BackIn the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.
– Shunryu Suzuki
As a leader working on leadership, I tend to give what it means to ‘lead’ much thought. While the mission I lead has been clear from day zero – to enable education leadership, what it takes to develop and nurture leadership as a trait instead of defining it as a position of power has come with its ambiguities and confusion. Or, should I say, my team and I have had to practise openness to consider and discover new possibilities, do what seems unintuitive, take the roads not taken and even change our paths midway.
One of the biggest learnings from my journey has been moving from cultivating leadership as the end goal to the first step of bringing about change. Scale can be achieved when everyone can be a leader. And, as with any journey, mine too has had a few mindset shifts that are fundamental to how I think and what I do. Here are three:
From “I’ve done it before and I have the answers” to “I don’t know what I don’t know”
ShikshaLokam has been set up by the Shibulal family. Mr. SD Shibulal was the CEO of Infosys and having seen the success of Infosys Leadership Institute, thought to set up something similar for education leadership.
At the core, the idea remained the same – if everyone displays leadership, a system can turn around and become high-performing. So, we planned to start a physical institute called the National Institute for Leadership in Education (NILE). We envisioned this as a space where leaders such as principals and education officials would come, attend classes to become better leaders and go back. We prototyped and experimented – all but built the building and thank goodness for that! It was at this time that we asked ourselves: while we’re designing for school leaders, do we even know them? Do we know what they seek, what challenges they face, what their days look like? Thus began our journey of meeting them where they are.
We visited school after school and spoke to leader after leader. It was eye-opening. While many stories we’ve heard of schools in remote and rural areas stop at them being under-resourced and underserved, we witnessed stories that went far beyond and spoke of passion, determination and commitment. We met a principal who nurtured a kitchen garden in the school so that children could eat nutritious mid-day meals. Another who got up early and walked to the vegetable market for fresh ingredients. It made us think about what’s possible despite constraints. It boiled down to ownership – to believe we can make a difference, no matter how small, and take responsibility for it.
This is ShikshaLokam’s central question: What can we do so that each school principal, each teacher, each member of the support staff and each education official believes that they can make a difference?
Now, if I narrow down what we really mean when we say “enable education leadership” it would be a simple statement: making sure every leader feels a sense of agency; every leader drives continuous micro-improvements in his/her context.
From thinking impact is the antithesis of scale to believing impact at scale is possible
I used to think that to create impact, I had to work with few people, deeply. It didn’t occur to me to even consider trying to think of impact and scale going together until a board meeting in 2017. We were presenting our 5-year strategy to our advisors and told them we wanted to go from 20 schools to 1,000 schools by 2025. Sanjay Purohit, who was one of our advisors at the time, asked a question that changed our journey entirely: Do you want to grow or do you want to scale? At first, we were stumped. We couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. Slowly, as we reflected, we realised that scale is relative to the size of the problem. We reframed our goal to 1.5 million schools. This seeded the idea of creating exponential change at ShikshaLokam since we realised we would have to create a multiplier effect to reach 4.5 million education leaders in these 1.5 million schools without exponentially increasing the size of our team.
Just this articulation opened up so many new doors for us. We learnt, unlearnt and tried to reimagine the problem at societal scale. We pursued many different ideas – some that even seem silly to talk about now – from implementing a 12-month school development programme to creating an app where leaders could access courses and learning material. Experimenting like this taught us some valuable lessons: one, what it takes to co-create with the ecosystem, two, building beyond as a way to leverage what exists and make something faster and cheaper, and three, the difference between designing capabilities to catalyse interactions and for one-way transmission of knowledge. We started thinking about what it would look like to move from solving to distributing the ability to solve.
From here, the idea of micro-improvement came about. We realised leaders can sense the challenges present and are equipped, without needing permission or budget, to solve one or two of these challenges. Our theory of action then became enabling this solving – which we call micro-improvements. Since these are +1 improvements rooted in the school’s unique context and needs, it is easy for leaders to drive them. On our side, we took this idea to actors across society such as government, civil society organisations and communities, to make it come alive.
We believe that micro-improvements have a compounding effect that can ultimately make the education system better.
From thinking mission to building a movement
This leg of our journey is just beginning. What started from NILE and led to the ShikshaLokam as a platform is now taking shape as a movement – an open network of actors across government, civil society and markets leading collective action towards a more robust education system in India. We are calling this Shikshāgraha. It enables education leaders, District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET), civil society organisations, youth, women – as individuals and as institutions – to lead the co-creation efforts for these need-based programs, or micro-improvements.
No one leader or improvement can shift the system to a better equilibrium – it needs education leaders, different Govt. Institutions and civil society organisations to collectively create an overall problem map, prioritise shared cares and concerns and collaborate to tackle these problems. Earlier, I narrowed down what it is that ShikshaLokam wants to do – making sure every leader feels a sense of agency. Now, building on that, we’re working towards a system that doesn’t only create space for the agency of actors to be restored and exercised but also changes alongside. We are confident that this phase of our journey will bring along many more unusual allies. We’re very excited to reimagine and realise our vision for the education system in India. I invite you to join the movement!
Learn more about leadership at societal scale, or system orchestration.
