On The Difference Between Moving Fast And Moving Honestly
There is a question I find myself asking more often when I work with district and state leaders.
What are we actually talking about?
I don’t ask because people are being unclear. Most teams can describe their initiatives in great detail. They know the timeline, the goals, the milestones, and the progress they have made. What I am often less certain about is whether we are using the same language to describe where the work really is.
One of the most expensive mistakes in educational redesign is not choosing the wrong strategy. It is calling something by the wrong name. When we call something implementation before it is ready, we change what we do next. We send coaches to support rollouts when school teams still need help figuring things out. We end up measuring adoption rather than learning, and we expand the initiative before we understand it.
Eventually, we find ourselves asking why something that looked so promising never produced the results we hoped for. This doesn’t happen because leaders are trying to get ahead of the work. Most of the time, it happens because there is real pressure to show progress. Boards want updates. Grants have timelines. Communities want to know what is changing.
It can feel difficult to admit ‘we are still learning’ when everyone is waiting for evidence of success. But naming matters because names influence what we decide to do next.
Consider a Portrait of a Graduate that hangs in every school and appears in every presentation. If it is not yet shaping daily decisions about learning experiences, assessment practices, hiring, or budget allocations, it probably isn’t implementation yet. It is still in the research and development phase. That isn’t a criticism, it’s just the truth of where the work is.
Or consider a real-world learning initiative that has generated excitement, partnerships, and positive stories. If the team can’t yet describe what students are learning, how they know it, and what conditions matter most, the experience is still in design. The learning model is still taking shape. That is not failure either. It is just a different stage of the work.
The challenge is that once we call something implementation, we instinctively stop asking certain questions. Implementation is about consistency. R&D is about learning. Those aren’t the same thing, and mislabeling pulls our attention toward the wrong one. We start tracking whether people are doing it, rather than what we are learning from it. We look for fidelity when we should be looking for insight. The questions get narrower exactly when they need to get more curious.
If an initiative is still trying to understand what works, who it works for, and under what conditions, measuring adoption tells you very little. The more valuable question is whether the work is generating useful knowledge that can strengthen the next iteration. When we mislabel the work, we can also speed up how quickly we scale.
This is where many promising efforts begin to struggle. A practice works in one school. The results are encouraging. Leaders naturally want more students to benefit, so the work expands. Sometimes that is exactly the right move.Â
But sometimes, the early success depended entirely on conditions that nobody documented because they seemed obvious at the time. I think about the early days of the national personalized learning movement, when groundbreaking work often started in small, nimble systems where every leader and educator involved could fit around a single conference table. The conditions that made it work, the shared assumptions, the constant verbal course correction, and the unique chemistry of that particular room were never named because nobody had to name them.
When that work tried to grow beyond the table, the technical pieces traveled, but the chemistry didn’t. The model started to fray, and people started questioning the idea itself, when the real issue was that the learning never caught up with the expansion.
This is where I find the idea of containers helpful. The container is not the idea. It is the structure that holds the idea while you learn from it. A container that is too large creates pressure to manage and sustain something before you understand it. A container that is too small may not provide enough complexity to generate meaningful data.
The goal is not to keep initiatives small forever. It is to match the size of the container to the amount of learning that has actually occurred. Â
The good news is that discovering an initiative that is still in the learning phase is not a failure. Realizing a pilot isn’t ready for rollout, or that a promising idea needs a different container, is evidence that you learned something important.
A Place to Start
Pick three current initiatives. For each one, answer two questions:
- What is the learning question at the center of this work, not the goal, but what you still need to find out?
- Does the size of the container match the amount you actually know?
The second question tends to do the most work. A Portrait of a Graduate rolled out across twelve schools might reveal that one school is using it while eleven others are still figuring out what using it actually means. That’s a cohort pilot living inside a pathway-sized container. Naming it honestly doesn’t mean stopping. It means changing what you do next, documenting what the one school is doing well before asking the rest to follow.
The work of redesign is less about making every initiative bigger and more about making the learning clearer. The question isn’t whether your initiative is succeeding. It’s whether the container matches what you actually know right now.