Your elevator pitch isn’t made of sentences, so stop trying to write it.

David’s marketing team needed to rebuild the elevator pitch for his school’s MBA program. And he was looking for help coming up with a few sentences that’d capture what they did best and why it mattered. The problem, as he saw it, was a writing problem.

But that’s not what an elevator pitch is. It’s not a statement that says something; it’s an action that does something. A pitch is like a play, and it happens in the back-and-forth between one person and another. The words that get said are just props that help one actor get something done with another (a rose to draw them closer, a sword to scare them off). 

So David and I stepped back from the page to think about the drama: who’s trying to make what kind of impact? On whom? What’s their setting? What just happened—and what’s about to? Instead of solving for the sentences, we tried to solve for the interaction. 

What’s it like? 

When you’re pitching an idea, you’re facing someone who doesn’t understand what you’re talking about. You’re challenging them to make sense of something fundamentally unfamiliar. 

So don’t force them to do a lot of translating. Instead, give them an analogy that's easy to picture, some landmark ideas they can take their bearings from.

David and I came up with this: 

It’s like Duolingo, but instead of learning Portuguese, you’re learning about marketing or finance. And you’re not just learning this content for fun: you’re getting credit that’ll count for your MBA.

The analogy felt pretty clear—but it also got people thinking of an app when they started thinking about the school. Maybe better to open by comparing the school to a brick-and-mortar  university...and then adjust the mental model by focusing on mobile-first.

Solve a problem. 

Put the idea to work, so people can see it in action—and understand what it’s good for. Show them the job your idea can get done, the change it can make, the problem it solves. Here’s what we sketched out:

Now that most everyone owns a smartphone, we’ve no longer got empty space in our days. We’re waiting for the train, or the tea to boil, or the doctor to see us—and we start scrolling. But mostly we fill in these gaps with stuff that's mindless. 

What if we helped people get real value out of their in-between time? A chance to use those 5 minutes before the train comes to move a little farther through the course on your phone—and get that much closer to your MBA.

There are a lot of right moves that can help people get your idea. But none of them wins or loses on the page--because success isn’t about getting the sentences right. A pitch matters when the other person nods, and asks for more. When you pitch it, and they catch it.

Managing a Volunteer Army of Parents

This spring, parents put in 10x as much teaching time as teachers did...which won’t change anytime soon. How might principals lean in to the challenge of managing an army of novice teachers? How might schools solve for children whose parents can't be teachers-at-home?

Tom Kane and I offer our take in this EdWeek op-ed.

The Limits of Rapport: What's lost when we focus on connecting to students

As schools turned toward remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, they focused on preserving the connections between teachers and their students. But the connections among students are at least as important--and easy to neglect in remote learning. We need to design new ways to deliberately build in to their experience of virtual school the things  our kids used to get around the edges of in-person school.

Read the full article in the summer 2020 issue of Kappan.

Inside Teachers’ Experience of the Pandemic

Partnering with MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab, Big Sky Blue conducted 40 intensive interviews with educators across the country to build a deep, intimate understanding of teachers’ on-the-ground experience—to inform a series of recommendations for school- and system-level leaders. You can read the full report, or explore the interview transcripts to hear teachers talking in their own words.

Dreaming of School

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same….One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God.

Martha Graham

It is difficult to talk about what schools ought to be in the same words we have learned in the schools we are used to. This old language is tied to ideas and assumptions so familiar that we can hardly think outside them. We take for granted our definitions of student, teacher, and school—as though they were as obvious and fixed as the meaning of a chair or a hammer. To open up our way of thinking about schools, we need to open up the ways we talk about them. And as school leaders, this re-imagination is especially crucial. No matter how small each may be individually, every choice we make—about hiring, or curriculum, or fundraising—remakes our school, and thus constitutes a chance to bring it closer to our dream of what it might someday become.

