“Who’s doing the washing up?”
The answer to this question might be significant.
If it’s you, you might behave one way.
If it’s not you, you might behave another way.
Take, for example, my friend’s domestic predicament. He and his partner have a long-standing rule that when one cooks, the other will wash up. They share the bills and they share the work. It all sounds fair and dandy to me.
But it turns out that there’s a fallacy in this arrangement.
Masterchef
The problem is that when it’s my friend’s turn to wash up, the gratitude and appreciation for the lovely dinner quickly sours into judgment and resentment. Why? Because, perhaps knowing that it’s someone else’s problem to clear up, his partner has cooked in such a way that the kitchen is left looking like a crime scene. The problem, it seems, is that it’s not her problem.
Would my friend’s partner have left so much mess if she knew she would be cleaning up after herself? To be fair to them, they “talked it out” and agreed to try a new arrangement: that whoever cooks also washes up after themselves.
I’m not here to write up a social experiment (or provide marriage counselling!), so let me just conclude by saying that their behaviours changed when accountability was added. Instead of leaving a mess, they clean up as they go along. Maybe they will now live happily ever after!
Drying Up
Here are a couple more examples:
Grandparents enjoy taking their grandchildren out for the day. They play games with them, give them loads of attention and ice cream, and then they give them back. Parents appreciate this temporary respite but soon begin to resent the fact that the kids have had too much excitement and sugar and will not settle for bed. The grandparents cooked, but the parents were left to wash up.
When I worked in the military, each posting was typically for two years (although many were much shorter) before being moved on. To get noticed, we had to make an impact. To make an impact, we had to do things. Seeing through the work of those who came before us was often not the sort of impact that caught the attention of the Commanding Officer. So we found things that were not working and then told everyone how we could fix things. Plans would be approved, good intentions were set in motion, and then we packed our boxes and left. We cooked, but someone else came in to wash up.
So, there can be real problems when we cook like we are not washing up. I must say that I probably have more examples of friends, family, and colleagues who, at one time or another, took extraordinary steps to ensure that they held themselves both responsible and accountable for what they cooked up.
I have a couple of final reflections.
Putting the Dishes Away
1. When the average tenure of (international) school heads is less than three years, what is the impact on innovation and school improvement? Are leaders being bought in to cook? Or clear up? Can they do either, or neither, in such circumstances? Who even asks these questions?
2. Conversely, perhaps a mixture of luck and design, our teachers want to stay at our school for long periods. This situation has pros and cons (and is a topic for another time). For now, I wonder what affordances this gives us to adapt and innovate our learning programme when teachers know that they are not just the architects of good ideas but also the stewards of them. We have made significant changes in our school – but would they have turned out so well if we had high turnover?
For school leaders, the question isn’t just about how well we can “cook” or innovate during our tenure but how effectively we can prepare our teams to sustain those changes after we’ve moved on (although I’m not planning that anytime soon!).
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