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The Net Assets podcast delves into the most pressing issues in independent school business and operations. Delivered by NBOA, the only national nonprofit membership association focused exclusively on fostering financial and operational excellence among independent PK-12 schools, each episode is based on a popular article in NBOA’s Net Assets magazine. Chief financial and operational officers alongside other leaders of school business share what inspires and challenges them as well as their approaches to problem solving and innovation. In each lively exchange, host Jeff Shields, NBOA president and CEO, teases out the human stories behind the printed story.
I firmly believe that there's no such thing as a not creative person or an uncreative person. I think all human beings are creative, and I think that a lot of us, we just get into the habit of not exercising that muscle, and that's something that I want to, encourage. What I want is not for people to try to be like me. What I want is for people to say, how can I expand my window of possibility here? What are the solutions that are on the table that I'm not looking at because I have been myopically focused only on the thing that I've always done?
Speaker 1:What other opportunities are available? What other sources of funding are out there? What other business models exist? Or what other business models could exist? What could I cook up?
Speaker 1:Where can I look outside of just this industry for inspiration?
Speaker 2:We build comforting walls around creativity, reserving it for the seemingly inspired few while the rest of us, the so called pragmatists, keep the world running. But what if this separation is a manufactured illusion, a societal constraint designed to keep our imaginative fires banked? The voice you just heard was that of Kyle Scheele, once orchestrator of a 21,000 regret Viking funeral and a fake marathon with thousands of runners. Kyle embodies this challenge. His outlandish projects aren't just quirky spectacles.
Speaker 2:They're profound explorations of our anxieties, our need for connection, and our suppressed desire to break free from convention. This week on Net Assets, Kyle sits down with our own Jeff Shields to dismantle the myth of the non creative person, revealing creativity as a muscle we all possess, often atrophied by societal pressures toward reasonableness. He questions our narrow definitions that exclude the very individuals financial stewards, operational experts who hold our institutions together. What might happen, he provokes us to wonder, if we unleashed their creative potential? Kyle serves as the opening keynote speaker at the twenty twenty five NBOA Annual Meeting in New York City, February.
Speaker 2:We invite you to learn more at nboaannualmeeting.org. The Net Assets Podcast is a partnership between NBOA and Tidal Education Consulting. This show is made possible thanks to the generous support of Community Brands.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Pete. Welcome, Scheele.
Speaker 1:Excited to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. And and thank you for joining us in New York City in just a few, short months. You're an innovation expert who's known for cooking up outlandish ideas that people love. That's quite a combination. And if you want to know why you were invited to be our opening keynote at the NBOA annual meeting, it's really because keynotes like yours, I think are so good for our membership because I really think it's important to encourage our folks who work in pre K through 12 independent schools every day, responsible for the business, finance, operations to help them think differently, to help them think about what could be, what might be, what might be out of the norm, not conventional, certainly not the status quo.
Speaker 3:So keynotes like yours, I think help our members think differently. And then we take it from there with concurrent sessions to help them do differently. I don't know if you knew that's why we picked you, Kyle. Did you know that?
Speaker 1:I didn't. No, but that, but I think that's true. And I think that that's always my goal is to get people to tap into their own creativity. I firmly believe that there's no such thing as a not creative person or an uncreative person. I think all human beings are creative, and I think that a lot of us, we just get into the habit of not exercising that muscle, and that's something that I want to, encourage.
Speaker 3:You know, I know if you go into a room of folks, especially a room of CFOs or HR professionals or controllers, and you ask them to raise their hands if they think they're creative, how many hands do you think will go up in the air? I mean, I think people are very reticent to say, yes. I'm a very creative person.
Speaker 1:You know, it's interesting. If you go into a room of kindergartners and ask that question, every one of those hands goes up into the air. And then if you come back and ask those same kids in first grade and second and third, as the years go up, the hands come down. And I think the reason is because as we get older, we there's this pressure from externally and also internally, if we're honest with ourselves, to to conform, pressure to be reasonable, pressure to kinda give up on that dream and and pursue something that's a leave a little bit more achievable. And and at some point, we go, oh, I you know, it's cute when a kindergartner says they wanna be an artist when they grow up.
