Every Good Idea Does Not Deserve to Become an Initiative
Uncorking leadership, learning, and the conversations that move schools forward.
I have a leadership confession.
I love a good idea.
Like, really love one.
Show me a promising instructional strategy, an interesting piece of research, a clever tracker, or a new way to organize data and immediately my brain starts going:
WE SHOULD DO THIS.
Perhaps you know the feeling.
You attend a conference.
Read a book.
Visit another school.
Listen to a podcast.
Someone shares a beautiful Google Sheet.
And suddenly…
NEW INITIATIVE!
We announce it enthusiastically.
We make a slide deck.
We put it on the strategic plan.
We schedule professional development.
We create a tracker.
Because obviously, if something is good…
we should add it.
Except here’s the problem.
Your teachers were already doing something before you read that book.
Your coaches had priorities before you attended that conference.
Your principals had goals before someone showed you that beautiful Google Sheet.
And eventually an organization can accumulate so many individually good ideas that collectively…
nobody can do any of them particularly well.
Welcome to initiative overload.
The place where good ideas go to die.
Your Organization Has a Backpack
Imagine your organization is carrying a backpack.
At the beginning of the year, we put in the essentials.
Strong Tier I instruction.
Student culture.
Attendance.
Coaching.
Assessment.
Intervention.
Reasonable.
Then September happens.
“Could we add a weekly tracker?”
Sure.
October:
“We really need more emphasis on student discourse.”
Absolutely.
November:
“We’ve noticed teachers need additional support with data analysis.”
Makes sense.
January:
“We should probably strengthen small-group instruction.”
Obviously.
February:
“What about AI?”
Of course.
March:
“We really need to revisit culture.”
Throw it in.
By April, the organization is dragging a 73-pound backpack through the hallway while leadership stands at the top of the stairs yelling:
“WHY ARE WE MOVING SO SLOWLY?”
Friends.
Look in the backpack.
Everything Can’t Be a Priority
The word priority originally referred to something being first.
Singular.
One thing came before the others.
Somehow, organizations turned it into:
Our 11 priorities for this quarter.
That’s not prioritization.
That’s a list.
Michael Fullan and Joanne Quinn’s work on coherence is helpful here. Coherence doesn’t come from implementing more things. It comes from developing shared understanding about what matters most and organizing the system around it.
That’s harder than adding.
Because adding lets everybody win.
You want writing?
We’ll add writing.
You want attendance?
We’ll add attendance.
You want student discourse?
Add it.
SEL?
Sure.
Small groups?
Absolutely.
Nobody has to say no.
But leadership is partly the discipline of saying:
Yes, that matters. And no, it is not our focus right now.
That sentence can save an organization.
Good Ideas Have a Cost
Here’s something we don’t calculate often enough.
Every initiative has a price.
Not just money.
Attention.
Planning time.
Professional development time.
Meeting time.
Coaching time.
Teacher cognitive bandwidth.
Leader monitoring capacity.
Implementation energy.
And perhaps most importantly:
the opportunity cost of what people aren’t thinking about while they’re thinking about your new thing.
If I ask a coach to deeply monitor five instructional priorities, I’m not getting five deeply monitored priorities.
I’m probably getting five shallowly monitored priorities.
If I ask teachers to simultaneously improve questioning, discourse, writing, differentiation, checks for understanding, student ownership, small-group instruction, and classroom culture…
I’ve technically communicated eight priorities.
Practically?
I may have communicated none.
Because when everything matters equally, people have to decide for themselves what actually matters.
And now we’ve traded organizational coherence for individual guesswork.
Your Brain Has Limits. So Does Your Staff.
This isn’t just a management preference.
It’s also connected to how humans learn.
Cognitive load theory reminds us that working memory is limited.
We can only consciously process so much novel information at once.
Teachers are already operating in extraordinarily cognitively demanding environments.
Picture a teacher during one minute of instruction.
She’s tracking the lesson objective.
Listening to a student response.
Deciding whether the misconception is individual or widespread.
Watching the student in the back who has stopped writing.
Thinking about pacing.
Remembering which students she needs to check first.
Preparing the next question.
Monitoring behavior.
Deciding whether to show-call Jordan’s response.
And realizing somebody has somehow broken a pencil into six pieces.
Again.
Now imagine me walking in afterward and saying:
“Great work! Here are seven things to focus on tomorrow.”
No.
That’s not development.
That’s an ambush.
Improvement requires enough focus for a new behavior to become increasingly automatic.
Which is why the best coaching action steps are narrow.
And why the best organizational strategies are, too.
Subtraction Is Leadership
Last week I mentioned Leidy Klotz’s work on subtraction neglect.
When humans try to improve something, we naturally tend to think:
What can we add?
Klotz and colleagues found that people systematically overlook subtractive changes.
That feels painfully familiar in education.
When student outcomes aren’t improving:
Add intervention.
When teachers struggle:
Add professional development.
When implementation is inconsistent:
Add a tracker.
When the tracker isn’t being used:
Add an accountability meeting about the tracker.
When people complain about too many meetings:
Add a staff wellness committee.
Please don’t.
Sometimes improvement requires asking a different question:
What can we remove?
What meeting no longer serves its purpose?
What report does nobody use?
What tracker duplicates information we already have?
What initiative has quietly survived three strategic plans despite producing no measurable result?
What professional-development topic is interesting but not essential?
What are we asking teachers to do because…
we’ve always asked teachers to do it?
Delete something.
I promise your organization will survive.
Beware the Zombie Initiative
Every organization has them.
Zombie initiatives.
Nobody remembers exactly why they started.
Nobody is particularly passionate about them.
Nobody can explain how they connect to current priorities.
But they continue wandering through the calendar year after year.
