The Building Has a Voice

When we returned to the teacher's lounge to debrief with the new principal and superintendent, Amy Yurko, an architect on our team, could not stay silent. She and her company, BrainSpaces, focus on the neuroscience of design and educational spaces.

“This building has a powerful voice over these kid's education,” she said before she listed the building's offenses—no natural light, visual clutter, poor quality florescent lighting, “temporary” buildings that were rusty from age and overuse. She pleaded the case for the kids who had to spend up to 1,000 hours a year subjected to these conditions.

Bill Latham and Page Dettmann use a model to find the sweet spot for engaged learning that I've refer to as the golden triad: sound pedagogy, effective technology, and active learning environments. All are focused on student engagement in the center. This school was clearly missing an important side of that triangle.

The superintendent acknowledged the conditions and said that the obsolescence and conditions of several old buildings was a huge challenge for the school district. This is common for many districts, in Texas and across the United States.

There are more than 100,000 public schools in America. Schools are the second-largest public investment our country makes each year. Almost 50,000 of those schools were built for the baby boomer generation and now require modernization. The ASCE¹ estimates that to stay current with growth, upkeep, and modernization our country needs to invest $58 billion for upkeep, $77 billion in modernization, and $10 billion in growth (new schools). Current spending levels are $46 billion short.² The Center for Green Schools estimates that schools spent $211 billion on upkeep between 1995 and 2008, but this was less than half the $482 billion that was needed, based on a formula included in the most recent GAO study.”³

Dan Boggio, the Principal and CEO for PBK Architects in Houston, says that, “Eighty percent of our work still supports the factory model of education . . . our first design for a progressive school was only seven years ago.” He sees growth and interest in twenty-first-century design as positive but recognizes there is a long way to go in convincing communities and administrators to change.

Simple Math

If we have an annual $46 billion shortfall and we are short an estimated $271 billion in infrastructure and maintenance, it will take an additional $73 billion a year for the next 10 years to bridge the gap. Now consider that 80 percent of the capital dollars spent today are for building outdated schools. Clearly, we will not catch the runaway train anytime soon with the current mode of thinking and operating.

We've got to think differently. To help us see things more clearly, this chapter focuses on:

• The vital partnership space plays in engaged learning.
• How space can become a catalyst for transformation.
• Moving from traditional building design to applying Design Thinking.
• Using neuroscience to inform design.
• Investigating how “micro-environments” can economically transform an older building.
• Tips and observations from building and design experts.
• Understanding the emerging trend toward wellness and the Delos Well-Building standard.

The Magic of Playgrounds

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

—Socrates

In her TEDx Talk, “The Wonder of Wonder: Stimulating Curiosity in Children,” Amy Yurko asks if our learning environments are creating those stimulating opportunities of curiosity and play that are essential to learning. She contrasts the perfunctory factory model of classroom design to playgrounds. Well-designed playgrounds release the imagination in play. Why? Because the playground designer has a singular focus, the play experience.

School design, like many institutional building models, is driven by budgets, standards, square-foot requirements, and schedules. The pedagogy and learning experience is squeezed at the end of all of the big decisions if included at all. We will show you why and how placing pedagogy and the learning experience at the forefront of the process improves the schedule and the budget.

Paris, Illinois: A School Building That Spoke to the Community

Paris, a small farm town of about 8,900 people and 2,300 students, is located on the Illinois/Indiana border 100 miles due west of Indianapolis.

Paris is similar to many Midwest towns that peaked in the early 1970s, but have bumped up and down in a stagnant growth pattern since then. The high school was housed in a 100-year-old building. Jim Blue, a school board member, said the school building was out of date, cramped for space and symbolic of the stagnation in the town. The town was ready to face the transition required to move from being a small farm town with an old and outdated high school into one that could attract new families and businesses.

Thankfully, some town leaders saw the need to change. While some had ideas of what it would take to make the transition, it was clear they needed strong partners to guide them through the process. Paris selected an experienced team for help in envisioning the future of learning: BLDD and FMG architects, MeTEOR Education for the interior design, and Bretford as one of the key furniture suppliers.

The Mayor, Craig Smith, recognized that Paris must become a community that looked to the future in order to keep businesses and attract families. “The best way you can show you're a progressive community is to have a state-of-the-art school. It shows that you buy into what's important to this generation and the next, the education of our children.” That is the same conclusion J. Irwin Miller reached in 1950—a healthy future begins with our kids and the quality of their schools.