Speaker 1:But when a senior in high school says that, our first response is like, oh, have you looked at the job market for artists out there? Or or, you know, how are you gonna use that degree? And and we we start applying these sort of practical questions. And I think that those things can be good, but I think that what what that does for most of us is it causes us to sort of like, well, I'll just hide that part of myself. I'll cover that up, and I'll pretend that it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:As a society, what we've done to justify that is we've kind of said only certain things count as being creative. And so we we think, oh, it's it's creative if you paint a picture. It's creative if you build a building or make a sculpture or or, choreograph a dance or something like that, but, oh, putting together a financial plan isn't creative, or making sure that the org chart works isn't creative. These things that we've decided, well, doesn't count. Is creative.
Speaker 1:It does count. Anytime you make anything new, it's creative. Opening a new Word document is a creative act, but we've decided it's not. And so I think that that's part of why you end up with a situation where someone's been in a job, you know, for for ten, twenty, thirty years doing this thing, and
Speaker 3:they go, well, I'm not creative because I don't think of this job as creative. And society has just said, yeah. I we don't think that either. It's not true, though. It's not true.
Speaker 3:Well, let's talk about that more because, by way of introduction, I just wanna give our listeners an idea of the kinds of outlandish ideas, that you've come up with that that people love. This is included hosting a Viking funeral for 21,000 people and staging a fake marathon. Now both of those have been featured in Fast Company, Wired, The Washington Post, and BuzzFeed. Your videos, have been viewed over 250,000,000 times speaking to people across The United States. And so you've got to tell me, let's just start with the the Viking funeral.
Speaker 3:I've never been to one. I don't know many people who have. What was the idea behind that and what kind of impact were you hoping to have?
Speaker 1:Initially, I wasn't hoping to have any impact. The first the seed of that idea came because I was, about to turn 30 years old, and I was trying to figure out, you know, what what's something I could do to celebrate my thirtieth birthday? It's a big one. And and I was talking to my mom, and she said something about, hey. You're gonna have a party to celebrate your birthday.
Speaker 1:And and I was joking, and I go, no. I'm gonna have a funeral to mourn the death of my twenties. And and she was like, oh, that's kinda creepy. You know? Like, you're gonna have a coffin, put gifts in the coffin and stuff.
Speaker 1:And I said, no. I'm gonna have a Viking funeral. And it was sort of just a joke that I had, and then I was like, you know what? That's actually a pretty good idea. And I'm a cardboard artist.
Speaker 1:That's one of the art forms that I like to work in. And so I knew where to get giant sheets of cardboard, and I thought, I think I could build a big Viking ship out of this. And so I built this ship. It was, like, eight feet tall and 16 feet long and, you know, roughly, like, minivan sized, I guess. And it was this big ornate dragon ship, and it had these big letters and numbers inside that said my twenties.
Speaker 1:And then I had a bunch of friends over, and we set it on fire for my birthday. And that that was kind of supposed to be the end of it. I like, you know, when you said where did what did you wanna do with it? I just wanted my friends to have a good time. And then some of my friends are videographers, and they made this, like, short, like, two or three minute little mini documentary about the whole thing.
Speaker 1:And in that, they asked me a question. They said, do you are you sad to burn this ship? You know, you've worked so hard on this, and it's so ornate. And and I said, oh, no. You gotta let go of the past to make room for new things in the future.
Speaker 1:And when that video went out, it it kind of, like, found this life of its own and got sent all over the Internet and went semi viral. And and I started getting emails from people who had seen it, and they all said, man, I I was kind of inspired by your weird birthday project, and I I kind of you know, I I've got some stuff I wanna let go of from my past to make room for new things. And and so I got one of those emails, and I thought, oh, that's kinda interesting. And and then I got a second one. I was like, oh, that's cool.
