Read the full transcript of Episode 65 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Carla Silver, executive director of Leadership + Design. She joins host Morva McDonald to discuss leadership and where schools are headed. Carla outlines the three pillars of Leadership + Design’s work as: developing reflective changemakers; instilling the habits of human-centered design thinking; and creating the capacity for leaders to become optimistic futurists.
Morva McDonald: When I was a head of school, I just cherished and loved the moments when I got to step back from the daily work, take a minute for a cup of coffee, reflect, take a walk, and think really about the big, big ideas about leadership or the school's mission and its vision and the strategy that was always just kind of around the corner, right? And I found myself more than once, actually many, many times, reflecting on some of the ideas from leadership and design about being curious and the value of telling the story of strategy.
Today we have Carla Silver, a co-founder and executive director of Leadership + Design. For the last 15 years, she's been partnered with schools and school leaders to build cultures of learning and to develop capacity as reflective change makers, practitioners, optimistic futurists, and human-centered design thinkers. That's a big task. Before coming to L+D, she worked in independent schools as a teacher, a coach, and an administrator.
Carla, welcome to New View EDU. I've been a big fan of Leadership + Design, and I've always thought about, I've kind of been curious actually about the name of leadership and design and kind of where that came from and how you think about that, what you're trying to tell us actually, just even in the title of the organization. So maybe you can share a little bit of that story with us.
Carla Silver: My gosh, such a great story. First of all, thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here. I'm an equally big fan of NAIS and have been for so many years. Leadership + Design. Well, it's an interesting story. I don't know if you know the history of the organization at all, but we actually started as two different organizations. We started as an organization called the Santa Fe Leadership Center, and that was founded by myself and a wonderful longtime school leader, Gary Gruber, and he was working and living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And so I'm from New Mexico, so I got a chance to go back every year to see New Mexico and work with Gary. And we were doing a lot of work with school leaders in New Mexico. And we started as the Santa Fe Leadership Center, really thinking about the inner work of school leaders, which has been a theme of our work at L+D ever since.
On the other side of this, of our organization of L+D, was a small little collaboration that was Ryan Burke and Greg Bamford. And they were starting something called Leading is Learning. And it was really, once again, similar to Santa Fe Leadership Center, about really great professional development. And they were really interested in human centered design work, as were we. And it's been 10 years, so in 2014, we actually merged the two organizations. We had been doing some collaborating together and we decided that this was a good opportunity for us to bring these two sort of fledgling organizations together. We were really organized around a lot of the same values and a lot of the same work.
And so we were looking for a name, and L+D came from a program that Leading is Learning was running, called Leadership and Design Summer. And it was one program that they were doing. And it was helping educators learn the design thinking process, and—learn it and then spend a week working with kids and teaching them the human centered design, design thinking process. And it was a really amazing program. And we thought a lot about different names for the organization. But we ended with Leadership + Design in part because we really were two organizations coming together. That little plus sign kind of…
Morva McDonald: Highlights that.
Carla Silver: Yeah. And then we were focused on leadership and we were really grounded in human centered design. Plus we loved all the things you could do with L+D, know, learning and development, leading and development, had kind of an R and D sound to it. And we always like to think of ourselves as, you know, innovators and entrepreneurs and we also love the idea of being able to L+Do it, I like to say. So. The name kind of stuck and you know, sometimes I look at it. I'm like it's a weird name, but it works and it works for us.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, it stands out. I think I really, as having been a school leader, I really appreciate the combination, actually, of leadership and design. I think the human centered part of the work, right, is really central and helping people put those two things together is, I think, just really key.
You mentioned that you came together in 2014. So we're in 2024. This is the big 10 year moment for you. And I'm just, I’m curious about like, when you think back across that 10 years, what have been some of your greatest learning moments, right? Either individually for yourself, but as an organization, or just like what you've come to understand about leading and leading in a school.
Carla Silver: Oh my gosh, 10 years, it's gone by so fast. For me, I think first and foremost, I have learned a lot about the fact that my role, and our role at Leadership + Design, not just my role, we get to work with just an amazingly diverse set of schools and school leaders. And one of the things I'm learning, and continue to learn, is how to enter a school or work with a school leader and help them think about where they want to go and to meet them where they want to go, not necessarily what I think about schools or learning and what's best.
