tag:world.hey.com,2005:/gwyn/feedGwyn ap Harri2023-08-25T06:17:45Ztag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/308932023-08-25T06:17:45Z2023-08-25T06:17:45ZWe’re not the weirdos<div class="trix-content">
<div><strong>We’re not the weirdos!</strong></div><div><br></div><div><strong><em>“This is an age of dyschronia, where everyone feels they belong in their own anomaly. They are at home in absurdity. And yet, to question this absurdity is to become absurd.” - Rob Davis, The Book of Forks.</em></strong></div><div><br></div><div>Since lockdown ended, our schools in Doncaster and Gateshead have hosted over a thousand visitors from all over the world. All three schools are the most oversubscribed schools in the north of England. We haven’t permanently excluded a single child since our first year of opening.</div><div><br></div><div>We have the same problems as other schools; hiring the right staff, training staff well, developing leadership, and we don’t always get things right. Things go wrong and we own these problems and try to fix them as best we can.</div><div><br></div><div>We knew that when we emerged that we would be treated as outsiders, anomalies, weirdos even. How dare they allow their kids to not wear uniform! There will be total chaos! Being kind to kids? How radical! It will never work…and when there is not chaos and it does work, this threatens people’s perception of reality.</div><div><br><br></div><div>This is how weird we are…</div><div><br></div><div>We teach kids how to make things.</div><div><br></div><div>We show kids how to be kind to each other.</div><div><br></div><div>We give kids opportunities to change their world and make it better.</div><div><br><br></div><div>This is what I think is absurd…</div><div><br></div><div>Teaching kids just to be able to pass standardised tests.</div><div><br></div><div>Believing a school is one word and one number.</div><div><br></div><div>Limiting our children’s life chances at 11 and 16</div><div><br><br></div><div>We’re not the weirdos.</div><div><br><br></div><div>When I stand there alongside my son, who I am proud to say has had a decent experience at our school, and he picks up his GCSE results and stares at the numbers, and he looks at me…</div><div><br></div><div>…he knows what is absurd.</div><div><br></div><div>I asked five other kids how they did in their exams, and weirdly enough, they said exactly the same thing my boy said to me… “I’ve got what I needed, so, yeah…”</div><div><br></div><div>…they know what is absurd.</div><div><br><br></div><div>When the adults in power have a mind to look about them and not accept their normality as being ok, and able to question the absurdity we find ourselves in, only then will we stop living in this madness and truly be in service to our children.</div><div><br></div><div><strong>Thank you to all the adults and children that have worked so hard together through this absurdity to get them what they needed in this world right now.</strong></div><div><br></div><div>Hopefully in the near future, we can all work together to make this world less absurd and more real and truly educate our children.</div><div><br><br></div><div><strong><em>“Just because you get used to something doesn’t make it right” - Rob Davis, The Book of Forks.</em></strong></div><div><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/217702022-07-06T05:36:40Z2022-07-06T05:36:40ZHow to teach complex concepts that stick<div class="trix-content">
<div>In these last few months, I have never learnt so much. To teach adults how to lead, I have had to dig extremely deep into what it means to be human. I’m glad that, for now, my head is back out of the rabbit hole.<br><br>But I have almost drove myself mad as well as my friends, colleagues and family as I wonder around with balloons, ‘hello fresh’ recipe cards, a half dollar coin and a rubrik’s cube… like a crazy but shit party magician…<br><br>You’ve got to go there to come back, and I am writing it all down to share eventually in one way or another, but I thought - why not put at least something out - just so I can at least stop thinking about it now…<br><br>So, here is my solution to Rubik’s cube.<br><br><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/153br-_7YqFjv2iUElAapLiHIIXx1V-bxNz6G3W_QnC8/edit">https://docs.google.com/document/d/153br-_7YqFjv2iUElAapLiHIIXx1V-bxNz6G3W_QnC8/edit</a><br><br>Why the hell would I want to learn how to solve Rubik’s Cube I here you say!? I could do it in the 80s, but now I’ve forgotten I here you say!? EXACTLY!!!<br><br>When we teach complex concepts, we want them to stick. Turns out, we can do it in totally the same way we look at empowering leadership.<br><br>For the record, my wife and I went for a weekend in Hornsea, stopping at my in-laws caravan. How could I make it more dull than it already was? Well, I left my phone at home - no internet whatsoever - and I picked up the cube. How could I solve the cube without following any instructions…? While my wife was sleeping (she sleeps a lot…), I started rattling the cube. It had secrets in it, and I wanted to get at them.<br><br>My solution is like no other I’ve ever seen. One move, one concept. That’s it. I used three concepts that I am using to teach and learn how to lead adults:</div><ul><li>Simplification</li><li>Start with why</li><li>Smoothly unfolding sequences</li></ul><div><br>I’d like to thank and recognise Greg Bryant and Christopher Alexander and Simon Sinek and everyone who has recognised beauty in simplicity.<br><br>Simple is hard. Anyone can make anything more complicated.<br><br>Now, brain… …please rest.<br><br>Gwyn<br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/208002022-05-14T05:02:36Z2022-05-14T05:02:36ZLeadership is polarised too…<div class="trix-content">
<div>I hate to say this, because I don’t want it to be true.</div><div><br></div><div>I want a world where we are all diverse and multifaceted and interesting and bouncing off each other, muddling our way through whatever this crazy thing called life is.</div><div><br></div><div>I hate how the world seems to be emerging as two-sided; left, right - trad, prog - red, blue - whatever…</div><div><br></div><div>But as I am solving a problem we have at XP - leadership development - I am seeing it much more clearly now. And although it is still a spectrum, it is a very one dimensional slide rule, and I desperately don’t want it to be so.</div><div><br></div><div>Anyone who asks me, what have you got wrong at XP, I don’t have to think too hard… “leadership development” I say without skipping a beat. Not that I see it being done well in many other schools, or any other organisations. Like my 17 year old boy observed the other day, “Dad, we don’t teach each other very well, do we?”, “No son, we don’t”, “Why do you think that is?”, “Money, Power…”</div><div><br></div><div>Like, we teach our kids a load of crap at school that is totally irrelevant to the rest of their lives, then it’s every man for himself. WTF?? - How much do we love each other? Not very fucking much, is what I see.