The Uncertainty-Growth Graph
“If you can’t handle uncertainty, you can’t handle growth.” —@steven / Image by @visualizevalue (on Twitter and Instagram)
Almost six years ago, I was hustling around Malvern Prep’s Learning Commons to arrange chairs, tables, coffee, and snacks. A few dozen people—a mixture of parents, faculty, staff, and trustees—had RSVP’d to observe teams of students in our Social Entrepreneurship pilot present their solutions to a CEO panel.
The school had never done this before—created a proof-of-concept for the future of learning, open to the public. (Prior to the CEO panel we had worked all week in the Learning Commons precisely because it was the most trafficked and visible learning space on campus.)
I had never done this before—taught social entrepreneurship, invited CEOs to listen to teenagers’ pitches, or personally organized an event for the public.
The students had never done this before—learned 100% within a team, 100% through a project, and publicly demonstrated their learning as their “final exam.”
All of which is to say, we were facing significant uncertainty.
At the time, Malvern Prep was in the middle of a transformation effort. We had envisioned a learning community that was Augustinian, Entrepreneurial, and Globally Competent. To achieve that vision, the Middle School was redesigning the curriculum one grade level at a time, while the Upper School ran multiple experiments such as Social Entrepreneurship.
Since I left Malvern in 2017, many of those seeds have grown. Upper School teachers have designed mastery credit experiences that will plug into the Mastery Transcript; the St. Augustine Center for Social Impact houses the thriving Social Entrepreneurship program; and students are the creators and producers of the “My CSItizen Moment” podcast that highlights “stories of positive social impact, and inspires the next generation of social entrepreneurs.”
But back in 2015, as I was anxiously arranging chairs in the Learning Commons, that future was totally uncertain.
And that’s where the growth is. As Seth Godin has said, we can only do our best work when we are prepared to say, “This might not work.”
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that every school must transform.
And transformations come with an irreducible level of uncertainty.
That’s not just ok—that’s the flip side of growth.
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