RIDING WITH TOM NAMMACK

Within Steve's first month as a new (very green) school administrator, he attended a conference with several other (much more seasoned) administrators from his school. The team was trying to gather information about a potential new program, and we had found a well-regarded annual conference that specialized in the topic.

Thrown in without a net and without much context, Steve tried to find ways to contribute once his team hit the ground. Wandering from session to session, though, he did not find much. He picked speakers the way he might have picked horses at a racetrack—by studying the program and observing the speakers as they warmed up before their sessions. By the end of the conference, Steve's method left him with a handful of bum tickets and no payoff. He had only a vague sense of what he would share when the admin team regrouped at school the following week. He figured he would say something about how the conference was unsatisfying or how the speakers were unprepared or uninspiring. He would talk, in other words, about how and why the conference didn't fully meet his needs.

For the ride home, he jumped in with his school's headmaster, Tom Nammack. As Tom turned the car onto the highway, and what became known in Steve's mind as the “journey of a thousand questions” began, Steve had a vague sense as to why the other administrators had opted for the train. Tom asked Steve a question about the conference, Steve responded, and for much of the car ride that followed, this pattern repeated. Tom asked; Steve answered. Tom wanted to know about Steve's experiences in the classroom teaching English, about his experiences as an advisor, about his opinion on certain school policies, about his family and interests and goals.

When Tom stopped to fill up for gas, Steve bought the biggest coffee he could find. Back in the car, the first hit of caffeine fortified him; the second made him realize that something wonderfully counterintuitive was happening. Though Tom was not answering any of the questions, Steve was getting to know him by listening to the kinds—and volume—of questions he asked.

The questions revealed Tom's curiosity; also, though, they revealed his passion for uncovering what he does not know and cannot see. They revealed a restless mind fond of testing reality, triangulating data, measuring gaps between mission and practice, adding—always adding—new dashes of color, new flashes of detail, to his internal map of the school for which he is ultimately responsible.

The questions also revealed Tom's humility. To close the gaps in your understanding the way Tom was willing to, one has to first admit that such gaps exist. One has to first admit that he does not, in fact, have all the territories mapped.

Curiosity, passion for inquiry, and humility: these qualities would have served Steve well at his first conference as an administrator. Though his career was several decades younger than Tom Nammack's, Steve was operating like someone who thought he was supposed to know everything—and therefore, someone unwilling to ask the right questions at the right times, unwilling to pull aside conference speakers, unwilling to let down his guard or to prepare properly by examining the gaps in his knowledge.

Nearly a decade after his car ride with Tom, Steve noticed that Tom still wields the artful, well-timed question as one of his primary learning and leading tools, reinventing it as opportunities arise. His method has allowed him to manage and lead a deeply complex institution through endlessly choppy waters: the subprime mortgage crisis that made plenty of people wonder if they could afford private school; the moment when laptops and other devices become de facto parts of day-to-day school life; the transition of marketing from art to science; the influence of Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat on communication; the call for global educational opportunities to be folded into one's local educational opportunities; the moment when diversity and inclusion initiatives became central to the work we do in schools. Tom has served his school well by being clear that he could not possibly know all the answers to all the questions school would ask and by opening his school—continually—to the world of ideas beyond his school. In refusing the insularity of “old school” private schools, Tom Nammack serves as an example of the post–“lone warrior,” post–John Wayne-style school leader described by Pearl Rock Kane in her now-classic article referenced in our introduction (Kane, 1998).

And, what's more, he doesn't seem likely to change. Recently, he started a tradition of meeting privately with every outgoing senior advisor group. When Steve asked him what he did during those meetings, he said, “Mostly I just ask questions.”

“Like?” Steve asked. (He, too, had learned something.)

“What escapes our notice?” Tom asked. “What do we need to know that we aren't currently seeing?”

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR HUMILITY OR Q + BA = (I)²

Tom Nammack is humble by nature, and this humility has allowed him to thrive in a leadership context wherein humility is not just a nice-to-have but also a bona fide need-to-have. Creativity expert Warren Berger, who wrote a definitive book on the way questions spark innovation, writes, “Whereas in the past one needed to appear to have ‘all the answers’ in order to rise in companies, today, at least in some enlightened segments of the business world, the corner office is for the askers” (Berger, 2014, p. 5).

His book, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas, as well as several other recent books including Little Bets, mentions how great questioners lead some of the most admired companies of the twenty-first century, such as Amazon, Google, and Apple. And, as Clayton Christensen (2014) writes in the foreword to Blended, channeling Thomas Kuhn, the humble approach can actually topple traditions and paradigms—can actually lead to serious, world-bending innovation:

Often, only a theory that is used in another branch of science in which the original and deepest believers of the paradigm have little background can help reveal … pattern across [its] anomalies. Because of this, the devout defend the validity of the original paradigm, often to their graves. Indeed, their instinctive toolkit that they used for learning in their branch of science renders many of them unable to see the anomalies that put the paradigm into question. For this reason, Kuhn observed that new researchers, whose training and disciplines are different, typically initiate the toppling of a paradigm and the development of the new knowledge that takes its place. (Christensen, 2014, p. xvi)

In some sense, new researchers create disruptive innovation because they are naïve enough to ask questions that expert researchers would never, ever ask—indeed, questions that might cause fellow experts to laugh them out of the room. What we are really getting at here, then, is the power of the growth mindset as applied to leadership. Leaders with fixed mindsets hide behind incomplete knowledge or hold up a veneer of truth. Leaders with growth mindsets know that they couldn't possibly lead effectively, especially for long periods of time, without asking for help.

To put an even finer point on it, leaders have no excuse to misjudge their own capacities. Sure, we've known since Oedipus that we can miss our blind spots, even when they become very obvious. But that's just a story, right? The pioneering work of Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics, proves the story true. His colleague Steven Pinker writes of Kahneman: “[Kahneman's] central message could not be more important, namely, that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds” (Pinker, 2014). Effective leaders today know that asking questions, or seeking feedback, helps us to see our blind spots. Hubris (the opposite of humility) powers us toward possible ruin; humility (the opposite of hubris) guides us back, keeping us focused and flexible and open to workarounds, such as the artful, humble question.

