School Leadership: Implementing Borrowed Ideas

Innovation: When Ideas Travel Without Their Creator

Ideas travel freely but often arrive missing their soul. Borrowed ideas and concepts are our most recyclable resource in leadership.

Whether you’re a CEO or a classroom teacher, we all borrow and adapt ideas from others. I borrowed so many ideas from other companies last week that my innovation strategy is now technically a compilation album.

Transplanting Ideas to Your School Context

How you transplant these concepts determines their impact in your unique environment.

Implementation without understanding leads to disappointing results.

I absolutely love the phrase “Borrowed Brilliance.”

I also love innovative adapters; learning from them is always illuminating.

We professionals respect the journey behind major innovations. Like watching someone execute a concept they deeply understand, we value the contextual knowledge, the failed iterations, and the hard-won wisdom behind breakthrough ideas.

We attend conferences and devour case studies, OfSTED reports and the EEF, eager to hear the untold stories behind successful implementations.

We respect great ideas, yet we often strip them of their context when adopting them.

The reuse of concepts without their foundation gives me anxiety.

The thought of implementing something without understanding its “why” terrifies me – I’m determined to grasp the core principles before adaptation.

Success with borrowed concepts is defined by how deeply leaders understand what they’re importing.

The warning that proves true in nearly every school is:

“An idea without its champion is just a PowerPoint slide.”

I’ve also learned that ideas separated from their creators often lose their essence.

We marvel at school that successfully adapt external concepts; they rarely just copy and paste. Often buy the time the implementation is complete school’s have really just blazed their own trail.

Teams celebrate leaders who can say “We understood the principle and reimagined it for our context” rather than “We did exactly what they did.”

Trust builds when you demonstrate thoughtful adaptation rather than blind imitation.

If you’re leading change, recognizing this principle is particularly valuable.

I’ve found that horizon scanning is an essential practice for identifying emerging concepts worth adapting. Looking beyond your immediate industry at adjacent fields often reveals transferable ideas that solve similar problems in novel ways.

The hours spent understanding the context behind borrowed concepts accumulate into a deeper appreciation for what truly makes them work.

When you finally implement, you champion the principles rather than just the practices.

We move to meaningful adaptation quickly. I’ve invested significant time in this approach, allowing me to successfully transfer ideas that would typically fail in translation. It links to my previous article on “The opportune moment” identifying and seizing the key time to act.

When I implement concepts from other contexts, this depth of understanding proves far more valuable than any superficial replication could ever be.

Misconceptions Kill Implementation

Now team, we understand that “Context matters” when borrowing ideas, but misconceptions can also kill implementation.

Misconceptions can derail adoption like technical difficulties during a major presentation.

If you’re importing a proven concept and agreement has been reached, it’s your responsibility to transfer the invisible knowledge that made it successful elsewhere.

Don’t assume, or you’ll watch your implementation falter.

I lost a major initiative last year because I didn’t transfer enough of the original thinking, and the team implemented the letter but not the spirit. We implemented a concept without understanding the context. It’s like we bought IKEA furniture and assembled it using only interpretive dance as instructions.

I was frustrated beyond words.

The documentation and training materials moved like traditional onboarding – technically complete but missing the passion.

I had other priorities competing, so I was hands-off about the knowledge transfer; the team had surface understanding and decided the concept “doesn’t work here.”

I know that realistically, the idea was sound, but the implementation lacked soul.

I forgot the principle, if it’s to succeed as intended, the original thinking must travel with the practice.

Borrowing Ideas from Outside of Education

Conversely, I was adapting an approach recently from another industry, and the process has involved so much modification that it barely resembles the original.

Like translating poetry to another language, sometimes the essence gets lost along the way.

Fidelity is crucial. Lose it, and someone can conclude, “This concept doesn’t apply to our situation.”

Lack of information can also kill the precious opportunity for successful adaptation.

You must capture the invisible knowledge quickly.

Ask deeper questions, understand the failures that shaped the final version, reduce assumptions, and make your learning visible.

Make it easy for teams to grasp the underlying principles when they’re implementing borrowed ideas.

Stakeholders that adopt new concepts need the complete story, not just the happy ending.

Research confirms that organisations often fail at implementation because they capture practices without principles.

Understanding Nuance in Transformation

In our “best practice” obsessed world, principle-based adaptation is the fastest path to genuine innovation.

When I was leading my first transformation initiative, I discovered that most failures happened in the nuanced execution.

I responded by documenting not just what worked but why it worked, and resolved numerous implementation challenges before they became systemic.

Most of our breakthrough moments happened when teams understood the thinking behind the practice, not just the steps to follow.

Horizon scanning must be central to your adaptation approach. Look beyond obvious sources, and you’ll discover transferable principles that others miss. My horizon scanning was so effective I saw tomorrow’s problems coming. Unfortunately, I borrowed yesterday’s solutions to fix them.