IKEA BOXES AND GARBAGE CANS

Recently, during the month of May, Reshan ran an entrepreneurial class for high school seniors. Called Startup 101, the class served as an internship-type opportunity because the students had completed the rest of their high school course work. He—and they—had a great deal of autonomy, and based on what Steve had heard about Reshan's plans, he was looking forward to spending time in the room, watching the experience unfold.

Prior to opening day, Reshan and Steve went to IKEA to get furniture, lighting, and a few other items to ensure that the basement science lab allotted for the course could be converted appropriately for a different kind of work experience. At the end of their shopping trip, Reshan and Steve dropped off a small pile of IKEA loot, efficiently packed in the company's trademark flat boxes.

On launch day, a Monday, Steve eagerly walked down to the classroom. Reshan had promised not only an interesting experience, but also a transformed space. His plan was to assemble the furniture on the preceding Friday. Steve arrived, camera in hand, ready to both experience and document a new space—ready to be transported to a startup-style office that had, only days before, been a working science lab.

But the space was unchanged. It was still the same old science lab—with a sad-looking beanbag chair draped over one of the benches.

Reshan explained that his plans on Friday had been interrupted. Constrained by time, he made a snap decision to leave the IKEA goods boxed and to figure out what to do on Monday. So here's what happened.

When the students arrived on Monday, they looked around at the assortment of chairs, couches, and boxes, and most of them seemed confused. Like Steve, they too had walked in with certain assumptions, certain mental pictures of what to expect. What's more, they had walked in with a standard high school hierarchy in mind: The teacher makes most of the decisions. But then, one student looked at the boxes and said, “Oh—are we going to get to build the furniture? Awesome!”

Photo courtesy of the authors

In that moment, Reshan made a design decision. Instead of directing the students about how to set up the room, and instead of dismissing them for a few hours and setting up the room himself, he dismissed himself. He dropped the default—that the teacher sets up the classroom space—and left for two and half hours after asking the students to set up the room in a way they thought would best serve their work and their aspirations over the next month.

When he returned, the room was completely transformed. Not what he expected, but better.

Photo courtesy of the authors

The students had created a symmetrical conference table, a comfortable sitting area, and an area for food and snacks. When Reshan asked them what else they needed or wanted to bring, they gave him a short list—including a video game console that they planned to run through the overhead projector. He continued his radical design experiment and said yes to anything—within reason—that they thought could support them in their work (and their needed rest from that work). They would, after all, be in the room for very long stretches of time.

The thing that impressed Reshan the most was that all the garbage and boxes had been taken out into the hallway bins. The students clearly “owned” the space and wanted to take care of it. What's more, the first day was supposed to wrap up at 2:00 p.m., but most of the students remained in the room until well after 3:00, talking and working. On day 2, students had a choice about showing up in person or working from home on a task list established during day 1; all of them showed up, save for the students who had other school responsibilities; they wanted to work in “their space.” Reshan's quick design decision transformed a space; also, it transformed the motivation of the students assigned to work there (we catch up with this group later on and see what they were able to build).

Working with spaces in schools is not always so inspirational. One of the most memorable acts of school leadership Steve ever engaged in took place at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. After teaching in the program for several summers, he had become an academic dean. When he arrived at the site that summer, head filled with visions for curricular and pedagogical innovation, the site director handed him a clipboard and told him to make sure all the classrooms had garbage cans.

What? Was this really something on which an educational leader should be spending his time? In this case, yes. Steve was responding to feedback from past groups of instructors and taking care of the basic needs of the current ones. If they showed up and saw garbage cans in their classrooms, they would realize that Steve and his team were tending to their needs. A small act, delegated from the site director to his academic dean, set the tone for positive relationships between the administration and the faculty, and by extension, between the faculty and the students.

More than just setting a tone, though, the placement and existence of the garbage cans enabled teachers to do the work they had signed up to do—teach gifted and talented students at the highest possible level—rather than having them worry about where they were going to deposit the trash that accumulated when a single class stayed in a single classroom for six hours straight, five days a week.

So what do IKEA boxes and garbage cans have to do with blended leadership? What do these physical spaces have to do with the kinds of online/offline spaces that many of us encounter in our daily work?