</div><div><br></div><div>As is my propensity, when I see a problem, I want to solve it. At XP, we need a certain kind of leader, like we need a certain kind of teacher. What we do at XP is hard, it’s complex and it’s scary because it is not the convention. I have been unpacking it; what does leadership look like at XP? What do I do? More to the point, why do I do it that way? My journey has gone from simple tips on productivity, to inventing a new word, ‘Impactivity’, to a comprehensive systematic leadership development programme.</div><div><br></div><div>My conclusion is that leading adults is the same as teaching kids, and unfortunately, there are pretty much two ways to do it.</div><div><br></div><div>There are those who are <strong>‘in charge</strong>’ and want the power and status and are powered by fear and ego, their fuel is hubris. And there are those who are <strong>‘in service to</strong>’, who strive to be redundant, developing others, creating safety to learn, where humility and vulnerability is a virtue.</div><div><br></div><div>Where others may chin stroke and talk about many styles of leadership, I see only two. And what I hate is that they lie across this same division of conformity versus creativity. Control versus freedom of expression. And while it is a spectrum, it is one dimensional.</div><div><br></div><div>There are those who want power, and there are those who empower.</div><div><br></div><div>I have absolutely no choice over the type of leader I must be. I strive to understand the other side of the argument. Am I the bad guy? But every time I feel I am sliding that way, I try the way I seem to be born into, and it works spectacularly. Whenever I get stuck, I give more and magical things happen.</div><div><br></div><div>So I am going to go for it big time.</div><div><br></div><div>Over the next few years, I am going to give everything.</div><div><br></div><div>The design of our schools and our Trust will be freely available. Our curriculum will be freely available. Our Impactivity, or systematic leadership development programme will be freely available.</div><div><br></div><div>Knowledge is not power, knowledge is freedom. Ideas are not owned by anyone, they either exist or they don’t. To shift to a more caring society, all we have to do is set things free. We need to smash down the paywalls.</div><div><br></div><div>So, we will continue to capture our stories and share them with everyone. They will be about our children’s beautiful work and how our teachers are enabling them to do it. They will be about how our teachers develop themselves and how our leaders are enabling them to do it. They will show anyone who is interested, how they can do it too.</div><div><br></div><div>As our children who went through our school are returning to teach at our school, XP will exist outside any one of us and it will become a reflection of what it means to be human, a society that we want to belong to.</div><div><br></div><div>And I have no doubt that there will be other reflections of society that others want to belong to; those that have power, who need those that do not.</div><div><br></div><div>But our battle is not with them. Fighting and arguing with them diminishes our mission to set our ideas free. They are distraction and noise. They want us to look at them because while we are doing that, we are not setting our ideas free.</div><div><br></div><div>Be the sun, not the wind.</div><div><br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/169302021-11-14T09:30:49Z2021-11-14T09:30:49ZChildhood<div class="trix-content">
<div>I woke up today on this Sunday morning, reflecting on the different childhood experiences I had compared with my eldest son, Jac. In many ways we are the same, but our experiences are very different.</div><div><br></div><div>Jac is now 17. When I was 17, my dad was living in London, as he had been for three years on and off. My sister had left home and my dad had rented out the spare rooms of our house. I had essentially been looking after myself from about 14. My mum had died when I was around 18 months old, drowned in the River Don, the river that cuts through my home town of Doncaster.</div><div><br></div><div>I remember my seventeenth year vividly as yesterday, receiving a letter my sister wrote to me which told me that my mum had actually thrown herself off the bridge in Sprotbrough and taken her own life. I remember opening the letter next to the front door and dropping to my knees uncontrollably, the letter falling from my hands, my life, my reality broken and any idea of a childhood shattered in pieces as I wailed with a lack of understanding, alone.</div><div><br></div><div>I had lived through my childhood knowing I didn’t have a mum, but with a simple fact that comforted me. She had died accidentally, caught in the underflow of a fast flowing river, and while it was sad, everything was ok. On that day, all of a sudden, everything was not ok. I was not enough. My own mum left me alone on this earth. I spiralled into a depression that lasted probably around nine years, which I escaped on my own by building myself up from nothing to the person I am now.</div><div><br></div><div>With my dad dying a few years ago, and with the comfort of being surrounded by a loving family all of my own, I ponder on the nature of stories and who we are. In the latter years of my dad, I asked him and other relatives about those sad times, and was amazed about the different stories, perspectives and claimed narratives that they all held, alongside my own memories.</div><div><br></div><div>The only truth is that no one knows what happened to my mum. Sure, the probability is that she took her life, but the circumstances and nuances before and after this point are lost and will be totally buried when we, who hold these stories in our heads, are gone too.</div><div><br></div><div>The reality is, it is our own choice as to what stories we hold and which we let go, and what we learn from them. Our stories don’t define us. We define our stories.</div><div><br></div><div>Back to Jac, aged 17, the same age my own world came crashing down. Yesterday I witnessed him dancing with abandon on the beach in Hornsea with his brother, Dylan aged 14, nicking each other’s hats and goofing around with an innocence I unfortunately lost or had stolen from me. I am so proud that Jac and Dylan know what love is, when they see how me and my wife Kate act childishly with each other, and fight and make up, and how Jac feels he can speak to me about anything and everything, and that he is safe to become his own brilliant self, undefined by his parents, but supported and challenged to be his best version, which is certainly already way better than me!