Speaker 1:They said the same thing as that other person. And then those emails just kept coming, and it was maybe six months, eight months, a year later, and I'm still getting emails about this birthday project. And I was like, oh, this is kind of crazy. Like, this project had taken on a life of its own. And so I said, you know what?
Speaker 1:All these people keep telling me they have stuff that they wanna let go of, and all of them would end their emails by saying, like, well, just wish I could let go of my stuff with a Viking funeral. So finally, I was like, okay. Well, let's do let's do another one. And I invited people to write down whatever it was they wanted to let go of, a regret, a mistake, a belief that they no longer held, a relationship they wanted to let go of. Just whatever that is for you.
Speaker 1:Write that down, send it to me, and then I'll have a big Viking funeral for for all of these regrets and for sort of like a funeral for the people that we used to be. I don't wanna be that guy anymore. I'm gonna be a new version of myself. And I kind of was hoping that I could get, you know, five or 10,000 people to send in their regrets. I ended up with over 21,000, submissions from people all over the world.
Speaker 1:They came in a bunch of different languages. Some of them, was like, I can't even read this, and I don't have to post it online, and somebody would translate it for me. And and so I built a much bigger ship. The second ship was 16 feet tall. It was 30 feet long, and it was, I mean, massive.
Speaker 1:I had to take it apart and trailer it across to the the burn site. But finally, after all that time, we collected all these regrets and, and put him in a giant Viking ship and set it on fire.
Speaker 3:Well, Kyle, I mean, I'm I'm not in my twenties. I'm not in my thirties. I do have a milestone birthday, I guess, approaching in a few years, but I'm, I am skeptical of the regrets, disappointments and, and, and negative thinking that, that folks in their twenties have. Gosh. What's going on out there?
Speaker 3:Sounds like you were you were onto something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think all of us have things that we you know, big and small, and I I read every single submission that came in, and and that's what my my book was about. I wrote a whole book about. It's called How to Host a Viking Funeral. And and I realized that everyone's got things that they wanna let go of.
Speaker 1:Everyone has regrets. Everyone has things that they wish would have gone differently. Some of those are really, really big and really, really heavy, and some of them, from the outside, you would go, why is that a big deal? But to that person, it's really And so that kind of that project taught me a lot about about the things that we hold on to and the things that keep us from becoming, the people that we're meant
Speaker 3:to be. And you heard from people in their thirties, forties, fifties, likely
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I mean, I heard from people that were in elementary and middle school, and then I heard from retirees and everywhere in between. I mean, all walks of life that that you could imagine. There were there were, like, college dormitories that would get together and do this as a project, like, as a as an activity together. Every kid in the dorm would do it.
Speaker 1:And then there were, like, Alcoholics Anonymous groups. And I mean, anything there were churches that did it. There it it was individuals, groups, anybody that you can think of. And so, yeah, we got a a huge, like, wide spectrum of of submissions.
Speaker 3:You know, you have demonstrated that you'd connect these dots and that these kernels of crazy ideas can grow into something bigger. You're gonna be speaking with a group of business leaders that, as I said, work at pre K through 12 independent schools. You know, they're not known for having a lot of crazy ideas. They're actually known as people who really hold the school together with strong financial stewardship and operational acumen, and they really are level headed people trustworthy, etcetera, etcetera. How are you going to challenge this audience to get crazy and to really encourage them to to think along the lines of some of the activities that you've just described?
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, I I think crazy is in the eye of the beholder. And I think that, you know, something that might seem crazy to me might not seem crazy to to a person who's been in that role for a period of time. What I want is not for people to try to be like me. What I want is for people to say, how can I expand my window of possibility here? What are the solutions that are on the table that I'm not looking at because I have been myopically focused only on the thing that I've always done.
Speaker 1:What other opportunities are available? What other sources of funding are out there? What other business models exist? Or what other business models could exist? What could I cook up?