Spend time in school and you spend time in spaces. Pencil cases and lunch boxes in the early days. Lockers and backpacks later. Classrooms, dining halls, lounges, offices, performance centers, labs, and gymnasiums throughout. And, increasingly, whether you are a student, teacher, or school leader, you also spend time in online spaces. You don't walk into them (yet). You enter them after clicking a few keys or putting on headphones or tapping your phone. You enter them when a colleague tells you to click on a link that encourages you click on another link, and another. You enter them when you set up a course management system.

And leaders—the blended sort we have been talking about in this book—take full responsibility for online spaces, as they take full responsibility for offline spaces. Blended leaders recognize that spaces, offline and on, can be designed (well, passably, or poorly) and cared for (well, passably, or poorly) and that the elegant blending of offline and online space is possible, and maybe even preferable, in the schools we have today.

Approaching spaces with a design eye means avoiding the default—the worn grooves of leadership and practice. It means thinking about the designated user, the problem that user is trying to solve, and in some cases, allowing that user to make choices about how the space will relate to, and support, the work that unfolds in it. It's a simple, though radical shift. After all, when was the last time you started a class or meeting by asking for input on the use of the space? When was the last time you included in a survey of your class a question about the layout of your course management system? Are you willing to teach or lead from a new place or in a new place in an old space?

Approaching spaces with an eye toward maintenance, toward care, means ensuring that the space remains maximally usable—that nothing gets in the way of the core purpose of the space. It means caring for the space in a way that everyone feels compelled to continue to use it, or even better, to care for it themselves. Caring for space offline is instantly recognizable. You roll up your sleeves to rearrange furniture. You clean up after a dance or party. You replace a bulb or add a recycling bin. Of course, caring for spaces is also possible in the online world, even though such leadership is largely invisible. For example, when an administrator or teacher fires up a computer, if everything works as it should, she is the beneficiary of such leadership. She sends the emails she needs to send or updates her calendar or posts an assignment or designs an activity. The ease with which she works is directly proportional to the quality of decisions that were made behind the scenes about the online platforms that drive and enable much of her educational work. What options and limits should she have? What bells and whistles? Should her online gradebook have built-in values for grades? Should her course management system contain templates or remain relatively flexible? Should her faculty email contain a standard sign-off?

In an effort to design and then care for digital spaces, leaders, both offline and online, grapple continuously with the questions in the previous two paragraphs along with a slew of others. Such grappling matters because it is a sign of good faith and, done well, it leads to one of the most important ingredients in successful collaboration between leaders and followers: trust.

In Reshan's first formal school role, he was a member of a technology department that provided technical and technology-related instructional support to faculty and staff. Completely new to the world of teaching and learning, Reshan mostly handled technology support requests like fixing printers, repairing network connections, and installing software. During his first three years in this role, three mechanisms were developed by the department to field technology requests: a generic email address that forwarded to all members of the department; a Web-based form that, when complete, would send an email with the results to the previously mentioned generic email address (helpful when a person is having trouble with his or her email); and a phone/voicemail extension that, when messages were left, made an indicator light appear on the desk phones of the four department members (helpful when the person is having trouble with his or her email and accessing the Internet).

The human challenge of such an online system was that people were used to contacting an individual directly, not a shared space or service. Subsequently, all the department members found that they were not only trying to manage the requests coming through the designed mechanisms, but also trying to respond to requests coming through their individual emails, individual voicemails, and perhaps most frequently, their face-to-face interactions with people. It became a hard sell, when speaking with someone in person about a problem he was having, to tell him to go back to his classroom, make a phone call to a generic voicemail, and leave a detailed message. Adding to the perceived absurdity, there was a 25 percent chance (or more, depending on how busy the department was) that the person standing in front of him would field the request anyway.

So the blended solution was as follows: the generic mechanisms (email, Web form, voicemail) would remain and the faculty and staff would be encouraged, but not required, to use them. Then, the technology department members would log any and all requests in an asynchronous, collaborative spreadsheet created on a networked drive. For face-to-face conversations, passing hallway mentions, and office drop-ins, technology department members would try to log the request immediately in the spreadsheet (if there was access), jot it down on a piece of paper (if there was one available), or politely ask the person to send it to the individual tech department member (not the generic line) via email or voicemail.

Such a solution certainly created more busy work for the technology department members. But it also helped to promote in the school a culture of trust that the department was supportive, flexible, and responsive. Over the years, more people began to trust and use the generic system because of faith in the people behind the system.