</div><div><br></div><div>Jac has had his own challenges, discovering his neurodiversity and coming to terms with how he sees the world being different from others, along with its advantages and disadvantages. Inevitably, he will have more challenges, when the world lets him down in its own relentless and brutal way. And I won’t always be here for him, but he will have stories about his dad to keep him strong. About how his dad built a house and then a school for him. About how Jac’s self discovery also helped his dad understand himself better. And I look forward to the adventures we will share as he wanders into the world on his own, as I did many years ago.</div><div><br></div><div>And while people can argue that my experiences made me strong and defined who I am, I would argue that no matter what my childhood was like, right now, I am doing what I was put on this planet to do.</div><div><br></div><div>I would argue that like a collapsing wave of multiple realities, I am who I am now because I have defined who I am, and no one or nothing else.</div><div><br></div><div>Now, what’s for breakfast…? Jac!! Wake up and make your dad some eggs and toast!!!</div><div><br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/161822021-10-09T05:36:01Z2021-10-09T05:36:01ZNo Excuses<div class="trix-content">
<div><strong>No excuses</strong></div><div><br></div><div>I saw High Tech High in 2012 and I knew I had to create a similar school in the UK, then I visited Expeditionary Learning schools and knew I could. Two years later, XP opened in Doncaster, UK.</div><div><br></div><div>Like us, HTH & EL gets many visitors a year, and I wonder why there aren’t more schools like HTH & EL in the world. How can you see those schools and then not replicate it?</div><div><br></div><div>I hear that the problem with XP is scale. It’s ok to create one good school, but how does it go to scale? Hmm… yeah, it will ultimately fail because it can’t go to ‘scale’. You see, it’s a small school and therefore can’t be replicated at scale.</div><div><br></div><div>This, like a lot of other things I hear, is bollocks. We have a natural propensity to look at the state of things now, and believe things will never change. We also have a natural propensity to assume everything was always like this, and always was, straight after something has changed. Do you even remember when we all started recycling? I don’t…</div><div><br></div><div>What I do know is that before, only the hippies recycled and we all laughed at them. Now we all do it.</div><div><br></div><div>I think this phenomena is something to do with ‘owning the narrative’. Things have to fit our own successful narrative, or unsuccessful one, but it can’t sound unsuccessful.</div><div><br></div><div>So if something new comes along and it looks, smells and sounds good, we have to have a reason why we are not part of it or doing it. We make excuses.</div><div><br></div><div>We used to say XP was a ‘small’ school. Now we say it is ‘deliberately sized’. True, it is much smaller than most other secondary schools in the UK, but probably similar to a lot of privately funded schools. It’s definitely similar to a primary school size.</div><div><br></div><div>And there’s the rub. Most of the time, these excuses become ‘memes’, and get shared like a virus and accepted quickly. We can’t all do XP because it can’t scale. It’s much too small for a secondary school. It’s frustrating because these memes obviously are blatantly not true.</div><div><br></div><div>We have a network of primary schools all across the UK. They receive less money per pupil than secondary students. Yet they exist at scale and are a similar size to XP.</div><div><br></div><div>We have shown how you can scale locally by creating another small school right next to XP, called XP East. We could continue doing this on our patch of land in Doncaster if we wanted / were allowed.</div><div><br></div><div>We’ve now created a new school in Gateshead which is exactly the same model.</div><div><br></div><div>We get asked how we would turn a big secondary school into an XP school, and while our favoured route would be to bulldoze it, and build new smaller schools that actually work, there are many models of splitting big schools internally into smaller ‘schools within schools’.</div><div><br></div><div>Yes, our school is financially viable. In fact, we pay for Outward Bound, Duke of Edinburgh and ALL the fieldwork our students experience, and ALL the experts that come into the school. All our staff have Apple devices paid for, including our learning coaches (teaching assistants). All our students have iPads. I can show you the spreadsheets.</div><div><br></div><div>Then it comes to demographics. To say we have a random lottery admissions process, and anyone who lives in Doncaster can apply, is not enough to convince people that we don’t have an unfair advantage. The differences are apparently ‘nuanced’. Well, I look at numbers to see the truth, and these are the numbers as of 9th October 2021:</div><div><br></div><div>We have 32.4% Pupil Premium students (The average is 34% locally and 16% nationally) with 17.6% Free School Meals - so we’re pretty much bang on average for Doncaster and twice as high compared with the rest of the country for deprivation.</div><div><br></div><div>We have 22% Special Educational Needs students (The average is 11% locally and 12% nationally) with 3.2% students with Education Health Care Plans (1.8% locally, 1.7% nationally), so we have about twice as many high needs students. </div><div><br></div><div>We have 6.4% Looked After Children, which is almost six times the local and national average of 1.2%.</div><div><br></div><div>We have 8% of students who have English as an Additional Language.</div><div><br></div><div>Finally, XP has taken three times more permanently excluded students from other schools than any other as a proportion through the local Fair Access Panel. XP hasn’t permanently excluded a single student in the last seven years.</div><div><br></div><div>While we know there are other schools in more difficult contexts, including some primary schools in our Trust, and most definitely some Expeditionary Learning schools in the USA, I personally couldn’t say that XP is only successful because of our context. But others will. I have heard that it’s not necessarily our demographics, but that ‘our parents are different’.</div><div><br></div><div>The truth is, to create and run a school like XP takes guts. It’s very different from most other schools. This takes courage, which means taking risks.</div><div><br></div><div>It has taken a lot of working out. A hell of a lot of design, and inevitably some failure and reiteration. It’s hard work and you have to put the hours in.</div><div><br></div><div>And with differences, comes complexities, especially because our norms are different. We are solving different problems to most schools, and there are not many people who know how to do things the way we do, so we have to grow our own.</div><div><br></div><div>These are the real excuses; too scary, too hard and too complicated. And these excuses are fine. It’s not for everyone and there’s no shame in that.</div><div><br></div><div>All the rest… bull. crap.</div><div><br></div><div>So this is what we’re working on right now. We are lowering the barriers by codifying and simplifying what we do, and we are working with partners like Edge to help disseminate our practices. We are an open source school, and anyone can take anything from us to adopt and adapt - except for our name.</div><div><br></div><div>Watch this space.</div><div><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/161482021-10-07T07:27:29Z2021-10-07T07:27:29ZIdeas and trust…<div class="trix-content">
