From LIMFACS to LIMBELS
During an Expedition, we pause twice daily for reflections. Last week, one of the reflection prompts was, “What are you learning about yourself during this journey?”
One student shared this:
“I’m one of those people who hates group work. After I got my Top 5 Strengths [from CliftonStrengths] and saw ‘Achiever,’ it made total sense—I always want to get things done, so I find it frustrating to work with other people. I usually end up doing all the work by myself, because that’s easier. But this Expedition has been different. I’m learning that I really can enjoy working on a team.”
We might call her prior belief—that she hated group work and that she would end up doing most of the work—a LIMBEL: limiting belief. Before she experienced the Expedition, her capacity to learn through collaboration was limited by her idea that it wasn’t worth it.
In schools, we often focus on LIMFACs: limiting factors. The term comes from the military and refers to the weakest dimension of a process, a design, a team, etc. In schools, LIMFACs include the length of the school year, standardized testing requirements, organizational design, and more.
LIMFACs matter because they represent hard, seemingly irreducible limits. But sometimes LIMFACs are not irreducible. Sometimes LIMFACs are a function of LIMBELs.
Learning collaboratively was a LIMFAC for our student only until learning collaboratively was re-contextualized for her. The Expedition:
Prompted her to reflect on her personal strengths as well as her teammates’ strengths;
Front-loaded team conversations around “Who am I? Who are We? What matters to us and what are we going to do about it?”;
Created the positive pressure of presenting together, in public, to a CEO panel.
It’s worth noting that we also got rid of LIMFACs: traditional grades, traditional school day length, and more. The absence of these limiting factors may have created the conditions for our students to see collaboration in a new light.
What LIMFACs are causing LIMBELs in your organization?
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We are taking applications for our next virtual Expedition, August 3-7.
Deadline: July 15.
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