Someone asks:
“Why do we complete this form?”
And someone else says:
“I think regional needs it.”
Regional says:
“We thought schools needed it.”
Schools say:
“We thought the coaches needed it.”
The coaches say:
“I literally have no idea.”
Yet every Thursday at 4:00…
the form gets completed.
Zombie initiative.
Kill it.
Humanely.
Monitoring Isn’t Free Either
This is particularly important for leaders.
Every time we add an initiative, we should also ask:
Who will monitor this?
Because remember:
Monitoring isn’t an action.
But if something truly matters, somebody needs to know whether it’s happening and whether it’s working.
That requires:
Evidence.
Observation.
Conversation.
Feedback.
Follow-up.
Adjustment.
All of which takes leadership capacity.
So if you tell me your organization has 17 strategic priorities, my first question isn’t:
“How are you implementing them?”
It’s:
“Who has enough Tuesdays to actually know whether any of them are working?”
You cannot deeply monitor everything.
Therefore, you cannot deeply prioritize everything.
Strategy Is Also What You Refuse to Do
This may be one of the hardest lessons in leadership.
A strategic plan shouldn’t only tell people:
Here’s what we’re doing.
It should also create clarity about:
Here’s what we’re NOT doing.
Not because those things are bad.
Because these things matter more.
Strong organizations protect attention.
They say:
This year, these are the instructional moves.
These are the student outcomes.
These are the coaching priorities.
These are the meetings where we’ll examine them.
And when another good idea appears?
We don’t immediately launch it.
We ask:
Does this strengthen what we’re already doing?
If yes, integrate it.
If not?
Put it on the shelf.
Good ideas don’t expire just because you didn’t turn them into a Tuesday meeting.
Try a Stop-Doing List
Most leadership retreats include some version of:
What should we start doing?
This year, add another question:
What should we stop doing?
Put everything on the table.
Meetings.
Reports.
Trackers.
Assessments.
Communication routines.
Professional development.
Committees.
Initiatives.
Ask:
Does this directly support one of our highest priorities?
Does anyone use the information it produces?
Would something meaningfully break if we stopped?
Is there a simpler way to accomplish the same purpose?
Are we doing this because it works…
or because it’s Tuesday?
That last question may eliminate approximately 30% of organizational activity.
You’re welcome.
Protect Teachers From Your Enthusiasm
This one is for leaders like me.
The idea people.
The people who read something Sunday morning and arrive Monday thinking:
I HAVE THOUGHTS.
Our enthusiasm can accidentally become everyone else’s workload.
That doesn’t mean stop learning.
Please don’t.
Read the books.
Visit schools.
Go to conferences.
Listen to podcasts.
Play with the fancy spreadsheet.
But develop a filter between:
“This is interesting.”
and
“Everyone now has to do this.”
Those are wildly different conclusions.
Sometimes the best leadership move after learning something brilliant is simply:
Keep it in your pocket.
Your team doesn’t need access to every thought you’ve ever had.
I say that with love.
And considerable personal experience.
Final Sip
Leadership isn’t just deciding what matters.
It’s protecting people from everything else.
Every initiative consumes attention.
Every tracker consumes time.
Every meeting occupies space that cannot be occupied by something else.
Every “quick ask” joins 47 other quick asks.
So before you add anything this week, ask:
What problem are we actually solving?
Does this connect directly to our highest priorities?
What will we stop doing to make room for it?
And my personal favorite:
If we add this, who now has to do something differently on Tuesday?
If you can’t answer those questions…
close the Google Doc.
Back away from the tracker.
Nobody needs to know about the webinar you attended yet.
Because the goal isn’t to build an organization with the most good ideas.
It’s to build one capable of executing the right few ideas exceptionally well.
So take another sip.
Look at the backpack.
And take something out.
Your teachers don’t need another initiative.
They need enough room to get really good at the ones that matter.
Sip Wisdom: Recommended Reading
Fullan, Michael & Quinn, Joanne. Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems. Corwin, 2016.
Fullan and Quinn argue that sustainable improvement requires coherence across a system: focused direction, collaborative cultures, deepening learning, and securing accountability. The key connection here is that coherence is not achieved by accumulating programs. Leaders have to create shared meaning around a limited number of priorities and align the organization around them.
Klotz, Leidy. Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Flatiron Books, 2021.
Klotz explores our tendency to improve things by adding rather than subtracting. For education leaders, this raises an uncomfortable question: how many of our solutions create additional work when removing a process, requirement, meeting, or competing priority might solve the problem more effectively?
Sweller, John. “Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning.” Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257-285 (1988).
Cognitive load theory provides an important learning-science foundation for this conversation. Working memory has limited capacity, particularly when people are processing novel or complex information. Leaders should consider those limitations when designing professional learning, coaching priorities, instructional expectations, and change initiatives.
Fullan, Michael. The New Meaning of Educational Change (5th ed.). Teachers College Press, 2016.
Fullan’s broader body of work on educational change is useful for understanding why technically good reforms often fail during implementation. Change is not simply the adoption of a new program or practice. It requires people to develop new understanding, skills, beliefs, and behaviors, all of which require sustained attention.
Ordóñez, L. D., Schweitzer, M. E., Galinsky, A. D. & Bazerman, M. H. “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting.” Academy of Management Perspectives, 23(1), 6-16 (2009).
This provocative paper offers another caution for leaders who assume more goals necessarily produce better performance. The authors examine unintended consequences of poorly designed or excessive goal-setting, including narrowed attention and distorted priorities.
One More Sip
At your next leadership meeting, don’t start by asking:
What else should we do?
Put this question on the screen instead:
If these are truly our priorities, what are we willing to stop doing to protect them?
Then wait. The uncomfortable silence that follows? That’s probably where strategy begins.