Because I'm a human being, and each of us at Leadership + Design are human beings with some of our own opinions about education and teaching and learning. But that doesn't mean that those opinions are necessarily right for every school or every school leader. So our job is to help them, to get them where they want to go in service of their students and their communities. So that's an ongoing learning that I have. But over 10 years, I've also learned a lot about building an organization and scaling it, and working towards making an actual impact, both on an individual school and on a school leader, but also on the educational community. Like, how can we do that? How can we continue to do that better? And we just met as a leadership, as a L+D team last week, and we were thinking, well, what is L+D 2.0? We've gotten to this point.
Morva McDonald: What’s next?
Carla Silver: Yeah, what's next?
You know, obviously L+D is framed around three primary pillars, and I think these have been emergent over time. You know, we always saw ourselves really focused on that inner school leader, so that reflective change maker. How do you really think about being a reflective change maker? How do you build change in ways that are effective, that decrease resistance in a school community? How do you lead really joyfully? How do you do the inner work that helps you to sustain really big challenges?
So being reflective changemakers has been really important. That human centered design thinking, obviously that's been part of our origin story and being designers and experienced designers and how do we help people develop the skills and mindsets and habits of human centered design thinkers. And then more recently, I would say in the last, it actually hasn't been that recent, but the last seven years of our work, we've really been also interested in futures thinking, right? And this third pillar of our mission is how to develop capacity for people to be optimistic futurists. And so we've been doing a lot of work in those areas too.
And so what's been really fun is that as we've grown and evolved as an organization, I've gotten a chance to really learn about those three areas of school leadership. How to really help people design change in their organizations, how to be human-centered design thinkers, and how to think about the future optimistically and to design towards that preferred future that people want to have in schools. And so for me, it's just been 10 years of learning,10 years of evolving.
Morva McDonald: One of the things I hear from school leaders at NAIS and also partially my own experience has been a perspective that the work of being a leader in school has gotten more complex. Not just harder, right? But actually more complex. And I'm curious about what your thinking is around that, and to the extent to which that's shaped or reshaped the way you think about your three pillars as they're taking place in an individual school or not. And maybe that doesn't resonate for you. Maybe that's not what you would, you would say, but I'm curious about what your thoughts are about that.
Carla Silver: Well, I think there's a couple things that play into that more, that complexity. One is that I do think that the pace of change, whether you call that technological change or social, political change, it's just so much faster. Things are changing so much, so rapidly. I feel like if you were a school head in say like 1985, 1995 wasn't going to be so different.
But really since the internet, things are changing so rapidly. And teaching and learning is having to change to keep up with those technological changes. So change is just rapid. And so that means that school leaders have to be way more flexible. They have to be way more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. You throw in things like a global pandemic, and the second thing I think that's happening is that heads of schools, and school leaders in general, are being asked to respond to so many external events in ways that they hadn't in the past.
Some of that is probably due to our own making, our own, you know, we put ourselves out there when major world events happen and we write letters to our communities and all of that. So we sort of engage in that. And so now we're being asked to take a stand on a lot of things. And I think that's made the role of school leaders, and in particular heads of schools, really much more complex. I mean, you're no longer just running your little school. You're thinking about so many bigger issues.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, I sometimes think of this as like, school leaders have become the moral compass for a community, right? In many cases, school is the institution, right, that people are in agreement with. And now school leaders are having to take that space.
Carla Silver: Yeah, and it's a little bit of a tension, right? It's a push-pull. And the minute it gets a little dicey, you want to say, wait, I'm just leading a school. But the truth is that it's very hard to be a school leader and not be thinking about the bigger picture. So I think that's where the complexity comes.
And you know, one of the things I said at the very beginning was helping school leaders to do the inner work that really sustains them. And I would say there's no one way to be a school leader. And we've learned a lot from many of the school leaders that we've worked with, but we really do believe that there is a common denominator and the most effective leaders who have the greatest longevity are the ones who are really pretty self-aware.