SOMETHING EVERYONE CAN USE

Designing spaces could involve developing complicated architectural plans, writing HTML code, or creating an asynchronous, collaborative spreadsheet… . It could involve knocking down walls or painting white boards onto existing walls. But it can also start on a much smaller scale. It can start with something as accessible, user friendly, and widespread as Google Docs, a tool of choice for many school leaders.

Reshan and Steve often ask members of their departments or committees to contribute to shared Google Documents or to respond to Google Forms. And, though the tools will change over time, these instruments offer an instructive, emblematic place to begin our consideration of digital space. Because, when you plan to use a Google Doc, designing the space to collect thoughts is the first step. You will want to make sure that you think through what you are hoping to collect in the space, and how best to organize the buckets into which information will flow. The space should have adequate headers and embedded questions so that contributors know where to add their thoughts. Clear directions at the top help as well. We're pointing out what may be obvious to some in order to highlight the kind of “design pause” that is necessary to shape space for users. Rushing people into a space can leave them disoriented or disengaged, and leave you feeling unsatisfied with their performance. Taking a few minutes to prepare for their arrival—as you would in your office or home—can make a big difference.

But you certainly shouldn't stop there. Once people start to contribute to the document, you have to care for the space, refining and revising the document. If you have used Google Docs with a group of people, you know that shared documents can quickly fill up with multiple colored and sized fonts, a variety of sentence and paragraph structures, and thoughts that are half-formed, redundant, or overly wordy. The leader's job, in the case of Google Docs, is to edit, reshuffle, cut, and where necessary, ask clarifying questions so that the document remains eminently usable for everyone.

The writing of this book is a good case to highlight. Steve and Reshan drafted the text for this book in a Google Doc. When it started, the document not only contained the book chapter drafts, but also it held an outline, links, inspirational notes, and a lot of other items related to the completely online collaborative process to which we agreed at the outset. Once the writing of chapters started to take off, with Steve and Reshan dropping in ideas, images, quotes, phrases, and various marginalia using the Comment function, the document was a mess we both had to scroll through each time we wanted to add something.

Reshan decided to create a second Google Doc and moved from the first document anything that wasn't a direct part of the text. He moved references, writing ideas, and marketing ideas; then he went a step further. In the main document he created chapters and bookmarks, and used page breaks and horizontal rules to organize the information.

Though Steve couldn't observe the work, though he couldn't see the effort, he benefited from it right away. Reshan took a break from writing—a design pause—to care for the space in which we were writing. Did this help the writing? In the short run, no. It didn't help to add raw word count to the text. And it knocked us off schedule a little bit. But, in the long run, it absolutely helped.

Reducing clutter allowed us to think clearly and to quickly arrive, with one simple click, at the part of the book on which we wanted to work. For Steve, this redesign of his digital workspace felt like walking into his house and finding that someone had organized it, cleaned it, and thrown away unnecessary items. The experience refreshed and energized him as he approached his responsibilities in writing certain chapters.

The Google Doc tool itself serves as a wonderful spur to collaboration, but it has limits. The tool cannot design itself at the outset, and it cannot reorganize or declutter itself so that the best, most workable ideas rise to the surface. The tool cannot reach out to its users and adjust itself based on their preferences (at least not yet). The tool cannot synthesize or make meaning. As they would in the offline world, these tasks fall to the leader: the human, not the machine.

Our own work in Google Docs drives the advice we give others when consulted. For example, we recently worked with someone who was in charge of unifying departments across three campuses and looking to serve her community by helping to address the typical school problem of vertical curricular alignment. She wanted to ensure that all members of each department had a voice. She reached out to us because she saw it as a blended leadership issue that would require a technological fix, and she wanted to use her school's ample and enviable technological resources. After offering her a technological solution, though, we quickly added an addendum about the necessity of ongoing maintenance, of caring for the space. None of our suggestions would matter or stick if a dedicated leader didn't take responsibility for the project—if a leader didn't adjust his or her work priorities to truly care for, and develop, the space. We wrote her an email, which we have copied here, because it is easily generalizable to many situations where we need to seek balance between technological and human elements:

One of the major challenges to first think about is how to keep whatever system you develop afloat. You can build almost anything, but if you don't find ways to entice people to use it and keep going back to it, it will almost certainly fall flat.

