Page 19 Thinking

A while back, I was listening to an episode of The Tim Ferris Show. For those of you who don’t know who Tim Ferris is, he is an author, blogger, and businessman, but I came to him as a podcast host. On the podcast, Tim does long-form interviews with a wide variety of people on many different topics. While it is rare that a guest on the podcast has direct ties to education, I often find value as an educator in aspects of the interviews. I will say that at times, the topics are not interesting to me, and when that happens, I’ll skip that episode, but often I find myself sucked into the conversations that I wouldn’t have expected to find interesting.

Last May, Tim had Seth Godin on the podcast (you can find the show page here). Seth is the author of 21 international bestsellers, and while the topics are generally related to marketing, his books and blog often venture into topics far beyond the realm of marketing. In addition, Seth has given multiple TED Talks, each with millions of views.

What stood out to me about the conversation was a five-ish minute clip about the concept of “Page 19 Thinking.” Honestly, the title of this concept could have been any number, but Seth chose to use 19. He described it as thinking about working on a book as part of a team. In the beginning, the team knows that there will be a page 19 in the book, it must be written, illustrated, footnotes added, etc. As a team of authors, you say “We know there will be a page 19. We know it’s coming from this team, but we also know that nobody here knows everything about what’s going to go on page 19.”

In this situation, the solution is to start with somebody writing a sentence, then someone can take that sentence and add to it to create a paragraph. The team may say “Let’s make this better” so then someone else will do some research and add another paragraph. Someone else might create an illustration, and someone else might add a footnote. Eventually, the team gets to a version of page 19 that they are happy with, and they “ship it” to the printer or publisher.

Along the way, team members relentlessly criticize the work, but they never criticize the person who did the work. And remember, criticism is closely related to the concept of a critique, where there is careful judgment, expression of opinion, and evaluation of both the good and bad qualities of something. If the goal is to create the best work possible, we must start somewhere. Rarely is our first idea also our best idea. Criticism forces us to reflect on our work and the ways to make it better.

Page 19 thinking allows people the freedom to speak up and contribute. Think about some of the best-known companies in the world. Whether you’re talking about Google, or Apple, or Amazon, what they are known for today is not necessarily how they began their work. Take a moment to look at your phone – personally, I have an iPhone. This is now the third iteration of the iPhone that I’ve had. Each has been different – they have changed in size, features, etc. Most people feel that the new features added have made the device better. But if we think about what the original iPhone could do, compared to the phone you are probably carrying with you each day, the changes have been dramatic. (If you want to see an interesting comparison between the original and the most recent iPhone, you can check out this short video) Those changes would not be possible without the work of a team to iterate and improve the device. And what’s interesting to think about is that Apple wasn’t a phone company in the beginning. It was formed to create the Apple I computer, but over time has become the maker of the iPod, iPad, Apple Watch, and various other accessories. The company has iterated many times.

Now, when we talk about criticism, sometimes when an idea is criticized, it can feel like personal criticism. But if we’re working as part of a team to create the best thing possible, we understand that the criticism is of the idea or the work, not the person. Hopefully, when we take on a mindset of page 19 thinking, we can allow ourselves the freedom to speak up and contribute, as well as to take feedback. Then as a team, we can iterate our way to excellence.

This whole process has me thinking about the PLC structure. When we get together as a PLC team, we have a goal of helping one another be the best teachers we can be to help our students grow. In the PLC process, questions 3 and 4 are about what we’re going to do if students aren’t learning, or what we will do if they are. In this portion of the process, we’re creating ideas to help our students continue to learn. If our PLC takes on a mindset of page 19 thinking, we know that the ideas we share are going to be criticized, but that criticism is about making the idea better, which in turn leads to better outcomes for students. We must let our own work be generously criticized, and we must generously criticize the work of others.

The teamwork that goes with allowing others to contribute their talent will always help our ideas become better. In a collaborative environment, it’s important to make sure that we all are welcome to the ideas of one another because the work of the team helps all our students.

What are your thoughts on page 19 thinking? How might this way of thinking impact the work your team is engaged in? Is there a time that criticism from someone else helped you to get better at the work you were doing? Let us know about your experiences in the comments below.