<div>It was 2002. I was a secondary teacher of Information Technology in Hatfield High School in Doncaster, the school I went to as a kid. I had a Computer Science degree, and I was being asked to teach our kids how to use PowerPoint. The first curriculum module was called ‘All About Me’.</div><div><br></div><div>Half of the kids were gleefully creating horrendously animated PowerPoints about themselves without much of my input, so I asked them how they knew how to do it all. They told me they had been using PowerPoint for about three years in Primary school. The other half of my kids looked bored out of their brains, and now I knew why.</div><div><br></div><div>No doubt, this is still the same in most or all subjects. Secondary schools need to learn from Primary schools and step up.</div><div><br></div><div>I decided I needed to step up, so instead of PowerPoint, I got my kids to create mindmaps using a piece of software called ‘inspiration’. While this was marginally less boring, I wanted to take it to the next level. Then I had an idea. If students could record their screen while talking, they could create a video of themselves narrating through their learning and showing their work at the same time.</div><div><br></div><div>And this could work all the way through all my teaching. Kids in all my classes were creating things on the computer, then creating screenshots and writing about it. They could just video the screen and narrate over it!</div><div><br></div><div>Brilliant I thought, so I started to scour the internet for the software to use. I remember thinking, “Great! This will only take me a few minutes and away we go…” - but I couldn’t find any. I searched and searched, and I found something that did it, but it created huge files, like massive! And to top it off, it was connected to my interactive whiteboard, and I couldn’t get it to work on another computer. The whiteboard was acting as the largest dongle in the world…</div><div><br></div><div>So I kept looking and searching. I couldn’t believe that no one had invented this simple piece of technology that would be so useful.</div><div><br></div><div>…and then I discovered this little website which looked a little homemade with a piece of software called ‘ScreenFlash’. It recorded the screen, but unlike the other software I found, it created much smaller files in Flash (some of you might remember Flash - it got killed off by Steve Jobs and the iPad). It was almost perfect.</div><div><br></div><div>I downloaded it, installed it on a test computer, bought a cheap headset microphone and tried it out on my students. They loved it and it was almost magical. My brain was bursting with possibilities.</div><div><br></div><div>So I sent ScreenFlash an email, telling my story, that I was a teacher in the UK, and I would like to use their software in school, but it would need a few modifications, and that maybe I could sell it to other schools if they could change it slightly.</div><div><br></div><div>To my surprise, I got a reply. He was from Beijing and called himself John (not his real name, his ‘English’ name). We started conversing and I told him what modifications were needed for it to work in UK schools. I asked him how much money he wanted to do this work, and he said he didn’t want any money, but if I sold ScreenFlash to other schools that we would split the profit 50/50. I thought, wow!</div><div><br></div><div>John made the modifications and I started using it in my classroom. It was amazing. A new IT qualification was coming out (DiDA) and I showed it to the exam board. I asked if they would consider accepting screen recordings instead of screenshots, and to my surprise, they said they ‘must’ accept it.</div><div><br></div><div>I showed some other schools and they loved it too, and agreed to buy site licences from me. I ended up sitting in my local bank branch in Thorne, Doncaster asking them how I could send over £5,000 to a guy I’ve never met from Beijing called John (not his real name). They kept asking me if I knew what I was doing and I told them that he had trusted me, so I am trusting him.</div><div><br></div><div>I got the money sent, and thankfully, John replied saying thanks and if I wanted more modifications to sell more.</div><div><br></div><div>This went on for a while until I had another idea which I couldn’t find on the internet, which turned into realsmart learning portfolios, which we created in Flash which Steve Jobs killed, then I went to Apple Park HQ and remembered all my work, so I recreated this work but with what I know now, making realsmart learning maps (which will be launching soon), because guess what… after 19 years, there is still nothing else out there that can do the job I want it to.</div><div><br></div><div>After a few years of ScreenFlash, a company brought out a piece of software called Jing. While it wasn’t as fully featured as ScreenFlash, it was faster and much more simple, and it was free. I saw the writing on the wall. I couldn’t sell ScreenFlash to schools when I would want to use Jing for free instead, so I failed faster and stopped selling it. I told John (not his real name) who understood and we exchanged nice emails about trust and making things happen and pics of our new baby boys and maybe I might get to China at some point (I never have).</div><div><br></div><div>He was a nice guy and I hope he and his family are happy. I don’t think he knows how significant a part his trust has played in my life journey and I don’t have a way to get in touch with him anymore.</div><div><br></div><div>Best wishes John! (not your real name)</div><div><br></div><div>By the way, if you want to record your screen with a narrative now, Loom.com is brilliant. Fast, simple, collaborative and creative and all cloud-based. And guess what? It’s free for teachers… knock yourself out!</div><div><br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/153922021-09-05T07:00:51Z2021-09-05T07:00:51ZBuilding success on success<div class="trix-content">