The leader has to be very committed, outside of the regularly structured meetings, to pull in content, edit it, format it, send reminders and updates, etc.

Perhaps you can start with a highly curated shared Google Doc, one that includes a simple, though strong, header structure for the different campuses. There could be a period of posting, followed by a period of commenting. This can help members of the department develop a simple rhythm.

Another option may be to generate an initial group of comments: a leader could ask the group to respond (via email) to a prompt. He/she could then publish the responses via a Google+ community or a Google Doc or a blog that is open to comments (or even a follow up email).

The driving initial question is: is there a person in the school who has the time, energy, and talent to prompt the writers (teachers), to clean up and post the prompts, and then to prompt people for comments? The choice of platform doesn't matter as much as the force behind the conversation. No driving force = certain failure. (Richards, personal communication, November, 2013)

A sloppy Google Doc that is not well cared for sends a poor message. Technological spaces that are wound up and left to run without care will soon be digital ghost towns. In our experience, one of the easiest things to do is to send around a Google Doc. One of the hardest things to do is to keep it clean and fluid—a space that serves its collaborators.

We have all had the experience of receiving targeted ads (say, while composing email in Gmail or Yahoo) that have absolutely nothing to do with our interests or activities. When this happens, when mere noise is presented as a gift, we feel that we are interacting with a technological algorithm, one that thinks it knows us, rather than a human being, one that can be appropriately intentional when seeking our attention. Noise is not good for the company providing it or the person breaking his or her concentration to process it.

If you want the people you lead to be the beneficiaries of technology and feel comfortable entering technological spaces to perform job tasks more efficiently and even joyfully, they must feel that an interested, empathetic leader is monitoring those spaces and making continual adjustments to improve them. To care for digital spaces, you have to care enough to push into them and continually sand them down, like a digital Zamboni driver who arrives, systematically and predictably, between the action on the ice.

Such work takes time—the kind of time that leaders, frankly, do not have for themselves and often do not grant to others. When you're working online, no one offline can see you sweat. You're just pecking away on a laptop. You're trading presence offline (say, in roaming the halls or visiting classes) for presence online (say, in connecting documents or altering where things are stored). Offline leaders reared in certain leadership contexts swoop charismatically into rooms. Online leaders serving young adults who grew up gaming and older adults who grew up before cell phones sometimes have to tiptoe out of those rooms in order to adjust comment settings or margins or headers or invite lists or permissions.

But make no mistake: Performing the kinds of work described in this chapter is a twenty-first-century version of servant leadership. Robert Greenleaf, who coined the term, tested servant leadership behavior by asking if it made others “freer, more autonomous” (Greenleaf, 1977, p. 281); the person making sure that digital spaces help teachers to collaborate better, problem-solve better, create better, is a thoroughly modern servant leader.

A PLATFORM FOR PROFESSIONAL GROWTH

Indeed, online spaces properly constructed and maintained can help the servant leader model scale in schools. You can serve one person—making him or her more autonomous—by designing a great document. You can serve many people—making them more autonomous—by developing a platform to support and enrich their work, and making sure the platform changes as their needs change.

Almost five years ago, a committee on which Steve was a key member revamped entirely his school's Professional Growth Program (PGP). They rewrote the mission of the program, all associated protocols, and all guiding documents. To house this new program, the leaders of the PGP Committee decided that they needed to find a way to store and present information, to allow people to interact with that information, and to create a space for shared reflections as well as forums. Steve and his colleagues knew that the tying together of all these functions and documents could best happen in an online environment. They had several meetings where they drew mock-ups, reviewed Web applications, and bemoaned the fact that the perfect online environment didn't seem to exist. Had they the money and the time, they would have tried to invent something themselves.

At one point, a committee member discovered Ning, and the first chapter of the PGP really began to take shape. Ning allowed individuals or businesses to set up standalone, customizable social networks, leveraging Facebook-like connectivity and shareability while keeping people within a “walled garden.” The ISEd Ning (short for Independent School Educators network) was developed as a social network playground and experimental space for educators to explore, share, and discuss topics of interest, videos, podcasts, blog posts and more. This community of well over five thousand members continued to be an active forum for a number of years. (Note: Ning transitioned from being a “free-mium” service to a completely paid service, but it allowed any existing Ning communities to continue to operate for free.)

