Many leaders express a desire to feel calm, in control and on top of things. We talk about wanting to support educator wellbeing and lead a ‘calmer school’ with great rhythms and an achievable workload. We know that improving our school’s effectiveness, culture and educational outcomes by even a fraction each year could have a significant, rippling impact on the learning and life outcomes of our students. The reality, though, is that school leaders have finite time, money, energy and human resources available in order to get there, and every day requires us to make new trade-offs with competing priorities.
The Additive Trap
Are you busier than you were three years ago? For how many years would you say this has been true? When we examine the sheer number of programs, projects and commitments we find ourselves tied to in our schools, it’s easy to see why the overload is real. We have found ourselves in a state of what I call frenzied stagnation, where doing more is the default, yet it’s not having the impact we hope that it will. As one educational leader in my local school systems said to me recently, “I’ve been flat out all week. I’m exhausted, and I don’t think I’ve even achieved anything.” I know he’s not alone.
We’re dealing with ‘The Additive Trap’ in education – a tendency to engage in improvement by defaulting to adding one more thing. We are like a calculator with only one function: addition. Our individual and team rhythms, tools, templates, protocols, and conversational norms are focused on how best to improve our schools through additive actions. The default assumption is that pursuing improvement for our students, staff, and systems implicitly means doing more. We have rhythms and routines for school improvement to ensure that every term, year or longer-term planning cycle, we carry on with all the things we’ve already committed to, whilst adding additional projects or initiatives that theoretically will finally give us the breakthrough that we seek.
So the question is, how can we learn to deliberately stop doing things? How might we collectively interrupt the additive trap that our schools and systems seem stuck in?
The Pruning Principle
Normally, in my applied research and development work I turn to the psychological literature to seek insights that could inform a workable solution in schools. However, this time, the most helpful approach came from a most unexpected field: horticulture. In ancient Greece, pruning was an essential practice in olive groves, a cornerstone of their economy. They understood that regular pruning was crucial for the health and productivity of olive trees. By removing dead or diseased branches, they ensured robust growth and a good harvest. In my journey through educational leadership and research, I’ve uncovered parallels between school improvement and the process of pruning plants. Just as a skilled gardener trims away deadwood to promote healthy growth, educators can benefit immensely from applying the principle of pruning – strategically removing or reducing ineffective practices and initiatives to make room for what will really move the needle.
Prepare your secateurs; it turns out that the same principles and practices of pruning that apply to dynamic living ecosystems have broader relevance. These concepts are unbelievably useful for those of us trying to work through how to get beyond a state of overload in educational settings and start making long-term meaningful progress in our schools and systems. At the core of pruning logic is a flip in the fundamental logic of educational impact: that to do less, you can achieve more over the long term. I define the Pruning Principle as – deliberately cutting off or cutting back is essential to cultivating long-term vitality and impact.
Pruning in education is all about mastering the art of strategic subtraction. In doing so, we redirect energy and resources towards the areas of the highest marginal impact, stimulate new desired growth and reshape for health and longevity.
Pruning isn’t the same as simply not adding – or declaring that you will not add for a while. Pruning is not simple trimming. Trimming involves giving the plant a ‘haircut’ mostly for cosmetic reasons. Pruning is a deliberative, active and intentional process of subtraction. It involves a deep commitment to the long-term health and vitality of your team, schools and systems and a willingness to hold to the fundamental principle of pruning: that through doing less we can unlock much more over time.
The Three Step Process
So, how do we go about the pruning process? There is a three-step cycle that can help educators and leaders work through a regular pruning rhythm. This three-step approach can be applied at the individual level, the team level, the school level, the network level, and even across an entire region, state, province, or system.
1. Critically Examine. The first stage is to review the landscape, examining what is and is not working based on available evidence. We’ll need to consider where we might need to remove the dead, the diseased, the damaged, or problematic and cut back to promote new growth and fruit. Through collective processes we can surface areas that are most likely to create a positive benefit through pruning, and then identify those from the list that we can directly influence.
2. Consciously Remove. The second step is to get those pruning tools out and begin to subtract with care. Sometimes, this will look like thinning out and reshaping a project or activity in order to simplify and fortify the structural integrity of what we’re doing. Other times, it will take a bold decision to cease a project, commitment or engagement altogether. This stage of the pruning takes courage and creativity as we choose to cut back, remove and thin out for the sake of the long-term growth of our schools. I recommend starting with a smaller pruning project while you get familiar with the process. This might look like pruning away a small project or editing your team’s overloaded meeting schedule.
