Last year, the hose in my dishwasher broke. For any of you who have experienced this, you can easily figure out what I am going to say next:
There was water everywhere!
So, I did what one would naturally do. I started mopping. But wait, the more I mopped, the faster it seemed the water was seeping out of the dishwasher. Okay, so don’t call me if you need a plumber. Clearly, I don’t get it. I had forgotten the most important step. TURN OFF THE WATER AND FAST!
I wonder, as leaders, if we spend time mopping and forget to turn off the water? Often, when we see a problem, we want to fix it. So, we just start mopping. We sometimes start mopping up the problem of “not enough time”. We might try to mop up the problem of “overcrowded classrooms”. And so on.
However, it makes me wonder if we are doing what I did to try and fix the problem of the broken hose. With the dishwasher, I had to go to the root cause of the problem. The water supply had to be turned off.
As we come to the last few months of this school year, I wonder if we need to put our mops down and decide – what’s the root cause that’s within our control? Once we know what that is, then we can make a plan that is doable, reasonable, and focused on stopping that core problem before moving on to fixing the rest.