And they take the time to do that inner work. And they take the time for introspection and exploration. And they are able to be attuned to others in their communities, but they don't get enmeshed in the drama and the drama triangles. And they can locate themselves. They can have, as Edwin Friedman calls, a non-anxious presence. And they aren't afraid of being a little vulnerable at times.
And they ask for feedback, and they ask for feedback from their supervisors, whether that's their board or, you know, if they're a middle level leader, their head of school or people who are supervising them. But they also ask for feedback from the people they supervise. Right. So to me, those are some like, really, those are some common denominators of the leaders that we see. And they're able to manage that complexity in ways that I think if they're not doing that inner work, it's really hard.
Morva McDonald: I think this is super interesting because I think this is a lot about who an individual is in the context of their leadership. I'm curious about how you think about that as something that, I mean, I'm somebody that works with leaders and I try to support them in the practices that they're developing. The age-old question is, is a teacher born or made? You can ask that same age-old question, is a leader born or made?
And I’m interested about the extent to which you think the things that you're talking about as the common denominators, right, are things that are learned, developed, coached, somewhat inherent, right? And how, in your work with schools and school leaders, how do you identify that and think about that?
Carla Silver: Yeah, I mean, I'm a big believer that leadership is a set of skills and mindsets and habits and practices. I don't believe one person is just born into great leadership. There might be some people who may be a little bit more aligned with some of these habits and mindsets and skill sets. But I think that's one of the reasons why, when we work with school leaders, we actually say we're building capacity in these different areas. And here are the specific skills that we're trying to help you to develop in each of these three different areas. So if we're helping you to become a better futures thinker, we're telling you what that looks like. We're saying you have to learn how to look for signals. You have to learn how to build scenarios and worlds. You have to learn how to think like a good ancestor. These are skills you can learn, right?
And that reflective change maker is very similar. You have to be willing to think about your story. Think about those moments in your life where you've been, where you've had highs and lows, where you've been above the line or below the line, where you had pivotal moments, where you've had paradigm shifts. Thinking about group dynamics. I mean, these are things that are so teachable. So I'm a big believer. I have a growth mindset. Thanks, Carol Dweck.
Morva McDonald: I think it's such a good and important answer at this time, because there's a lot of people who will say, I don't, I look at school leadership now, and that is not a role I would want to take because of how challenging or complex it is. Right? And so I think the message that you're sending, that this is a set of skills, habits of mind, ways of being really, right, that you can develop and learn and that help you manage that level of ambiguity, is a promising, optimistic, futuristic perhaps, right, point of view about it. Really, you know? And I think we need to take stock of that as a field, as we're thinking about who the next leaders are in schools, whether those are independent schools or public schools, right, we need to think about that.
Carla Silver: Yeah, absolutely. And also another thing I should say is that we don't necessarily define “leader” as someone who necessarily has positional authority. I mean, obviously that's the most common definition. You think about someone who has a position or a title, but some of the most effective leaders that we work with and they come to our programs, they come and be fellows, L&D fellows, they're actually classroom teachers and they don't necessarily want to leave the classroom. They actually want to influence change from that position.
And so I think it's really important to think about the fact that when we talk about leaders, we think about anyone who's really trying to mobilize other people to make change, to manage adaptive work, adaptive challenges. So I think leadership is really, really broad in our definition.
Morva McDonald: Let's talk about that, like, skill set and ways of being in the context of what I think schools and even as a nation we experience as just increasing, maybe increasing polarization, high conflict, binary thinking sometimes in the way that we respond. And what are the strategies, right, that you use and help school leaders develop that are helping them manage often, increasingly, a very really high conflict situation or very polarized points of view that exist in their own community.
Carla Silver: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we think a lot about at Leadership + Design is how to reject binary thinking in general. And that's hard because in reality, our brains are wired for simplicity. Our brains are seeking the fastest, most efficient answer to any challenge, right?