<div>I recently realised I’d made a mistake. Something didn’t feel right. I’d committed to doing something which I know would have worked but I felt I was being drawn into a cul-de-sac. But it was just a feeling until I realised what I was doing and could name it, and therefore could state the solution. </div><div><br></div><div>I’ve been working on ‘productivity’ and specifically not just how I can explain to others how I get stuff done, but how I can meet them where they are at in order to move them to where they want to be. This has been very useful work in creating a foundation for extremely impactful work across our organisation. </div><div><br></div><div>I have learnt many things; how to unpack, codify and explain to others very abstract concepts which helps their practice and mine, how that no matter how clever and effective your solutions are, they will not have any impact unless you can sit beside someone and meet them where they are, and that productivity is all about managing our anxieties and sits firmly within wellbeing. </div><div><br></div><div>We have worked with teams and people who needed it, staff who would benefit from it the most, and we have seen some gains. </div><div><br></div><div>But I have not felt the big gains I was expecting, nor the sustainable cascade. Instead, I felt a spurt… when I and others injected energy into our staff, there was a momentary gain, like a liquid nitrogen turbo boost… BOOM!</div><div><br></div><div>But then, after this, I have felt entropy, and the same behaviours coming back and repeating. And I have wondered why. </div><div><br></div><div>I had set up sessions to repeat the work that had given us the gains, but I felt something wrong about it. I felt I was creating a black hole for myself - a situation where I would be spending my energy and only getting stuff out when I am putting it in, and we need to create supernovas. </div><div><br></div><div>And I realised my mistake. I was throwing seeds on stony ground. Instead of identifying staff who needed my help the most, I should have done the opposite; identify staff who already do it well, and work with them.</div><div><br></div><div>I realised I need to build success on success.</div><div><br></div><div>I have done this many times and it always works, and it is a strategy I use really well, but I fell into the conventional thinking trap of, “who needs my help the most? Ok… I’ll help them…”</div><div><br></div><div>My negative feelings were one of, “Why is all this coming from me? Why am I creating a dependence on my time? Why is it that I’m being seen as the expert, and therefore the gatekeeper?” - negative thoughts which seem to be around ego.</div><div><br></div><div>Fear and ego, hubris and entropy are our enemies which we need to smash. I need to get better at spotting these things within myself. </div><div><br></div><div>So I failed faster. I cancelled all my plans for this grand ‘roll out’ of productivity. </div><div><br></div><div>Instead, we are identifying our productivity champions, working with them so that they will create a development programme collaboratively, and for them to identify others who they believe will have success. And we create a supernova. </div><div><br></div><div>Those that struggle the most will be surrounded by those that are being successful and will inevitably adapt and slowly grow, or they will choose to bloom somewhere else. Either way, the organisation will strengthen. </div><div><br></div><div>With this thinking, I have identified a different area of development where we are making the same mistake - expecting everyone to do the same thing, before we have created a successful model. Success is achieved more easily through showing others your success, not trying to convince others that they may be successful.</div><div><br></div><div>This isn’t ‘piloting’, this is ‘modelling’. Just like we do with our kids. Trying to explain a concept and then expecting them to create the concept is much less successful than showing them a model and how it works and then asking them to recreate it. So we do the project first ourselves, and share the model for critique. </div><div><br></div><div>And what’s good enough for our kids is good enough for us.</div><div><br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/114092021-05-17T18:54:19Z2021-05-17T18:54:19ZSupernovas and black holes <div class="trix-content">
<div>I have described relationships as supernovas and black holes before. Some relationships no matter how much energy you put into them, suck the life out of you (black holes) and others make you feel bigger than the sum of your parts (supernovas!).<br><br>I’ve always tried to get rid of the black holes and invest in the supernovas. <br><br>This is the same with focus at work. I try to focus on three things that will give me the biggest payoff. The things that the more I put into them, the more impact they will have. <br><br>I also focus on three things I want to get rid of. The things that are taking my energy away for no impact or even negative impact. <br><br>While I’m investing as much time as I can on my three supernovas, I only have one black hole to kill. Hopefully this will be gone by the end of the week. <br><br>It feels great when I’m feeding my supernovas and it feels great when I kill a black hole. <br><br>Boom!<br><br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/107452021-05-02T07:53:25Z2021-05-02T07:53:26ZCopying is not cheating…<div class="trix-content">
<div>… it’s how we learn!</div><div><br></div><div>One of the main reasons XP has been successful so quickly is our ability to copy success. To see success somewhere else, and copy it.</div><div><br></div><div>That sounds like a really obvious thing to do, but a lot of people seem to have massive barriers to this.</div><div><br></div><div>When I visited High Tech High in 2012, I actually didn’t think about not copying their design principles. I saw that HTH’s success came from the deep belief, understanding and implementation of the design process which was rooted in their design principles.</div><div><br></div><div>When our first school launched in 2014, we had changed maybe a word or two, and added our understanding and interpretation to this, but they were essentially the same.</div><div><br></div><div>When we visited Springfield Renaissance and King Middle schools, we nicked their Habits of Work and Learning (HoWLs) and put them together. Yeah, we changed like one word (We changed ‘nice’ to ‘kind’), but they were the same.</div><div><br></div><div>When we heard about ‘crew’, we decided to call our pastoral system, ‘crew’.</div><div><br></div><div>When we saw Expeditionary Learning’s ‘three-dimensions’, we realised we had three dimensions too, and we aligned to them.</div><div><br></div><div>When I sat next to Scott Hartl (CEO of EL) in Atlanta during EL’s national conference, I had a black band on my right wrist. It said, “XP. #WeAreCrew”. Scott sat to my right and on his left wrist, he had a red band. It said, “EL #WeAreCrew”. I leant over to Scott and said cheekily, “Scott…? Are you copying me…?”. He laughed and said to me, “...as long as you keep recognising us, I promise not to sue…!”