Stickers for stolen bases

In the fall of 2023 I was coaching a group of 9-year-old softball players, and that week we were working on baserunning. We made a simple rule for the next game. Every time a player stole a base, she got a sticker for her helmet. By the end of the game the helmets were covered, and nobody on the team cared much about the final score.

I wrote about those stickers in a discussion post for a course called Leading Organizational Change. Most of the reading was about change models, the step-by-step frameworks that tell a leader what to do first and what comes next. One step in the best known of them is to create short-term wins. The textbook version is about early, visible results that prove the change is working. What I was doing with the helmets was a little different, and I didn’t see it until I reread the post this fall.

The stickers didn’t reward winning. They rewarded the one behavior we were trying to build. A stolen base is something a 9-year-old controls. A win is not. If we had only celebrated wins, most of those kids would have gone weeks without hearing they were getting better, even while they were.

Measuring the thing that comes first

The same course had us read about vital behaviors. The idea is that in any change there are a few specific actions that, if people actually do them, move everything else. A leader’s job is to find those few, make them visible, and measure them, instead of measuring only the result at the end.

I knew that idea before I had words for it. My first job in technology sales measured me on revenue and margin. It was frustrating, because revenue was the last thing to show up. It was the outcome of months of work nobody was counting. About two years in, I started tracking my own leading indicators. Meetings each week, quotes sent, calls made. I set goals on those, because I could move them every day and I trusted they would move the number that mattered. They did.

Now think about how most technology rollouts in schools get judged. There are usually two measures. One is logins, which tells you someone opened the thing. The other is a year-end outcome, like test scores or a renewal decision, which shows up long after anyone could have changed course. Neither one is a vital behavior. Neither one is a stolen base.

An educator in the second month of a rollout needs to hear that something they did this week worked. Maybe they built one exit ticket in the new platform, or got feedback back to students a day faster than they used to. That is the behavior that turns into adoption. When the only scoreboard is logins or spring scores, they go weeks without hearing they are getting better, even while they are.

My dissertation backed this up in a way I didn’t expect. When educators described leadership that worked, the thing they mentioned most was specific recognition. Not praise in general. Someone noticing the particular thing they did. Fourteen of the sixteen people I interviewed brought it up.

The part that used to take too long

So why don’t rollout leaders do this already? Mostly because noticing is work. To recognize the vital behavior, someone has to pull the usage report, find who actually did the thing, and write a note that says what they did and why it mattered. That is run-rate work, the routine tasks that keep things going and crowd out everything new, and it loses to the next meeting every time.

That part has changed. An AI tool can now read a week of usage data, flag the handful of educators who did the behavior a rollout is built around, and draft a short, specific note for a principal or coach to send. The tool doesn’t hand out the sticker. A person still has to mean it. But the hour it used to take to find out who earned one is mostly gone, and that hour was the reason nobody did it.

If I rewrote that 2023 post now, I would keep it simple. Pick the one or two behaviors that matter. Celebrate them the week they happen. Let the scoreboard catch up later. A team of 9-year-olds figured that out in one game.

Next week: Understanding the Organization, the course where I first looked at how technology changes the structure around it.