Simon Breakspear:
For those of us who care deeply about this sector, we kind of feel like sometimes we carry the weight of the world. And the only way we know we’ve done enough is that we’ve literally exhausted ourselves, time, energy, and then we finally have the moral license to say, “Okay, we can’t do another thing.” And I’m questioning whether or not that is the best way to make long-term contributions to complex problems and to long-term institutions like schools.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Dr. Simon Breakspear, adjunct senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, and co-author with Michael Rosenbrock of the The Pruning Principle. Mastering the art of strategic subtraction within education.
The idea at the heart of the book that is the Pruning Principle itself is this, in education as in gardening, deliberately cutting off or cutting back is essential to cultivating long-term vitality and impact. This idea is in contrast to what Breakspear and Rosenbrock call the “Additive trap,” which is currently the norm in most schools.
They write, “We landed ourselves in the additive trap through a simple assumption, that if we were to solve problems and improve the things that matter most in schools, we should continue everything we are currently doing and then add one more thing.” I’m guessing that the additive trap will sound familiar to you. It certainly sounded familiar to me, so I was very excited to talk to Simon. Let’s get into it. Where did the idea of the Pruning Principle begin for you?

Simon Breakspear:
Well, Alec, as a former high school teacher, married to an elementary school teacher and with teachers in every part of my family, almost every conversation I was having around the family dinner table was to do with teacher workload, overwhelm and this sense that during COVID, educators might’ve had a brief pause, but there was no actual reduction on the other side of what we were doing.
In fact, on the other side of COVID, we found ourselves in a situation where we were trying to do everything we were doing in education before COVID, but then also trying to add on a whole range of other things, particularly around learning catch up, equity and really taking well-being more seriously. And so what I noticed is actually there was this incredible growing rate of things that we were trying to do.
And by late 2023, I reckon there was a deep sense of just frenzied stagnation across my colleagues in education where they were feeling like they were utterly flat out, but actually not making any progress. And at the same time as I’m hearing these anecdotal stories, as a researcher, I’m looking at the survey data for school leaders, for schools talking about workload challenges, overload, teacher shortages.
And I was really trying to work out what is a way forward? Where might we be able to help our schools and our networks and our systems actually be sustainable places to work, but still sustain the impact that they want? And normally, Alec, my background is psychology. So I normally look at the psychological literature, I look at the educational research literature, but this time I found myself in a garden. And I was walking around a beautiful garden in a family member’s place, and I noticed the beautiful fruit trees have been cut right back.
And I remember thinking, “Oh, they’re looking a bit ugly at the moment. Why did someone do that to that lovely tree?” As far as I know, they had a great fruit season. And of course in that kind analogy of the pruning analogy, you start to discover that when things are even going well, you’ve got to continually cut back or cut off in order to sustain vitality and to sustain fruitfulness over time.
And so it was that both wrestling with the anecdotal and survey data literature around the great challenge of workload and overwhelm and teacher burnout and teach shortage, and then discovering that actually within that overarching metaphor of pruning, we might find a pathway where we could release ourselves to cut off and cut back, not to reduce our impact, and not because we’re giving up, but because actually we want to get to long-term vitality and that long-term fruitfulness in what we do.

Alec Patton:
And I should say the book gets more into the botany of pruning than I expected it to. Not too much, but I appreciate that. It doesn’t just throw away the metaphor, it gets into it a little bit. All right, where have you applied the Pruning Principle in your own life? What have you pruned?