Some in the town questioned if they really needed a new high school and if the cost would be worth it. Bill “Beetle” Bailey, a school board member, said that one of the community members came up to him after the first meeting on the project. “He was kind of against it.” He didn't have kids in the school anymore and pushed back on the vision. But after a bit of discussion he said, “Beetle, I got to thinkin' about this real hard . . . somewhere a hundred and some years ago when they built Paris High School, I am sure there were critics then . . . but someone pulled their boots up, jumped in, and did it. I guess I oughta be the one to help do that today.”

With the help of the state, Paris raised the $23 million needed to build a new high school, an innovative and sophisticated learning environment similar in design to the active learning environments we saw in Columbus, Birdville, Coppell, or many of the other project-based-learning environments that are leading the way into the future. I was also interested in the school and community benefits.

Kristy Rodriquez, an English teacher, told the story of a student who could not focus on his reading in the old, traditional environment. Since they have added the comfortable seating and community tables in the “Extended Learning Area” right outside her classroom, this student has become one of her best readers. The kids feel comfortable moving chairs and tables around and gathering in small groups.

Kristy sums up her observation of the student experience now: “In this new school, the students are happier and more relaxed.”

Zach, a student, said that that kind of support from the community made him want to step up and do more. This is what engagement begins to look like: pride, gratitude, and ownership. Paris shifted stagnant thinking into a virtuous cycle that will refill the reservoirs of social capital. Listen to Jenna, another student, “For once the community believed in us enough to grant us a new school so we can better ourselves.”

The improved environment spoke a clear message to the teachers, the students and the community. Craig Smith summarized their pride, “We can show anyone in the United States that if they are thinking about coming here to hire people or build . . . they will not find a better school than here.”

Paris had the foresight to not only build a new school, but to do so with guidance and help. Most architects and contractors know what a future-ready school looks like and how to deliver one. But too few are brought in early as partners in the process, the way the Paris community engaged their architects, designer, and furniture suppliers.

Change Your Space, Change Your Culture

The workplace becomes the catalyst, the stage, and the enhancer for new values to emerge and grow.

—— Rex Miller, Mabel Casey, and Mark Konchar,
Change Your Space, Change Your Culture

Our last MindShift project and book looked closely at several companies rated as some of the most engaging places to work: they included Google, CBRE, Zappos, Harley Davidson, W.L. Gore, Red Hat, and many others. Our conclusion was that space, to them, was a proxy for culture. In other words, it reinforced the values, attitudes, behaviors, and habits that signaled what was important to them.

When new strategy is needed it also requires a new set of priorities (values), new attitudes, behaviors, and habits. Those don't simply change because an organization decides it wants to go in a new direction. In fact research shows that more than 80 percent of new strategies in business fail because leadership wants to go one direction and the culture says, “No, thank you. We'll continue as we were.”

If changing space is not executed with the new desired culture in mind the new space will get eaten by the shadow culture.⁴ Bill Latham tells about an award-winning high school in Connecticut. They decided to create an active learning campus with open spacious classrooms that would push casual seating out into hallways. Traditional student desks were replaced with tablet chairs on wheels. The school was bathed in natural light; the windows allowed the landscaping to feel like an extension of the corridors. But there was just one problem. Teachers who held onto the shadow factory culture lined those mobile student chairs in rows and columns. They stood in the front of the class and taught the same way that teachers have taught for more than a hundred years.

How are we approaching design and how are we influencing the learning experience? If we design with the learning experience in mind, we will see a cascade of change. By redesigning how we would like kids, content, and teachers to interact, we change their relationships. Changed relationships change the learning experience.

Engaged Leaders Lead to Engaged Schools

“In 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Oprah's couch with Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to announce a $100 million matching grant for Newark's troubled school district. At the time of the announcement, Booker promised to transform the face of urban school reform.”⁵

That, of course, did not happen. Why? Dale Russakoff's book, The Prize (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), painfully chronicles where it all went wrong. A primary problem was the lack of frontline engagement by the key decision makers and champions. It is the same common error that business leaders make during big corporate shifts that present bold new strategies.