</div><div><br></div><div>For me, stealing ideas comes naturally. I don’t feel dishonourable or dirty. I feel proud that I can recognise why something is successful and then do the same. I feel like I am honouring the power of the idea and amplifying it in the world.</div><div><br></div><div>When Steve Mahoney, who was the Principal of Springfield heard we’d ‘repurposed’ his HoWLs, he asked if I could bring him one of our posters. When I met him in Boston, and delivered on his request, he was visibly emotional, that his idea had been amplified by us. This was a very powerful moment for me. He was proud that he had given his idea to me and we had built on it, that some part of Steve was forever enshrined in XP.</div><div><br></div><div>He didn’t ask me for a percentage. He wasn’t offended that we’d ripped off his intellectual property. He was proud that his idea had come to life, given birth as it were!</div><div><br></div><div>Coming from England, I am forever grateful for my American colleagues sharing so much with us, so graciously to further our noble mission. Larry Rosenstock (CEO of HTH) said to me, “You can take anything you want from us, apart from our name!”.</div><div><br></div><div>This was quite a surprise to me, coming from England, thinking Americans are all about monetising IP, when my experience is totally the opposite.</div><div><br></div><div>In England, we seem to feel we must come up with our own ideas. That copying is cheating, and it is not allowed and totally frowned upon.</div><div><br></div><div>...and maybe this comes from our experience at school?</div><div><br></div><div>It’s ironic that in a place where we are trying to transmit ideas to each other that ‘copying is plagiarism’ - we’re always copying each other! It’s how we learn! How we push ourselves further, by standing on the shoulders of giants!</div><div><br></div><div>When anyone visits our school, I say that we are an ‘open source’ school. If we can easily share the things we do, we will. You can have anything, but our name! (Thanks Larry!)</div><div><br></div><div>I repeat great things I have heard other people say. Sometimes I recognise and reference them, and you know, sometimes I don’t. Because it’s the concept that is important, not the person. If I use a quote, I investigate its origins first, as so many quotes are misquoted or attributed to the wrong person, or the origins are unknown!</div><div><br></div><div>George Bernard Shaw famously said, “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas”**</div><div><br></div><div>This is the fundamental principle of how we learn.</div><div><br><br></div><div>You don’t have to ‘come up with your own words’ if someone else has come up with some great ones already!</div><div><br><br></div><div>The transmission of concepts.</div><div><br></div><div>Sharing stories.</div><div><br></div><div>Meme theory.</div><div><br></div><div>Alan Moore’s Ideaspace.</div><div><br><br></div><div>Copy me. No please… Copy me!</div><div><br><br><br><br></div><div>(...** or did he…? <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/13/swap-ideas/">https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/13/swap-ideas/</a> )</div><div><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/93612021-04-14T05:55:35Z2021-04-14T05:55:35ZShow me...<div class="trix-content">
<div>I often say that the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my professional career have been when I’ve employed someone for their apparent skill set, and not their character. That need to fill that space in your organisation, the slight panic because they ‘can do’ what you can’t. The relief when they start...<br><br>...then the bullshit starts.<br><br>...when ‘yes’ is suffixed by a qualifying statement that makes it ‘no’...<br><br>“Yes, well, when X happens...”, “Yep, all done. Just need to...”, “It’s ready to go, apart from...”<br><br>You rely on ‘trust’. You feel honourable that you are ‘trusting’ people. You feel like you are a good leader. They won’t let you down, you say to yourself, whilst having this little nagging feeling in the back of your head.<br><br>Just give them a bit more time. And a bit more space, and they’ll deliver. Don’t pressure them, because god forbid, you don’t want them to leave... who will do the job then? Do you even know anybody else who can do this work..? After all, their reference was great, they must be able to do it. They’ll come through, you’ll see.<br><br>...then you realise you’re bullshitting yourself.<br><br>I have three tools that ensure I either don’t get into this state, or at least I get out of it quick.<br><br>The first is the hardest, and takes most time, most investment, and that is “Do the job yourself first”. At XP, I’ve done every job (and I mean EVERY job) apart from cook. I guess I could be bullshitted about cooking... but not teaching, or SEN, or safeguarding, or finance, or marketing or HR or... you become a ‘general’ ie ok at almost everything, but not specialised. But then you can hire people that are at least better than you, because you know how to do it. You can’t be bullshitted.<br><br>The second is the way to get out of the situation the best; ‘fail faster’. When you get that niggling doubt, you act on it. If someone is going to react badly, they might as well do it sooner rather than later. Set up a test, see if they come through. If not, fail faster. Cut your losses. It’s the best for both of you. You might be able to be bullshitted, but not for so long it causes lasting damage. You will find someone else, and if you don’t, then what you were trying to do would’ve failed anyway...<br><br>The last is the most sustainable, most replicable, most sensible. Yet a lot of people feel really uncomfortable doing it, because of our sense of honour and our understanding of what ‘trust’ is. It’s two words...<br><br>“Show me...”<br><br>I cannot think of one single thing that I have wanted to achieve that didn’t ‘look like’ something, that is, something you can see... <br><br>For instance, let’s think of something seemingly intangible, like say, the ‘happiness of our staff’. Let’s say we want our staff to be more happy, and you employ a ‘happy’ coach. Well, I would ask, “So what does that look like...?” - “What will I be able to see that is different to now, when our staff are more happy?”... Well, it might be that staff absences go down, or less staff are late for work, or more are willing to do extra-curricular activities, or they smile and talk more in corridors...<br><br>Whatever you want to achieve, there is always something you can see with your eyes. Everything else is not real. It’s bullshit.<br><br>When someone says they’ve done something, ask them to show you. Don’t believe it, till you’ve seen it with your own eyes.<br><br>This isn’t a case of mistrust. Trust is a transaction. You put your trust in someone to deliver something for you.<br><br>When you walk into a shop and you hand over your money, you don’t just ‘trust’ that the shop keeper will at some point in the future get you what you want. You demand it. And until you’ve seen it, until it’s in your hands, you’ll keep demanding it.<br><br>This transaction is the same as delegating, giving them responsibility and then holding them to account. Accountability is a transaction. As a leader, you must demand of yourself to see the tangible outcomes.<br><br>When you do this right, rigour and accountability in your organisation becomes public celebration. “Show me...” becomes how we celebrate the amazing work our colleagues are doing, pushing us to do more than we thought we could.<br><br>“Show me...” becomes an expectation, not a shock, and the opportunity to “Show off” and celebrate.<br><br>“Show me...” also stops you from being bullshitted, because in the end, the only person bullshitting you is yourself.<br><br><br><br><br><br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/66142021-03-18T07:01:50Z2021-03-18T07:01:50ZSeven years work<div class="trix-content">
