The PEARRL Leadership Strategy
"Life doesn't get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient." Steve Maraboli
Imagine the day you present to your team the decision you have been mulling over for many days. You stand in front of them, preparing to deliver your rationale, the details of the plan, the timeline, and the measurement tool. Your voice rises to meet the excitement you share with a fervor you have rarely seen. At the apex of your presentation, you realize that your decision-making process is clear and produces effective results. After you finish, many team members join you in the celebration of a well designed plan. They are now excited to join the journey into a successful path. Suddenly, a new team member, not familiar with your process, interrupts you. He asks, "what is the process you used to develop such a well defined plan?"
This short story epitomizes the realization of an effective planning process. Clear, concise, and easy to follow are the key points of the process I wish to outline. For many years, I have used this PEARRL process to aid my own guided planning. I informally use this with my team and the staff within my school. Often, in a quiet moment, I analyze my steps:
Plan- The first step of the process is to chart your future way. Start with a hypothesis. Develop a clear way to determine what you are seeking to achieve. For example, when seeking to develop a new time structure to garner additional time within the school day to allow for struggling students to be able to receive remediation, I wrote the following hypothesis: "Additional instructional time and various support structures, within the school day, will cause a decrease in student failures and an increase in successful measures." At the end of the planning structure, we were able to compare constant outcomes to the goals determined in the hypothesis. Not only are we setting a goal, rather the goal and action steps are planned to determine success. In the example, a goal was determined, a time structure was set, an RTI (Response to Intervention) set of strategies were aligned, a measurement tool and staff members were selected.
Execute- Clearly, executing means to apply the hypothesis, actions, resources, and staff to the process determined. Executing with Linear Fidelity means to be undeterred to the absolute purpose. Do not deviate in the execution phase from what was planned. Do not make those adjustments on the fly. Keep with the plan and steps aligned in the hypothesis stage. Go through the entirety of the process before making adjustments. This sounds a bit rigid, rather it is a good method to collect information for future applications. After accomplishing the first run on the plan, you can make those adjustments to add detail to future feedback.
Analyze- At this point take all available data to make the first determinations toward effectiveness. Look at the effects toward the individual. Individual responses must be immediate. This is a data gathering opportunity from individual responses. No judgements...just data gathering.
Reflect- At this time, once all individual data has been collected, begin making judgements. The collective reaction can be made based upon the numerous past situations. Here, we connect the dots. Individual data are singular and isolated. Here, we have multiple sources to make judgements. The operative question is "how much individual data are required to make a judgment?" The effective answer is... That is up to the stated question... In the example, we had 3000 students, so we compared the trend data of each student and the likelihood of failures at the conclusion of the first quarter. Failures decreased by 36.9% in the first nine week period after the Lunch & Learn structure was applied. We found that the education was more than significant to achieve success.
Respond- At this stage, we determine the effective steps toward meeting our goal. These steps will be used to replicate for effective alignment. Repetitive actions will become meaningful execution of the hypothesis. In our example, the Lunch & Learn structure became a daily mechanism for student success. Simply put, responding means to act daily.
Learn- This last phase is the most intriguing phase. In the learning phase, apply all of the lessons learned to the ongoing nature of the same hypothesis or to new strategies. Cognitively knowing the steps for replicating the actions means to follow through in all situations. By this time, you have been through the ebbs and flows of the applications of your structure. Here, we can expect that any new situation can be handled within the growth of our new plan. We have learned from the effects of our plan...
This structure has served me very well in many applications of the change process, development of new ideas, and the overall development of leaders as they emerged into being able to plan.