I dream of a school where students do something much better than what young people typically do in school. I am not interested in building a smooth machine that keeps everyone in it—students, teachers, staff—going through the motions that keep the wheels spinning. I want our students to do real work. Hard work. But in school, hard work too often means meaningless work: many directions to follow, lots of mistakes to avoid. Too much memory and too little mind. A great deal of note-taking and too little sense-making. And love has little to do with any of it. I am aiming for something different: for students to do the kind of work that people do because they have learned to love it—not because they have been made to do it. I want to see students who work so intensely that the world outside the essay or sculpture or experiment before them seems muffled and far away. I want this work to leave them sweaty and exhausted and proud. I want our students to take their work home not because somebody told them that it is homework, but because they cannot leave it behind, because they are not done with it yet. I want their work to be like play, and this play to be like when a real athlete is entirely immersed in her game or a serious musician gets perfectly lost in his music.

I want our students to learn the discipline required to accomplish good work, the care needed to shape brilliant possibilities into precise actuality. At first, this discipline may come from the school’s expectations; ultimately, it must be driven by each student’s understanding of what the work deserves. I want our students to lean toward the challenge of a harder book or a more difficult equation—for the chance it offers to prove that they can do better this time than they did the last: to show that who they are today is not just who they were yesterday.

I see this school in a half-daydream: teachers committed like priests to the gods of their discipline (of physics, or poetry, or architecture); whose devotion, though, does not take them out of the world, but into it: math teachers who see that everything around them is made of numbers, history teachers who know that who we are depends entirely on what happened before we arrived, science teachers who secretly believe that chemistry is the only way to get at what matters most. And their commitment to these disciplines transforms these teachers in the same way that a marathon runner is made thin and swift by her training—and a swimmer, through his “discipline,” grows wide-shouldered and at ease underwater. When I imagine their classrooms, I see teachers wrapped in robes as brilliant as those the monks in Thailand wear, whirling round like dervishes. Outside the doorways lie a pile of robes the same color for students to slip on as they enter (indigo for the poetry room, and scarlet by the door where math happens). The students walk in and soon they are dancing, too, trying out what it is like to give themselves up to a historian’s passion, or to use their body like a painter does. The students leave and drop their robes outside; but maybe the color has rubbed off a little, and when they graduate they’re smeared with crimson and aquamarine: painted like Joseph’s coat from dreaming. Or maybe it is their eyes that sometimes see the world through science-colored lenses, or make historical sense of what just happened. Or maybe it is their ears that hear more keenly the world’s insistent whisper: Watch closely. Figure me out.

The different teachers a building can be

As school designers, we’re used to thinking about how a building can be a “third teacher.” There are the teachers, there are the other students, and there’s the environment they spend their days in. And we know that each of these elements plays a key role in what students learn. So we add signs that show how the heating system works, or we call out the materials the walls are made of, or we reveal the route the roof water takes to get wherever it goes. In so doing, we’re choosing the kind of teacher our building will be: one  who teaches by explaining. A lecturer-building. 

And that’s a big choice. The building is the teacher that’s always there, wrapping around the others—a concrete statement of what the school believes about the kind of teaching and learning it wants to have happen inside it. When we set up the physical space, we surround students and staff with a medium whose message shapes their sense of what teaching should look like (I speak and you listen); how learning should work (by transmission from expert to novice); what knowledge is made of (a truth so sure you could write it in stone). So, when we turn our school building into a teacher, we need to think seriously about the kind of teacher we’re building.

Because what we learn—and how we learn—is shaped, too, by the character of the teacher we learn from. There’s the faraway expert who delivers information to our waiting minds. The coach who leans over our shoulder, watching what we do and pointing out how we might do better. The counselor who makes sure we know deep-down that we’ve got what it takes to meet the challenges we’re facing. What if one of the key relationships our students had—one of the “people” they learned from and with—was their school building? What if there were as many different kinds of “third teachers” as there are teachers? 