The first iteration of the online space to support the school's professional development and evaluation cycle was set up as a subpage of the ISEd Ning. Considering the robust presence of educators already involved with ISEd, Steve and his colleagues, Jenny Zagariello and Karen Newman, believed that ISEd would be a great place to house their school's resources for the PGP. The intent of the PGP subpage was not only for the school to create a repository for all its professional development resources; the design of the online space also facilitated the type of growth-oriented participation that the educational leaders at this school were looking to leverage.

Unlike Steve in the garbage can example at the start of the chapter, an online leader cannot expect to simply set up a space and move on; the ongoing care for digital spaces extends their effectiveness and promotes engagement by all constituents and users. So, in the case of the Professional Growth Group on the Ning, Jenny took the lead in caring for the space. She updated resources based on feedback. She created an index with categories so that resources appeared in a more organized manner. She helped people who had trouble logging in or who were inadvertently kicked off the Ning by glitches in the system. She communicated directly with Demetri Orlando, who was in charge of the ISEd Ning, whenever there was a problem or in advance of sending the entire faculty to the site, to ensure that the concurrent hits wouldn't somehow crash it. In short, her online leadership, behind the scenes, ensured that the school faculty was supported as much as possible during their transition to a new and complex professional growth program and its platform.

At the end of the first three-year cycle of the PGP, the PGP Committee collected feedback about everything from the growth protocols to the rubric driving the growth protocols to the use of ISEd as a backbone for the entire project. The community was loudest and clearest in regards to their desire for a simplified and streamlined process. The Ning was certainly part of the solution, but it was also part of the problem. Though well intentioned and well managed on our end, it lacked a few key usability factors.

People critiqued the site itself, and the tools it offered. They noted simple things like the problem of having to remember another username and password or having trouble with their usernames and passwords. They had difficulty finding their way around the Ning or establishing a workflow. They found that the site contained too many links, too many things to click on, and not enough guidance.

Now, frankly, some offline leaders would laugh at you if you told them you were thinking about your colleagues' behaviors in such minuscule ways. You wouldn't have to tell a group of teachers how to use a door to enter a classroom or how to walk around that classroom. And you shouldn't have to help professionals remember usernames and passwords. That's true on some levels, but in the online world, the design interface is of critical importance, and effective online leaders pay particular attention to the way design affects behavior. Nabeel Ahmad, a Learning Developer at the IBM Center for Advanced Learning, has stated that the more menu clicks in a web or mobile environment, “the higher the likelihood of distraction,” and the higher the likelihood that “the user will deviate from the original intent” (Ahmad & Orton, 2010). As such, an effective online leader will work to reduce the clicks it takes for the end user to complete a task. Dan Saffer, a designer and author, adds this real world example: “Why do Windows and Mac OS X, which basically do the same thing and can, with some tinkering, even look identical, feel so different? It's because interaction design is about behavior, and behavior is much harder to observe and understand than appearance. It's much easier to notice and discuss a garish color than a subtle transaction that may, over time, drive you crazy” (Saffer, 2007, pp. 3–4).

If an online environment does not work smoothly, if it appears to be broken, if people leave the site to dig up a password stored in their email, their workflow for that particular task might be irreparably broken. They certainly will not be able to focus on something as complex as their own professional growth.

Other changes signaled the end of the Ning for this school. Jenny, who best understood the Ning, had moved into consulting work. Ning itself was going through an identity crisis trying to figure out its business model. The committee was not sure that Ning would even exist in a usable form for the school's purposes in a few more years. As is discussed again later in this book, blended leaders always have to try to guess the next iteration of a product … and be ready for its demise.

All these factors contributed to one of Reshan's and Steve's first collaborative projects: the redesign of the PGP site. With the guidance of the PGP Committee, we decided to abandon the Ning and build our own website. Simplicity and usability were our primary goals. We decluttered the site, made people's usernames and passwords the same as they are to log into school email, and asked Alicia Cuccolo, a talented artist and art teacher at the school, to design a logo that would encapsulate the driving spirit of the program. When we explained the new PGP (called PGP 2.0 to signify a second iteration and to remind people that, in the world we live in, flux is the only constant), the loudest applause was reserved for the new online interface. Rather than having to find their way around the Ning, people could focus on their growth and development.