Speaker 1:Where can I look outside of just this industry for inspiration? Steve Jobs once said that that creative people often feel like they're they often kinda feel guilty because they feel like they didn't actually do anything, that they just noticed a connection between two things. And you mentioned connecting dots. That's all that creativity is. It's just figuring out, oh, if you take this thing from this other industry and this thing, no one's ever thought to put these together before and say, what if you did this?
Speaker 1:And that's what I love about the work that I get to do is I I I do work where I'm working with, like, your audience is is business leaders at private schools. And then the next week, I might be with a bunch of HVAC contractors. And the next week, I might be with a bunch of consultants. Or, I I've done so many different industries and and sub industries, and every one of those people has a unique perspective on their industry and on the world at large. And I think that that's where the magic is.
Speaker 1:What I'm asking for is, hey. How how can we think a little bit differently, and and how can we tap back into that inner creative child that a lot of us were taught to ignore?
Speaker 3:Well, it's so interesting because we all know that innovation is so necessary all industries. Right? You always have to you can't think of just what's happening today. You have to think of what's next. You have to think about the future and certainly our members are focused on that.
Speaker 3:If we accept that as we should be looking to advance our organizations, we should be thinking differently. Why are there so many stumbling blocks in organizations for innovative or idea generation? Why do we struggle with that in organizations? And as you just said, you've seen a bunch of different industries, but that seems to be an area that we constantly run up against. What's what's your observation on that?
Speaker 1:You know, there there's a quote that, it says nobody ever got fired for picking IBM, and I think that that's sort of true. Like, nobody ever got fired for maintaining the status quo. The status quo exists for a reason. The interesting thing is you don't have to defend that reason because it's sort of like, well, we're already doing this, so somebody must have had a good reason for doing this. We think that there's a much better reasoning behind how we got here, and we forget that, no, actually, this was just a new idea at some point.
Speaker 1:We tried it, it worked, and there are pros and cons to it. But because it's what we're doing now or what we have been doing, we're comfortable with it, and we think, well, there's no reason to change anything. The reality is every idea was new at some point. The entire way that we do fundraising, the way that we do our educational system, it all started somewhere. And it started with an idea that probably seemed pretty crazy at the time, and it's turned into something now that we're comfortable with.
Speaker 1:And so as a result, we feel like, well, let's not let's not shake the boat too much. Let's not, you know, question too many things. And I think that there's a time for that, but I also think there's a time to go, hey, we got here by shaking up things. Let's how are we gonna get to the next place? Probably by shaking some things up again.
Speaker 3:Well, I have to tell you that many of our schools understand that status quo thinking is not going to help us secure our school's future. It's not going to help us secure, long term financial health, for our schools. So I think that really resonates that change can be uncomfortable. Change takes us into the unknown. I think leaders have to really function in ambiguity if they're going to do something different in their schools.
Speaker 3:But I think they're there, Kyle. I think when you speak in front of this audience, I think folks, are ready to embrace something different. They're ready to think differently. They're just not quite sure how to navigate it. They're just not quite sure how to extend themselves in that direction.
Speaker 3:Do you have any advice advice in that regard?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I agree with you that I think that they're ready. I think that in general, one of the things that I say all the time is that the solution to whatever problem is keeping them up at night, it's not probably going to come from me or from some outside expert. That solution is probably already inside the head of someone in your organization. But a lot of times, we haven't done the work to get that idea out of that person.
Speaker 1:Sometimes that means that we haven't empowered them. We haven't asked the right questions. Sometimes that means that they haven't felt safe enough or courageous enough to be able to give that idea to you. But I don't think that you need to go somewhere else. I think that your people know how to run schools.
Speaker 1:Your people know how to fundraise. Your people know what the needs are in that community. It's connecting the dots on how do we do this the best way and what are the ideas that are already in
Speaker 3:the heads of the people there that will take us to the next level. Do you ever get blocked on coming up with creative ideas, or do you just generate a 100, a thousand of them every day and you're never quite sure what sticks? I mean, what, what do you do when you get creatively blocked on maybe a new presentation you're developing, a new book you're writing, a new video you're making? Mean, do you ever just get stuck? And and and how do you get unstuck?
