Ruthless Simplicity

Hey

Hope you’ve recovered from any weekend losses. Today, more on complexity and school effectiveness…

Big idea 🍉

The more complex a system becomes, the harder it is to maintain or improve. As complexity grows, so do coordination costs: more meetings, more guidance, more decisions, and more time spent managing the system rather than improving it.

Schools are particularly vulnerable to this creep. Education is inherently complex. Everyone has an opinion about it. And as humans, we have a blind spot when it comes to the true costs of complexity.

So when a problem emerges—weak outcomes, behaviour issues, staff workload—the default response is often to add something new: a marking policy, a behaviour framework, a new intervention, a new initiative for teaching and learning. We are great at imagining the benefits of these additions, but much less sensitive to anticipating their cumulative burden.

Over time, this additive bias creates schools full of competing priorities: multiple behaviour systems, overlapping data demands, professional development pulled in too many directions. The result is frustration and exhaustion.

In my experience, leaders of the most effective schools share a defining habit: they actively push back on complexity. They practise ruthless simplicity. They do less, but better. And they do it with conviction. This entails things like:

• Being explicit about a small number of non-negotiables (eg. a singular behaviour system or a tight definition of effective instruction) and over-communicating relentlessly.

• Building strong guidance and simple, consistent routines that support those priorities—used by everyone, every day.

• Stripping away anything that doesn’t serve the above: redundant data drops, competing initiatives, unnecessary meetings… and rejecting shiny new ideas by default.

The payoff is focus. Teachers spend their energy on improving core practice, not navigating systems. Leaders gain the capacity to deal thoughtfully with the genuine edge cases that inevitably arise.

Complexity is the silent assassin of school effectiveness. Ruthless simplicity is the antidote.

🎓 For more, check out this article on how simple systems can optimise the learning experience.

Summary

• When problems arise we tend to add something new, without fully considering the extra focus this will demand of staff.

• The best leaders are highly sensitive to this ‘complexity cost’ and pursue ruthless simplicity.

• This entails: over-communicating priorities, building strong routines, and constantly stripping things away.

Little updates 🥕

• Analysis of gamification in the maths classroom → finds it can raise motivation & works best when focused on cooperation over competition.

• Paper testing minimal guidance → reports that practice & feedback can rival teacher-led lectures whilst keeping learners motivated.

• Review of student engagement across adolescence → suggests that the drop-off in engagement during teenage years may be due to a mismatch between learner’s needs & the school environment.

• Study into teacher appraisal systems → reveals that effective teachers may be at risk of lower evaluations when working with disadvantaged learners.

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