Educational pruning: Mastering the Power of Strategic Subtraction
Simon Breakspear
28 October 2024
The idea: Doing less could mean achieving more.
Strategic subtraction (or ‘pruning) can redirect much-needed energy and resources towards the areas of highest impact.
30-Second Version
- We’re dealing with ‘The Additive Trap’ in education – a tendency to engage in improvement by defaulting to adding one more thing. Causing educators to be constantly overloaded.
- The Pruning Principle is about strategic subtractive thinking that can set us up for better long-term impact and sustainability.
- This ‘pruning’ needs to become habitual, an automatic part of our yearly cycles. It could be beneficial for all systems, schools and teams to engage in a pruning period before school planning activities.
The Full Read
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.
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 answer Michael Rosenbrock and I believe is the Pruning Principle.
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.
The Three Step Process
- Pruning Phase 1: Critically Examine. Effective pruning needs to begin with a thoughtful review of the current landscape and then move through identifying, categorising and prioritising pruning targets. At the core of this analysis is the view that everything that is currently happening already has an impact-to-effort ratio: that is, how much impact you’re getting from the effort and investment being put in.
– - Pruning Phase 2: Consciously Remove. Pruning in education must consider the humans involved and the relational and organisational dynamics that will play out. This means we must learn how to subtract with care. Attuning to the people and organisational readiness is vital here, along with being thoughtful in how we communicate and steward the change.
– - Pruning Phase 3: Carefully Nurture. This is the phase that is most commonly overlooked and under-prioritised. The benefits of pruning come from having a solid commitment to cultivating what matters. Here, as “pruners”, our goal is to protect the space that we have worked so hard to create and avoid additional things rising up that would risk rapidly re-creating a similar state of overload.
The cycle is versatile and holds up across any level of use – from personal or team pruning, through to organisation-wide and even education-system-wide pruning. We hope it gives you and your colleagues a shared way of working through the process of strategic subtraction.
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.
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.
Challenge → When could you schedule a pruning session ahead of finalising your next annual improvement plan? Remember the new order of operations for school improvement should be subtraction before addition.
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