Getting Real About Visionary Leadership for Progress in Education

Getting Real About Visionary Leadership

for Progress in Education

After my family and I thoroughly toured the Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island last summer, we found ourselves drawn back into them. It was similar to the feeling we've all had when we don't want a captivating novel or movie to end. We were especially entranced by the Sunken Garden. For me it had to do with the experience of standing in someone's vision. I don't mean standing in someone's line of vision, but being in the place where a transforming vision has been fulfilled.

In 1908, when Robert Pim Butchart, a cement industrialist, had emptied a large quarry of its limestone and clay, his wife Jennie went to work in the place -- a vast and desolate cubic hole in their property. More than a decade later the waste place had been transformed into the Sunken Garden, which now daily draws and inspires thousands of visitors. The experience in this garden reminded me that the daunting challenges that educational leaders face in the 21st century simply cannot be met without the transforming power of vision. Our work is to transform obsolete factory-model school districts into systems of schools that accomplish what has never before been accomplished: a high quality education for all children across the ethnic and socioeconomic spectrum.

Vision is indispensable, but that's not to say it is some kind of singular silver bullet. There is an array of essentials that could not be given full treatment in an article of this length. My purpose here is to focus on one of many crucial aspects of educational leadership – one that has more often than not been "observed in the breach."

The writing and posting of vision statements is a nearly all-pervasive activity in schools, districts, and other organizations required to adapt to changing circumstances. But regardless of the ubiquity of these documents, it appears that comparatively little in the way of genuine visioning takes place in public schools and school districts.

And so we need to make a sharp the distinction between a vision statement – words on paper – and the vision itself, which is more of a living power. While the vision or mission statement often serves a necessary purpose, the fundamental question – the measure of a vision's power – is what stays in thought or in the heart when you put aside the words on paper. A vision that is original and powerful should plant an image in consciousness that provokes deep feelings, that stirs a sense of possibility and inner commitment.

By inspiring, energizing, and motivating stakeholders, vision serves a vital purpose. Furthermore, as John Kotter has pointed out, a broadly owned, authentic vision unifies diverse participants around a shared aspiration and clarifies direction in the face of shifting agendas and priorities.1

From Personal to Shared Vision

Visions arise in the hearts, imaginations, or souls of individuals. And for some projects – personal gardens, paintings, and novels – the vision will often remain with the individual throughout the creative process. But if the vision is to drive progress in a social institution such as a school or school system, it needs to be shared and owned collectively. And this raises the question, How does individual vision become shared vision? The answer to this question, of course, is not prescriptive.

A word of warning: the power and collective ownership of a vision will be greatly diminished if the stakeholders' personal visions are given short shrift. "I think a lot of organizations go through visioning activities," says Les Omotani, superintendent of West Des Moines Community Schools, "and they assume that individuals have got their own act together." He continues:

"When I have had an opportunity to facilitate some of the visioning sessions, I've asked people how many of them over the previous 12 months have spent over an hour actually reflecting and thinking about their own vision of their individual future. You would get virtually no hands up. I would ask them how many spent more than two hours with their travel agent planning a family vacation, and almost every hand went up.

We found that supporting people to go through reflective learning ("What do I really want out of my life? What do I want my legacy to be? Who are the significant people who have shaped and influenced that? Who are models and mentors? What were their characteristics and values?") opened all kinds of opportunities for them to question, to learn, to think about, to ponder what they wanted to do next as an individual -- what was important to them, what their priorities were. I believe that people who have gone through that kind of experience come to a shared visioning activity from a different orientation than people who haven't. They bring more to the conversations. They bring more passion. They bring more reflection. They bring a greater sense of purpose. They're more certain of what they want the learning community to be like."

Only after personal visions have been broadly cultivated should the work of developing a shared vision commence. The essence of that work is dialogue. In West Des Moines, Donna Wilkin, the assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, led a team of eight or ten in the effort to coalesce personal visions into a vision that would elicit the commitment of all. (And the district received valuable support and advice on the development of shared vision from two nationally recognized experts: Peter Senge and Charlotte Roberts.) According to Omotani the small team's job was not simply to collect personal visions and fashion a statement that they could all sign off on. Rather they would meet with schools (teachers, students, and staff) and departments, the board of education, parents, and community leaders and ask key questions:

What is it you believe wants to happen here? What do you think is important that would be a framework for our learning community? What should our fundamental values be? What's your picture of our culture and our organization if it is to be highly successful? So we were asking individuals to talk about their own vision of a learning community and what was important to them. Part of it was making sure people were comfortable with each other. This is a very demanding process in terms of building relationships.

What's common? We also look for what's different and that's part of the diversity. The idea is not to reject something that's different. One of the goals is that everyone can see him or herself present in the shared vision. It ends up being a synthesis of the entire process, but whoever facilitates needs to make sure that that diversity is not rejected too soon.

In the West Des Moines process, the team would gather perspectives from facilitated dialogues, work them into the emerging vision, and send them back to the group for feedback. The evolving vision circulated in and out of the core team, gathering more and more perspectives throughout the process. One challenge in such a process, says Omotani, "is not to get too vested in ownership too early. The goal was not to create a vision that eight or ten people could agree on. It was to create a shared vision that over a thousand people would say, 'you captured it.' That is a shared vision I want to make a commitment to."

Les Omotani would be the first to say that there are diverse ways to pursue the development of shared vision and would strongly object to the touting of the West Des Moines approach as the "one best way." At the same time, I think it's fair to say that as the result of years of evolutionary work on the development and ongoing refinement and implementation of a shared vision, the West Des Moines approach is instructive and illustrative of a process that is far more demanding and potentially far more rewarding than what too often passes for visioning.

Vision in Action

The visioning process in West Des Moines did lead to three sentences on paper. As Omotani quipped, "we gave in to some words." Here they are:

"West Des Moines Community Schools will be a caring community of learners that knows and lifts every child. We will inspire joy in learning. Our schools will excel at preparing each student for his or her life journey."

Getting the words on paper was by no means the end of visioning for this school system. It was more like a landmark on a never-ending journey. For, as Jim Collins has noted, "There is a big difference between being an organization with a vision statement and becoming a truly visionary organization. The difference lies in creating alignment -- alignment to preserve an organization's core values, to reinforce its purpose, and to stimulate continued progress toward its aspirations."2

Leadership for Educational Progress

An educational leader's success hinges on his or her ability to mobilize the system in such a way that the distance between current reality and a powerful vision for the future is significantly diminished.3 This strategic work calls not only for the building of a shared vision and effectively communicating that vision, it also involves clarifying and communicating the stark facts of current reality. If the picture of current reality is honest and if the vision is clear and powerful, there should be a significant gap between the two. And that gap between vision and current reality can serve as the source for the creative tension required to generate a sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo and the corresponding level of urgency needed to overcome resistance to change.4 I believe -- heart and soul -- that a possible human future includes systems of education that exceed what our imaginations can currently conceive. But there's no getting there from here without getting real about visionary leadership.

Notes

1.John P. Kotter, Leading Change (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996), pp. 68-70.

2. Jim Collins, "Aligning Action and Values," Leader to Leader (No. 1), Summer 1996.

3.Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1990), pp. 150-55. See also Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp.19-27.

4.Senge, p. 150.

About the author

Scott Thompson is the Assistant Director of the Panasonic Foundation and Editor of Strategies, an issues series published by the Panasonic Foundation in cooperation with the American Association of School Administrators. Much of this article is drawn from his book, Hidden Within Reach: Spiritual Leadership for Educational Progress, to be published by Scarecrow Education Books. He can be reached at sthompson@foundation.panasonic.com.

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