If you examine, again, the blended leader, the one who capitalizes on affordances made by control of “time, path, place, and/or pace,” you will see a leader perfectly situated to thrive in a world where the spoils go to the questioners. Blended leaders are the opposite of the leaders who, in having only a hammer, treat every problem like a nail (surely, we have all been on the receiving end of such leaders' problem-solving approach). Blended leaders, on the contrary, keep lots of tools—whether online or offline—in their toolkits because they are never quite sure which one they will need. What is more, they leave room in their toolkits in case they have to learn how to use a brand-new tool when faced with a problem they have not seen—or solved well—before.

Blended leaders' collaborative patterns parallel their use of a wide variety of tools. Rather than going directly to the default—that is, the hammer—they seek proper tools only after understanding problems properly and thoroughly. Likewise, they are willing to bypass the “right” collaborators in favor of finding the best collaborators. There is quite a difference. The right collaborators have the right titles, fit in the right place in the hierarchy, have the right degrees from the right colleges, and usually have the right to speak first, foremost, and with unquestioned authority. The best collaborators might happen to be those people, but they can also be anyone who can offer honest insight, creative perspective, a willingness to embrace failure, and an insistence on play and iteration in search of viable solutions. They can be old or young, new or experienced, in or out of network, in or out of the discipline within which the problem is framed.

Blended leaders can bypass familiar knowledge channels because they know they can go anywhere—quickly, and at any time—to find help. They know that, as Einstein reputedly said, you should not expect to solve problems with the same mind that created them. If your go-to team's standard operating procedure made a mess, perhaps the procedure itself was to blame and perhaps they aren't the best team to understand what caused the mess.

Blended leaders also favor opening their iterative process, their inquiry, to others. They know they don't profit by keeping trade secrets; they profit, instead, by feeding into, and off of, learning channels. Admittedly, their approach is inflected with a software maker's ethos. As Paul Ford wrote in “What Is Code?” his epic, 38,000 word Bloomberg Business essay, “Software is everywhere. It's gone from a craft of fragile, built-from-scratch custom projects to an industry of standardized parts, where coders absorb and improve upon the labors of their forebears (even if those forebears are one cubicle over)” (Ford, 2015).

Scott Berkun expands on this notion of “absorbing and improving” in The Year without Pants, the story of WordPress. Berkun shows how Matt Mullenweg, early in the development of the company that would become WordPress, turned a dead lead into a solution that changed the Internet (and therefore the world). Barely a high school graduate, Mullenweg was trying to solve a problem related to photography, but the program he was using—Cafelog—had stopped serving his needs. The person driving it had literally disappeared. Most of us in this situation would settle for one of two choices: continuing to use the program in a suboptimal way, or finding another program. Mullenweg chose a third way, in this case the way of the programmer. Berkun explains:

While most software is copyrighted and closed, Cafelog had different rules. It did not have a copyright. Instead it had something called an open source license, or a copyleft. This meant anyone could copy the source code for Cafelog and do what they wanted with it, including making a competitor to Cafelog (that copy is known as a fork, as in a fork in the road). The wrinkle was that anyone who did this would have to use the same license in whatever they made—a little rule that had a grand implication: it ensured that ideas inside software could live on and be useful in ways the original creator never imagined. (Berkun, 2013, p. 30)

Mullenweg was the beneficiary of Cafelog's passion for ideas and openness. In turn, he had to abide by those same principles. Blended leaders watch, and learn from, these benevolent cycles. As they develop solutions or processes, they want to share them with others—they want to practice a kind of open source leadership, saying, essentially, “My victory is your new platform.” Ultimately, the sense that others in their school—or in the educational field—might be able to use their breadcrumb trail to find their own way is a good thing, because new journeys clear new pathways for teachers to teach (and learn) and students to learn (and grow).

The question is not why anyone would want to lead in a blended way, it is why would anyone not want to lead in a blended way? Technology, even very simple technology, offers options to extend good instincts and scale good intentions. Let us return to Tom Nammack for a moment. Tom Nammack is a headmaster. There is one of him at each private school (and sometimes he is a she). His job gives him the opportunity, the gift, to lead in the way he sees fit. And others, like Steve and Reshan, have a chance to learn from him. But others, like Steve and Reshan, do not need to wait to assume Tom Nammack's mantle to begin to apply what they learn from him, especially in a world that offers so many tools to carry out his particular leadership legacy. Blended leadership enables us to practice and model the kinds of humility, the kinds of questioning, that reduce our reliance on our own egos, our own cognitive biases, our traditional ways of doing things, our unquestioned default settings, a closed approach.

In A More Beautiful Question, Berger presents a formula: “Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation)” (Berger, 2014). We would add that, in schools, you can also multiply A by B (blended leadership) to increase innovative outcomes exponentially: . To see some examples of the formula in action, we need to jump from the theoretical perch we've been balancing on to an anthropological perch: real teachers in, and out of, real schools.

ASKING OLD QUESTIONS TO NEW PEOPLE

Successful blended leaders accept the fact that they don't know everything, and often, they are willing to broadcast that fact in an effort to get the answers they need. At the same time, they take seriously the ways in which technology can connect them to outside problem solvers or, in Christensen's words, new researchers.

This way of working and leading contrasts sharply with the traditional mode of leadership, wherein the leader is seen as the unified and authoritative voice, the one who has the answers, the one who is unshakeable in the face of a crisis and expresses doubts only privately and with a limited number of people.

Blended leaders may very well be unshakeable, but they work—by choice—in a tangle of voices and ideas, mediated by their primary workstation (that is, their computing device). Tweets, texts, emails, and instant messages roll in continuously, informing the blended leader's thoughts and actions. What looks like a distracted and fragmented world of work gains clarity when you understand the simple credo that drives it: Blended leaders believe that connected brains are more powerful than unconnected brains, that more brains are better than fewer when solving complex problems or dealing with a world, technological or otherwise, that changes continually.