MONITORING SUCCESSFUL VENTURES

When Reshan started as director of educational technology, he inherited oversight of Moodle, his school's course management system. Moodle had been set up in such a way that there was an incredible amount of teacher use of this space as an extension of the classroom; additionally, committees and leadership teams used the space to organize their work. All the school's professional development resources were posted there.

Over time, however, Moodle became a victim of its own success. Remnants from previous years began to add up. People were starting to complain about the long lists of courses they had to scroll through to find their current courses. Students and teachers had no idea how to find certain things. There were links and resources that dated back several years. The color scheme was an unpleasant, to say the least, beige and brown. The faculty's high usage of Moodle led to Moodle being difficult for faculty to use.

The people in charge of managing Moodle had a good problem; the teachers and the greater school's understanding of online spaces as part of the learning environment created a burgeoning shared space in need of some serious curating. Reshan set aside several weeks of his summer to completely overhaul the internal and external structures without compromising existing materials or the shared understanding (among administrators, faculty, and students) of how the environment functioned.

The redesign of Moodle had two major purposes. First, some clean-up needed to be done to make the experience of using it more palatable. Second, the redesign was a simple act of practicing what one preaches—of modeling. Teachers are asked to maintain and curate these online learning spaces for students (their primary constituent); the one with the power to make the design environment as usable and friendly as possible for teachers has a responsibility to do so also.

Course management system administrators should systematically check in with teachers to ensure their online experience is smooth; the hope is that the teachers will then systematically check in with their students. Good practice is a virtuous cycle.

MANAGING BY SURFING AROUND

The example presented is about a leader being receptive to what he learns by watching, and listening to, users in a space over time. By making adjustments—some of which people knew they wanted and some of which they didn't even know were possible—Reshan modeled the need to be as responsive to a virtual burst pipe online as he would be to an actual burst pipe offline. Digital wall rot has real consequences over time.

A leader need not stop there, however; it's also possible to drive change in an online space; to not only learn about the needs of users, but also to manage or lead those users by making your presence known, by actively collaboratively to solve problems, by spreading your own beliefs about optimal behaviors—by entering the space in order to maintain or promote excellence in it. We call this practice Management By Surfing Around (MBSA), a derivative of Management By Wandering Around (MBWA).

MBWA was practiced by David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, popularized by the bullhorn of Tom Peters, and continues to startle leaders and followers who sometimes forget that they can diverge from the kind of prearranged partnerships that occasionally (or more than occasionally) make the workaday world so stale. MBWA's ascendancy and core principles continue to be well documented. Recently, for example, Peter Sims wrote in Little Bets, “Gathering insights from people doing the work seems like such an obvious (and fairly common) way to be a better-informed leader and person, but in the early 1980s, it wasn't a mainstream management practice” (Sims, 2011, pp. 120–21).

The classroom visit/observation/evaluation lands in the job description of many school leaders. They walk into classrooms, either scheduled or unscheduled, as a way to understand what is happening in their schools. These visits help them to be more informed, and done well, become a powerful tool for both supervision and growth. The last time Steve was observed, he ended up working with the observer to fix a very simple issue: the physical spot where he taught in the classroom. At times, the place where he settled moved some students into his blind spot. After receiving the feedback, and knowing that habits are difficult to break, Steve started randomizing the seating in most of the classes that followed. This ensured that students were always in different parts of the room and would receive equal amounts of his attention. By using a school leader's version of MBWA, a school leader helped Steve to better help his students.

But Steve does not just teach in the classroom anymore. He teaches in Moodle and Edmodo and Google Docs. He facilitates discussions in these places, posts resources in these places, and asks questions in these places—sometimes from the comfort of his own home. To become a complete teacher, and to continue to grow, he needs feedback in the online realm of his teaching—the design choices he makes, the quality and warmth of his communication, and the freshness of his content, to name but a few categories. And to become a complete leader, he needs to click around on the Moodle pages of the teachers at his school, he needs to “drop in” to the online extensions to their brick-and-mortar classrooms. He needs to incorporate Management by Surfing Around into his leadership practice.

Good leaders visit the front lines; good blended leaders realize that the front lines are not always face to face.

WHERE THE FISH ARE

The frontlines are shifting dramatically right now. Walk into a true “Maker Space” and it's difficult to know where the instructor ends and the learner begins. Likewise, place-based education initiatives are shaking the very walls of the classroom.

