The Stories we Tell About Other People
Who is your favorite constituency to complain about? Is it the board? The administration? The faculty? The parents? Alumni? Who are the villains in your story of the school?
And who are the heroes in your narrative of the school? Is there a group that strikes you as having the truest, most important one, or most virtuous perspective on where to go from here? (And is it you?)
In schools, we love to carve up our community members into categories, which often leads to seeing them as unitary entities with fixed agendas, motivations, and places in the system.
We could let go of our AP program and do something truly interesting and creative, many faculty say, if only the parents would let us.
We could really move our culture forward, many administrators say, if only the faculty were willing to change.
We could fix this problem, many parents say, if only the administration would listen to us instead of insisting on their agenda.
There is no such thing as “the administration,” as a unitary entity, there are administrators. There is no such thing as “the faculty,” there are faculty members. And there is no such thing as “the parents,” only parents. An imagined, unitary identity can serve a rhetorical purpose, but it usually obscures what’s happening on the ground.
When we are talking about any group of constituents in schools, and what they want or do, we are almost always telling a story. That story serves us in some way, even when that story obscures what’s really going on.
Why We Love These Stories
Why do we do this?
Well, it’s soothing to become part of a group that’s the hero.
Parents can see themselves as the wronged customer whose needs are going unmet. Faculty can see themselves as the unsung heroes who live the school day to day. Alumni can see themselves as the ones holding onto the true legacy of the school. Our attachment to single constituent identities, in other words, can keep us at the center.
Seeing these constituencies as monoliths can also give rhetorical power to individual preferences.
I’ve heard this rhetorical sleight of hand referred to as “the invisible army,” as when an individual board member shares his individual concern about a particular policy – or perhaps one she shared with another board member once – and attributes that concern to an entire group, saying, “The board has a lot of concerns about the dress code.”
It can be soothing to ascribe a single motivation or intent to other groups, as well. How many times have we heard faculty talk about “the administration” as the boogeyman for any number of disliked initiatives?
But, in addition to positioning ourselves at the center of the story, such thinking also helps us let ourselves off the hook, avoiding the need to make hard choices ourselves.
I remember listening in on a departmental conversation where teachers spoke about wanting to be rid of a particularly time-consuming assessment. In their view, the problem was that “the administration” expected them to complete this onerous task. After the Head of School made clear that continuing that particular assessment was entirely up to them, they were unsatisfied. On some level, they wanted to keep it all along.
All Models Are Wrong, But Some Are Useful
One of my favorite sets of insight about systems comes in Barry Oshry’s Seeing Systems, which is a very insightful work (that is composed in a really strange way).
In Seeing Systems, Oshry outlines some of the ways that human behavior is shaped by individual locations in a system and the power dynamics that bind them to each other within an organization. In other words, when we talk about “the faculty” or “the board,” there really is something to it. These constituencies have common dynamics that arise from their position in a hierarchy, the burden created by that position in a hierarchy, and the perspectives their particular position either opens up or obscures.
Tops tend to feel burdened by the complexity of the organization and frustrated by simplistic solutions. Front line faculty and staff tend to feel “done to,” with unrealistic mandates imposed on them from outside sources. Middle management typically feels stretched in multiple directions, and customers (e.g. parents, or students) feel like no one listens to them.
When I reflect on Oshry, I reflect on one of our favorite quotes at L+D, by a statistician named George Box: “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.”
It can be useful to understand the ways that an individual’s location in a given constituency shapes their views, their expectations, their gripes, and their superpowers.
When I first joined a Board of Trustees, I started to see the school obscurely, through Head’s reports and highly curated presentations. I was no longer a Head who couldn’t understand why the board always seemed to want more information, and instead a trustee who wouldn’t understand why the Head wasn’t sharing more. The insights and limitations of that particular position – both influential and intentionally limited – began to shape my perspective and behavior as a member of that school community.