The book in front of you, from its earliest stages, was meant to exemplify this credo and show an example of its possible outputs. It was drafted and designed by two individuals using one of Google's cloud services. We knew that we would both bring different skills and ideas to the project, and that together we would be much more prone to say something of value than we would on our own. The book unfolded as a continual back-and-forth process, with each author regularly asking the other for help.

Writing collaboratively in a document nested in the cloud, and with an openness to the voices just clicks away from that document, moves one past the notion of the solitary author or solitary thinker. You start a sentence that your collaborator might complete, altering your original intention in unexpected ways. As you are writing, your collaborator might drop a comment alongside your paragraph, redirecting your thoughts, asking for clarification, or adding a new fact. As you are writing, you might leave a thought unfinished and insert a question as a comment that will then show up as an alert on your collaborator's phone. Meanwhile, if you leave your tabs open, you can shift rapidly between a host of tools that can help you to shape and advance your ideas: Gmail for longer-term questions, Twitter for immediate feedback, an online dictionary for nuance, online research for depth or support.

Sure, it is possible to call this writing experience “distracted,” but we prefer to call it “network informed.” Solitary writing and thinking has its place, but the solitary writer and thinker has more options than ever before, built right into his or her computing device, to ask for help, to seek wider contexts for his or her thoughts. So that's one reason we partnered. The book itself is an artifact reflecting how one might learn, think, and lead as a result of the interconnectedness of computing devices.

BUILDING SMALL PUBLIC WORK GROUPS

At one point, early on, we decided to push the “asking for help” principle by starting a Twitter chat to see how other online leaders felt about the work they were doing. We chose Twitter as a medium because we knew it would attract leaders who were already comfortable operating in online environments. And we didn't once mention the conversation outside an online environment. We simply publicized it (quickly and painlessly, we might add) via Twitter and our respective blogs. A few people helped in the publicity by retweeting our message to their own followers. Then we “showed up” at the stated time and started with a question: “How do leaders ask for help in an online world?”

For the next hour, a half-dozen contributors—from North Carolina, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York City—talked about how, when, and why they ask for help. A few of us had met before, but some of us were talking for the first time. What follows is a close reading of parts of the conversation, performed to extract its value.

At one point, the conversation turned to different levels of faculty engagement with online resources: as more faculty members at our schools engage in continuous conversations outside their schools, conversations that are happening online, the nature of the dialogue within our schools will necessarily change. To punctuate this conversation, Bill Stites, director of technology at Montclair Kimberley Academy, shared a resource from Scott Rocco, a superintendent from New Jersey. Rocco's post, for edSocialMedia, depicted the ways in which faculty members can move from watching social media conversations to shaping and extending those dialogues.

You might be thinking, “A guy shared a link. That's no big deal.” That's a fair point, but let's dig into the gesture a little bit. It was not just a guy sharing a link. It was a guy sharing the right link at the right time in the right place.

Unpacked: the importance of Stites's share grows if you look at it from the perspective of leading and learning. Because Bill shared a post in the context of a particular conversation, with the conversant individuals seeking particular information and insight, and because Bill shared a resource at the precise moment that the participants could best learn from it, he added value to a link that, until then, was idly posted on a website like millions of other links.

So the forum itself, the Twitter chat, set up quickly and executed effortlessly, intensified the value of the common share as well as the link being shared. It also led to a consideration of Google Plus, a social network. Is it ready for primetime at our schools? Is it ready to be used as a collaborative tool to help school faculties learn from each other and “ask for help”?

Reshan and Jason Ramsden, chief technology officer at Ravenscroft School, answered the questions in the same way: “Not yet.” Jason shared his investigations into using private communities in Google Plus for internal conversations. Reshan share that the Web interface had gotten too busy for him, but that the iPad version and the Hangouts video conferencing feature of G+ were both positive elements.

Here we have two technology leaders who not only have influence over the professional development agendas of their schools, but also have influence over others at other schools. Put more simply, if Reshan or Jason thinks something is a good idea, other tech leaders are going to take note. And if Reshan and Jason think something is not quite ripe, then others are going to slow down in their own investment in the product or service. Plus, these two leaders have reaffirmed each other's thinking.

So in the end, the group who assembled for our first Twitter chat shared some resources, talked about their use of an emerging tool (Google Plus), coached each other a bit, challenged each other's thinking, and then went back to their lives. What's more, some old friends reconnected, some weak ties became stronger, and some new relationships were born—all in a quick hour's work from the comfort of our own homes.

The conversation itself was saved on Storify, an approachable tool for archiving Twitter conversations. Though not every (and probably not most) Twitter chats deserve such revered status, some conversations, like the one that was just described, become learning discourses. Any participant can access the conversation to remind him or herself (What was that article that Bill Stites recommended?) or to reflect (as we did earlier) or to lean on the perspective of an expert (What was Jason Ramsden saying about Google Plus? Maybe I should reach out to him as my school seeks to explore this new medium?).

We hope the lengthy detour into a meta-analysis of our own writing and collaborative process now seems justified in the context of our larger points. By setting up the chat, we (Reshan and Steve) attempted to lead the learning of others. By opening ourselves to the conversation and its potential value, we learned as a result of leading. Any school leader with a connection to the Internet could use this same method to solve a knotty problem—building a small public work group to surface fresh solutions, to gather perspectives from people who weren't involved with the creation of the problem or who, more important, haven't internalized the perceived limitations of the organization. (We have a simple rule that we call “the rule of 12”: If everyone in the faculty room is telling you that something can't be done, ask a dozen strangers before you give up on the idea.)

BUILDING, AND CONTRIBUTING TO, LARGE PUBLIC WORK GROUPS

Because of our iterative approach, Steve and Reshan were lucky enough to take the ideas in this book on the road often. From the earliest inception of our ideas—notes on the back of hotel notepads—to the book you are holding, we spoke in more than a dozen venues to many different kinds of audiences. Our goals when speaking at conferences were always the same—not only to inform and entertain our audiences, but also to learn from them.