Simon Breakspear:
Oh, Alec, that is a hard one. They say you write the books that you need the most in your life. And I’m definitely in that mode of I am passionate about having the largest possible impact on the most number of students possible in education. I’m the guy who dropped out of med school, idealistically became a teacher, started to think about not just one school, but networks of schools, systems. Studied PISA in my doctorate.
I wanted to think about how we can move everything forward. And so so many of your listeners, so many people in your network are the same sort of people that are always asking, “What’s next? What problems can I solve? How can I keep moving forward?” But there is this point where I’m going to say, I’m midlife now. I’m 41 now, Alec. And there is this point where you just start to say, “Hey, wait a second.
Maybe just adding one more thing isn’t always the best approach to creating sustainable impact on the things that you care about.” And so I definitely find this in my own life and thinking about what I would call in the book, The Personal Pruning Layer. And it’s funny, Alec, because when people often first hear this work and I’m working with school leaders or teachers, they’ll often straight away say, “Oh, the systems need to fix something.” And they do.
But then we often say, “Yeah, there is a level of pruning which is at the system level, but we actually need to think about pruning at the personal level first.” So what I do myself and what I do with leaders that I coach is that I use a simple 3D framework where I sort of preferably once a month or once a quarter pause and I look back through my calendar and I kind of just try to notice points of friction where even if it was good work, I found myself on the wrong side of a lot of good work and I notice those of points of friction or I notice areas-

Alec Patton:
What does that mean? How do you know you’re on the wrong side?

Simon Breakspear:
Yeah. Well, normally for me, if you think about my workflow productivity systems, whether it’s my inbox, my calendar, my hours of work, I’ve got three youngish kids, 10, nine, and six. If my work is spilling out across the boundary conditions of time that I wanted to put into my work, about times that I will not work, whether in certain periods on weekends, evenings, mornings, when I’m feeling like I’m unable to, it’s almost like the banks of my workflow productivity systems, my to-do list, my inbox, it just overflows.
And so then normally, I have to break the boundaries of either the way I want to turn up in other parts of my life, the role as a husband, the role as a brother, the role as a dad, the role as a friend, the role of other parts of community membership. And I break those, because I’m so far behind and I say to myself, “I’ve just got to just grind this out for a while.”
So they’re normally sort of points of that. Sometimes, mate, it’s not actually just the overflow of time. And I would say Cal Newport, the Georgetown professor has a great frame of this. He thinks we start saying no when we’re about 20% over, which is like we’re working about one day additional per week, and then finally we feel like we’ve got the emotional cover to say no.
But the other thing with friction is sometimes the exhaustion cognitively comes not so much because I’m out of time, but I’m out of the kind of cognitive energy or the emotional energy to turn up and do the work the way it needs to be done. And for me, that’s often a statement of learning, that I’m doing too many things in parallel. And because I’ve got a lot of cognitive switching from one thing to the next thing to the next thing, I’m burning a lot of sort of cognitive energy and emotional energy and all that switching.
And I think that’s another sort of signal to me that, “Hey, wait a second, either too much or too many good things happening simultaneously.” And the switching cost is meaning that I’m not getting deep enough and progressing things to that deeper level. Anyway, so that kind of signals to me. And then I go through and I ask questions sort of dump, delay, delegate.
And this can be a really simple early personal pruning one that we do where you just say, “Hey, is there anything here that I actually need to just either straight away or within a period of time, take off my roles, responsibilities, commitments, projects that I was excited about? Do I just need to dump? Do I need to delay?” Sometimes in personal pruning you can say, “Look, it’s just too much on in this quarter, and so I’m going to push this into next quarter.
Sure, I might choose to dump it then, but right now I just feel like I’m going to delay and I’m going to push that part of the work into the next quarter.” Or the last one is to delegate. So, “Might I need to invest a period of time to actually move this towards someone else who could actually pick up this piece of work?” And that’s a really simple thing that I do on a regular cadence within my team and the people I work with. Other things are harder core, so they’re pruning around setting quotas.
I work with a range of different schools, sometimes that involves certain travel. And so I might just prune and say, “This is the number of days I’m willing to be away on an evening.” And you can just take a number, whatever it is, you might say, 50 or so a year. And then you say, “I’m going to prune that back to 40.”
And then with that constraint, that might actually then force me to make harder trade-off decisions. And leaders into all sorts of positions could make equivalent kind of decisions to say, “I’m going to cut back that to a certain quota, and then once I hit that quota, I’m not allowed to give any more of those away.” And that can be a really helpful way, again, of driving not just, “Oh, can I squeeze this in?” Because in that way I run out of that quota before I run out of time. Does that make sense?

