We have a few more items to chalk up to the power of unconscious stimuli and bias on our feeble human minds:

1. ### The basic shape of a logo is enough to bias your perception of that company's product.

“Five experiments document that the mere circularity and angularity of a brand logo is powerful enough to affect perceptions of the attributes of a product or company,” the researchers write in the Journal of Consumer Research.

—"The Shape of a Logo Has a Powerful Impact On Consumers" on Association for Psychological Science

2\. White college students associate black faces with violence and guns, even when those faces are as young as 5 years old.

“Our findings suggest that, although young children are typically viewed as harmless and innocent, seeing faces of five-year-old Black boys appears to trigger thoughts of guns and violence,” said lead study author Andrew Todd, an assistant professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa.

—"Faces of Black Children as Young as Five Evoke Negative Biases" on Association for Psychological Science

3\. On a more positive front, conducting a value affirmation exercise can not only mitigate the "stereotype threat" for individual students who may be discriminated against, it furthermore seems to transfer that benefit to the entire class.

New research suggests that when students who are vulnerable to being stereotyped complete exercises that cause them to reflect on their own personal values, they perform better in class -- and so do other students around them, even if those other students don't complete the self-reflection tasks themselves.

—Jacqueline Howard, "Shielding Students From Stereotypes Helps Way More Than We Thought" on the Huffington Post

As the lead researcher in the latter study stated, "Who would have thought that the indirect benefits of an intervention could be almost as large than the direct benefits?"

Yet more evidence that speaks to the power of oblique methods of influence.

For more posts on this blog about obliquity, click here.

Dominic Randolph, the head of Riverdale Country Schools, and Max Ventilla, the founder of AltSchool, have written a thought provoking series of letters on Medium, on the topic of "What's the Point of School?"

Randolph's final letter, "Reimagining School," contained two great concepts I wanted to especially highlight:

If schools took learning more seriously and aimed indirectly but intentionally, like a Zen archer, then I think they might be in quite different places.

This is an interesting way to phrase the principle of obliquity and pair it with the concept of social-psychological interventions! I agree strongly with Randolph on this. I tire of hearing leaders in education harp on shallow and direct sources of targets, such as test scores or standards or compliance rates, as if these are the ultimate drive or purpose in our work. Data and standards are only powerful when contextualized and analyzed from multiple perspectives, in consideration of the needs and interests of students and the curricular focus of the department and school. Compliance rates . . . well, that's a baseline, not a target. Yet the messages I and other educators too often receive is that our focus should lie on such desultory targets.

How can we bring “applied anthropology” into schools so we can learn about how to more effectively construct the right culture of engaged and deep learning for our students, teachers, and parents? People talk about the effect of a leader on a school environment or the way a particular class is difficult, but where is the science of the culture of schools?

Matt Candler's ideas about "Tiny Schools," in which small schools are begun as prototypical experiments, then brought to scale as they experience success, seems to be a great opportunity for such an expansion of "applied" science, most especially if the learnings from the failures of these experiments are shared transparently and openly.

I certainly hope there's more thirst out there for such an education-specific science! I know I have this thirst myself. It's hopeful that schools are pairing more often with academic researchers or design firms like IDEO, though I fear that such pairings end up focusing on schools and communities, like Randolph's, that are already set up for success.

I'd perhaps be more interested in those pairings if they sought to expand the concepts of design thinking and character education to their broader community in the Bronx. How can school learning experiences build connections between students and schools of varying skills and backgrounds? And how can those connections be leveraged to actively overcome the physical and mental silos of our city and nation?

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on “the meaning of man” and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term “god only knows” purely as an expression.) There’s very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I’m the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.

To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter. As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal) he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires). In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life – the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

When viewing this advice from the lens of obliquity in the face of chaos and complexity, Thompson's advice presents an interesting addition: his suggestion that we would do better to focus on patterning our behavior based on our ability and our desires. He also stresses that this choice of patterning must be self-determined.

As a special education teacher and coordinator, this is especially interesting to me, because one of my duties is to develop Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) for students with disabilities, of which a major component are annual goals, which are written with little parental input, let alone input from the student themselves.

One of the critiques Will and I have offered of current education paradigms is the dominance of deficit models. Unsurprisingly, this deficit focus is especially prevalent in special education. So that leaves me with some critical questions to consider for improvement of special education services:

• How can I more effectively include student voice in the development of annual goals and the IEP process (beyond simply inviting them to the meeting or administering surveys)?
• How can I focus on student strengths and ability, while acknowledging challenges and deficits?
• How can I assist students in discovering their long-term interests and desires, and encourage self-selected patterning of daily practices and behavior to achieve them?

Following a link on Twitter from Tim Harford, I found this great TED talk from economist John Kay on the principle of obliquity.

We've explored the principle of obliquity here before—in relation to goal-setting in business (thanks to Steve Denning)—and we related the cheating that occurred during Michelle Rhee's reign to her pressure on goals based explicitly on test scores, as opposed to oblique goals.