One way to think about the different ways a building can teach is to consider the different kinds of learning they can prompt—for example, how active that learning is. A building, like any teacher, can set us up for passive absorption, where we’re just taking in information that has already been figured out. Or it can get us much more deeply involved in the work of sense-making, where we’re not just figuring out the solution, but framing the problem. Or deciding what’s worth learning about. Michelene Chi and Ruth Wylie offer a helpful way to think about what learning can look like  in their “ICAP” framework--the beginnings of a field guide to learning that starts with the simple opposition we’re used to (“passive” vs. “active”) and then opens things up by setting those terms on a continuum that extends into “constructive” and “interactive.”

What if the school we built asked the people in it to do more than just read a sign or look at a graph? (By giving them a way to track air quality--or the flow of traffic through the parking lot? By helping them tackle the challenge of building a plan for rainwater collection or a better way to do drop-offs?) How far past “active learning” might we go than pulling a handle or pushing a lever? Imagine a building-teacher that could get people thinking back to it. Or one that drew us into a conversation. Could we design a building that asked a follow-up question? 

If, as educators often say, “the person who does the work does the learning,” then the incredible amount of work that goes into building a school might also be a great opportunity for learning. Maybe we don’t want this learning-work to be finished before students and teachers get there, leaving them little more to do than move the furniture around. What if next year’s freshman class showed up to a school that felt like the space under the kitchen table, or the “room of requirements” at Hogwarts: an all-possible space you could turn into whatever you need? What if we treated “school-building” as a verb, an activity that starts before the space is fully planned, and lasts long after it’s occupied?

One model of this kind of building-teacher is MIT’s Building 20, a space built in 1943 and meant to last “for the duration of the war and six months thereafter.” According to Paul Penfield, one of the strange mix of teachers and students assigned a room in it, Building 20 was so obviously “temporary” that it licensed its inhabitants “to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building. If you wanted to run a wire from one lab to another, you didn't ask anybody's permission—you just got out a screwdriver and poked a hole through the wall.” Over the next 55 years, this “magical incubator” was where  Noam Chomsky developed modern linguistics, Amar Bose did a lot of his early research on loudspeakers, and Rainer Weiss and his team built the Cosmic Background Explorer. 

What might a building like this teach someone about the world and their role in it? About what learning looks like. What it really means to be “a good student.” How much room you should get to do the thing that interests you. How much right you have to push back when you disagree. About what school is for—and who it’s for.

What if, moving through our school buildings felt less like being told how things are, and more like encountering a problem that still needs solving? Imagine a school that feels like car engines used to: you raise the hood and you can see all the parts with no shiny cover to hide the wires. The logic of how things fit together, the reasons they work or don’t, right in front of you to figure out. Imagine a school full of students who learn to take for granted that the world around them is hack-able. A school that teaches its students to see the way things are as nothing more or less than the way they were made: not an inevitable fact, nor a sacred creation, but a human invention—the last, best solution developed by someone like them. 

Inventing our customers by how we talk to them

“Describe a significant experience, achievement, or risk that you have taken 

and its impact on you.”

Do you remember how it felt to hit that kind of prompt at the top of your college application? Or maybe you don’t need to remember. Maybe you’re like me, and you scan across that sentence, and something clicks inside, and next thing you know you’re in Bullshit Mode. Ok. It’s like that. I’m just here to say what I’m supposed to. You don’t really care what I really think.

I had the same kind of feeling, over and over these past few months, as I talked with my seventeen-year-old about her own college essays. I saw again the way these questions can pull you, like some black hole of bad expectations, into a way of thinking about yourself and what you’ve done. How they set the rules you’ll be playing by: what counts as “significant,” what sorts of risk are right to take, which kinds of impact are worth having.