Introducing a series of papers for Bank Street College of Education, guest editors Roberta Altman, Susan Stires, and Susan Weseen sound the alarm: “Across America, children are taught in classrooms that are judged increasingly by their adherence to common standards (in terms of appearance as well as content), by teachers who receive increasingly standardized training, and who are governed by imperatives that crowd out the possibility of paying attention to place… . This narrow, depleted classroom (a place in its own right) calls out for air—for opportunities” (Altman, Stires, & Weseen, 2015).

Outside of school, work is being transformed, as well. Walk into a thriving coworking space and you'll see dozens of motivated and engaged people sharing ideas, opening their networks to one another, swapping their phones for their iPads for their laptops for their notebooks, arriving at work when they choose to, leaving for the gym when they choose to, pursuing tasks with relentless focus one minute and laughing at an animated GIF the next. These spaces look more like bustling coffee shops than places where venture-backed and business-hardened startup CEOs mingle with fresh-out-of-college dreamers who might be holding the idea for the next big thing in their Moleskine notebooks. According to the research of Gretchen Spreitzer (University of Michigan's Ross School of Business), Lyndon Garrett (University of Michigan's Ross School of Business), and Peter Bacevice (senior design strategist with the New York office of HLW International), people thrive in coworking spaces because such spaces offer an ideal mix of autonomy—you can leave to exercise, you can stay to work—and for structure: “People need to be able to craft their work in ways that give them purpose and meaning. They should be given control and flexibility in their work environments” (Spreitzer et al., 2015, p. 30). It sounds like these places, properly equipped, would pass Greenleaf's test of servant leadership.

Outside of school, too, play is being transformed in ways that could, in turn, transform work. Have you ever watched young people “learn the ropes” in a complicated video game world? They don't need to be told what to do; they don't need to be “onboarded” or read an instruction manual; they process feedback rapidly and apply what they learn.

Is it any wonder, then, that spaces like Slack are being called the office of the future? As Scott Rosenberg points out in an article called “Shut Down Your Office. You Now Work in Slack,” Slack, which has picked up millions of users (and millions of dollars in funding) in a rather short period of time, “almost demands a certain level of casual play” (Rosenberg, 2015). Slack's features (messaging, group conversations, attachments, API integrations) are not unique in the realm of productivity and communications platforms. What is unique is the way that Slack weaves these features together for seamless integration across multiple devices, providing app/dock notifications when there is something to which users need to pay attention. Slack works for people because it meets them where they work and it supports them in working the way they would like to work, tying them to digital spaces they can park in their pockets rather than physical spaces where they have to park themselves.

Leaders set the conditions for work, monitor them, adjust them as needed, and promote change in them when needed. Blended leaders, always on the lookout for the point of highest impact and greatest leverage, realize that you have to cast your line where the fish are. They don't stubbornly fish in the same nook because that's where they have always fished. And they don't try to force the fish to return to the old nook in order to be caught.

College admissions provides a good example. If you were charged with “selling” a college to a prospective student body, you would assume that your greatest asset would be the campus itself—the manicured lawns, the student spaces, the ancient trees, the immaculate buildings, the modernized dorms, flying Frisbees, the lake next door… . Yet Caylor Solutions recently released a summary of some key points from a student survey conducted with users of Chegg, an online textbook provider, and Uversity, a higher education data and communications platform. Here's what they found: 79 percent of students “reported that they would drop a school from consideration” if their experience of the school on the school's website did not meet their standards. And, 97 percent of the students surveyed reported that they consumed these websites via mobile devices (Caylor, 2014).

In principle, admissions directors have the same job they have always had—to attract and admit the right students—but their tactics must shift, much like the tactics of the US military, detailed in our introduction, had to shift when the state of modern warfare shifted. The same goes for school teachers and school leaders. Reshan stopped writing this book in order to care for the writing space of this book. He redefined his role for a few days to best serve the larger goal of the team. Sometimes you have to disrupt the default; sometimes you have to work in a different way; sometimes you have to add a different hat to an already crowded head.

Some of this thinking came from an analogous experience Steve had while working with a communication and marketing professional who helped him build a website for his school's May Term program (the same program that enabled Reshan to lead students in the entrepreneurial venture described at the start of this chapter). Steve felt that this program, which allows seniors to pursue independent projects, internships, or travel opportunities during the month of May, could benefit from having an online address to house resources, news, and media. He spent weeks building the website, writing the text, organizing photographs, and working closely with his school's director of technology. And then, when the site was launched, his school's director of communications called him and said, “Are you ready to get to work?”