John Kay enumerates three issues with decision-making on complex problems:

1. Defining what our objectives are is complicated
2. The world is uncertain. We can't predict the future.
3. The world is very complicated and the simplifications we make to deal with it are often very misleading. We don't know what the right model will be for each particular problem.

In elucidating the 3rd problem, Kay quotes Benjamin Franklin in what he terms Franklin's Gambit: "So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one had in mind to do."

In other words, in our decision-making processes on complex problems, we often select the evidence that best supports the decision we think best to make. One can see this sort of thinking in abundance on both sides of the ed reform divide.

Given these issues, then, Kay advises us to apply obliquity to our decisions. He suggests that we model the fox, rather than the hedgehog, in that "The fox knows many little things. The hedgehog knows one big thing." Given the size and complexity of the unknown, therefore, we are best off focusing more obliquely on the small things immediately before us that we better understand. In this way, we are more likely to accomplish the grander goals and vision we really hope to accomplish over the long haul.

This also reminds me of Nassim Taleb's advice in Antifragile* to give up any attempt to make predictions of the future, as there is no way to predict what he called "black swans." He suggests that instead of trying to quixotically predict events impossible to predict, we instead should assume the worst and prepare for it. Assume volatility, in other words, and seek to create systems that will adapt to such volatility, rather than try to prevent it. Similar to Kay, he also suggests that we adopt a more fox-like mentality, and use heuristics that have been proven and honed by time and practice, rather than blithely seeking the next technological fix or algorithm.

Food for thought.

Some thoughts on applying these insights to the context of a school:

• Clarify a shared vision and purpose for the school, and allow each departmental/grade-level team to create their vision and purpose based off of that.
• Rather than establishing goals, establish short-term project or task deadlines. If you must set goals, instead of setting annual goals, set short-term goals that align with the school's vision.
• Meet as grade-level and departmental teams on a frequent basis and focus on practical, immediate targets and student work (continuous refinement and  improvement).
• Expect and grow to love The Chaos Monkey (love this term. Read the article linked to on it.)

I would love to know your thoughts on applying the principle of obliquity in a school. I think if we focus on the tangible work and students before us, we can more efficiently get to the grand ideal of a strong school culture and academic achievement.

*I found Antifragile fascinating and highly provocative and useful, while also disagreeing with Taleb's ideas on education, so I will be writing more in depth on this book in the future. Probably the far distant future, at this point, since the school year is about to begin. . . That's an oblique goal, obviously.

Two years ago, an interview with a writer by the name of Steve Denning was posted on Anthony Cody's blog on Education Week. Denning is a proponent of what he terms "radical" management and leadership, which entails reduced hierarchies and increased flexibility and continuous improvement. In that article, he applied some of these ideas to education.

I can be very critical of ideas that I end up becoming closely aligned with, so it's funny to go back and read my comment on that post, which you can see here. The reality is that I've ended up repeating many similar critiques of the education system and proposing similar solutions. Perhaps I got so scrappy because I saw it as an encroachment on my turf.

In any case, the reason why I bring him up is that he posted an article on Forbes, Can Complexity Thinking Fix Capitalism?, that makes interesting points about how the idea of managing complexity applies to business.

His ideas about managing complexity parallels the discussions on this blog regarding intensive management of complex systems and the need to view schools as complex systems rather than simple machines:

Yet as the world has become more complex, management thinking is still largely anchored in linear thinking where command and control and linear cause-effect thinking are dominant. Managers have often treated organizations as machines (complicated but predictable) rather than organisms (complex, with limited predictability).

Efforts to impose linear thinking on complex situations have often led have the opposite of what was intended. As a result, the principle of obliquity becomes relevant. Where explicit articulation of a goal will result in the complex environment pushing back in the opposite direction, oblique goals will often be more effective, e.g. the goal of delighting customers may make more money than an explicit goal of making money.

I found his principle of "obliquity" fascinating. It's something that resonates strongly with me, because one of the key things I took away from my experience as a store manager with Trader Joe's was just how much the "bottom line" of making money was enhanced when you focus on treating employees and customers well. At the end of the day, Trader Joe's makes a lot of money. But they do so not by focusing on making as much money as they can, but rather by seeking to provide the best service and products possible.

Though I haven't termed it "obliquity" until now, I've advocated a similar focus for public schools. Rather than focus on the "bottom line" of student test scores, we need to focus on the content taught and the learning environment of the school. And by focusing on those things, test scores will naturally be enhanced.

Education reformers have much to learn from the principle of obliquity. The debacle with Michelle Rhee illustrates this point to a T: a zealous reformer comes in and imposes strict linear thinking on an incredibly complex system; the opposite of what was intended occurred. Rhee would have done better to have had her principals set oblique goals, rather than goals that were explicitly tied to their students performance on tests.