And so the simplest way of doing things is where our brain wants to go. But as you know, simplest is not really always best. And our colleague, Ryan Burke, has really been pushing us to think about things not as good or bad, or right or wrong, or true or false. Because just generally when you're managing a complex situation, that really isn't helpful. So I think sometimes when leaders are stuck, and they feel really stuck between two polarizing opinions that are in front of them, what we try to help them think about is, is there a third way? Which is not necessarily a compromise between two ideas, but it's just a different path and one that might be more nuanced and maybe more interesting.
And of course, the other thing I would say, when you get to polarizing opinions and maybe you happen to be on one side of that polarizing idea, how do you get curious in someone else's idea, and try to really understand what someone's lived experience has been to get them to that belief or that idea? Because the truth is we don't just arrive out of nowhere and suddenly have an opinion. Our opinions and our values are built from years of experiences. And so when we're standing opposed to someone else, how do we get curious in that person's experience?
Morva McDonald: That's great. I know that the L+D's tagline is Be More Curious Than Certain, right? And so you've talked a little bit about the skills, but can you say more about like, what does that look like? What's challenging about that in your experience? What's hard about that for leaders, right? And how does that look the same for somebody who's known to be a leader, somebody who's a faculty member who's leading, somebody who's a student who's leading, kind of help explore with us kind of that concept, right, of be more curious than certain.
Carla Silver: I think there's a huge pressure on leaders, especially those with positional authority, to have an answer, and to have the right answer all the time. I think that's what leadership traditionally has looked like. You gotta be ready to make a decision. You have to have the answer. And one of the things that we talked about when we met at our retreat last week, our Leadership + Design 2.0 retreat—
Morva McDonald: —Which must have been super great and really fun and I wish I could have been just a fly on the wall in that space.
Carla Silver: I have the best colleagues. It's so fun to meet with them.
One of the things we talked about when we thought about our long-term impact was how could we help to really redefine what a leader looked like? And the idea of being more curious than certain doesn't necessarily mean you don't know how to make a decision. It doesn't mean that you don't sometimes have to show up with some decisiveness, but you are willing to entertain many possibilities and you are also truly interested in other people and other ideas.
And we thought a little bit about this idea of being curiosity organized. How can leaders be curiosity organized? Which doesn't mean that they can't make a final decision, but rather that they have done the work to learn from other people and to see many different perspectives.
Morva McDonald: One wondering I have, and I was talking to, actually, Caroline Blackwell yesterday about this, who's the VP of Equity and Inclusion at NAIS. And we were having a conversation, I think, about kind of ambiguity and leadership and diversification of leadership. And I'm wondering if your experience, right, that there's a differential, I don't know if it's impact or way that leaders of color or women have to navigate the space of curiosity and uncertainty that's different, right, than it would be.
And like, what, what would you say about that? Because I think part of what you have to think about for leaders is not in the generic sense, but how does leadership take shape given who you are, your identity, which has to do with positionality, and how is it influenced by that?
Carla Silver: Yeah, sure. I think the pressure to be certain, the pressure to be, have some sort of like position on something, to be really clear, is doubled when you're a woman or a person of color who have any sort of less of the more traditional demographic qualities of a traditional leader, right? I think that it makes it even…the stakes are even higher.
I don't remember who, I don't remember the study. It was a long time ago. We do a program for women leaders in the summer called Wonder Women. So we talk about this a lot, but they talked about this sort of continuum of women's leadership and you were either competent or you were warm, right? And you had to—talk about polarizing, right? But if you might be too competent, seem too competent and then you're sort of cold, too warm and you're not seen as capable of being able to actually lead and move things forward. And I just think all of that is just so much nonsense, right?
Once again, let's just get rid of all those polarities and those binaries. One of the things we really try to help leaders of all different backgrounds and genders and race and ethnicities think about is, how do they lead with their own signature presence? Which is, what are the things that they, where they naturally feel really gifted and in the flow and how do they amplify those qualities and be attentive to them instead of trying to necessarily come from a deficit model of leadership, where I'm not good at this or I'm not good at that, but rather where are you naturally really gifted as a leader, and how do you build more of that in your life?
So I think there's a lot of pressure for leaders of color and leaders, women leaders to look more certain than curious. And so they need to kind of think a little bit about how that, I don't know, once again, I think that's rethinking the model of leadership.