<div>For over two years now, I have been obsessively thinking about and actively working on simplification.<br><br>Building XP, we made a racing car. Faster than any other, better than any other, could win any race, but only if it didn’t blow up before the end.<br><br>When we get things right, the results are spectacular, but as we grow, we find that people don’t always get why we do things, so they shortcut. They turn purposeful actions into tasks they have to do, so they try to get them done as quick as possible, or get away with not doing them when no-one is looking...<br><br>...it’s a natural thing to do, and so we call it ‘entropy’... when we see something not quite right, we recognise we need to use our energy to reshape the systems we have created.<br><br>But because XP was so complex, there were many moving parts, and not many people understood how the whole thing works. On top of this, if you tinker with one thing, something else is affected elsewhere, or more than one thing, or sometimes a cascade of things. Schools are not jigsaws, they are more like neural networks. People networks are complex.<br><br>There are a number of quotes that struck me... I think all of them are from dead white guys... but y’know... for me, they get to the heart of the power and problem of simplification to solve the issue of entropy.<br><br>1. Blaise Pascal was a French dude, so this is paraphrasing, but his note went something like this... “I’m sorry for writing you this long letter... I didn’t have time to write a short one...” - I love this quote, because you equate brevity with time, and it’s just not true. To look effortless takes a hell of a lot of effort.<br><br>2. Albert Einstein - again paraphrasing - “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler” - there is a balance here, and if you go over it, you lose all meaning.<br><br>3. Antoine de Saint-Exupery - another French dude... “<strong>Perfection</strong> is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. “<br><br><br>There’s another quote, but I’ll leave that till the end... ...back to our story... we were seven years into our XP journey, and we’d done all this work on simplification... if you simplify things, more people understand it, so more people will do it right, they will do things faster and better, so the quality goes up and interestingly, the cost goes down. You normally equate quality with speed and cost. There is a ‘quality, cost, speed’ triangle where you can only pick two.<br><br>Well, here’s a secret... if you simplify things, you achieve the genius of the ‘AND’... you get all three.<br><br>So we’re simplifying like crazy... aligning things left, right and centre, using numbered lists, using ‘pattern language’ (another blog post...), colours even etc all the design tricks in the book...<br><br>...and then we realised we hadn’t looked at what started XP in the first place, our design principles... we realised that the things we used to build XP were only understood by a handful of people at most. So we turned our gaze onto this.<br><br>Now, we could only do this because of the 10,000 hours we had spent previously on everything else, but it only took 30 minutes to reduce our design principles to one sentence (in reality, it took seven years)<br><br><strong><em>“At XP, we build our community through activism, leadership and equity, sharing our stories as we go...”</em></strong><br><br>This beautiful little sentence is our masterpiece. I will say that this is the best piece of work I will ever achieve in my lifetime. But I do not expect everyone to understand why I say this so boldly.<br><br>No, the real work has begun; to show how everything originates from this sentence, from abstract to concrete. From this sentence, we can build much more than a school, but our school is where it starts.<br><br>Watch this space...<br><br><br>My last quote is from Steve Jobs... <em>“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”</em><br><br><br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/56302021-03-12T08:11:28Z2021-03-12T08:11:29ZOnce more with feeling...<div class="trix-content">
<div>I’m sat in a lecture theatre in Apple University, at 1, Infinite Loop, and the guy presenting to us says, “when designing product, we start and end with this... ‘how does it make me feel...?’...”<br><br>Our initial designs for realsmart learning maps are nowhere near where we have ended up. We’ve archived these notes probably for nostalgic reasons so we can see the design process and the moments of breakthrough, the moments when we were able to simplify things. <br><br>We spent a good number of months getting the feel right. I was driving people crazy talking about the architect, Christopher Alexander, and ‘increasing the life’ between the fundamental elements of our design. <br><br>I know how I want realsmart to feel like. That feeling you get when you hear a great song for the first time, but you feel like it’s existed forever. It must have, because you know somehow where it’s going to go, but it manages to surprise and excite you anyway when it does it. <br><br>And if it is a song, it’s a three minute pop song. You get it in the first minute, and you listen on repeat to finally know each note, each dynamic, like that dropped beat in the middle of Blondie’s Heart of Glass, so you know its secrets. <br><br>Now this is hard to achieve when you’re talking about an app fundamentally designed to allow us to learn more and learn it faster! Not as exciting! But you know... for a metaphor on how to achieve a feeling, that’s it!<br><br>“Ok, so what does it do...? Ok so I can do this, right, ah ok so then I can add stuff here, and share and... oh wow! I could use this for X and I could use it for Y and... does it do...? Yes, great! Wow, it’s so easy and fast. Let me think about this for a bit... yes, yes I’m gonna do this with it, now!”<br><br>Then it becomes your old friend and you can annoy everyone by saying, “oh, you’re still doing things that way... ok, but you really need to have a look at this. I can show you if you want...? No, it’ll only take 3 minutes...”<br><br><br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/55272021-03-11T19:57:32Z2021-03-11T19:57:32ZCan one person change the world?<div class="trix-content">