But it’s not just college essay questions that push around the people they’re pointed at. Every time we start a conversation--especially when we’re the ones asking the questions--we choose the rules by which it’ll run. We make up the role we’ll play and lay out another one for the person we’re talking to. By the words we choose and the way we put them together, we signal the kind of person we are: Excuse me, ma’am, may I trouble you for directions? And we ask the person we’re addressing to be a certain kind of person back. Where can a guy get a drink around here? We let them know who’s got the power, what’s in-bounds and what’s out, how far to go and where to stop. Employees must wash hands. We let them know where they stand in this relationship, and signal what kind of questions they get to ask back. 

In the business world, the voice we choose shapes every touchpoint we create with our customers. There’s look and feel...and also tone—the kind of “person” we present as. The kind of person we invite our customers to be, in response.

I got a call awhile back that solved the problem of voice in exactly the wrong way. A recruiter wanted to get a reference on a former colleague, and though I answered every question she asked, she learned almost nothing from the 20 minutes we spent on the phone.  Partly it was the questions she asked; partly it was the way she responded to my answers; partly it was a million ways she signaled that this would be the kind of conversation you need a jacket and tie to get into—where everybody talks politely and not much gets said. 

It didn’t take long to see where things were heading, maybe as soon as she asked for my assessment of Pam’s capacities for taking initiative. So I was pretty clear on the rules we’d be playing by--the kind of conversation this was supposed to be--by the third time she said perfect in response to whatever I said. Maybe she figured “positive" feedback would encourage me to keep talking. Maybe she thought she was making me feel comfortable. But what I actually felt was ignored: as though she didn’t really want to find out what I really thought, and just wanted to fill the blank under each question on her list. Perfect.

By the time she asked me how I’d characterize the candidate's strengths as an employee, it seemed like I was the only one left in the conversation--like she’d just stepped out for a smoke, and it was just me and a list of questions that’d been passed down from one recruiter to the next, armchairs wrapped in plastic that nobody had ever sat in.

She wanted to know how Pam had interacted with senior executives during situations of significant stress and, for a moment, I remembered Pam telling off one of the VPs who’d asked her to stay late. But then I remembered where I was, and stuffed back my memory into that same place that off-color jokes get put when you look up and remember you’re at your grandma’s. 

Afterwards, I wondered what would’ve happened if the recruiter had opened with a question that showed she truly wanted to hear what I had to say--instead of stock questions that asked for stock answers. If she’d started off with So, what do you think of Pam? It would’ve been harder, I think, not to say at least a little of what I was thinking. Or if she’d hit me with her last question at the very beginning: if you had the chance, would you hire her again? Especially, If she’d asked a little like a bartender asking What’re you drinking? Maybe then I would’ve let myself slip into that moment she wanted me to imagine: when I’m looking at Pam’s resume and trying to decide if she’s the best person I could find for the job.

Back when I was single, a friend told me that brunch was the best place for a first date. The room’s brighter than a bar, there are families around, and it’s early in the day, so there’s no pressure about what’s going to happen afterwards. Conversations work the same way: we invite someone to meet us in a certain type of place, and each comes with a specific set of rules for what can happen there. Stiff and formal; friendly and straightforward--the way we ask our questions makes room for certain kinds of answers, and lets the person we’re asking know what kind of person we’re looking to meet.

Reasons for leading

A serial CEO thinks about why he does it.

Trochanter!” Harry said, leaning across the dark wood of the bar where we’d met for lunch. We hadn’t seen each other for a year, so when Harry saw my crutch he wanted to know what I’d done to get it. I told him about the bike, the dark, the last patch of ice at the end of winter, and the light came up in his eyes as he sketched out bones on a napkin to find out where, exactly, I’d broken my hip.

“That was one of my very first projects,” Harry explained. The client was a big healthcare company that saw a market opportunity in designing ways to keep older people from breaking their hips. The tricky part, Harry explained, was testing. They’d developed a prototype you’d wear inside your pants, a pad with a hard shell on the outside that shifted the impact away from the point of your pelvic bone. But you couldn’t go around pushing over older people to see if your new product actually worked. “Cadavers,” he said. “We’d drop them like they were falling.”