Morva McDonald: It leads me to think about a different place in a school. And this is true of independent schools that are nonprofits and have boards of trustees. Often, at least in my kind of small experience, right? Many of the folks who are on boards of trustees of independent schools, they're not educators. They don't come, necessarily, right, from the world of education. They perhaps live in places or do work at places that have more certainty. Maybe that's true, I'm not sure.
But you can see that as a leader in a school, you have this potential challenge of helping your board understand, I think, some of the things that you're sharing and talking about. So I'm interested if you have advice, right, for heads of school who find themselves in this position. They're trying to lean into curiosity. They're trying to lean in, right, to learning as a framework for leadership rather than knowing as a framework. And what your advice is in terms of helping the board, right, or even their other constituents kind of understand what their approach and strategy is?
Carla Silver: Yeah, it's interesting. We actually talked a lot about this at our retreat as well, because we've been noticing how…We've noticed, we've seen, a number of heads of schools, their tenure being really, really short. And in part that may or may not be because of what's happening with the board. I don't know all the details all the time, but I do think that these school leaders, all these people who are doing this work, are well intentioned and they are working really hard and primarily they're relatively capable people. And in fact, they need to be nurtured and developed and helped by their board and all those things.
But I think more and more what we're seeing is capable heads being let go when boards get nervous or unsettled, even just sort of one time. And in part, it's because they don't, boards don't always know exactly what their lane is and what their boundaries are. And sometimes that leads them to kind of do the wrong things or go in the wrong directions. And so we think that we need to help boards themselves manage ambiguity and uncertainty and discomfort without confusing that ambiguity and discomfort with something that is a head of school doing something wrong.
That's hard, right?
Morva McDonald: It's almost like a reconception of the leadership whole approach for the entire board of trustees, essentially.
Carla Silver: Yeah, and I think, you know, we've learned for a very long time of the three roles of boards, which is kind of a fiduciary role, the strategic role and the generative role. And then their one employee is their head of school, right? And we couldn't help but think, is there a different model for thinking about sort of the board work and the board role?
Morva McDonald: Such a great question.
Carla Silver: And I think that's another one of our challenges for the next 10 years, is how do you re-think about the board's role and how do you help them to learn that role in a way that's actually going to support longer term headships, longer term, you know, longevity in the head of school role, but also a lot more partnership between the board and the head of school.
So one of the things we've thought a lot about is how do you do year-long work with a board and a head or a board chair and a head or an executive committee and a head, so that they're really sort of doing that work together. The other thing I would say, and maybe I'm a little biased because I happen to be married to a head of school who's had really long-term board chairs, but the tenure in board chairs is so short in most schools. It's one year, two years, and max three years.
And even though I'm someone who has some beliefs in term limits and things like that, I'm not opposed to those things, I understand the reason behind them. I think if you've got a head of school and a board chair who can work together for a sustained amount of time and it's working, that that's a really positive thing in many cases. And the heads of schools that I've seen sustain and have the longest tenure in schools have often had board chairs that have been there six, seven, 10 years with that head of school. And they've really been able to be partners and work together, both on the side of things that are like school related, but also on developing a culture of the board that really understands its lanes, understands what its role is, and also is not spooked by every single thing that happens.
Morva McDonald: I think you're thinking out loud with us a little bit here about a fundamental part of the board is the partnership between the board and the head. I think we've thought about that in one way, kind of. And I wonder if you're onto something about reframing that and what that looks like. So I'll be curious, as you guys move forward into your next 10 years, right? And kind of reshape what that looks like.
Yeah, it would be remiss in this conversation if I didn't say, here we are, we're headed into the election season. Everybody, that is on everybody's mind, right? And we're closing in, in that time. And I know you all have done a lot of work around this. You've done a lot of thinking and you've done a lot of great work of supporting schools and school leaders in this frame.
And I'm just wondering as we're getting closer into that time period, what are the practical things you're helping schools think about? One of the things schools have to do is translate a big idea and actually put it into action. Where are you with that? How are you thinking about that now as we're getting closer to those moments? It's not one moment anymore. All of the moments that can be true related to an election now.