The setup of conferences makes the latter part of this task difficult, even when you set up collaborative note-taking spaces to try to join people together and solicit their opinions. After a session, too, most people are usually moving on to something else, and the people who stick around are generally positive rather than constructively critical.

The best workout our ideas ever had happened when we were at our respective homes, sipping our respective Saturday morning coffee, wearing our respective pajamas. Scott Rocco had invited us to host something called #satchat. It's a pretty simple concept; educators from around the world tweet about certain topics using the hashtag #satchat to connect the tweets. When you're only keeping half an eye on the space, it's pleasant; when you're trying to moderate it, it's like a hyped-up version of Space Invaders where what flies at you—and often past you—are comments, links, jokes, and questions about pedagogy, educational practice, books, articles, apps, programs, and so on.

After an hour of asking people to respond to our beliefs, many of which are discussed in this book, we had heard from 394 active participants who shared 441 links, 2,324 unique tweets, and 694 retweets. In the moment, all of this was a little overwhelming. Combing back through the conversation, though, there's a lot there—a lot of leads to pursue, a lot of actionable ideas, a lot of new thinkers to follow.

What follows is just a small sample of what we took from our #satchat experience and how it flexed our ideas.

We launched our first question: Effective leaders today not only lead the learning of others, but lead by learning. In what ways do you lead by learning?

One of the first replies came from @hayhurst, a teacher who described how she videotaped her own coaching sessions to better understand her practice. She publicly conceded her discomfort with the taping aspect, but she qualified her reaction by pointing out that such a practice is part of her learning and growth. @ScottRRocco, a #satchat cofounder, described a monthly staff newsletter he produced and shared a link to an example.

We posed our second question: We believe effective leaders ask for help but, more important, accept help. How have you accepted help recently?

@bradmcurrie, another #satchat cofounder, shared how a specific tool, Voxer, helped with a problem that was not unique to his school. He stated that educators in his state were struggling with implementing certain standardized tests. They used the tool to share tips and tricks.

Our third question followed: How have you used, or seen others use, online tools to extend or articulate the missions of organizations?

@MathDenisNJ referenced another educator (@NMHS_lms) while also invoking an additional hashtag (#makerspace) where he was seeing mission articulation happening. @cybraryman1 suggested posting the mission on the school website, blog, and regular communications and then shared a link to his own curated resources around this topic. @jvincentsen shared her school's evidence of mission articulation while remarking that the branding of it was a work in progress. Interesting to us (in a good way) is how something publicly available and important as a mission can have the words “work in progress” associated with one form of its articulation. These were just a small fraction of the responses to only a few of the questions we posed that morning.

So how does this happen? It helps that the #satchat audience is boldly participatory. They share without shyness and ask for help when they need it. They are comfortable sharing successes, setbacks, and works in progress. And the whole event moves so quickly that most participants—the ones who are adding to the conversation rather than passively watching it—throw out their gut reactions, their intuitive responses, to whatever they happen to see. Such candor is often lost in face-to-face meetings where—especially in schools—people tend to avoid conflict or awkwardness.

But the whole endeavor is also set up very deliberately and thoughtfully. If you moderate a discussion, the organizers—Billy, Brad, and Scott—ask you to submit questions weeks in advance, making sure you have constructed questions that will work for the group. Going back to Berger, there should be no surprise that such innovative sharing practices—and the flood of innovative ideas that follow—would be spurred by such a carefully calibrated questioning process.

If there were a Hall of Fame for blended leaders, the leaders behind #satchat would be in it. They promote shared humility in the face of problems that are too complex for any one leader or one school to solve. And they scale such work by tying teachers together with computers, networks, and hashtags. Their project is simple, elegant, useful, and constrained (in the best sense of the word), and it all happens outside the school building and the school week.

PUBLIC TROUBLESHOOTING: USER BASE AND BRAND

Our experiences setting up our own Twitter chats and participating in #satchat have shown us that leaders can and should use the technological forums available to them to ask others for help, to listen to many voices rather than simply a chosen few, and to lead with “multiple tabs open.” All these moves help them avoid insularity at a time when being open, available, and accepting is less a choice than an imperative.

All these moves also help them to build a new kind of relationship with their users (that is, their constituents). We can turn again to Twitter (and the startup world) to see how pointed, real-time feedback can project and protect a brand's identity while fortifying the user's experience with that brand.

At Explain Everything, Reshan's company that provides the interactive whiteboard and screencasting application of the same name, if someone posts a question on Twitter that the company knows is very specific to the user's situation, requires additional personal information from the user, or is too complex to summarize in a few tweets, Reshan will often just reply with, “Can you please email [email protected]? We can help you better there!” Most people do follow up this way.

However, many times when users post questions or comments on Twitter, Reshan and his company feel that they have a unique opportunity. Responding to the queries in a timely manner gives users the “just-in-time” support they want, which is not always possible with email, and shows them that the company is actively listening.

Also, responding to users on Twitter makes the question and its answer visible to all the users' followers (and followers of any chat hashtags they may include). If someone from the Explain Everything team is not in a position to write back right away, perhaps someone outside the company may know the answer. The entire user base (like the entire #satchat audience) becomes a potent ally, and if they love the company, they are happy to help.

A company willing to truly meet individual users where they are, and empower members of its user base to help one another, builds a unique relationship with its customers. Individuals know they can interact with the entire brand—not only an individual or small team within the brand. The ability to engage in this kind of exchange elevates the brand beyond its component parts while also elevating the importance of the user and that user's experience. The company is saying, in a way, “Your work, and the problems it surfaces, is our work. Our future, as a company, will be tied to your work, as an individual.”

TROUBLEFINDING AND TROUBLESHOOTING: BEYOND TWITTER

Another way to access a wide range of voices and perspectives, one that works for a leader-learner who wants something slower and more methodical, is the listserv.

When Reshan is presented with a question or challenge, he sometimes wants to access the perspectives of people from outside his institution before constructing or delivering his own response. He generally starts by sending a query to the NYCIST ListServ.