3. Carefully Nurture. The last phase of the three-stage pruning cycle is to cultivate what matters. This is where we focus on nurturing what we’ve chosen to keep doing, while also remembering to hold space where there used to be clutter. After we’ve cut back on things and preserved others, there’s a natural temptation to want to fill the space we’ve created by returning to the additive trap. The goal here is to resist the urge to go back to our original workload and honour the space we’ve created by following through on your commitment to doing fewer things – better.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
We have an innate bias as humans to defend our past investments. It is a well-established cognitive bias known as ‘the sunk cost fallacy’ that leads us to a natural tendency to want to continue with something, rather than prune it, because of how much time, money, or energy we might have already put in – despite it being ineffective, potentially redundant or no longer solving the problem (Arkes & Blumer, 1985; Kahneman, 2013). We simply can’t bring ourselves to give it up.
We’ve all had an experience like this: A school signs up to an expensive three-year program with an external provider to run professional learning. It seemed like it’s run by a credible group, and other schools you knew were signing up to do the same, giving you the confidence to jump in without necessarily doing your own deeper due diligence. One year in, things aren’t going well. The presentations run by the consultants are long, boring and break all of the rules about effective teaching that they themselves are asking your teachers to execute. Feedback from teachers is that they don’t find it relevant. Lesson observations show that there’s almost no transfer into practice from the program. The principal has now spent thousands of dollars and 50% of an entire year’s quota of professional learning time on this program. As you can imagine, it’s therefore very tempting to continue with it, due to how much has already been invested.
The sunk cost fallacy manifests in all sorts of areas of life. A good example is a problematic secondhand car. While it may have looked fine upon purchase, sure enough, it wound up in one breakdown after another, with you having to sink more and more cost into it. Rather than sell the car and start afresh, the natural human tendency is to continue pouring more money in – not so much because we believe that the next fix-up will solve the problem, but because we feel as though we’ve added so much money to it already that we’re ‘too far in’ and might as well go ahead with this next purchase. The sunk cost fallacy prevents us from seeing all of that previous money spent on the dud car as a sunk cost – a cost that can’t be returned, and therefore shouldn’t influence future decision-making. We get emotionally attached and hold on to things longer than we need to.
In a similar way, in our educational settings, all of us can tend to hold onto things that we’ve committed to in the past, that we’ve spent money on, and that we’ve asked our staff to spend significant professional learning and planning time on. It feels painful to prune them away, because we’ve already invested. Even if we’re no longer convinced that the return versus the effort is worth it, or that the problem we’re solving is still relevant, we can tend to get caught up in continuing things because of a level of guilt about what resources have already been ‘sunk’. This can get in the way of effective pruning.
Releasing Ourselves From Sunk Costs
So, what is the solution? Release ourselves from sunk costs, distil the lessons learned, and focus on maximizing future impact.
We need to be aware of this natural tendency as humans to avoid pruning because of a sunk cost, and once we’re aware of it and talking openly with our colleagues about it, we need to learn to overcome it. We can’t get back the money, the time and the energy we’ve put into things. However, we can think seriously about the additional dollar and the additional time that we were going to add and consider redirecting that resource into activities likely to have a better effort-to-impact outcome.
Sometimes something will not work, or we will get it wrong, and that’s ok. It’s not about perfection, it’s about the speed with which we accept and learn from a mistake and move forward. Focusing on the future – not trying to make up for the past – is the key.
Running Your Pruning Experiments
While mastering the art of strategic subtraction may seem simple in theory, the collective impact it would have on our roles, teams and schools is nearly limitless. As educators and school leaders, it is time to start engaging together in pruning. It needs to become habitual, baked in as an automatic part of our planning cycles. In fact, I would argue that all systems should encourage a pruning period before engaging in school planning activities. The new order of operations for school improvement should be subtraction before addition.
Pruning is best pursued through a series of iterative pruning experiments where we try out subtractive changes and notice both the impact on the outcomes we care about and the impact on the well-being of the people involved.
I am convinced that our current additive trap is exhausting our people and reducing the long-term vitality of our schools as learning organizations. Our schools are organizations that need to thrive, not just over the next few years, but over the coming decades. If our schools are going to have a sustainable impact for multiple decades and be set up as places for educators to flourish, it’s imperative that we learn how to intentionally stop doing things. The Pruning Principle, process and tools might be just what we’ve been collectively waiting for. Is it time for you and your team to master the art of strategic subtraction?
This article is based on Dr Simon Breakspear’s new book “The Pruning Principle” due for publication at the end of 2024. You can download tools and resources to support your pruning practice at www.simonbreakspear.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr Simon Breakspear is the founder of Strategic Schools and an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales. He works globally with educational leaders to enable them to enhance their impact. He began his career as a secondary school teacher and holds a PhD from Cambridge where he was a Gates Scholar.