As the CEO of Engage2Learn, Shannon Buerk has worked with more than 150 school districts. She finds the lack of addressing all three sides of the Leadership Triangle a common struggle when districts adopt new strategies. Leaders tend to excel at vision (the strategic side of the triangle) but do not lead the culture shift (adaptive change) or integrate the tactical components in a coherent plan of execution. In fact, they often suffer from an overabundance of initiatives that lead to organizational paralysis and confusion.

There are structural reasons for this leadership gap that are not entirely the fault of leaders. One structural challenge is the layers between the Superintendent and how the work of educating really gets done.

A second challenge is the departmental silos where each lays claim to a piece of the decision, the process, and the budget. Instead of an integrated team focused on the learning experience, each silo constricts and protects its domain. Because self-interest becomes the loudest voice in the ear of each leader, the voice of the student gets completely lost in the complex, highly segregated machine.

Tiffany Anderson in Jennings, Missouri, and Jeff Turner in North Texas are visionary superintendents who stayed engaged; they eventually won over the shadow culture and built relational bridges for old mindsets to cross over into unknown territory. They also actively developed cohesive leadership teams and broke down silos in their schools. They were all serious about creating consensus and partnership around their kids.

They also approached new ideas and new design differently. Innovation requires exploring unorthodox approaches, asking the right kinds of questions and moving beyond simply repackaging common practices. By first stepping into the real-life experience of the student, the ultimate customer of education, you gain a deep understanding of what engaged learning looks and feels like. By doing the same through the eyes of the teacher you gain appreciation for the learning choreography that takes place in an active and participative classroom. This process is designed to give room to experiment, prototype, test, and refine ideas.

The Cardboard Classroom

After Page Dettmann's team conducted field trips and developed their teaching strategy for their STEM Active initiative, it was time to simulate a day-in-the-life of a class and test their furniture and equipment ideas. They tossed out the traditional approach of searching images on the Internet or asking their architect to create digital renderings. They started from scratch.

Page brought in students, teachers, members of their facility team, their designers and even their furniture suppliers to reimagine an empty classroom. Their only starting point was a large pile of cardboard in the middle of the room. The project for the day? To build the classroom of their dreams and simulate the new active learning model.

The kids positioned the teacher in the middle of the room at a standing work surface. The desks were designed for collaborative inquiry, with four students at each station. The shape they cut out was a new concept that resembled a large “D.” They envisioned a touch screen monitor, connected to the table. In a second iteration, this monitor would be required to swivel and allow access from numerous angles to adjust for presenting and easier input from students.

That exercise produced several benefits. The most important was the common experience, sense of accomplishment, and ownership the students and teachers felt by participating in such a process. They realized that someone actually cared about how their environment would best support them. The second benefit was the shift in student-teacher relationships; they became partners in designing their classroom and practicing in the new environment. They became co-creators of their future educational experiences.

The third benefit was the furniture modifications that the manufacturer was able to accommodate. Nothing in production at that time fit their unique needs, so they created their environment from scratch. The kids changed the standard height and the standard top dimensions to better facilitate sitting and frequent standing.

Legacy High School and the Flex-Mod Schedule

If you were to walk through Google, LinkedIn, or CBRE headquarters you would notice many different kinds of unexpected spaces. Imagine turning every imaginable traditional single-purpose space into work, think, gather, ideation, conferencing, presenting, eating, and casual places. CBRE, the largest real estate broker in the world, does not have any permanently assigned spaces in their headquarters. Instead they have neighborhoods (accounting, sales, legal, etc.) open to anyone. There is one private office for their CFO and its walls are glass. Their old office included standard private offices, cubicles, small conference rooms, and large conference rooms. When they redesigned the new space CBRE went through a discovery process to arrive at their cocreated office. They applied a design approach called Activity Workplace Design. AWD first looks at how work actually flows through the organization and then designs the space to support those particular tasks. CBRE's existing space made work fit into four traditional boxes: a private office, a cubicle and a small and a large conference room. After their AWD process they arrived at sixteen distinct work venues that are staged seamlessly throughout the office. There appears to be no demarcation of where areas begin or end.

Employees migrate through the workspace throughout the day to work as needed with different people, in different settings. Moving away from permanent assigned work areas allowed much more space for informal meeting areas and accommodates 40 percent more employees without feeling squeezed and uncomfortable.