Reshan's first job at a school was being a fifth-grade math teacher and an assistant in the technology department at a small independent school in New York City. His boss and mentor informed him about a group of people in the area who had formed an email distribution list (listserv) on which they shared information and asked questions. During his first three years, Reshan used to go back and forth between subscribing and unsubscribing to this group, mostly because he was a passive participant and many of the conversations seemed like noise to him.

A few years later, this group's size and activity grew at the same rate that educational technology was increasingly present on people's radars, and Reshan found that the collective and contextual knowledge of the group could often be more reliable than any Google search or external consultant for that matter.

So when he has a question, he posts it to this group. Usually within the day he has anywhere from five to ten solid responses or follow-up questions. Not everyone replies to every email, but he is certain that a majority of this group reads the messages (or at least the subject lines) before deleting.

What is more, every question posted on a discussion forum becomes permanent evidence of both gaps in knowledge and an ability to seek ways to fill those gaps. With a quick search of a Google Group he belongs to, Reshan can find more than five years worth of documented knowledge gaps in the form of requests for help to do the job he was technically being paid to do. Participating in such a forum may seem like a risk, because he was simultaneously exposing these gaps and requests for help to people who may be future bosses or who may someday be competing for the same job as he is.

In the past, fear of this risk may have been appropriate. However, this breadcrumb trail does not lead to a represented lack of knowledge but rather reveals one's grasp of how to solve problems by relying on a network of people who have similar contexts and experiences. It reveals a self-starting, growth-oriented mindset. Certainly you learn a lot by doing—by trying to solve problems without any additional help. But, when others (or an entire institution) are relying on you to find the solution to a problem, such fumbling around in the dark may be a luxury.

Another advantage of such a public display of gaps in knowledge is that it makes available other people's public questioning practices. Of course many online discussion participants are hidden behind identity-fogging avatars and usernames, but when Googling a solution, the best answer often comes not from officials from a product or service but rather from engaged users on message boards—from “new researchers,” passionate amateurs, and the newly converted.

BUG BOUNTY

Some companies are willing to pay to find flaws (especially security flaws) in their software. They are willing to pay, in other words, to develop a habit in their user base—“Find a flaw and tell us about it and we'll give you something in return.” “Bug bounty” programs, as they are known, reframe subversive behavior (hacking into systems to see where they are broken) in order to help companies fulfill their missions, embrace the knowledge, experience, and skillset of curious users and hackers, and make the ongoing development of their product a participatory process.

An ethos of continuous learning emerges; companies that promote bug bounties announce that their work is forever unfinished. And they announce that they care about their wider community of users. Bug bounties enable people who can break the system and disrupt the lives of users to support the system, and in turn, the lives of users. Buying into such a program, from a company standpoint, requires a swapping out of ego for a commitment to learning and service.

We recently asked a few tech companies to share their thinking behind their bug bounty programs. A representative from Avast! Antivirus software and the community manager for Prezi both shared some interesting insights, reflecting the kind of growth mindset that we often talk about in schools.

Here's an irony to consider: Schools are engines designed to promote learning and growth. And yet, we sometimes have a hard time selling ourselves as organizations that are in a state of continual growth. Parents often love new programs or curriculum, but they would prefer that the associated growing pains, the inevitable stumbles, happen off set, away from the children. “Grow all you want—and yes please grow a lot,” they seem to suggest, “but don't compromise my child's experience.” The irony inherent here is one reason why change in schools is often very slow; mistakes, especially public mistakes, are frowned upon and difficult to frame.

Bug bounty is one idea from the world of startups/software that could begin to soften the culture around growth at schools—and even reframe some of the student behavior that's already happening around the edges of our technology programs. Too often in classrooms, teachers and students fail to recognize that they are playing on the same team—if the teacher provides clear and engaging instruction, students learn. If students learn, the teacher succeeds. So, for example, if a teacher is working in a learning management system like Moodle or Blackboard, both the teacher and the students would benefit from a modified “bug bounty” program wherein the teacher rewarded students who offered productive suggestions about the ways in which the interface could function more productively or with enhanced clarity. In fact, starting such a program, even informally, would allow teachers to remind students about the role they play in their own educations. Instead, many teachers signal that they do not want to be “corrected” by their students; and many students talk only to each other when they have an issue with the way in which a teacher designs, presents, or archives his or her class material. Bug bounties offer schools a productive model for creating partnerships between teachers and students. Or, to go back to what we learned from Tom Nammack, bug bounties could help educators see those things we cannot see—those things that are glaringly obvious to some of our own constituents.

LEARN TO SHARE, MIX TO DISTRIBUTE

The unspoken rule in the online world is that you will share—or, to be more precise, overshare—things that delight you or bother you, pictures and media, articles, stuff your cat or kids do, you name it. That's why sharing functions are built into much of the media we consume online … with the simple push of a button you can share that photo of your notes or that blog post you wrote about how to screw in a light bulb or that funny picture of your grandmother—via text or mail or Twitter or Facebook.

But … and that is a hard but, the blended leader believes in tidiness, especially in the information ecosystems where most of us work. He or she doesn't believe in sharing for the sake of sharing (or just because sharing is so simple to accomplish). He or she would never want to create digital clutter. Instead, the blended leader shares professionally for the sake of learning—sometimes to spur the learning of others, and sometimes to solidify his or her own understanding.

So there is a step—yes, another design pause like the one we saw in Belief 2—where the blended leader takes the time to shape something before sharing it. This shaping could be something simple (slapping a contextualizing caption on a photo) or much more complex (organizing and annotating a series of documents in a workflow). Such sharing celebrates—and extends—the rejection of insularity documented earlier. Also, it allows blended leaders to credit—that is, cite—the people from whom they asked for, and received, help. Finally, such sharing expresses an important idea about power: It should not be hoarded.

We have all heard the expression “Knowledge is power” because in many arenas, it's just plain true. The cliché is a cliché for a reason. If you're negotiating with a car dealer who knows a lot more than you do, he has the power. If you do your own research on the car you want to buy and get quotes from a few other dealers before walking into the dealership, then you have shifted some of the power in your direction, reducing what Hagel and Brown (2013) call “information asymmetry.”