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Because if you’re like, “Well, can I squeeze that in?” The answer’s almost always yes, whether it should be or not. But if you can really say, “Well, no, this was the number I set. Where does it fit with that number I set?” It becomes a different thing and it kind of gives you permission to make good decisions.

Simon Breakspear:
I think that’s it. And you can apply that to all sorts of things. Right, Alec? And once you’ve been living for a while, you kind of get a rough sense of how many of a certain type of thing you can have happening at the same time and do it well and enjoy the process. And one of the things that I often find, and around this time of year in the Southern Hemisphere, we both run into summer and close out the school year all at the end of the calendar year.
And I know that when I’m finishing a project, do I just feel relief? Do I just feel like, “Oh, I’m so glad that’s done,” or do I feel a sense of accomplishment and joy? And I know if I’m sort of, “Oh, I’m just so glad that’s over,” then I was probably carrying too many of those things at the same time. And I think this is true with schools who start to say, “Yeah, we can probably only do one major improvement push here and then maybe one other thing in a minor, like a smaller piece.”
And we know that it’s not about how much time we’ve got, we just know that collectively as a team or as a school, we can probably only do this many of that type of thing. And once you’ve got those quotas set, then you limit it. And I think you need to have some of those physical almost constraints of saying, “Oh, those two slots are filled.” It’s not about can we find future time in the calendar.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Going back to one of the first things you said, I think it’s a really useful heuristic of if it’s eating into the time that I want to be spending with my family, it’s a problem. But the other thing you said is that that can be a situation of, “Sorry guys, I’ve got to send a bunch of emails today, so I know it’s Saturday, but I just need to lock myself in my room.” And that’s a very clear cut thing. But it can also be I’m physically present, but I’m just running things over in my head about work things or I’m just so tired that I’m just not able to engage and I’m not able to be emotionally present.

Simon Breakspear:
Absolutely. And for those of us in education in all fields, we spend so much of our time around people who are dysregulated, the adults, the parents, some of our kids, and we’re constantly having-

Alec Patton:
I like the fact that you started with the adults.

Simon Breakspear:
That’s the number one thing we hear from school leaders. Parents are turning up and, “I need to get this solved now.” They don’t have time for deep listening and talking about the situation and they fire off an email and everyone is at this level, whether it’s this long-term COVID hangover or other things.
And so what I often find is educators are spending a lot of their time sort of staying above the line trying to keep themselves at a stance where they can engage and not just mirror the kind of dysregulation that they might experience in the humans that they’re working with. That it means when we get home, Alec, when we get home, suddenly we walk through the door and all of that kind of executive functioning override can just go, “Oh, I’m done.”
And so sometimes I think I’m glad there’s not a live recording in my own kitchen because I just lost it over something so small or I was so much less patient. And there are other signals I think here to the teacher, the school leader, the person working across school saying, “Ah, I’ve actually used up so much of that.”
And then when I walk in at home and I don’t have those kind of eyes looking at me in that role, I don’t have my work role eyes monitoring me when I come in and I play the other role, whether it’s a husband, a wife, a partner, a dad, a mom, but also perhaps just a brother or a friend. Because I also just want to say it’s not always just family, it’s also these other roles.

Alec Patton:
Absolutely.