Harry used to run the design firm where I’d worked, and then he’d left to help lead another company, and when we met, he was just done with another CEO gig. The non-compete he’d signed was expiring soon, Harry explained, and he was wondering which he wanted more: to keep working as an independent consultant — or to take on another leadership role.

I asked Harry if he thought he’d be able to stay away from the C-suite, if he wouldn’t miss it. I thought he’d say something about creative freedom, or the power to make a real impact. (I didn’t figure Harry would mention status, since I’d seen the nothing-special desk he’d chosen in the middle of our open office, and I’d once heard from a client how he was the only CEO they’d ever met in work boots, while he was building a prototype bank branch out of foamcore.) But the thing that Harry said he’d miss was responsibility.

It seemed like a strange choice. Responsibility is what most of us spend a lot of time trying to avoid. We look at kids on the playground and talk about how lucky they are to have no work that needs to get done; nobody they need to make happy; nowhere they need to get on time.

But Harry was never much for the obvious answer, and he got me thinking about Robert Frost’s poem, “Birches.” The speaker imagines himself a young boy, swinging from branches out into the sky, escaping the ordinary world and all its worries. But no matter how “weary of considerations” he gets, the speaker insists he doesn’t want to get away for good. “Earth’s the right place for love,” he says, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s the only chance we get to make things happen. “I’d like to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over.”

Making Up the Universe

Last night, my daughter asked for Harold and the Purple Crayon for her bedtime story.

For those of you who may not have read it for a while, or might never have, the book starts with a young boy deciding to take a walk in the moonlight. He steps onto the next page, which is empty except for Harold in his footie pajamas, holding a crayon in his hand. He draws a moon to make the moonlight and a long, straight path to walk along under it. “And he set off on his walk, taking his big purple crayon with him.”

Though we’d read the story many times before, this was the first time my daughter asked “How come there’s nothing in the world except for what he draws?

And as we talked about why, and then watched the story unspool—watched Harold draw a tree and the apples on it, and because they look so tempting, a dragon underneath to guard it; an ocean and a boat to sail across it; the pies he’s hungry for and a moose to eat the parts that he can’t finish—I thought how well this bedtime story captured what so many progressive schools struggle to say about themselves.

When people ask school-folk what they mean when they call themselves “progressive,” they're sometimes unsure of where to look for answers. Is it in the way their students call teachers by their first names, or in the fact that they cast votes with the rest of the trustees? Are progressive schools different because their courses are more focused, or because of how much responsibility they give students in shaping those courses? I think these things matter a great deal, but the list they’re part of just keeps going. I think that somewhere underneath it there’s a simpler story we can tell: a myth, perhaps, that might catch hold of what we want our students to believe about the world and their place in it.

By the material we make our courses out of and the way we ask students to speak for themselves, we teach them a basic orientation toward the world, a faith that all those facts that fill our day-to-day—the old furniture wrapped in plastic covers, the landscape that has been leveled already and mapped out in familiar streets and avenues—might still be re-imagined and made better. We want our students to grow up in the conviction that they could always get back to the drawing board. We want them to know how to close their eyes and erase, for a moment, all those hard facts that frame the limits of what might they might do next.

We want our children to know, deeply and in its details, the world they’ve been given—its history and literature and the art that was made long before any of them ever stood in front of a canvas. But, in a certain sense, we don’t want them to “believe” in it. We don’t want them simply to accept what they’ve been given as though it were the inevitable last word; we don’t want them to feel that they come after everything important has already been figured out and finalized. We want them to approach all this glorious stuff not like a tourist walking through a museum but like an artist walking through another artist’s studio: we want them able to appreciate what’s true and beautiful because they know how to make it.

“And he set off on his walk, taking his big purple crayon with him.”

---

Set up a complimentary consultation.

Contact Us

contact us