Interesting to note, in that particular example, is that the power shifts toward you because someone else made it his or her business to share knowledge with you. Someone had the same question … and built a website (the fruit of their inquiry) that helped you get “under the hood” of the car industry. Someone rewrote the rules of the cliché. In this case, giving away knowledge is power. Blended leaders, big and small, recognize the potential in such a counterintuitive concept.

Let's start (big) with the city of Chicago. Recently, Chicago made available a series of datasets ranging from street locations to bike routes. Using GitHub and an MIT license, they essentially told the world that they wanted any interested and informed person to “have at” the data. A report from digital.cityofchicago.org (2013) encouraged users “to improve data accuracy, combine it with other data sources, or download and use it for analysis or a new app.” Modification was fine; commercial use was fine, too.

So some people would use the data on a volunteer basis, and some would use it for personal gain, but the denizens of Chicago all stand to benefit if, for example, bike paths are updated or maps are improved.

In the past, these data, like the car data mentioned earlier, were squirreled away. They was controlled by a few people who may have used them for their own interests or simply made no use of the data whatsoever. But some very savvy blended leader decided that bottling up these data was not helpful or healthy. It was not a way to actualize the potential of the data.

So what does any of this have to do with school? School leaders of all shapes and sizes squirrel away useful information, data, best practices, instructive anecdotes, and so on. More often than not, they do so inadvertently or because their systems are simply not set up to make sharing easy.

Blended leaders are interested in using technology to scale organizational learning. As a habit, they continually look at their work in real time and ask, What knowledge is valuable here and not being shared? Are we (am I) hoarding knowledge that might be useful to other leaders as they attempt to complete their work? Am I hoarding knowledge that might help others learn or approach a problem in a new way?

Can we save the institution time and/or reduce unnecessary friction by creating an archive, models, procedures that don't need to be rethought every time? Can we apply one of the most basic lessons of the software world—that is, we should not have to redo anything that is repeatable?

So, for example, a blended leader looks at email and sees a mostly closed system that could be opened slightly. He or she sees it as a system that can be gamed in some way to actualize the sharing of information or models.

In a typical email exchange, A writes to B, B writes to A, A writes to B, B writes to A, and sometimes C is copied because he or she is expected to eyeball the information but not to act on the email. If you are in the To: … line, you are a “doer”; if you are in the Cc: … line, you are an “observer.”

This system works well enough to dominate much of the knowledge work that takes place in organizations (we're not saying we are happy with it, but that is a story for another chapter). Let's say a leader—Elizabeth—is working on email with one of her direct reports—Simon. Elizabeth and Simon are trying to solve an urgent problem. They bounce half a dozen emails back and forth at all hours of the day and night. Elizabeth frames the issues and asks all the right questions; Simon finds all the right answers. They solve the problem. Is Elizabeth a leader? Yes. Is she a blended leader? Kind of.

True, Elizabeth used asynchronous technology to frame issues and ask questions, but she couldn't be called a fully effective blended leader unless she took one more step—a step that requires a little bit of will and a little bit of discipline.

If we were coaching Elizabeth, we would tell her that she handled the “urgent,” near-term problem well; now, to continue using Stephen Covey's terms, she has to handle what is “important” and more long term: that is, the development of other leaders through the sharing of knowledge, through the gaming of her own system to ensure that it yields the most possible benefit to the most possible people (Covey, 2004).

Let us say that Elizabeth was helping Mark, a new department chairman, to mentor a new hire for his department. She might have helped him to develop a list of people who should be involved in the mentoring process, shared a previously used Google Forms survey to aid in the evaluation of the new hire, and asked some important questions about which classes would be best for the new hire to observe in order to shore up her weaknesses and extend her strengths. Solving problems with Mark helps Mark to grow. That is the first step. Sharing the problem-solving approach used by Elizabeth and a new chairman like Mark helps other chairs, new or not, to grow. That is the extra step, the blended leader's step.

To be a truly effective blended leader, Elizabeth should find a way to repackage her online conversation, and any documents or ideas that emerged, so that other leaders can learn from the exchange. Here is where blended leadership, like all leadership, is tied to good, old-fashioned will power and self-discipline: Will Elizabeth take the time to cut and paste, contextualize, and organize documents into a file that can be referenced as often as it needs to be? Will she capture and archive the learning so that it can be shared? Will she create a checklist that explains the desired outcomes for effective mentoring? Will she make this checklist accessible to all department chairs by placing it in an area (like Moodle or Evernote) where key documents can be stored and accessed as needed? Will she become more systematic about expressing her underlying philosophy that new hires should be thought of as community members, rather than as specialists being filed into a particular silo?

Extracting and cataloguing the value of a complicated, multistep exchange sounds like a lot of work—and it is. But it is great modeling. If Elizabeth acts first, other members of her team might act next. And, in the future, they might think to copy each other—as observing learners—on similar exchanges.

In our work, as we try to continually find ways to build leadership across distance and time, it is becoming routine for people to passively share targeted information using the Cc: function. So, as Steve emails meeting agendas to a team that he oversees, he includes colleagues who oversee similar teams on different campuses. Is he cluttering their inboxes? Once a month, sure; he is adding a single email to what we all know is an overwhelming amount of email. But he notified these colleagues in advance that he would be doing this, and they know they can erase the email quickly if they don't have the time or inclination to read it. Every now and then, though, they see something on one of his agendas and they ask him a question about it. They ask him why he's doing something or how he's doing something … or they try a similar exercise with their own groups. This brings them closer as the leaders of their respective campuses and helps the campuses stay loosely aligned with a very limited amount of effort. It promotes the sharing of what is sometimes called “soft knowledge,” which is difficult to quantify but important for the ways in which organizations function.