Simon Breakspear:
These parts of our identity that just sort of get shrunk more and more. They gave us feedback about that. But I’m not qualified here, Alec, to give wellbeing advice. I’m really helping people think who are still deeply, deeply committed to long-term change on complex problems. And I just want to ask, hey, do you really think carrying on in the way that you’re currently working, given the complexity of the problems you’re working on, do you really think this is going to be sustainable for you and the people you’re working with?
And I’m a big long-term thinker. I think about long-termism and I think most of the problems and the challenges that we’re working on within teams, schools, systems are kind of things that we should think about in decades, not in days. And so the most important thing for all of us is quality. People can turn up and do meaningful, thoughtful work this year, but then do it again next year and we’re going to need you for a decade.
And preferably two for some of us or some of us three who are in our 20s. And I think that sense of how might we go for long-term vitality and impact personally, as teams, as organizations and schools. And I think that metaphor of the fruit tree that keeps being fruitful, the orchard that keeps being fruitful over time, it’s a helpful one for us to get out of short-termism where we’re willing to trade off our own energy, relationships, roles, whatever else for some short bump in performance and think much more about long-term.
And as soon as we start thinking about long-term, we start realizing our subtraction is going to be a necessary part of our conversation every term and every year. And being in a, what I call the additive trap is not going to likely result in the long-term improvement that we really want.

Alec Patton:
All right, let’s talk a little bit about the additive trap. You write in the book, “When we try to solve problems or lift outcomes, humans generally tend to overlook subtractive answers and instead focus on how to improve something by adding more to it.” And where do you most often see the additive trap at work in schools?

Simon Breakspear:
Hardworking school leaders and teachers gathering together around some type of challenge or problem, they unpack the problem, they say, “What should we do about that?” And the additive solutions start coming forward. The interesting ones of this would be something like as teacher well-being has come to the fore, Alec, in the last couple of years, and particularly in the last year, people get together and they say, “We really want to look after our teachers.
We want to care for them.” Someone says, “Okay, let’s start generating some ideas.” And what do people do? “Let’s have the teacher well-being breakfast.” Okay. So now that teacher’s got to get up a bit earlier, if she’s got her own kids at home, like my wife, “Hey, can you take the kids this morning? I can’t do my normal drop-off with them. I’ve got to get to school early for the well-being breakfast.”
And it’s a beautiful thing. But there’s this idea of even this thought of how might we help teachers enhance their well-being? People went straight to additive solutions like, “Let’s have a barbecue. Let’s have some extra things on,” rather than, “Hey, let’s have a late start. Let’s drop off a week of meetings. Let’s reduce a few of the demands.” And so that might be an example.
But again, think sort of, “Hey, let’s get together. Our mathematics progress isn’t where we want it to be. Okay, what are we going to add to the programs? What are we going to add to the assessments? What else could we do?” And very rarely might it be, “Hey, there’s a problem here, or what might we subtract from the current programs to see an improvement in student confidence and progress in mathematics?”
And it’s just this sort of default, whether it’s solving something for a student, solving something for staff, we do fall into this default of if it’s a problem to be solved and what we’re currently doing isn’t getting there, then what shall we add?
The other thing I’d say, Alec, as someone who spends most of my time working with school leaders and their sort of school improvement cycles, there are ongoing rhythms and routines in every school and in every district, in every larger system, whether it’s a yearly school improvement planning routine and rhythm. And then many schools and systems will also have a three or a four planning as well. That most school leaders will come together with superintendent or others supporting them, and they’ll have to give account for, “What are you going to do in addition next year?”
And then next year they’re like, “What are you going to do to lift targets to make progress next year?” And each and every year they’ll be a template that they’ll have to fill out of some sort to keep the system happy about what they’re going to do next. There’ll be conversational norms that they’re meant to have about what they’re going to do. And it’s just this ongoing sense that every year that we should add something, you should have a conversation about adding, you should make a plan and make a public about what you’ll add.
And what I noticed is there was almost no conversational norms, almost no templates and almost no requirements to at least say, “What are you going to subtract or pause or cut back before you add anything else?” And I reckon those two combinations of the systems and norms and templates we have for improvement always means adding. And then the conversational norms we have together that if we care, if we want to solve this problem, then we should go to additive solutions.
And I just feel like we’re hitting the upper boundary limits now of both time, budget and kind of cognitive and emotional resources. And finally we’re starting to get to the point where we’re saying, “You know what? Maybe more is not going to get us any further against the things we care about.” And even if we do think we need to do something in addition, we probably will have to change the order of operations for improvement, which for me is subtraction before addition. And if possible, see if you can solve the problem purely through subtractive changes first.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, absolutely. So far, this is the least controversial interview we’ve ever done. I think everybody is going to say, “Yeah, I agree.” And then they’re going to say, “Yeah, right, but how do I do it?” And you have a suggestion that to get started on the pruning process, one thing you might want to do if you’re working with staff on this is to generate a prepared list of potential pruning targets to give folks a sense of what they could be getting on with. And I was wondering if you can kind of take one step back, what are some things that lots of school leaders could put on the list of potential pruning targets?