Carla Silver: Yeah, it's funny. Why did L+D decide to get involved with elections? I think it's a really interesting question. And I think it goes back to a Santa Fe seminar that we had in 2016. And it happened to start the day after the election in 2016. And we were gathered in Santa Fe with a group of, you know, 35 school leaders who showed up totally, I would say, blindsided. Whether they were happy or sad about the election, we didn't care, but they were just surprised. And we looked out into this sea of individuals, and they just looked like they had been shell shocked. Many of them were on the phone back to their schools managing what was, you know, a little bit of chaos in some cases.
Morva McDonald: I was a head of school in 2016, so I’m familiar with this.
Carla Silver: You remember. Crystal Land was like calling her school and she was trying to coax teachers out from their desks, like, it's going to be OK, you know. But we had not planned ahead. We were as shocked as anyone and we didn't really know what to do with this group of leaders, right? We kind of moved along kind of clunkily in that seminar. But what we did say is, oh my goodness, schools were just so not ready for that.
And really the next two elections, 2020 and this election, we thought, what can we do to help schools think a little bit ahead? You know, we're a human centered design firm. We are experienced designers. And so in 2020, we launched something designed for election week. And it was really an intention to help schools plan for that week around the election and really the whole election season. And to just be intentional. Like, do you want to actually use election season as a learning opportunity? Do you want to ignore it altogether? Do you want to hope for the best? Do you want to just pretend it's not happening? Do you want to use it as an opportunity to teach students about democracy and about the election, about having conversations across diverse viewpoints? What do you want to do with it?
And no judgment. You know, every school is going to answer that question differently. But whatever you decide, then make it happen. Then do it. Right? So this time around in 2024, we've been really much more thoughtful about that big design process. And so we created another set of materials and resources called Design for Election Season. And it really does take schools through the planning very specifically. How do you have a pre-mortem with your faculty and staff and ask them, what are you worried about? What are you worried that could happen? OK, let's actually practice some of those scenarios. How do you have a conversation with your board about what might happen? And how do you think about the many different possibilities for what might happen over the course of the season?
Right now we're doing a couple of sessions with a few associations, NWAIS and ABVIS, about the day after the election. And how do you want people to show up? Because the truth is there's a tension in schools. We talk about people feeling like they can show up as themselves and their full selves, right? We want you to be your full self, right?
Morva McDonald: Their authentic selves, I think. Yes.
Carla Silver: But guess what? You're also a teacher for all the students in the school, right? And someone's going to win the election in November. Someone's going to lose the election. We may not know until December who actually wins. That's another scenario. But regardless, if you are the biggest supporter of one of the candidates and they win, you can't show up looking like you're having the best day. You got to be there for all the kids. You're a teacher, you're a member of the community for all students.
And so I think that's one of the things that we also are working on with schools, which is, you know, you are part of a school community that is representing many different viewpoints. Even if you're in San Francisco, California, or you're in a school in Florida or a deep red state, there are people in your school community who come from different perspectives. And the best thing you can do is really think about taking on someone else's, walking in someone else's shoes for that day, and thinking about how you would want to experience that day.
Right? So really thinking ahead and planning ahead is what we would say. And, you know, we've created tons of materials step by step, very simple, plus a lot of really fun things to do with the election. But a lot of the work that we've done is about empathy building, listening to each other, talking about topics that are controversial and trying to understand that there are many different perspectives on that topic. And why would someone think about that?
One of my favorite lessons that we developed is something called the glossary of controversy. And I love that because it's basically a list of words that we like to call cover terms. They're like words like woke or safe space or whatever it is. There's just a list, and we all think we know what they mean. But each of these words have histories and stories behind them. And they also can be used to weapon, as weapons. It can be weaponized, or they can be used in different contexts.
So when you throw out a word like woke, depending on who's using that term and how they're using it, it can mean a lot of different things. But let's actually find out what the story of that word is. It's got a really interesting story, right? So find out what that word is, and then explore that and understand why it would be really a great word for one person to use, and really how it could feel really hurtful if someone else used it in a different way.
So that's the kind of stuff that we like to do.