Imagine this kind of thinking for a school; an activity-based design that looks and feels like a high-tech work culture and encourages students to choose where and when to do individual or group work. That is the strategy that Legacy High School in Bismarck, North Dakota, followed. Having chosen a bold new concept in scheduling known as “Flex-Mod,” the school set itself on a path of student agency and control over many hours each week that would, in traditional environments, have been structured and allocated for them. In order to see this vision through, the facility and its environments had to support a variety of group and independent activities. Working with MeTEOR Education interior designers and Amy Yurko, principal of BrainSpaces, the school was able to fully realize and support their vision and integrate Flex-Mod scheduling. This enabled students more influence and discretion in owning and adapting their work in a needs-based system.

A growing body of solid research verifies the benefits of Flex-Mod scheduling. Based on 20-minute time blocks, classes are assigned a certain number of modules, depending on the subject and kind of learning students are engaged in. While it may seem intuitive that not all subjects require the same time allotment to be taught, it may be even more important to consider that not every student requires the same amount of time to assimilate the information and gain mastery over a topic. Some learning is better chunked into smaller bites or extended for deeper immersion.

This strategy moves toward more personalized learning, greater relevance, and increased student power. This approach gives breathing room in the schedule to accommodate more flexibility; this could never be accommodated in a traditional school setting. The building has to be equally adaptable and open.

Legacy High is a magical place to visit. Faculty and students are clearly engaged. When you walk through the halls it is not unusual to see a small group of students, or a teacher with a few students in a small room with writable walls and a projector so fully engrossed in their conversation that it's clear some are experiencing creative “flow.”

Traditional schools don't have to be very smart. They are cookie-cutter templates with rigid fixed-wall, single-purpose classrooms, halls, cafeterias, gyms, and so on. These new buildings or upgraded and modernized schools require smart design. They need to intuitively convey the kinds of behaviors, the imaginative uses and permission to break out of passive learning and compliance into fully accessing the facility as a learning resource. These new patterns require a lot of time in order to become the habits and attitudes of a new culture.

The Shelton School: Intelligent Space

Children want to learn to the degree that they are unable to distinguish learning from fun. They keep this attitude until we adults convince them that learning is not fun.

—Gina Shapira

Over the years I've known that Shelton School in Dallas is renowned for its work with kids with learning differences. But when I recently met with Shelton's Amy Kelton I realized that Shelton's success also depends on intelligent spaces.

Amy, an energetic, positive, and fast-moving guide, opened our conversation with an intentional and direct gaze, “You're going to find I get passionate when I begin talking about our kids.” Throughout our tour, I became fully engaged as a “systems guy,” but also as the father of a son diagnosed with ADHD and a daughter with Asperger's syndrome. I quickly saw that all their methods and the environment were designed to support their students' unique wiring and individualized learning needs.

Shelton is designed with three foundations:

1. Piaget's theory of cognitive development: Amy walked through the reasoning for the different activities in each grade classroom based on this theory.
2. The Montessori method.
3. Brain science and emotional literacy.

Amy Kelton's tour reminded me of the design mindset that Amy Yurko described, designing for the essential elements of learning: curiosity and play. So it didn't surprise me that Shelton is built on the Montessori method. I knew that Maria Montessori developed her model for mentally challenged kids and that she produced extraordinary results.

The question I've been reflecting on since that tour is: Do solutions that address the extremes and those on the margins hold insights for us all?

The Lean Classroom

Many know about the Lean model of manufacturing because of Toyota's success. That kind of thinking has expanded into other fields and disciplines that must focus on reducing waste and errors. But I never thought of it as a principle for designing a classroom. Amy walked me through all of the areas in an empty classroom and the reason for its organization, artifacts, signs, and placement of materials. Within a few moments I realized that I was standing in a Lean learning factory.

I saw, for example, that setting up a work area on a factory floor (or in one of Shelton's classrooms) is to make the work and workflow intuitive (see Figure 14.2). Anyone who walks into the area will quickly see the nature and flow of the work, and the staging of the needed materials and just-in-time access to those materials.

A small kindergarten classroom is divided into seven learning zones—language, association, math, culture, practical life, sensorial life, and oral language–and it does not feel cramped or cluttered. A small white rug defines a child's work area. They roll it up and take it with them from zone to zone. A specific icon for each zone communicates the kind of work they will be doing. The supplies needed, including a kit of parts, are placed in the same zone so each child can make one trip.