Simon Breakspear:
Yeah, nice one. Well, just a couple of frames here. One, I think this has got to be a collective action problem, Alec. I think lots of us need to start talking about regularly our subtractive stories and, “Hey, we’re pruning.” And anytime educators leaders are talking about something they’re doing or planning for in the coming term, the coming year, they should normalize the idea of, “Oh, and we’re also going to cut back on or stop doing or prune this.” Because I think it gives license particularly to these unbelievably committed leaders who are always in this additive mode.
If they hear other leaders that they respect talking about, “Hey, we’ve hit our upper limits, we’re playing a zero-sum game. Everything we add has to take away from something else now,” I think it really gives this license. The second thing is not just a collective action problem, it’s got to be done together, Alec. I’ve been advising my local department here and they’ve been doing some wonderful work.
We’ve got 2,200 public schools within our New South Wales system, and they’ve been working really, really hard at trying to reduce workload, but they’ve been doing it as a system for the teachers, for the school leaders. And then they might send an email out and say, “Hey everyone, look at all this workload we’ve saved you. We’ve condensed these policies, we’ve reduced some of the training requirements.”
And everyone sort of rolls their eyes and goes, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess so. I don’t feel any different.” And so one of the things here is I see the pruning work as not just something that we need collective action on, but we need to have people as active participants in this work. And that’s why we encourage people to kind of move through this collective cycle of critically examining, after critically examining, moving to conscious removal, thinking about how we thoughtfully do subtractive change management.
And then the last one is nurturing, because if people aren’t involved in the process, they often don’t then actually feel motivated to protect the space that they’ve got. And so they just let the time, they let that energy drift off into another area that might be low leverage. So where are some things that I find staff kick off with?
And it will depend in every system around how much freedom and flexibility that you’ve got, but often say something like reporting or parent teacher interviews. We’re not talking here about are you doing reporting or are you doing parent teacher interviews. But there’s a case study in the book where we talk about people unpack it and they say, “Okay, well there’s some pits here that are useful and are required.” But they might hone in and say, “Hey, what about the way that we write comments?
Okay, how does that currently happen? How much time do we spend there? To what extent is that time really resulting in parents or students really understanding how they’re going in their learning or what do they need next?” And so people might sort of start to think about subcomponents of reports and say, “Well, what would it look like to remove that element?
What would it look like to cut back on the length of that?” And these small little sort of conversations around something like reporting or so too, if you have some sort of format of conversations between parents or caregivers and teachers and students, you might unpack what are all the different components of that. And then we’d sort of do a two by two, which elements of that are really resulting in the kind of impact and partnership and understanding that we want, which parts take a lot of time and aren’t really resulting in that much.
Okay, are there parts there? And I think pruning is not often about total cut off. It’s often about that sort of cut back or reduce and you’re trying to get to the pieces that are most essential. I’d also say meetings is a great one that we start with. So we often list out all of the ways that people are getting together to meet, one-on-one, in small groups, full staff meeting.
And then we might again work through and do a brief rating about what’s the purpose of that time, how impactful is it at the moment against that purpose. And then rather than sort of doing some one-off cut, what we often would say is, “Hey, what would it be like to try to cut back one hour a week of some of these meetings?” And people say, “Well, what’s that going to do?” Well, actually one hour a week across a 40-week teaching year is 40 hours.
And so that’s actually technically one work week. And I know many educators and leaders work more than a 40-hour week, but it’s technically one full work week back a year if we can find one hour back. And so as a collective action problem, we’ll work through it and we’ll say, “Hey, are any of these meetings here something that we might be able to collapse? Those two meetings are actually very similar.
Could we collapse them so that those two one hour meetings become a one hour?” Is there one where we could change the cadence? Could we move it so that rather than meeting every week, it could be every second week? Could we carve it back so that rather than a 60-minute meeting, which is the default, let’s turn it into a 40-minute meeting? And if we can find three of those 20 minute savings across the week, again, we find one hour back.
So I raise some of these things and meetings aren’t all that controversial, but it’s that idea of getting people really to consider things through an impact effort lens and to ask questions where small adjustments might result in some save time and energy. And I’d say lastly, with all of these Alec, we encourage people to not make one and done decisions, but to see all of this as little experiments.
And so we say, “Hey, let’s run an experiment in the upcoming term or the upcoming month, or let’s run an experiment just with a subgroup of our students and let’s make this adjustment to how we engage with parents or reporting or meetings or other areas.” And let’s then ask, “How did it go? What did we lose from that adjustment?
But what did we gain? Is it something that we’d like to move forward on?” And that idea of not doing a one and done cut, but actually asking ourselves through that impact effort lens that we help people pick up, where could we be having the greatest potential impact? And let’s run some experiments and see whether or not we can win back some time and win back some energy.

