Coaching Letter #226

On keeping systems simple

Friends, thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter—you are awesome. There are many new subscribers to the Coaching Letter, as the last CL, #225 on Practice Architectures, got top billing in a recent Marshall Memo. (Not for nothing, Kim has been very kind to the Coaching Letter, and my work that has appeared in previous Marshall Memos is actually a fairly good guide to my greatest hits, which was a fun thing to think about. I put them at the bottom for you to check out.)

In this and recent CLs, I am trying to stick to an arc of talking about the work of districts to create systems that create conditions for more equitable practices, whether those practices are in the classroom, lunchroom, or counseling office. (I launched this series in CL #223). In this Coaching Letter, I am actually going to direct you to the writing of Peps Mccrea, who mostly writes about evidence-based teaching, but his latest posts have been about keeping the system that supports good teaching focused and simple. Which is what I drone on about all the time. So I’m deferring to Peps partly because I don’t want you to think that my argument about reducing variation and making the system more effective because it is focused on fewer things is unique, and partly because Peps is a really good writer and some of his lines are better than mine, so I think you’re better off with him. (Just this once.)

In Educational Entropy, Peps uses the idea of entropy—the tendency of systems to drift toward disorder unless energy is applied—to explain why sustaining school improvement is so difficult. He calls educational entropy “an invisible yet inexorable force continually thwarting school improvement.” The problem is rarely dramatic failure; it is gradual drift. Routines loosen, expectations blur, initiatives accumulate, staff change, and practices slowly deviate from their original intent. Even when people work just as hard, schools can feel as if they are “getting harder or falling apart” because entropy is always at work.

The core insight is that the struggle to maintain improvement is not a sign of failure but a property of complex systems. Drift is inevitable; coherence must be actively maintained. (This is a big idea that also comes up in the work of Donella Meadows, my all-time favorite systems thinker.)

This reframes improvement from a search for the next innovation to the disciplined work of sustaining coherence. (See also CL #218 on coherence.) Leaders must expect drift and design against it by simplifying systems, protecting core routines, reinforcing norms, and continually re-energizing shared expectations. Small deviations, left unattended, accumulate into systemic decline.

In Ruthless Simplicity, Peps argues that school improvement gets harder as systems become more complex. Every new policy, initiative, or requirement adds coordination costs (a term I wish I’d come up with): More meetings, more decisions, more guidance, and more time managing the system instead of improving teaching. Schools are especially vulnerable to this “additive bias.” When problems arise—behavior issues, weak results, staff workload—the instinct is to add something new. Over time, these additions pile up and create competing priorities, overlapping systems, and staff exhaustion.

The most effective leaders resist this drift toward complexity. Instead, they practice ruthless simplicity: they define a small number of non-negotiable priorities, build strong routines around them, and remove anything that does not support those priorities. This approach frees teachers to focus on improving core practices (folks who have spent time with us will recognize this as one of our obsessions) rather than navigating systems. It also gives leaders the capacity to handle real problems instead of managing clutter.

The central message is practical and counterintuitive: Improvement often comes not from adding more, but from removing what distracts from what matters most. Complexity drains energy; simplicity concentrates it. And here’s a killer line I wish I’d written: “Complexity is the silent assassin of school effectiveness.”

I guess I’d like to add a couple of thoughts to this one. First, schools and districts simply cannot support multiple goals and initiatives—and even if they could, they have created a system that is so complex that they cannot tell, within all the noise, what’s actually happening and therefore they cannot know what’s working, which is really important to know! Second, adding new initiatives increases variation in the system, which is always a bad idea: Variation brings inequity with it, because variation almost always affects our most marginalized students disproportionately.

In Collective Alignment, Peps argues that improvement depends on people doing key practices the same way, every time. (I swear, I have never met the guy, haven’t talked to him, haven’t even emailed him yet.) When routines vary from classroom to classroom or meeting to meeting, the system cannot learn. Variation hides what works, weakens alignment, and makes outcomes unpredictable. Consistency, by contrast, creates reliability. It allows teams to see patterns, compare results, and refine practice.

This is not about rigidity or compliance for its own sake. It is about reducing unnecessary variation so attention can focus on improving the work itself. When the basic routine is stable, professionals can concentrate on quality rather than reinventing process. Consistent routines also lower cognitive load, make expectations clear, and help new staff integrate quickly. Without consistency, systems cannot learn. With it, small refinements accumulate into meaningful improvement. (My friend Christina once pointed out to me that you have to standardize a routine or practice before you can improve it. As Peps puts it, “Consistency is what allows systems to improve.”)

In improvement science, this principle shows up as standard work: a shared, agreed-upon way of performing essential routines so that practice is consistent, visible, and improvable. In our work, this same idea lives in recipes—clear, repeatable routines that enable teams to enact core practices with fidelity while learning from each cycle of use. If you have not yet read CL #190 on recipe testing, now is the time!

So you see? Not just me banging on about systems, simplicity, focus, iteration, and standard work. Please sign up for Peps’ newsletter—it’s free. (I’d also like to put in another plug for my colleague Tom’s newsletter, also great and also free.) I’m always looking for feedback, so please don’t be shy about reaching out. And please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you. Happy Valentine’s Day, Isobel

Here are the Coaching Letters that have appeared in the Marshall Memo, in reverse chronological order.

1. MM 1123 featured CL #225 on Practice Architectures, which is a very useful conceptual framework for talking about the system/organizational conditions that foster particular practices. My colleague Andrew and I have been spending a lot of time together on the road lately, and we’ve been talking a lot about this. He found a much easier way to summarize PAs on Stephen Kemmis’s website—Sayings, Doings, Relatings—that is very useful. We also started playing with the idea of PAs as a replacement for a traditional strategic plan—also Andrew’s idea—stay tuned!

2. MM 1110 included my discussion of Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) in CL #221. I was making the point that BTC frequently gets criticized for not having a research base, and of therefore “experimenting on children”, but this is not fair or true. Actually, BTC is a very clever change package that enables teachers to implement research on mathematics that has been around for a long time, so the CL reviews some of that research.

3. MM 1086 summarized why I think we should be paying a lot more attention to Task in CL #213. Task—the intellectual work students are asked to do, not the assignment they have to complete or the worksheet they have to fill in—is the engine of learning, equity, and opportunity to learn, yet it’s routinely underestimated as a lever for engaging students in thinking. If districts are serious about equitable, adaptive instruction, they have to treat Task as system infrastructure, not as work that falls to teachers under the guise of “lesson planning”.

4. MM 1038 was a polite retelling of my rather snarky CL #198, which took apart the critics of Building Thinking Classrooms for writing about it without really understanding what they were talking about.

5. MM 989 featured one of my most popular posts ever, CL #179, which was an analysis of Ted Lasso’s deliberate creation of a holding environment through the lens of the Developmental Relationships Framework from the Search Institute, and other relevant ideas including Judith Kleinfeld’s construct of the Warm Demander. But you should please also read CL #178, about the holding environment, not least because it contains stories about some of my favorite people.