Failure of a Great Idea

It happens so many times.  A group  of people work with a vision and find a new way to make their work rewarding and very productive yet the idea dies on the vine.  How many school reforms start with great promise only to meet the same fate.  I heard a great podcast about this very phenomenon but it is about manufacturing cars.  Listen to a recent episode of This American Life to learn how General Motors teamed up with Toyota to build the most reliable cars in company history and hear how the fantastic ideas at the NUMI plant failed to spread to the rest of the company until it was too late.  Sounds a lot like some schools if you ask me.  Now I know people always say that teaching children is nothing like making things in a factory….and I think that is really true if you only think of factories in old terms.  When old style GM teamed up with Toyota in the 1980′s,  the workers at the NUMI plant had to totally re-think their jobs.   They had to learn what it meant to be on a team – to solve problems together, to help each other, to put quality first.   Hum….working as a team, helping each other, putting children first…I can see many connections.  How did the NUMI plant work?  Well, their task was urgent – the old plant made terrible cars and was shut down.  They received lots of help, even traveling to Japan to learn new ways to do their old job.  But most importantly, they learned to work as a team and constantly helped each other to make better cars.  The sad part is that the very successful ideas learned at NUMI did not spread to the rest of GM.  A combination of resistance to change, mistrust between management and labor, and a lack of urgency lead to the NUMI plant becoming a pocket of change that ultimately failed.  There certainly are lessons for schools to learn here!

Advertisement