Alec Patton:
And is there a real world example of a school that cut back a meeting that you can share?

Simon Breakspear:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, one would be a primary school here in Australia that said, “We just started doing peer observations a few years ago.” And what that might look like is Alec wants a term, we want you to find another teacher within the school to just find a time where you can go in and be in their classroom for an hour and maybe give them some feedback and then later on that term, you go and do that same thing to the other person.
And someone might look at that and say, “Look, I think we were kind of doing this a few years ago when the goal of that sort of meeting or in that case a form of professional learning was to just open up classrooms.” The school said, “We’ve hit diminishing returns on this now, Simon. We’ve kind of opened up classrooms, but we’ve just got this process that is still chewing up a huge amount of time, but actually I think we’ve got diminishing returns from that.”
And they just made the decision to say, “Actually, we’re going to stop that peer observation process.” And so this then gets into conscious removal. So rather than just stopping it, you would normally do something like technology companies would call sun setting something. So you might start communicating a term or so out or towards the end of the year a sense of celebrating all that’s been learned through this three or four years of the peer observation processes where we’ve got, letting people know that in the coming year or in the coming term we’re going to be sun setting that approach to learning from each other.
And then it’s really a decision. In this case, they decided to hand that time back and so that time, two or three hours per term, can be handed back for your collaborative planning time. It’s not that it was bad, and it’s not that it stopped working, they were just getting diminishing returns from it. And so they’re asking always that question of how could we get even greater impact for that time and energy and effort?
Other ones might be keeping the time. So maybe someone’s been doing something like quite, at one school I was working with here, quite well-supported and they had a really comprehensive action research process. And it was really well intended the way it’s set up, people were having to define a problem of practice and then they’d move through a whole term of sort of investigation.
And the reality was that over half the teams in this school, by about halfway through the year, were just asking, “Oh, so where are we again in this process?” And then by the end of the year, the presentation was just a stressful thing for them. And after they did it, they would say things like, “Oh, thank heavens, that’s finished. It’s over. We don’t have to think about that.”
And so this was an example where a pruning of keeping the time that they had, but they actually pruned back this overly complicated action research process that stretched out over nine months and then they instead went with a much more reduced model based on my teaching sprint model, which is just engage with research evidence around one core practice, try it out for two to four weeks, and then review on how did it go and how you could incorporate that into your ongoing repertoire.
So that’d be an example where moving from a very comprehensive nine months attempt to do action research. And this school then said, “Actually, what would it look like to really cut that right back, to still have the intent of what we were trying to solve for, which was helping teachers engage in evidence informed practice improvement, but pruning it right back to that core intent and then going with a much more simplified, shorter cycle approach to that work?”