Morva McDonald: I mean, there are two things that are really highlighted just even in the way that you talk about this, you can see the core value that you hold, I think probably individually and that Leadership + Design holds organizationally around curiosity. Be curious about the word, right? Ask yourself, right? Like what is its story? Where does it come from? What is its history? You know, and then I think the other takeaway for me just as a listener is the value of intentionality, which is, people who know about teaching and learning actually really know a lot about the value of intentionality when you're designing for experiences, whether that's experiences for kids or whether that's experiences for a community.
Before we go, I just want to hear a little bit about your application, if you will, of, like, being future thinkers, right? In your 10 year moment of redesign and thinking about who you are and where you're going. So just, you know, one of the hardest things we might have to do is actually apply our ideas to ourselves. And I just wonder how that's going for you and what you're excited about.
Carla Silver: Oh my gosh, I'm so excited for the next 10 years. We talked a lot about obviously some of the technologies that were showing up in the world, artificial intelligence. And it actually got us to think a little bit about the future of students as well as the future of school leaders. And this is really rough thinking. We're not committed to this, but we did think a little bit about what were going to be the qualities that we really needed to harness in students as well as school leaders.
And we thought about three, being curiosity, creativity, and then connectedness, right? How are you staying connected, curious, and creative? And if those are the three sort of human qualities that distinguish us from AI, how do we build those in students? And then how do we model those as school leaders?
So we started to think a little bit this way, just thinking about the future. But to me, futures thinking is not about predicting the future, right? We're not trying to predict it. We're actually trying to think about all the things that are possible, what's probable, and then how do we design for what's preferable? So you know, technology, we always think about technologies, but we don't really think about the social change that happens. So I'm really interested, and you can't, once again, you can't predict it. What are going to be some of the social changes we might see?
And you know, it's always one step forward and then you see the backlash, people go back. I'm so curious right now about how schools are banning cell phones right now, which is the big story. And is that going to last?
Morva McDonald: Yeah, what does it mean, right?
Carla Silver: What does it mean? What is it actually doing? But I would say, like, one of the things we'll be continuing to think about with leadership and design is, you know, how do you sort of build those skill sets of futures thinking, human centered design, and being a reflective change maker in kind of a new context, what that will look like. How do we help reimagine the role of a school leader? How do we imagine the relationship of the board? So those are the kinds of things that we started to think about in the future. And we try to apply it.
We tried it. We tried to take our own medicine and do a lot of the things that we do with schools onto ourselves and see if they work. Yeah, but it's really, really fun. But I don't know if we did a full futures thinking session, but we're sort of always grounded in that, in those futures. And we love to imagine, like we're really an imaginative group. And I think that's to me, like one of the most fun things about futures thinking is it is generative and you get a chance to imagine. And it doesn't mean you have to do everything that you, that you imagine in your head. Which is one of the things that we sometimes see when we're working with schools on strategic plans, is they don't want to put that imaginative and creative idea out because they're worried that then, oh my gosh, we're going have to do that.
Morva McDonald: I gotta do it. I gotta lift it. Yeah, I gotta make the lift. Yeah, for sure.
Carla Silver: So I almost wonder for us, like, if a board and a head could do a year of futures thinking before they go into strategic planning mode, where all that thinking is just, it's just imagination. It's just play. But imagine going into a strategic plan after a year of that. And then you've already had all that fun and dreaming, and now you're like, OK, I'm going to make it a little bit more practical.
Morva McDonald: It's been such a delight to talk with you. And I think if I were to say you left me with anything just in the last bit is a sense of optimism, right? About, just about where we're headed and where leaders can go and the power of leadership in schooling and what that can mean, right? And so I just, as a school person, as an educator, as a leader myself, I just really appreciate the depth of your knowledge and experience and the message I think that you're helping us lean into right now. So thank you.
Carla Silver: I'm so grateful to hear that. I'm really optimistic because I see so many schools really doing so much more student centered, really interesting work. And it excites me. I love working with those schools.
Morva McDonald: I agree. Thank you, Carla. Appreciate it. Yeah.
Carla Silver: Thank you.