How do you contribute to the collective expertise?

I’ve been thinking back to the work we did with our Profile of a Graduate and Learning Beliefs when I was the Superintendent in the Salisbury Township School District. It was good work that has remained a focus, even through the rough times of a global pandemic and beyond.

The most memorable aspect of this work at the planning stage was the gatherings we had with stakeholders. We met with students, teachers, leaders, parents, community and board members across the span of an entire school year to dig into questions like these:

• What knowledge sets, skills and dispositions will our learners need to thrive in the world upon leaving us?

• What kinds of learning environments do we need to design today to support those outcomes now and in the future?

I didn’t realize it at the time, but each of those stakeholder groups, and each of the participants across the year had an insider perspective––an expertise––that contributed to a lasting commitment from the community to its learners…both young and old.

We were navigating from devaluing an insider perspective (at least passively) to embracing our collective expertise.

In Complex Adaptive Leadership, author Nick Obolensky talks about a “charade” that occurs in many organizations…organizations with a traditional hierarchy of leadership. 

A charade that looks something like this…

Top leadership: People expect me to have all the answers. Yikes…but I really don’t!  What consultants can I bring in to give us the answers?

All others: I don’t have any answers. That’s for people above my pay grade.

The charade is that the top pretends they know the answer; and all the others in the hierarchy pretend they don’t know the answer.

But if we value the insider perspective of everyone, and acknowledge that no one person knows the answer to our complex challenges, we get a synergy that leads to beautiful solutions. 

The power of the collective.

How are you leveraging your insider perspective: Navigating from devaluing your insider perspective to embracing our collective expertise?