<div>I’m reading a couple of books about the halcyon days of ‘britsoft’ - when it was possible for one person to create a computer game that became a smash hit. I remember playing ‘Monty Mole’ on my ZX Spectrum in the early 80s, programmed by the very talented Peter Harrap who lived in the village I went to school at, and I had the privilege to work with when he graciously wanted to give something back and was our incredibly over qualified IT technician at the school I worked at. <br><br>But there’s something inbuilt to society that says, ‘you can’t do that...’ - no matter what you see... the two Steve’s who formed Apple. You can’t do that. Jeff who created Amazon. You can’t do that. Greta, the kid who shamed the world hopefully into some meaningful action. You can’t do that. Yeah, they have, but you can’t. <br><br>You can’t because now it takes a big company to make a blockbuster game. It takes a trillion dollar company to get the market share you need to compete. And if you think you have an idea, someone else will pick it up and make it a success, not you. <br><br>I remember trying to find the software I needed to do my job in 2004, and after literally hundreds of hours googling in disbelief, I realised it didn’t exist, so I decided to make it. I was constantly told I wouldn’t be able to make a success of it and even if I did, a big company would copy it (How many times was I told that!?). <br><br>Yet even now, 17 years later, there isn’t anything that does what I want. So I’m making it. <br><br>Am I sure it will be a success? All I know for certain is that I want it. I’m pretty sure it will be an amazing success. I think this because I believe it’s a ‘crossover’ - not just for schools but for anything and anyone. But I can’t be certain. So I’m making it. <br><br>Not on my own, but with a small talented team within realsmart.co.uk - in fact, with one programmer, one designer and the managing director, Simon Brown. Four of us. <br><br>Let’s see what happens, hey?<br><br>Do I believe that one person can change the world?<br><br>Yes, you can. <br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/54052021-03-11T10:48:05Z2021-03-11T10:48:05Zrealsmart<div class="trix-content">
<div>I formed my company, realsmart.co.uk in 2004 in Aberdovey, Wales. 8 years later, I found out Outward Bound had started in Aberdovey too. This was after I had decided to open a new school based on Expeditionary Learning, which was born out of OB... must be something in the welsh water...<br><br>At realsmart, we created five portfolio tools... an assessment for learning portfolio, a website builder, blog and podcast builder, a mind mapping tool and a passport portfolio. We also made a filesystem that allowed you to store any artefact you created on the internet... so six tools...<br><br>After I created the first 'like' button in 2004, which no-one in the world noticed or recognises, and building realsmart into a £1m+ company from my bedroom, Steve Jobs famously announced that he was killing Flash, the technology that our beautiful app was made from, and that was pretty much that.<br><br>I started the journey of XP around 2012, and left realsmart with my business partner.<br><br>Fast forward to 2020, and I found myself in control of realsmart again, and sitting in Apple Park headquarters, in Cupertino, San Fransisco. I made the only phone call I could... "We need to make the realsmart app again, but with what we know now..."<br><br>One year on, today, the app is shaping up nicely. It is being used to create the new 'activist' curriculum in XP, which will be shared with the world in a few month's time.<br><br>I love how things change, and I love my drive to make everything a simple as possible. The eureka moment came mid last year, when we realised that the five... no, six tools we created... was actually just one.<br><br>If someone asked me to imagine what a tool looked like that combined a website, blog, mind map, AfL and passport portfolio with an internet filing system would look like, I would guess at, "A MESS!"<br><br>But we have created something so fast and simple, and I am incredibly proud of it.<br><br>It is being used in anger right now, and will be ready to launch to the public for the next academic year.<br><br><br>realsmart learning maps connects you with your learning, from concept to content.<br><br><br>See you this summer...<br><br>...oh, and the smiley is back... ;-) </div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/53952021-03-11T10:17:01Z2021-03-11T10:17:01ZHey World!<div class="trix-content">
<div>So, I've been following this company based in Chicago ever since I created my own company, realsmart.co.uk in 2004. They're called basecamp.com and they make two products I use every day... basecamp which I use for all my projects (I currently have six...), and their new take on email, hey.com - which now allows you to blog, from an email, which I'm doing now...<br><br>What I find fascinating and useful and inspiring about them, is that they're sort of a 'meta-company' - in terms of, they create tools for companies to use to create companies. Their books (of which I have every one) are about making companies too. But it's not just about companies or software or books, it's about the design of life.<br><br>Almost everything they say, I feel an absolute affinity with. Their design shapes mine. I recognise the patterns they talk about. I see it in my own work. I give myself to the design process and my work gets better and better.<br><br>I am told a lot of stuff I do is not the conventional way to go about things. But what I do makes complete sense to me, and I don't understand why others keep doing the same things that don't make sense to me.<br><br>I have said for years that the biggest weakness in my leadership is that I assume others will react the way I would, even though I know most people don't react the way I do... so this year, I have been working on meeting people where they are, and trying to understand their point of view, looking through their eyes.<br><br>This has reaped the biggest benefits for me. I am able to scaffold, model and frame from an individual or a group's perspective to understand how to work closer, in a much more impactful way.<br><br>My mission is to write the handbook on this, and at XP, we are doing this as a collective. Alongside this, I am modelling how we learn through technology and how we learn it faster and simpler.<br><br>We will launch 'The Culture Burger' this summer, and 'realsmart learning maps', ready for the new academic year.<br><br>Then things will go crazy...<br><br>🤪<br><br></div>
</div>
Gwyn ap Harrigwyn@hey.com