Is this an accurate description of your school district central office administrators/staff ?

Does your organization (or discipline) encourage or discourage you to directly go to others with whom you want to collaborate?

Many organizations cling to the traditional notion that people who want to work together need to do so by going through their supervisor. Essentially they have to wait until their supervisor talks to the other person’s supervisor, and if the two agree that people from their teams can work together, the respective employees will get the go-ahead.

Sound crazy? It is!

Even when this exact scenario isn’t the case, many organizations are so hierarchically structured that people from different teams have very few opportunities to discover each other.
Stewart Mader discussing this blog entry

Stewart hits on one of the fundamental problems with school leadership. Having seen how bad it can go, I’m now open to seeing how well it can be. Dr. Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) once gave me some advice that I have found useful–don’t be afraid to circumvent the hierarchy if they’re dysfunctional. It has been wonderful advice. Quinn, author of Deep Change (a book I highly recommend), shares that it’s important to align your realities, internal and external. For me, that means not holding back for fear of speaking up, sharing what I know with others and introducing a new reality.

Wow, that’s powerful and so doggone liberating. Why didn’t I do this more? That’s the power of wikis, though…enabling people to work together, to bypass the culture and current accepted version of reality. Time and again, I’ve found it easier to share information via a wiki with other people, giving them the power to edit meeting notes, etc. In considering school leadership, it’s no longer a matter of getting my version of what’s happening out there or ensuring that others are telling the truth.

Rather, it’s about building a story of what happened together…and a wiki enables that, especially in school situations where emails that fight for primacy are abandoned in the use of a wiki that all can access, modify to reflect a shared understanding of reality. Wow.

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