Inside the door of each child's locker is a small plastic envelope that holds badges for each of the different zone icons. Each student can choose any of the badges to work on. They take the learning zone badge from the envelope and their little white rug from the locker and move to set up in that learning zone. The outside of the locker features a ribbon badge. When the student masters a zone they place their badge on the ribbon (see Figure 14.3).

That self-selected and self-paced learning approach evolves in form as the students get older.

This classroom is an example of integrating pedagogy and the unique learning experiences of the age or cognitive development of the child, and creating a self-paced learning environment that provides agency, curiosity, and play. For example, in the Math Learning Station (see Figure 14.4), all the supplies are assembled, easily accessible, and intuitive.

This is just a sampling of the schools we visited that follow similar principles. I also learned about the Joy School in Houston, a Balfour Beatty project that also serves kids with learning differences. They faced the additional and very unique challenge of taking an old estate that had been adapted beyond coherence and capacity rethinking the learning experience in a fresh way, and then applying those insights into building a new facility from the ground up.

The Da Vinci School in Los Angeles is specifically chartered to prepare future-ready kids through project-based learning and college preparatory curriculum. In a true student-centered approach the kids came up with the school name in a design charrette exercise intended to capture the cross-functional learning approach. The school is unique because of the way the platform of learning is expanded: they have a 13th-year university transfer path as well as a blended learning option available through their Da Vinci Innovation Academy. Da Vinci is moving forward to an integrated life-learning mindset that can take place anywhere, at any time—for life. No wonder they are graduating kids who are academically, emotionally, and culturally well rounded.

So many progressive schools are designed with the user in mind. We saw that in the way Sarasota modernized old traditional classrooms or how Paris High School engaged the community in a collective vision and tangible expression of how they envisioned their future. Legacy High used design thinking to build a school to reflect the kind of agency required in a flexible work-world. Shelton's environment reveals design thinking in its pedagogy, in the deep understanding of the unique needs of the students and applied brain science.

50,000 Schools and the Micro-Environment Solution

There has been a shift with decision makers gaining greater recognition . . . of the role microenvironments play in creating positive, high-performing learning environments.

—Bill Latham

Half of today's schools—about 50,000—were designed for the baby boomer generation. That means they must be modernized in order to support active learning and the development of future-ready skills.

It can be done. We saw it in the dramatic improvement at Sarasota Middle School. The challenge for many other older schools is not primarily funding: it is a lack of imagination and the failure to empower teachers, administrators, and the community to make changes. No one walking through Sarasota will mistake it for a new state-of-the-art campus like Paris or Legacy. But you will see student engagement and effective learning in these places.

And, just like people, school districts can get used to things being the way they are—or always have been. Paris, Illinois, had fallen into that state until some of the leaders got tired of a slow demoralizing decline.

At the beginning of the chapter I describe a dilapidated 1960s-style elementary school in Texas. We asked our architects, designers, contractors, and cognitive consultants what they could do to this school's microenvironments that would create a more positive experience. They went to work reimagining the possibilities. The actions they recommended may be helpful to other schools.

1. Reimagine real estate: Half of the library space contained stacks of unread books. The other half contained folding tables with desktop computers (in a school where every child has a tablet). We learned that the banks of computers were for kids who were being disciplined by having their tablets taken away (one of our members wondered if the school would take textbooks away as punishment).

   Neither the stack of books nor the banks of desktop computers were necessary. The school could reclaim the space and make an engaging multiuse learning lounge with comfortable seating and moveable furniture.

   This school also maintained a separate computer lab and multiple storage areas. If repurposed all that space could also be captured for new and creative learning spaces.

