I still remember one of the questions I was asked during my interview for a position as a summer orientation program coordinator during my senior year of college.
What do you think will be the most challenging part of being an orientation coordinator?
I was ready for this one. It was something I’d thought about a lot and was hoping I’d get the chance to talk about.
The short version of my answer: Deciding which parts of the program we should change to look for newer, better ways of doing things, and which parts we should keep the same.
That program had been thriving for nearly 20 years, with a rich history and a long line of traditions that meant something to people. Plenty of smart, successful coordinators had come before. Clearly, they’d done a lot right. And it felt pretty arrogant to suggest that any part of the program needed a complete overhaul.
But I also knew promising only to repeat everything, unchanged and unimproved, was no way to get any job worth having. The hiring committee didn’t just want the program to duplicate itself year after year. They wanted progress– new and better ways to serve the program’s mission of helping incoming students feel welcome and prepared for college.
I genuinely believed that striking that balance of honoring the old and embracing the new would be challenging, but that the right people for the job would embrace that opportunity. I can’t say for sure whether or not that was the answer they were looking for, but I did get the job. And my fellow coordinators and I spent the next nine months deciding where to innovate with what would be new and honoring what was already old.
Students, teachers, and counselors, as you head back to school and assume your positions in offices, classrooms, teams, clubs, organizations, and other constituencies, where will you innovate to find the new, and what will you keep unchanged by honoring the old?
There’s no easy, right answer to this. But here’s a good place to start. “That’s the way we’ve always done it” is not honoring the old and is often an insufficient reason to stay the same. Unless it’s followed by something compelling like…
…and everyone has been thrilled with the results
….and we’ve yet to find something that promises to work that well
…and it’s at the core of who we are and what we stand for
…and the stakes are just too high to experiment with something unproven
…then it might be time to try some innovating.