Ready to get to work? Steve was ready to celebrate his work and move on to something else. But caring for a digital space like the May Term website (http://mayterm.mka.org) entails more than just dropping content into website templates; if you truly care about your content, you have to market it. You have to break off bits of it and send it to interested parties; you have to layer it across various social media platforms; you have to announce it both online and offline; you have to build your audience. And you have to keep adding content, linking to old content, connecting to other content.

It would have been easy for Steve to say, “That's not my job.” But as a leader of a significant school program, one that will benefit offline from having robust support mechanisms online, Steve has to lead in thoroughly modern ways. He can delegate the work to others (say, an assistant in the communications office), but he has to truly understand what he is delegating so that he can envision what success will look like and adjust his practice if the website is not hitting its targets. The technology is important … but the person behind it is equally important. The leader must be enough of a technologist and enough of an editor-in-chief to help his followers thrive. As John Miller writes on http://www.scribewise.com, the editor in chief “for a content marketing effort must be committed to distribution. In this age of personalization, content creation must be done with an eye towards how the content will be consumed by the audience” (Miller, 2014).

All leaders know that marketing and resource gathering are important; blended leaders know exactly how technology can assist such efforts. They know their jobs are expanding, and they are willing to assume new roles if and when such roles help them to advance their projects and organizations.

BEYOND DESIGNING AND CARING FOR SPACES

Leaders who are technophobes and leaders who are technocrats will ultimately agree that designing for spaces and caring for spaces is important because caring for people is supremely important. Jonathan Ive, Apple's designer extraordinaire, considers “design thoughtfulness” a “sign of respect,” and he speaks of his own encounters with well-designed space as “a feeling of gratitude that someone else actually thought this through in a way that makes your life easier” (Parker, 2015).

So if you follow the beliefs in this chapter and find yourself frustratingly tangled up in digital space, return to the noble purpose of such work: ensuring your followers have what they need to do their jobs well, ensuring your followers are “freer, more autonomous.” Organizing digital spaces can be mucky work. Slogging through the unedited thinking of others requires concentration and stamina. But someone has to do it, bring shape to it, follow up with it. Someone has to lead in this area.

There's a tension in the app developer community that provides a useful analogy. You have noticed that apps always ask to be updated. This happens whether you ask for the update or not.

If you were caring for those spaces (caring for those apps), you would have to decide if you wanted them to be “reverse compatible” or if you wanted to press your users to change their behaviors. Making an app reverse compatible involves catering to the lowest common denominator environment (that is, the slowest processor speeds, the lowest memory capacity, and the worst graphics). The upside is that reverse compatible apps will work on old devices and that old behaviors do not need to change. On the other hand, the developer who pushes his or her app forward, making it accessible only on the latest, greatest machines and software, generates the best possible user experience. However, what worked fine yesterday will no longer work today.

The moral of the story? Sometimes, you can only make your app, or your online/offline space, do amazing things if you are willing to push people to upgrade their software/apps/habits. The developer has a responsibility to guide the user to the update, acknowledging a behavior shift. But those who make such a change without warning or steps for mediation are not leading well. They are caring for spaces without caring for users.

So as you approach your work in online spaces, decide if you are going to use a space in a way that will work for everyone or if you need your teams to upgrade their own engagement, their own interaction. Fortunately, there are some simple operating procedures to ensure that spaces are forward updated and users are cared for.

1. When change is coming, announce it in advance—give people lead time to know about it (for example, “We'll be updating our interface, and here is a preview”).
2. Once the update has happened, provide steps toward becoming updated (Please update your [browser, OS, and so on]).
3. Make the update worth it. If you want users to trust you even when an unexpected (though advertised) roadblock emerges, you have a responsibility for the update to be better than what you had before.

We have come a long way from IKEA boxes and garbage cans in classrooms, and at the same time, we have not moved past the simple lessons of those stories. Blended leaders design and care for spaces. This work is not always glamorous or obvious—it is foundational. In a technology-drenched world, you have to lead online well to lead offline well. You have to update resources when need be and help people continue to engage with, and uncover, the value of technological spaces. You have to give people what they need to do amazing work.