2. Declutter: Part of the reason that the school facility felt cramped was the many objects stashed and stored on the floors, items that had no place or were being kept “just in case” someone might need them.
3. Transform the cafeteria: The two-story cafeteria occupied the center of the building. The second-floor open corridor ringed the cafeteria and was the only space in the building bathed in natural light. The long gray cafeteria tables and benches made the space look like a prison mess hall. Our team quickly sketched ways the room could be transformed with a variety of table shapes, seating options, and booths.
4. Lighting: Few things can transform institutional environments like lighting, and its relatively inexpensive. The new LED lighting technologies certainly create better learning and working environments for everyone. And the white “outdoor” color of bulbs is much brighter and friendlier than fluorescent lighting.
5. Walls: The barren prisonlike walls in the corridors of the Texas school could easily be reimagined to showcase student work, school conversations, or student works of art.
6. Entry: A large overhang created a compressed and sterile entrance into the building. We saw the possibilities for a renovation that could feature plants, a large wall mural, and even benches to soften and make the area inviting.
7. Gardens: The landscaping around the school was also reminiscent of a prison: lots of dirt and scrubby and isolated patches of grass. These were perfect areas for the creation of gardens. They would not only transform the campus, but could also provide an engaging horticultural learning experience.
8. Active furniture: The school furniture was old, heavy, and dented, made of steel with attached brown desks. The teachers were trying to create small learning clusters or semicircle configurations, but it was clear the furniture worked against an easy and enjoyable reformatting of the room. New furniture would achieve a great recapturing of space.

These suggestions reveal some of the possibilities for finding brand-new space within any existing building.

New Thinking in School Design

In addition to the example of the Texas elementary school, MindShift has explored the new thinking in progressive school design, construction, and furniture. We continue to ask experts about trends. Their answers blow the doors right off the possibilities.

Reversing the Rising Health Risks in Schools

The concerns of childhood obesity, poor air quality in schools, daylight deficiency, stress and passive learning (sitting all day) mark a rising crisis in the workplace and in schools. Only a small percentage of our schools have been designed to address these challenges.

A large body of research underwritten by the federal government, Carnegie Mellon, Lawrence Livermore Labs, Cornell University, and the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (part of the Salk Institute) have studied the effects of different kinds of lighting, air quality, ergonomics and acoustics on the health and performance of people in office spaces, schools, and hospitals.

That is why our nation will begin to hear more discussions about evidence-based design, salutogenic (the source of health) design, circadian rhythms, sleep, and the value of physical activity and recess on physical and psychological well-being. The benefits and practice of mindfulness have already been in use in many at-risk schools and schools for learning differences. Now, it is expanding into the mainstream of learning. Our growing understanding of the brain through FMRI brain scanning and what seems like an epidemic of different conditions have raised the alarm. The good news is that we know our environments and lifestyle are key causes—and we can do something about that.

In our research on workplace disengagement, we ran across a startling issue: sitting is the new smoking. Consider this summary: “The takeaway (from a Stanford conference on the dangers of sitting) was simple: Sitting is not only harmful because it represents a lack of exercise, but also because sedentary behavior initiates a unique cascade of physiological changes that lead to a higher concentration of fat in the blood, insulin resistance, type-2 diabetes, heart disease, and obesity—even in those people who meet the recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate to intense aerobic activity.”⁶

In earlier chapters we addressed the importance of safe and stress-free learning environments, especially for at-risk students. Wellness is now a hot social topic because of the ripple effect of the Affordable Care Act and increased health insurance costs.

The rise in chronic health issues and the social and emotional health challenges in underserved communities will force all districts to include their facilities as a key part of their holistic strategies in tackling this problem. New design standards will emerge to guide schools and their architects and designers in creating facilities that promote wellness and well-being. Delos is an organization that has developed a Well Building Standard. The WELL Building Standard® is an evidence-based system for measuring, certifying, and monitoring the performance of building features that impact health and well-being. Their work is one of the catalytic forces in this conversation.

In the convergence of need, understanding, and our ability to act, school buildings will become a major arena for rethinking design and use, space as a catalyst for healthier behavior, and an environment that fosters wellness and well-being.

Future Ready

If our mission in education is to prepare future-ready students, we will need a dramatic shift in our approach to designing our learning environments. Our school buildings can be used as catalysts for positive change and reinforcements of a future-ready culture, or they can impede our best intentions. Achieving this transformation will require administrators, principals, teachers, parents, and citizens to be full stakeholders in the process and the outcome.

The job of administrators and teachers balances on a razor's edge of maintaining an old system's standards while transforming their schools to prepare kids for a 2040 world. This is the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world of leadership. None of us were trained or prepared for walking this razor's edge. We have found several examples, however, of leaders who are accomplishing both. The next chapter tells some of their stories and distills their lessons in leading change.