SHARING AND NOT SHARING

Jeff Herb, an educator, blogger, and podcaster, posted a similar idea related to passive sharing on his blog. It is worth considering in the context of this chapter. The title of his post was “Display an #edchat in your Faculty Lounge.” Though many educators are aware of the numerous resources made available every day on spaces like Twitter, according to Herb there are many more educators who know very little about these conversations and are reluctant or nervous about engaging with these spaces. He suggests simply using a projector to display a live feed of #edchat-tagged tweets on the wall of a faculty room and posting a flyer that notes the times and places when the official #edchat conversations happen online. Jeff proposes five steps to creating this access (in a mere five minutes).

1. Find a clear wall in your lounge or set up a screen in a corner.
2. Set up a projector with a laptop that is connected to the internet.
3. Head to http://visibletweets.com and enter the #edchat hashtag in the space provided.
4. Choose the style you prefer—then hit View Full Screen in the bottom right corner.
5. Send out a building-wide email saying that an #edchat will be streaming in the faculty lounge and to check it out if you have a spare minute. Don't push it, those who do see it will share with their colleagues who didn't. (Herb, 2013)

Ted Parker, director of digital literacy and innovation at King, a coeducational, independent day school in Stamford, Connecticut, heard about this idea in the previous version of our book and tried it out at his school. When we spoke to Mr. Parker, he said,

“I'm trying to encourage a culture of independent, online professional learning. It's a disposition that has really come to define my career, but how one could possibly find the time to engage with the torrent of online information continues to mystify many of my colleagues. I liked the idea in your book about projecting #edchat in the faculty room, so I gave it a shot with #isedchat.” (personal communication, April, 2014)

When asked to reflect on the process, Mr. Parker admitted right away that “it started a few good conversations, but not much more than that.” His analysis of the limitation of the project, in his teaching context, serves as a useful reminder that one size does not fit all, even when we're only talking about sharing free knowledge freely:

First, my timing was wrong. By the fourth quarter, most faculty are more concerned with finishing out their current projects than envisioning new ones. Second, the standard Twitter visualizers like Visible Tweets and Tweetbeam are good for displaying conversation such as what happens on #isedchat from 9–10 on Thursday evenings, but not so much the resource sharing that happens the rest of the week: tweets that share resources display a series of hashtags and URLs that, to the uninitiated, are pretty much indecipherable. As it's the resource sharing that I'm most interested in (I don't find Twitter all that great a medium for dialogue), I'm still seeking a tool that, like Flipboard, would show a preview of each tweeted link. (personal communication, April, 2014)

BLENDED LEADING WITH DIGESTS

Here is a more complicated example. Let us say you are a member of an eleven-person team, and the team has to hire a new member. To complete the process, the team has to go through many steps together: understanding the job that needs to be filled, reviewing credentials of potential teammates, and interviewing and evaluating them. This process can easily mushroom into many emails. Imagine:

1. The leader emails the team once to invite you to a meeting. You attend.
2. The leader emails you again with the notes from the meeting. The notes contain the timeline of the hiring activities as a separate attachment.
3. The leader emails you the credentials for the three top prospects. Three more attachments.
4. The leader emails you the credentials of two more top prospects. Two more attachments.
5. Before each interview, the leader emails you additional documents. Two more attachments.
6. He emails you, too, about the location for each interview.
7. He forgets something, so he emails you again.
8. At the end, he asks for your feedback on the candidate. One more attachment.
9. Steps 5 through 8 repeat in advance of the each candidate's interview.

A good blended leader thinks continually about ways to reduce friction for others; ways to use technology—if at all—to free up people to do their best possible work. She would look at her list and see the kind of clarity that ultimately undermines itself. Roughly eight emails (per candidate) containing nine attachments sent to ten team members. Was the writer clear? Sure. Excessively so. Will the ten team members do what needs to be done to properly catalogue each email, archive each attachment, and reference the right email and attachment at the right time to ensure that the hiring process runs smoothly? Not so sure. Excessively not so sure.

So what would a good blended leader do in this situation? First, she envisions the process, in all of its complexity, before inviting her team to participate. She would take a design pause to figure out the best way to reduce friction for her team members. She would not “do things the way they have always been done”; we all know the kinds of confusion that ensue from an onslaught of even the most meticulously crafted emails. And so, in this case, perhaps she would choose a digest approach. People need the information, but they don't need the information to pop up randomly in their email stream, necessitating near extreme acts of organizational dexterity in order to make sense of it all.

We have seen this digest approach used masterfully by Tom Holt, chair of the upper school science department at Montclair Kimberley Academy. When he hires, he sends one email per candidate and uses folders in Google Docs to minimize the attentional cost for his hiring team.

Here's a typical email from Tom with details blocked out to hide some identifying details:

And here is the tidy digest you see when you click the live link:

There is another layer to the story—and it is the (brutally obvious) fact that you are looking at Tom's work right now and in a position to learn from it. Tom paid nothing—by way of his own time or attention—to share this work with you. Steve was copied on the original email, and since he's charged with helping other department chairs to succeed, and hire, he saved the email and the shared folder. Next year, when Steve's school hires again, Tom Holt's mastery will guide us—and someone else will take it one step further, improve it one notch more, as we continue to try to assemble the best possible faculty. Archiving an excellent model primes excellence for further iteration.

When such work is accomplished offline and out of view, it is tough to scale. Performed online, the blended leader awake to its potential can quickly and easily capture it, contextualize it, remix it, share it, and insist on it as a future starting point. If the blended leader can achieve such a goal without burdening the master, that's all the better. The master only needs to chime in, in fact, when he decides whether or not to give permission for his/her work to be shared.

BLENDED LEADING WITH TEMPLATES

In her book slide:ology the peerless Nancy Duarte pushes the digest approach—or at least the thinking behind it—to one of its logical conclusion. If you are creating outward-facing presentations that represent your organization, you should be working from a previously designed, company-approved template. The digest, in this case, is not a nice-to-have but a should-have. In a chapter called “Governing with Templates,” Duarte suggests:

When more than one person generates presentations for an organization, a well built template system is a must. Templates increase productivity, constrain exploration, and protect the investment you've made in your brand. You want your clients to have the same visceral reaction to your presentation that they have to your products, services, and ad campaigns. Unfortunately, it's usually tough for the employees building the slides to pull that off. (Duarte, 2008, p. 204)

Read without the corporate language, this paragraph pushes us as educators and educational leaders. We, too are “ambassadors of [a] brand.” In our case, a brand should represent an approach to learning, a set of values (that is, the way we approach learning, the ways in which we live the growth mindset, and so on), and our school missions.

