Andrew (Andy) Hargreaves, Dennis Shirley - The Fourth Way_ The Inspiring Future for Educational Change-Corwin (2009)

28 The Fourth Way
and making midcourse adjustments are viewed as reprehensible failures to
hold fast or get a grip when faced with doubt or difficulty.
In her work on “the power of mindful learning,” Ellen Langer tells us
that excessive rigidity can prevent us from apprehending new information
that could lead us to revise our thinking and reconsider not just our strategies
but also our previously established goals. 18 A distinguished tradition
of work on organizational learning yields the same result. Double-loop
learning that provides constant feedback allows organizations to evolve
and improve continuously, compared with single-loop learning that leaves
existing norms and values unchallenged. 19 Being driven only by intended
outcomes, rather than also being open to new information as it emerges,
can lead to an enervating “mindlessness” that promotes habit, ritual, and
compliance rather than learning, creativity, and change.
In reality, “letting go” is essential to highly skilled performance. In
his incisive analysis of high-quality craftsmanship in carpentry, cooking,
music, and sport, American sociologist Richard Sennett points to the virtues
of “minimum force” and the art of “release.”
If the cook, like a carpenter, holds the cleaver or hammer down
after striking a blow, it works against the tool’s rebound. . . . The
ability to withdraw force in the microsecond after it is applied
also makes the gesture itself more precise; one’s aim improves.
So it is in playing the piano where the ability to release a key is
an integral motion with pressing it down. Finger pressure must
cease at the moment of contact for the fingers to move easily and
swiftly to other keys. In playing stringed instruments, as we go to
a new tone, our hand can make the move cleanly only by letting
go, a microsecond before, of the string it has pressed before. In the
musical hand, for this reason, it is harder to produce a clear, soft
sound than to belt out loud notes. 20
These principles of letting go or failing to do so, writes Sennett,
apply equally well to political and military strategists. “Brute force” is as
counterproductive in leadership and “state-craft” as it is in any other craft.
Instead, “cooperation with the weak, restrained force [and] release after
attack” are essential to the artistry of effective political control.” 21 It is
the strongest—those who have greater muscular or mental control—who
can let go most effectively. When leaders refuse to “let go” at the right
moment, it is not strength they display, but rigidity.
Policy exponents of the New Orthodoxy have not been able to get
beyond “belting out loud notes” through the unrestrained hammer blows
of heavy-handed government interventions into districts and schools. In