Shaping the new leaders of education

INTERVIEW – A program that aims to help disadvantaged school districts in Ohio used A3 thinking to teach principals how to scientifically solve problems with teachers. We met with a principal and one of her teachers.

Interviewees: Peg Pennington, executive director of the center for operational excellence at Ohio State University, and Aneesa Locke-Hines, program manager for Ohio state social services – Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities.

Roberto Priolo: Can you introduce the BRIGHT program to Planet Lean readers and explain how lean fits into the broader context?

Peg Pennington: The BRIGHT MBA program started last year. It was an idea generated by the Ohio Business Roundable in collaboration with the Ohio Department of Education and the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. It aims to help children in schools in disadvantaged districts.

The program is aimed at professionals from outside the education system (such as government, the military or business), who are given a place in school districts across the state of Ohio for one year while they study for their MBA.

I was asked to teach the Operations part of the curriculum, and it is in that context that I decided to give the students A3 thinking. I wanted them to learn to think critically about problems. Each program participant created an A3 of the projects they worked on with the teachers of the school where they worked during the academic year, and then I taught those A3s.

RP: Aneesa, can you tell us about your background and how you came to take part in the BRIGHT program?

Aneesa Locke-Hines: My background is almost entirely in social services. For the last ten years, I worked at Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities (OOD), the Ohio state agency that seeks to ensure quality employment and independence for Ohioans with disabilities. I have a sixteen-year-old son with a disability, who had a very hard time at school. That, combined with my passion for education, made BRIGHT particularly appealing to me.

RP: What was your favorite thing about the program? What was the biggest lesson you learned?

ALH: The program was transformational. It gave me two new perspectives: as a school principal, I was able to look at the state of our education system from the inside (after being a parent advocate on the outside for many years), and the MBA taught me how leadership needs to behave if change is to come. Looking back, the two fit together perfectly and gave me a very strong foundation. It was exhausting, but truly great.

The biggest lesson I learned was about leadership. The program taught me that, ultimately, leadership is about discovering what your people are good at and bringing it out. No one can do it alone. Instead, a leader has to learn to maximize their resources – people being the most precious of all. Coming from social services, I already shared this view, but going through the MBA really reinforced the idea and made me feel more comfortable as a leader.

RP: Back to you, Peg. What did you focus on specifically when teaching the students about A3 thinking?

PP: The problem was that they had no clear metrics to work with - a common situation in any kind of organization. We had to break the cycle of fixing something without knowing what the problem was: A3 thinking helped the principals go back to the beginning to truly understand the current state and describe it in the form of a metric. In manufacturing, looking at trends is something most people take for granted, but in education it is new.

I spent a long time on the cause-and-effect diagram we see in John Shook's book “Managing to Learn”. If there is a gap in a school's reading scores, for example, there is a multitude of problems that can be related to it. I had the MBA students recognize that teachers have to be part of the solution and have to work together to solve problems. To improve and create change, you need to have the teachers on board.

A3 thinking helped the students see problems within a systemic context. While some of the problems children face are too big for us to solve on our own, understanding the context is important so that we can act on what we can influence.

RP: Can you give me an example?

PP: Sure. There is a protocol for how teachers should break up a fight: they usually send the children involved to the principal's office. When they do that, however, the children are out of class for about 55 minutes, which will have a negative effect on their reading and math scores in the future. Once the context was analyzed, it became clear that what seems to be a normal reaction can in fact have a very negative impact down the line. If, as a teacher, I see a bad interaction between students, how do I resolve it? What can I do to make sure the class carries on normally without sending the child to the principal's office? It may seem like a small thing, but it was actually a major cause of variation in the schools we looked at.

RP: How did the MBA students react to the A3s and what results do you believe you achieved?

PP: Some of them got it immediately, especially those with an industrial background. I remember one of the MBA students immediately understanding it and using the cause-and-effect diagram to ask the teachers to understand why certain problems were occurring (instead of them thinking he was blaming them for those problems). They then mapped the situation together.

What I tried to do (and I believe I succeeded) was to teach the MBA students a different way of thinking. First of all, by showing them – as Aneesa said – that they cannot go it alone. Second, by helping them understand the difference between success and failure: what method are we using to test and know whether a certain change had the desired effect?

RP: What did you think of the A3 exercise, Aneesa?

ALH: Once everything was explained and we had a finished A3, I realized how amazing it was. Looking at the data and going from process to process takes the emotion out of the equation and helps you look at the problem objectively. Discussing with teachers the reasons why our children do not perform well can be a rather emotional conversation, but when you are looking at the situation from the data, it becomes easier to handle: given the information we have, this is how we can behave.

To get to that point, I had to work on eliminating my own personal bias, which was leading me down a specific path. Peg's coaching helped me understand why I was jumping to a solution I thought was right instead of the one the data showed to be the most logical. Without a doubt, the hardest part is taking a step back and understanding where you think you should go compared to where the data is taking you. Now I use A3 thinking on a regular basis: it helps me not get stuck on the problem at hand, but actually find a solution to it.

RP: Peg, another one for you. What opportunities do you see for programs like BRIGHT in the United States?

PP: Every organization in America and elsewhere can benefit from truly understanding the point of concern it is trying to solve, rather than simply throwing out solution after solution. The BRIGHT MBA program is a proposed countermeasure to traditional methods – a way of studying whether or not what we are doing in education is effective. Applying the scientific method (and that is what A3 is about) makes you a critical thinker… we need more of them!

RP: And you, Aneesa? What do you think about the potential of these kinds of programs?

ALH: Every decision we make has to be for the children! It sounds elementary, but it is often not how we see things. There is a lot of clutter in the system right now, and a lot of things that need to be improved. If someone is brave enough to take a step back and ask whether everything we are doing really helps us meet our main goal – the education of our students –, we will see immense progress. I think the first step toward that is getting rid of all the clutter and focusing on what is important in our education system.

In my next role, as principal of the lowest-performing school in my city, I want to make a difference for the children. I don't want them to struggle the way my son did to get a quality education.