This book started as a 60-minute presentation in which we explored and examined what school leadership looks like in online spaces. After the presentation, we looked at our pile of notes—scrawled on hotel pads and iPad screens—and decided to write down an expanded narrative, adding examples and expressing our beliefs.

At that time, Reshan was beginning his involvement with the Apple Distinguished Educators program, and he had learned the ins and outs of Apple's iBooks Author platform. Given the spontaneous nature of our project, we used that software to publish a first edition of our book. Our goals were to move fast, ship quickly, fix bugs as they appeared, and explore the dynamic possibilities—live Twitter feeds, swipe-ready images, open communication channels between reader and authors—of publishing online.

As we traveled and spoke about the electronic version of the book (everywhere from Boston to Philadelphia to Canada) and interacted with educators from around the country, we realized that the book was changing again.

Our core beliefs became clearer and clearer as people asked us tough questions or assured us that their experiences matched our own. And as we lived with our beliefs, taught with them at both secondary and graduate school levels, led with them, read with them in our heads, and showed up to meetings with them, they functioned as a kind of intellectual flypaper. We would turn to each other or email each other and say, “That was an example of cleaning up spaces” (Belief 2); or we would challenge each other to plan meetings differently rather than using the default mode of calling people together in a room (Belief 4).

We also learned that by shining a light so intensely on leadership in online spaces, we cast a shadow on what leadership looks like in offline spaces. Shift the light and you shift the shadow; shut off the light and you have all shadow. A simple truism emerged: it is both impossible and impractical to articulate a vision about leading online without articulating a vision about leading offline. If you move a leadership practice online, you are making an implicit statement about all leadership and followership in your organization, not just some leadership and followership in your organization. The same holds true, these days, for keeping leadership practices offline. When, for example, a leader says, “I'm going to cut this meeting short and ask that you all email me your final thoughts,” he is implying that the people in the room are responsible enough and professional enough to follow through on an individualized task. He also may be reading the room and being respectful of people's energy and time. Likewise, when a leader shows up in your office to talk to you about something, she is implying that spending time with you is important and that some things are best handled face to face. Talking about leading online and leading offline should not be done in separate conversations. Deficiencies in one or the other reduce your leadership capacity.

Blind spots partially exposed and blinders off, we started writing again. We collected notes and ideas, attaching sticky notes to a printed PDF of the online text. We clipped important articles into our Evernote folder. Our original text—purposefully lean to share the stage with some of the functionalities made possible in a multi-touch book—became larger. And larger. We realized at some point that the iBooks version was like the demo a band makes on their way to figuring out how they really want their songs to sound.

This edition contains some new versions of older songs, some new beliefs (about the maker ethos and storytelling), fresh photos from Unsplash, gleanings from academic journals, ideas from popular researchers, approaches from practitioners, and insights from startup culture. The latter development has been informed by Reshan's recent transition from full-time work in a school to full-time work at his own New York City–based startup, another example of iteration in practice. At the end of each chapter, you will find “Things to Try.” Consider these personal challenges to help you exercise your offline, online, and blended leadership muscles. They are guaranteed to alter your perspective and make you aware of opportunities that are just a few steps, or a few keystrokes, away. There are additional sketchnotes from Brad Ovenell-Carter, who has shared the following based on his experiences:

I love marginalia—those notes and doodles you find left in secondhand books by previous readers. They extend the conversation beyond the author and me, often giving another perspective on how to read the book in hand. Finding marginalia is usually a matter of chance, though I will admit that when choosing two copies of the same book I will leave the cleaner version on the shelf. It is even rarer to find marginalia now that we are moving to digital publications. But now, Steve and Reshan I think may have restored the practice … with this wonderful idea of taking those embellishments and baking them into their book as sketch notes.

Sketchnoting is a visual form of note-taking, drawn in real time—in this case, as I read Blending Leadership. That was different. I have been sketchnoting at conferences and presentations for some time, but this is the first time I've drawn notes while reading a book. Reshan pointed out that reading is a “live” experience so sketchnoting a book shouldn't be all that different. And he was right. I kept to the spirit of that and made my drawings on my first read through the manuscript. So, what you see here are those ideas that resonated for me, recorded as fresh and immediate as though Reshan and Steve were presenting their ideas from the stage.

Back to the story: As our text solidified into its new version, we also realized that, by publishing it exclusively online, we had missed readers who were interested in the concepts we were discussing but couldn't access the book online. Many people still read in a traditional way, turning pages and writing in margins, and we want to connect with these people too.

Why begin a book about school leadership by talking about a pile of notes that became an online text that became the book you are holding? And why admit that so much has changed in our thinking?

Because this is partially a book about how we work in schools and how we might work in schools. We are committed to a set of ideas and a process for spreading them. We are trying to capture our evolving understandings and present them. We are trying to reach multiple constituents (in our case, readers) who listen and learn and access information in different ways. Is this not what school leadership is about, too? A constant riffing on a set of core beliefs, rapid prototyping to ensure that we apply what we learn, a continual evolution of program and curriculum—and people—to ensure that our missions play out on modern stages and fields and classrooms, offline and online?

Pulling up the curtain on our own working methods, on the story behind the story, is a critical part of our reflective process, a critical part of what we can share with you, and a critical part of what we hope to model for you. In the online edition and in interviews, we promised to treat each subsequent text like software code—updating it as new ideas presented themselves and the needs of our users (readers) changed. This book, made of paper by design, not default, isolates our core beliefs even more starkly, adds new examples, and generally presents our ideas in a more accessible manner.

That accessibility is important—all-important at this point. Leadership is, after all, almost everyone's job in a school. Whether you are leading the entire school, the board, a department, a committee, a classroom, or a club, you can perform that duty with intention, with a growing number of tools, with a certain attitude, and with a certain mindset.

Our goal is to tell a current—and new—story of school leadership, to model how to make sense of the shifting context in which school leadership happens, and to speculate responsibly about where we think the story of school leadership is headed. This time, our delivery device is a book. Next time? Who knows?

As you read, and react to what you read, please connect with us on Twitter—@reshanrichards, @sjvalentine, @blendingleaders—or Google Plus. We'll be listening.