This is a series of reflections on the book that my Mastermind group is currently reading, The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.

Chapter 2 – The Billion-Dollar Day When Nothing Happened.

As a teacher, imagine walking into the staff lounge at school and seeing this on the bulletin board:

These Lesson Plans Suck

Posted all around that sentence are lesson plans from every department at your high school, marked up with comments in red pen.  As an educator, I couldn’t imagine it!  Teachers’ heads would explode!  The embarrassment! Cell phone cameras would be out snapping pictures to be posted on social media, with captions like, “Can you believe this!?”.  The union president, the head of HR, and the local news vans would descend on campus so fast the principal wouldn’t know what hit her.  Take it a level up, and you’re a principal that walks into be the monthly principal’s meeting to see the director with a PowerPoint slide with school test scores, by site surrounding the title:  These Test Scores Suck.  Those principals would shutdown for the rest of the meeting, then afterward come together to discuss the poor leadership displayed by “throwing them under the bus.” These responses remind me of that Erykah Badu song “Tyrone” where in the intro she says, “Imma test this out.  Now keep in mind that I’m an artist, and I’m sensitive about my (stuff).”  As educators we are artists, and we can be very sensitive about the units/lessons/results that we and our student produce.

“These Ads Suck” is the sentence that Google founder Larry Page pinned a note on the wall of the company kitchen (along with the Ads) to describe the products that were being produced by the folks working on the AdWords project.  (This project was all about being able to find ads in the search engine).  Obviously this wasn’t a typical note that would be found in the kitchen of a traditional business (and definitely not a traditional schoolhouse), but because of the culture that Page had created, no one was about being “called out” in front of their colleagues.  The AdWords project solution was eventually solved by a member of the company, Jeff Dean, that was not part of the project at all, but saw the note and the Ads and it reminded him of a problem that he’d seen before, so he just jumped in to try to solve the problem.  And he did, without any prompting or encouragement.  The day Dean completed this work became the unintentional billion-dollar turning point in the history of Google.  This is what can happen when you have a cohesive unit.  A unit where anyone can identify a problem and attack it.  “Cohesion like this happens when they (members) are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection,” which Page had done.

Now imagine the same scenario of lesson plans or test data, posted on the staff lounge wall. Instead of teachers and principals being offended or upset, they are now excited.  In this new scenario we have created a culture where putting our work on display is not an opportunity for embarrassment or shame, but an opportunity for growth and collaboration.  Imagine that decent lesson that you have for acceleration in physics begin seen by that biology teacher who is an Army veteran and artilleryman.  He has some ideas that could enhance the lesson with some of his practical experience firing artillery shells.  What about the English unit on All Quiet on the Western Front being seen by the AP Psychology teacher and now they can collaborate on a unit that addresses the psychological affects of war.  Or the Spanish culture unit dealing with Spanish art is seen by the art teacher and they are able to trade classes to integrate their curriculum.  And those principals decide to share best practices or get their curriculum teams together to help each other determine how to best support all students’ success on standardized tests.

I would love to part at a school where creating The Billion Dollar Day is an intentional part of the culture for the benefit our staff, students, and the community.