The Story of Your Year
So, how was the year?
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with school leaders the past few weeks as they have wrapped up projects or attended culminating professional conferences and have heard their attempts to sum up the year in some form of “It was good.” or “It was bad.” Of course there are variations of each of these responses “terrible” “better than some” “the hardest year I’ve ever had” and “it felt amazingly normal”. Good, bad or just another year.
My colleague, Ryan Burke, has been talking and writing this year about breaking the pattern of binary thinking, and in particular overcoming “The Goodness Binary” - the idea that things are either good or bad, positive or negative, moral or immoral. It’s a particularly hard pattern to break in this moment of polarization across political and social viewpoints on almost an issue. We happen to be living in a moment of extreme binary thinking, and when you are part of a system, those patterns replicate across all parts of the system. Binary thinking is also a likely default for almost all of us as we try to make a fast judgment about a complex topic. We try to put ideas, people and experiences into simple buckets like good or bad, luck or skill, easy or hard. Occam’s Razor, a mental model attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century friar, philosopher, and theologian, states that “the simplest explanation is preferable to one that is more complex.”
Add to the pattern of binary thinking the concept of recency bias - the idea that we tend to be influenced more by recent events than those in the more distant past. If the last three weeks of school were particularly challenging, one might find themselves telling the story of a “bad” year. Like all cognitive biases, recency bias is unconscious, but still has the potential to cloud our thinking around how we leave a specific event or experience or even worse how we make a big decision.
Part of the problem of the binary answers above is in the question itself, “How was the year?” This question leads us straight to binary answers. It’s a set-up. Warren Berger, in his book, A More Beautiful Question, reminds us that if we want better answers, we need to ask better questions. So, I’ll offer two different questions that you might want to explore over the next few weeks when you might have a little more time and space.
What was your learning of the year?
What is the story of the year you want to tell?
These two questions provide you with a real opportunity to interrogate and reflect upon the year and the multitudes of moments that made your times since last August and to arrive at a more interesting and more nuanced answer and one that might be helpful in thinking about the year ahead. It might also help you to reframe those “good” and “bad” moments as simply learning moments. These things happened and you were present to witness them. What were these moments there to teach you?
The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kaley Waner is one of our favorite books at L+D because it helps us to reframe even the most challenging situations as the perfect experience we need to have. Commitment 13 states: I commit to seeing all people and circumstances as allies that are perfectly suited to me learn the most important things for my growth. And when we start to see people and circumstances as allies the binary way of experiencing the world fades quickly.
So, here is an exercise you might consider doing. If you can do this with a partner or a leadership team it is even better, but doing it solo is fine too.
Walk through your year and find 5-7 moments or particular experiences that were emotionally resonant for you - either moments of joy, sadness, anger, fear, or shame. Put the moments on post-it notes and put them in chronological order in front of you. Here before you is a story (just one version) of your year. Then take some time to interrogate those moments not as good or bad but rather as learning, and ask “What was that moment teaching me?” Try, as best you can, to see that moment as an ally.
In her book Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke writes about her journey to become a world class poker champion. She learned quickly that the only way to get better was to replay every hand in her mind, and preferably with a “truth seeking” partner, and do the hard work of understanding what about that hand was luck and what was skill. While you can’t control the cards that are dealt in poker, there is a lot of agency in the game and decisions to make. Learning where she had either played skillfully or unskillfully and tracking patterns along the way made her a better player - the best player in the world.
I would argue that school leadership is much more complex than poker and there are not obvious winners and losers as there are in finite games and sports. Leadership is more of an infinite game. The goal is to keep playing. You have another year ahead of you. What will be the story you hope to be telling at the end of next year? Like poker players, you can’t control the cards you are dealt, but if you reframe the moments from this year as learning and see these moments as friends who are helping you along the way, you might find that your story at the end of next year will be far more satisfying than can be reduced to a simple binary.
