The DMC’s Seventh Superintendents' Strategy Summit: Recap

DMC’s Superintendent Strategy Summit was held in New York City on January 20-22, 2009, and titled Innovation in Education: Developing and Scaling Effective Strategies. For DMC, strategic innovation is a means to pursue our three goals of increasing student achievement while improving operational efficiency and reducing or maintaining costs.  The agenda followed three main stages in the innovation process: 1) idea generation 2) testing and refinement and 3) replication at scale.  DMC’s innovation frameworks closely tie with the initial guidance given by the Department of Education on the Investing in Innovation (“i3”) grant program, slated to begin later this spring, and many participating districts are planning to pursue the grants.

DMC defines an innovation as something that is actually implemented and achieves results.  This differentiates between the concepts of “invention” and “innovation.”  An invention is an idea made manifest while an innovation is an idea applied successfully over time.  Further, incremental innovations make smaller but less risky changes over time, while breakthrough innovations pursue revolutionary results, but with higher risk of failure.   Innovation management should force districts to pursue these differing objectives intentionally, and to organize accordingly.  DMC’s management approaches focus on enhancing specific areas of the three stages of innovation to improve overall efficacy and resource efficiency.

Within the first stage of "idea generation" DMC focuses on three discrete sources of new ideas:  individuals and teams within the organization, and external sourcing from either one-off pursuits or longer-term partnerships.  Each of these areas has a variety of best practices for school district management and leadership.  Meeting participants discussed a video clip of a team from the legendary design firm IDEO working on a new product.  IDEO’s process serves as a classic example of carefully managed idea generation with an interdisciplinary team that resolves initial failures quickly in pursuit of a clearly defined goal.  Similar processes can be applied for a variety of incremental and breakthrough innovations in public education.

At certain points in the implementation process, school districts need to decide if the initiative should move forward, remain where it is, be put on hold, or abandoned entirely in order to avoid failures and capitalize on a positive outcome.

For the testing and refinement phase of innovation. DMC introduced a structured process to determine the continuation or strategic abandonment of an emerging innovation. At certain points in the implementation process, school districts need to decide if the initiative should move forward, remain where it is, be put on hold, or abandoned entirely in order to avoid failures and capitalize on a positive outcome.  Forming a bridge between the testing and refinement discussion and the replicating at scale discussion, superintendents were treated to a case study presentation by John Barry, superintendent of Aurora Public Schools in Colorado, who shared his strategy to bring about transformation of a diverse set of district practices.  Barry cited trust and transparency among employees, innovative use of student data, and strategic planning as key factors in the growing success of the program.

Barry cited trust and transparency among employees, innovative use of student data, and strategic planning as key factors in the growing success of the program.

For the last stage, replicating innovative ideas at scale in a school district requires applying everything we know as leaders about successful change management.  DMC focused the Summit discussion on overcoming barriers regarding organizational design and team structures.  Matching the team to the task is critical for innovation success.  Teams need to be structured appropriately for the goal at hand.  If small-scale incremental innovation is being pursued, existing functional teams may work.  However, if the innovation being pursued is more of a “breakthrough” nature, the likelihood of success is increased by using more independent teams with greater stand-alone decision making authority. Finally, Summit attendees also discussed the importance of ongoing management through a portfolio approach to contain risk and resource allocation.

Apple’s observation of consumer needs and elimination of excess led to many of the most innovative and successful product designs in its market, steps to innovation that school districts could translate for their own efforts.

In DMC tradition, attendees also discussed a Harvard Business School case study to give an example of innovation and leadership outside the education sector.  Attendees analyzed a case study on Apple, frequently ranked the most innovative company in the world, and its leader, Steve Jobs.  Apple’s observation of consumer needs and elimination of excess led to many of the most innovative and successful product designs in its market, steps to innovation that school districts could translate for their own efforts. In addition to the main innovation themes of the conference, participants were treated to two additional guest speaker sessions that rounded out a variety of related management themes.  First, Dr. Abelardo Saavedra, former superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, gave an encore presentation regarding Houston’s groundbreaking pay-for-performance program.  Originally presented at DMC’s Fall 2009 Leadership Development Meeting, the presentation prompted an invigorating discussion regarding not only pay-for-performance, but also regarding multiple aspects of innovation, including how we define it and how we take it to scale.  Second, Kevin S. Buehler, a Senior Partner at the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, presented scenarios for possible economic recovery based on the latest research and expert insights. The severity of this downturn demands innovation from school district leaders who must learn to think differently in order to stabilize scale-backs on budgets and resources.