Hey, Teacher, Leave Them Kids Alone!

I recently read No Rules Rules, which was by far the best book I have read this year. It was co-written by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer. The book is about how Netflix’s ‘no rules’ culture has helped to provide and sustain its competitive edge. Rules and top-down controls, it seems, just get in the way.

Holiday policy? Travel and Expenses policy? They are not needed, apparently. Why? They are created to prevent people from doing the wrong thing, require paying people to police them, and create a bureaucracy that gets in the way of a culture of freedom and responsibility.

There are three steps to building a culture that can benefit from ‘no rules’:

Firstly, you need a high “talent density” in the staff.  Typically, high talent does not like to focus on controls, but they are also expensive compared to the market.  This is all very well for a high-tech firm that can invest profits into salaries, but surely impossible for schools that operate with fixed budgets.  However, let’s not fixate on that for now… 

Secondly, you need to encourage a culture of “candour” to provide an effective feedback loop about performance. This is not to say that colleagues can say what they want – there is a considerable explanation in the book on the need for feedback to be provided with positive intent and the need for training and coaching to support staff to do this well. So there’s some food for thought here about how schools might ramp up feedback regularly – what might the impact be of training and then encouraging students to give feedback to their teachers. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Finally, the big one.  Once you have the first 2 things in place, you can “eliminate most controls by leading with context, not control”. 

What does this mean?  Just that.  Rather than spending time trying to control everything through rules and regulations, lead by explaining the context and intent of what you want to happen.  

This last one is a difficult one, isn’t it!  Do schools need extensive discipline policies?  Do schools really need to ban mobile phones?  Do they really need a special policy for uniforms? These are all designed to control student behaviour.  But don’t they just create friction?  I can only imagine how many school and teaching hours are wasted chasing around students about the need for the right colours, styles, or lengths?

More controls = more policing = more frictions = more time not spent on teaching and learning. That’s not to say that I am arguing against any rules, but I wonder what the impact of too much focus on rules would be in schools that also aspire to champion voice, choice, and agency in their young people.

The point is that if you forever tell young people what they can not do, you are not spending enough time telling them what they can do.

And that’s the whole point of school, is it not?

Something to ponder.

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