THE LEAFLET

August 28 2025

“hacks” as trojan horses for mindsets, the school leader paradox, you control powerful and cheap incentives

HACKS AS TROJAN HORSES FOR MINDSETS

It’s really hard to convince people to think differently. The smarter the person is, the harder this gets. Ironically, it gets even harder when the person knows about cognitive biases and understands that they, too, have them. 

As a leader, you may be best served with some of your people by starting with the “hack” – the practical maneuver you want the person to use to get better results. That better result can have vastly more persuasive power than your preaching. Having achieved more after taking your advice, their ears may be more open to your theory of the case. In other words, they’re likelier to believe what you tell them. 

I’ve often witnessed a “Belief Cycle” at play in organizations where people regularly make improbable leaps in performance. The cycle has three parts: belief, work, results. Each part fuels the next. Different people enter the cycle at different parts. Starting at “work” (what I’m calls “hacks” above) doesn’t mean you’ve skipped or ignored “belief.” It means they’ll develop those beliefs after they’ve seen the results.

-ben 

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THE SCHOOL LEADER PARADOX

When I work with clients in K-12 education, the shelf that most of my coaching content sits on is the School Leader Paradox. The paradox holds the following:

• Being a School Leader is everything like being a teacher.

• Being a School Leader is nothing like being a teacher.

The idea is that the best default moves that school leaders can make with/for their staff are slight adaptations of the ones they would have made with/for their students. At the same time, novel power dynamics and fewer opportunities to build and repair mean that leading adults is different than leading children.  

The first half of the paradox is the one new school leaders are likeliest to overlook. They have to be reminded, often, that adults need so many of the same things that kids do, and often need higher doses of them: clear goals, explicitly high expectations, rationales for the things they are being asked to do that go beyond “because I said so.”

-ben

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YOU CONTROL CHEAP AND POWERFUL INCENTIVES

We often reach for the School Leader Paradox when we’re working with clients in other sectors. It’s so potent and memorable. But clients who don’t work with kids now or who haven’t been teachers in the past often find the Paradox unhelpful. For these folks, the thought that you might treat your employees or peers like children is aversive at least and offensive at worst. 

Fair enough. Here’s a different way to look at it: when you lead a team, you’re at the helm of a small economy. In this economy, like in any other, people respond to incentives. As a leader, you control incentives and you can manipulate them cheaply. In fact, the most powerful incentives we know of – the social ones – are the cheapest for the leader to set and adjust. 

To be clear: “cheap” does not mean “effortless.” Setting up and delivering those incentives usually requires a change of habits for leaders. They have to intervene in ways that may feel awkward. 

In tech and research-driven sectors, there’s a common view that leaders should avoid the exact thing we’re recommending here. They should refrain from social leadership. In this model, the leader is a technical troubleshooter who makes special appearances. They deliver solutions only when reports bring them problems. Otherwise, the leader should be pretty strictly laissez-faire.

The laissez-faire approach will work out by coincidence if you have people who are already outstanding at their jobs and deeply aligned with your interpretation of the organization’s values. Most folks who have led teams know that this is assuming a can opener. 

Entropy happens by default; alignment does not. Deliberately, proactively setting up your social incentives is a way to beat back entropy and secure alignment. 

-ben & eric

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COMPELLING QUOTES

Historian Alan Taylor on style and substance:

Avoiding the arcane works of political philosophers, Paine quoted only the Bible: the primary text known and revered by his intended readers. For Paine, style was also substance, for he sought to constitute a new readership: a broad and engaged public for a republican revolution. He insisted that common people should no longer defer to gentlemen in politics. Aptly titled, Common Sense spoke to and for common people.

Runner and novelist Haruki Murakami on memories:

Commonplace they might be, but the accumulation of these memories has led to one result: me.

Time capsule expert Nick Yablon on predicting the future:

Disappointment is the most common response to time capsule openings

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric