their body.

If you are blending leadership, if you are supplying people with new online tools, you should occasionally remind them to get off the machines, to leave the tools behind. As technological demands and possibilities increase, there must be times when technology is not around and is not used.

If you are creating professional development opportunities for your school, make sure you include some nontech offerings (like a giant group meditation).

Consider circulating something like the email charter (http://emailcharter.org) that offers guidelines about how we can use email effectively without drowning—ourselves or others—in it.

Consider promoting the message and practice of someone like neuropsychologist Rex Jung, who suggests that “meandering” is an essential aspect of creativity. We swear we did not plan this, but he recently explained, via analogy, that intelligence “is a superhighway in the brain that allows you to get from point A to point B. With creativity, it's a slower, more meandering process where you want to take the side roads, and even the dirt roads, to get there, to put the ideas together” (Jung, 2015). So, as you structure work for your peers or direct reports, consider ways to promote meandering, whether intellectual or physical. Perhaps, at the start of a meeting, you can play a game like Disruptus, which encourages participants to rethink—and resee—everyday objects and ideas. Or perhaps you can suggest a walking meeting instead of a sitting meeting, helping to move a group out of its usual context, out of its usual thinking patterns.

If you are a leader, consider the timing of your emails. Do you send emails on Saturday and expect a reply? Could the email wait until Monday morning? Has anyone in your school told parents that they should expect replies to their emails in a reasonable period of time (say, twenty-four hours) but not over a weekend?

Do people in your school, especially leaders, talk about taking tech breaks? Do they ever post away messages on their emails that tell everyone in the community that they are unplugged every once in a while?

Online leadership that occasionally leads people away from their screens will likely become more crucial than ever. We are working at the dawn of Google Glass (and even Google Cardboard) and of machines that will be able to read and react to us, read and react to each other. Leaders will be the ones to say, “Thanks, yes, that's for us” or “Thanks, no, that's not for us.”

TALKING WITH THE TECH RABBI

We move this chapter to its close by focusing on the life and times of Rabbi Michael Cohen, whose job asks him to stay plugged in to online networks more than most of us, while his spiritual vocation asks him to completely unplug once a week. He is director of educational technology at Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy in Beverly Hills and a rabbi, and he joins his identities masterfully at his website, http://www.thetechrabbi.com.

We spoke with him in August 2015, and this is what he told us:

I am a full time educational technology director for a school. I have four kids, all five and under. I am in the middle of trying to finish my master's degree. I am also trying to create a consulting practice. Once, over coffee, Scott McLeod [director of innovation for Prairie Lakes Area Education Agency in Iowa] asked me, “Are you going to burn out?”

I said “No, I have this thing called Shabbat.” Every week I spend twenty-five hours totally disconnected [from technology], and I reconnect and deeply connect with people who are very important to me, especially my family and close friends. This practice gives me the energy to then go back to the online world and be productive.

It also helps me to think differently about what technology is meant to do. To ask, what is technology's essential purpose? My feeling is that technology, in essence, should connect us with one another.

I'm not insular, so to speak, but I've been very much in my little bubble in Los Angeles. After one opportunity to present at a conference, I've been thrust into the [ed tech] world. It's interesting to have conversations with people about what technology can do to better our lives and our learning. Then, never taking a break … I don't know how… I don't know what it's like to not take a break.

My weekly Shabbat is a humbling experience for me because it's bigger than I am. I think that sometimes when we use social media, it becomes a very self-centered activity. I don't mean that in a negative way, only that it becomes about the sharer. I think that the “bigger-than-myself” experience that I have every week helps me really understand that social media can be about a conversation—a meaningful conversation, a meaningful sharing of information. Though my Shabbat takes me away from social media for part of each week, it helps to shift and expand the center of things—including social media—for me.

We started this chapter with meditation and we ended with a reflection on the practice of the Shabbat. Though both are different, both are similar in that they help us to shift and expand the center of things—of a tech conference, of our social media use, of our leadership practice. What is all of this technology really for? Online or off, maybe that is the best path forward: asking that question, living the most thoughtful and thorough answer you can think of, and then asking that question again after some time has passed. Balance, in terms of blended leadership, is best thought of as a verb, not a noun.