Speaker 3:I mean, someone in in your unique position for what you do.
Speaker 1:Constantly. Everyone gets stuck all the time. Like I said, there's no difference between me and anyone else, in terms of creative skills or potential or anything like that. What I have done is over the years, I've developed systems and habits that enable me to get stuck for the least amount of time possible. And so one of the things that I talk about in my presentation is what does an idea need?
Speaker 1:You know, we if you think about an idea like a plant, plants need air, they need water, they need soil, they need light. And what many of us do is we we we think we really like plants, but we don't turn on the lights, we don't put any soil, we don't do any water. That's kind of what the business environment is like in a lot of places. We say we love innovation. We say we love creativity.
Speaker 1:We say we love ideas, but then we don't meet any of the needs of that. And so one of the things that I talk about is that an idea needs a home. And, and so when you have an idea, what do you do with it? Do you write it down? Do you put it into a system somewhere?
Speaker 1:Do you record it? Because what most people do is they have an idea, and, the whole process, they just go, that's interesting. And then that's the end of their ideation process. And so what happens then is six months down the road, they get stuck, and they're like, oh, I have nothing creative to do, nothing to work on because they didn't capture that idea back in the back when it happened. And so one of the things that I do is I write down ideas all the time.
Speaker 1:I keep notebooks. I have I have Evernote and and Google Docs and, I mean, all sorts of different places to capture an idea, voice memos, text to myself, emails, whatever, so that later on when I go, oh, I'm in this creative slump. I go, well, I don't have to create something right now. What about the 500 ideas that I've been writing down over the last year? What if I pick one of those and run with it?
Speaker 1:And if you do that enough times, you switch from one thing to another, and eventually it kickstarts something else in your brain and and the ideation process starts again. You know,
Speaker 3:I really appreciate that because for someone that's worked with this community for for nearly fifteen years, we are uniquely positioned within education to think creatively, to do differently because we're independent, we're independent schools. And so we get to decide school by school by school, you know, under the leadership of the head of school, with the strategy of the board of trustees, with the resources we have from students and families, we are truly independently minded in the way we choose to deliver education in that pre K through 12 environment. So it really is a perfect fit. If you're not going to, if education's not going to experiment and innovate in this space, where else, where else is it going to start? So I think, I think this community is really ripe to to really supercharge, that side of independence in independent schools.
Speaker 1:I I think that that's really important to sometimes you just need that reminder. You know, there's that the the apocryphal story of, like, if you want to tame an elephant, you only have to nail it to a stake for a couple days, and then eventually, the elephant just thinks that it's forever confined to that environment. And sometimes, we put those things around ourself, and we put these creative constraints, and we go, oh, it must be, like, x y z. It must I can't do these other things. And then you eventually realize, well, no.
Speaker 1:Nobody actually said I couldn't do that. Oh, that that isn't actually off the table. Those regulations don't apply to this kind of a school. And so sometimes we just have to remind ourselves we actually have a lot more freedom than we maybe think we do.
Speaker 3:Do you know what's a great example of that, Kyle? And we're working in this space a lot. It's around compensation, for faculty and staff. And just like you were inferring, you know, in public schools, that's generally the, the compensation is determined by the years of teaching and the educational level of the faculty member. Yet in independent schools, we talk about quality.
Speaker 3:We talk about quality teaching. We talk about making an impact on students, personalizing the learning that happens in the classroom, but we don't base compensation off of what we say is important. Instead, to your point, we borrowed what happens in most public school districts and said, well, that's the way you compensate teachers. So I think we're saying the exact same thing. We're make we're just borrowing.
Speaker 3:We're bringing that over and saying, well, this is the way you compensate teachers. We can't think about it differently. And yet independent schools need to think about it differently.