When those approaches, values, and missions meet an outside audience, the success with which they are presented should not fall (solely) to the design skills of the presenter.

Steve and Reshan started thinking about this concept the last time they saw a large group of teachers—from the same school—present at an open house advertising their school. Every presentation they attended was homegrown. Some used PowerPoint, some used Keynote, some used Google Docs, and some used a projected MS Word document. Some used pictures, some of those pictures were cited (and some were not), some of those pictures were stock images, and some of those pictures were originals. Some presentations included student voices and some did not. Multiple fonts were used across presentations. Clearly, some teachers were very good at making presentation slides; some were much better at teaching students multivariable calculus.

After seeing the various slide presentations, Steve and Reshan had no idea about the school's mission. They understood the personal agendas of a few of the more charismatic presenters, but their overall impression of the school itself was utterly fragmented. They could have been in ten different schools that day.

SAVING OUR ASSETS

In short, sometimes a digest, archival, or template approach can be used internally to control quality. That's what we learned from the Tom Holt example. Other times, such an approach could be used to ensure that a school is presenting a united front. In the private school market, this is particularly important during open house presentations. You want families to understand the school they are considering. If they think they are choosing one school, and in reality your school is not that school, that is a lose–lose situation. It is bad for the student and bad for the school that has to attempt to realign expectations that never should have been transmitted in the first place.

Sharing one's work—whether via a simple Cc: function, a digest system, or a template system—also ensures against calamity. Though it's difficulty to contemplate, you could lose any member of your teaching faculty or administration on any given day. A blended leader understands that, in a world where professional assets are so easily captured, replicated, stored, and shared, there's no reason to lose institutional ground if you lose an important institutional player (to something tragic or simply because she leaves the school to work at another).

Returning to The Year without Pants, we find that Mullenweg's original blog post, announcing his plans to build his new company, talked about the importance of keeping vital and vibrant ideas—like the ones that help our schools to shine—alive:

Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL [general public license], which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michael would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost … if I fell off the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. (Berkun, 2013, p. 31)

We started this chapter by talking about the importance of humility; we can't possibly know all the answers to all the questions that school leadership will ask of us. The furthest extension of such humility is the acknowledgment that what we do learn is not only a result of our own hard work, but also a result of the luck of circumstance—that we happened to work in particular schools with particular people at particular times. We who ask countless questions have countless teachers. When we leave those teachers, and those schools, we should leave behind the best of what we found so that others can build on top of it.

MINDFUL ORGANIZING, MINDFUL ORGANIZATIONS

We all work at such a high rate of speed, racing from one task to the next. It is really not surprising that “mindfulness training” has emerged as a recent trend in leadership development.

Tony Schwartz, in a February 2013 Harvard Business Review blog post called “How to Be Mindful in an Unmanageable World” cites several examples of high-level executives discussing practices that they themselves use to deal with the overwhelming demands of many workplaces. Chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco Padmasere Warriuo meditates and paints. CEO of LinkedIn Jeff Weiner deliberately tries to work compassion into his leadership and management practices. Executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company Bill Ford used mindfulness and meditation to help his company overcome some of its toughest recent challenges.

These practices include putting down technology. But there's a middle ground—related directly to the kinds of sharing for which we advocate in this chapter—for the leader who would be a blended leader. A quotation from Marlys Christianson in an interview she gave to Chris Gusen for Rotman Management helps us to see how such work might look:

Mindful organizing is a set of organizing practices that help people not only to do things like notice problems, but also see what others are working on, so that they know how their work fits with other peoples' work. If I see that you're having a problem with something, I can help you; I can realize that what I do actually affects what you're doing. It's about being really aware of your work and other peoples' work, and how it all fits together. (Gusen, 2014).

Christianson provides an excellent set of guidelines for the online leader who would tend to both the urgent and the important, both the problem in front of him or her and the long-term growth of the organization all around. Taking the time to understand the work of others—as Steve did with the work of Tom Holt, for example—allows you to support that work and the work of others. Asking questions about the work of others—as Reshan once did when he asked Steve about some clutter in his iCal and helped Steve adjust his calendaring practice dramatically—allows you to share, in a targeted way, resources you come across. You will be the one making sure to connect an important email to a calendar event six months from now, ensuring that your boss has access to the exact note that she needs in the exact moment she needs it.

We have been talking in this chapter (and this book) about design pauses and designing against defaults; another name for such practices is “mindfulness at work.” Asking, How might I organize this team project before diving in to work with the team? Asking, Are there buckets I can establish to collect certain artifacts during an upcoming semester, so that these artifacts are easy to find and share in future semesters? We need not needlessly duplicate efforts; we need not reinvent certain wheels in every department, every month; we need not start from scratch when a star player leaves the organization; we need not needlessly frustrate one another with an endless string of email messages; we need not close off our work from one another.

Blended leadership, as a model for leadership, is, after all, largely about openness. About asking for help. About design thinking. The tools, in the end, will change (more on that later). You can take them or leave them. You can reject them as soon as you accept them. Not everyone has the time to learn new tools (in our experiences at a very tech savvy school, it's not uncommon to hear someone say, “I don't use _____ yet because I haven't had the time to play with it; I'm planning to do that this summer”). That is fine. But new technologies have led to new ways of working (that is, new ways of collaborating and new expectations for interrelatedness, access to information, input, and sharing). These new ways of working cannot be put back in the box like the digital camera that doesn't work the way you want it to.

The moves toward openness and accessibility, toward a flattening of hierarchies, cannot be put back in the box either. That leadership is tied directly to learning, and that leaders have an obligation to help others learn, cannot be refunded. In the same way that you can do a good deed without donning a superman suit, you can lead like a blended leader without using technology. The tools change; the moves do not.