Book Review – Spider and the Starfish: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

Upon the recommendation of Joyce Valenza, in her NECC presentation Information Fluency Meets Web 2.0, I reserved the following book from my local public library. Picking it up last week, I got a chance to read it and was amazed how quickly I got through the reading (two evenings) and how thought provoking it is.

In this book, the authors, Ori Brafman and Rod Breckstrom outline how a decentralized organization can be stronger than an centralized heirchy. Using examples from history (the Apaches vs the Spanish) through modern technology (the emergence of wikis and craigslist), the authors use the metaphor of the five legs of the starfish to describe the five aspects of a decentralized organization:

  1. Circles
  2. Catalysts
  3. Ideology
  4. Preexisting Network
  5. Champion

Focusing on the role of the catalyst, the authors then describe strategies and rules for becoming a starfish organization

In thinking about the impact towards education and what I would like to implement at my school, I am taking away from this volume is that although a there needs to be a central authority at the top (superintendent or principal), that you have to allow for more teacher autonomy in order to allow students to have the best learning environments. Teachers should be guides within their classrooms, like the Apache Nant’an who provide a vision and then allow the rest of the tribe to meet the vision. At North Shore, I think that we do a reasonably decent job at providing this within each classroom, but like with the conversations surrounding classroom 2.0, we need to have further opportunities for students not to feel like they are being forced into a local centralized classroom.

Also, it is important for teachers to be able to have time to get together, organically, to share best practices with each other. Like in many schools, we acknowledge the need to do so but do not always prioritize the practice as being essential for our own learning.

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