Speaker 1:And all it's gonna take is one one organization doing that really well and coming up with a really thoughtful way to to compensate teachers based on the values that you, someone has to develop the model. And then once that model is working, and then especially with an organization like yours, you get a bunch of people in the same room who all do the same thing in different places, and someone goes, hey. We did it this way, it worked. And it and it's like the four minute mile. All of a sudden, all those reasons why it could never happen and why it was an insurmountable obstacle, they're gone because somebody did it.
Speaker 1:And then it just it it just trickles through the whole rest of the environment.
Speaker 3:Well, Kyle, good to know that MBOA has done a lot of that work. We've done a lot of that research and we have, many case studies on how you can think about your compensation models differently. It's called our Max Compensation Project. And so that was a great segue to say that's what MBOA is all about. We're always trying to present new and different ways of thinking, to help advance our schools.
Speaker 3:Before we leave, last question is, do you have any crazy good ideas for education right now? And and particularly in the in the terms of business, how they operate, manage facilities, anything along those lines? Anything kind of pop into your head, or where would you start if if you were given that challenge?
Speaker 1:Oh, man. I I think that there's I am of two minds here. One is, as a a person who loves education and loves and and I'm I'm a father as well. I have four kids of my own who are in the educational system right now. Three of them are actually in a private school.
Speaker 1:The other one has aged out and is in a public high school. So I there's part of me that comes from the I I love learning environment. There's also the part of me that comes from I love business, and I love playing with with business, and and how that side of things works. I think that I think that thinking of education as a product, there are ways in which that can be really bad. But I also think as a parent, I sometimes I wish that schools did think of education more as a product because I'm happy to pay for a product if the product is good.
Speaker 1:And I'm happy to, when you think of something as a product, you're able to evaluate it on is it doing the thing that it's supposed to do? Is it not? And and I think that for too long, there are parts of education that have we haven't been able to question. How what's the value proposition on this particular activity? Now I don't think that we should get granular with that because I think that's a really quick way to get arts right out of a school is to go, well, we only teach these.
Speaker 1:And I think as an artist, I go, no. No. No. Those things have value. It's harder to measure, and it's longer term.
Speaker 1:But I think that, yeah. I I think being an independent school, I would say you've been given these tools, play with them, figure out, like, why can't we try something else? Why can't we develop a program and it partners us with local businesses? Why can't we have a certain percentage of the time that we're not on campus? Because we don't have to be.
Speaker 1:Why can't we take more field trips? Why can't we do more engagement? Why can't we do things like that? And and I think figuring out which of those things resonates with your population, with your particular students, with your funding base, like, play with those pieces until you find something that works. And and then when it works, continue to refine it, continue to tweak it.
Speaker 1:There's no perfect idea. Everything's gonna have pros and cons, so continue to do that until you figure out the thing that lights lights up your students, lights up your staff, and lights up the people who are paying the bills. If you can find the overlap in those Venn diagrams, then then I think you're in a good spot. And I think that honestly, as a as a parent, I just say, do the thing that makes the kid come home excited, because that's what makes me as a parent go, whatever you're doing is great. Like, keep doing that.
Speaker 1:I'll keep throwing money, resources, time at the school when my kid comes home and is excited to tell me about what they did.
Speaker 3:Wow. That's a really great, place to land this conversation, Kyle. I was excited before about having you in New York City with us, but I'm even more excited now. I think our audience is is really going to, resonate with your message and, hopefully, they'll leave the NBA annual meeting excited about what they learn and excited about the possibilities, that they can advance, at their school. So you will be there, Kyle, in New York City on Monday, February 24 to kick off the twenty twenty five NBA annual meeting, and our listeners can learn more about it at nboaannualmeeting.org.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, Kyle, for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I can't wait to see you all in New York.
Speaker 2:The Net Assets Podcast is a partnership between NBAA and Title Education Consulting. This show is made possible thanks to the generous support of Community Brands.