When I first became a parent at an independent school where I wasn’t also an employee, I started to notice different cracks in the pavement – and others I would have seen as an employee have no doubt escaped me entirely. I was no longer a school administrator scrambling to edit a clear and accurate weekly newsletter, but a parent who emailed crankily when the newsletter sent us to the wrong place at the wrong time – and telling myself all kinds of stories about what that might mean.
But even as both experiences have been shaped by my position in the system, I’ve been struck by multiplicity: board members experience the school differently; they came to the school for different reasons, and they bring those motivations to their role. Parents have their own cliques, interest groups, and experiences; those corners of the school where my child finds meaning constitutes the limited, sum total of my impressions.
None of this is surprising. Just like faculty, or parents, or the administration, boards are made up of different people with different experiences, identities, and perspectives, and often they see and experience the school very differently. Not only do they not always agree with each other – because humans have contradictory impulses, they often don’t even agree with themselves.
Rather falling into the script of what the parents want, for example, we might practice some both/and thinking: Some parents want ______, and other parents want __________. And there are other parents whose needs and wants we haven’t even explored yet.
Moving Forward
In the same way that light is both a wave and a particle, the positions of constituents in a system shape their experience, and also those constituents have individual experiences, identities, and perspectives that can be obscured by that label. Rather than telling one story – stakeholder blocs or individual views – we need to hold both in mind.
How might we use this as people trying to make our schools better? What can we learn by getting more curious about what is possible for ourselves and for the school?
We can start by recognizing and naming the stories we are telling about our stakeholders in schools, their actions, and their motivations. We might:
Unpack Power Dynamics:
Whose voice is heard when we talk about that group? Whose experiences are being centered? What can I learn by decentering those experiences, and/or centering the needs and experiences of others?
Whose voice isn’t in the room or at the table? How can I hear from those other voices, and help them be heard by others?
How and where is power amplified, or dampened, by membership in a particular constituency? How might we shift the power dynamic to create new opportunities?
Think Like A Futurist:
What is emerging among that constituency? Which preferences or experiences signal where others in our community might be 10 years from now, in 2035?
Which voices in each constituency are a lingering signal from the school as it existed 10 years ago? What voices from the past might be worth holding onto?
Think Like A Designer:
What different experiences exist among a given constituency, and how can I learn more about them?
How can I better understand the full range of unmet needs in other groups?
How might we co-create better solutions by collaborating on a new idea, rather than centering myself and developing it on my own? What possibilities does my own position in the system obscure?
Practice Reflective Changemaking:
How can I build coalitions with people in other constituencies? Where do our interests align?
What is the most innovative 20% of a given group doing, and why? What are the most conserving 20% doing, and why?
How are the experiences and perspectives of others shaped by their position in the hierarchy or system, and how might I disrupt that hierarchy or system to help them see something new?
How are my experiences and perspectives shaped by my position in the hierarchy or system, and how might I disrupt my position to help myself see something new?
Practice Conscious Leadership:
Who benefits from the story I am sharing/hearing about that group? How might my frustration be soothing some unmet need?
What am I avoiding taking responsibility for? What constructive actions can I take from my place in the system?
When we tell these stories about other groups, what pathways and options am I unnecessarily taking off the table? How could I advance those options?
As a leader, you always have agency – and your power and influence is always limited. The goal is to have as many options as possible to make as many good things happen as possible. Obstacles lurk everywhere, but so do openings and opportunities.
Given this, why would any future-minded leader trade away their power for a story that limits their sense of what can be done? As tempting as it can be to feel like you’re in the good group and others just don’t get it, why wouldn’t we want to see the chessboard in full 3D?
Our cognitive biases are powerful, and so is our capacity for self-delusion. By seeing constituencies as constituencies shaped by their position – and also as gloriously diverse, dynamic, and contradictory – we can design away from cognitive bias, and toward a future with more opportunities to make our schools better.