Alec Patton:
I think this really demonstrates why it’s so important to have a structure in place where you look at things to prune them regularly. Because I’m thinking about those examples you just said, and you can totally imagine the person who read the article or listened to the podcast or went to the training where they learned about the peer observation or they learned about the action research and got really excited about it.
And I can imagine someone going to a training where someone says, “Action research is rubbish. We did a bunch of studies and it doesn’t do any good.” And then you’d say, “Oh, we should cut that.” But you never go to the training where someone says, “Eh, I mean, action research can be really helpful, but if it’s not adding anything, maybe consider that.” That never comes up.

Simon Breakspear:
Yeah. And I think, look, this is the point, Alec, it’s just getting more people involved in the process of what I call putting on their impact effort glasses. Right? And it’s not judging or evaluating or which team you’re on. It’s not sort of, “Oh, this is good, this is bad.” It’s sort of in this context, where would we put this currently against its intended impact or the problem it’s trying to solve, right?
Is it high impact, more moderate or lower impact? And then what’s the effort, whether that effort is time, whether that effort is money, whether that effort is just discretionary sort of energy from the people involved. And it’s just this constant asking the question not, “Is anyone getting any benefit from this?” Of course some people are. Of course there’s some great examples, but are we getting the most benefit for this investment of time and energy?
And just helping people on a regular basis asked that question in the pursuit of having the most potential impact for the investments of time and energy that we’re putting in. And sometimes you don’t have to cut and then not reallocate that resource. Things like a lot of schools might say, “Hey, actually we’re going to cut some of the external conference PD we used to send people to.” It’s not that we’re entirely anti that. We’re not saying that no one’s ever had benefit from conference, but they might come-

Alec Patton:
Not the Deeper Learning Conference obviously. No one’s cutting that.

Simon Breakspear:
No, absolutely. Sign up now. Is that March?

Alec Patton:
Yeah, you got it. Quick correction here. The Deeper Learning Conference will actually run from April 2nd to fourth, 2025 in San Diego. You should come. There’s a link in the show notes. Now back to Simon.

Simon Breakspear:
I’ve been thinking I’ve got to get across. So we’ve been planning before COVID, so absolutely.

Alec Patton:
Oh, that’d be brilliant. We’ll have a fire pit, it’ll be great.

Simon Breakspear:
All right, it looks like I’m committed now.

Alec Patton:
It’s on the podcast.

Simon Breakspear:
I’d love to join. I’d love to join. But that’s a good example of sort of if people are doing deeper workshops, they’re actually learning how-to in conferences, we’re happy to do that. But if it’s just an edutainee kind of, “Hey, it was nice to get a few days out of the classroom or out of the school,” we say, “Look, we get it, but actually could there be a better way to reallocate that?”
And instead what we’re going to do is we’re going to cut back on sending people to one-off events that feel very light and there’s no learning how-to, and then we’re going to reallocate that time to say be able to go and shadow some practitioners in a school that’s further ahead on something that we’re working on. And so it’s just that constant sort of asking these things.
I would say though, when I have had firmer conversations with leaders is when they might’ve signed up for an external engagement with consultant, the program, all good intent and maybe they’ve signed up for a two or three year program. And at the end of year one they’re starting to say, “Look, actually I don’t think this was such a good fit. It’s not really landing with our staff. They’re not really adapting things.
They’re constantly telling our staff to kind of measure their impact, but they’re not really partnering with us to measure their impact. They’re just kind of going through the motions here.” And so a lot of people will get caught in what behavioral economists call the sunk cost fallacy here, which is we’ve already invested a whole year of money and time in this and therefore I guess we’ll just roll it through to year two or year three.
And I think the other thing that pruning lets people do is just give some license to learn from failure and learn from things that were well-intentioned but hasn’t worked out. And a regular pruning cycle would probably say you’d come through and you’d work with your team and you’d say, “Well, are we getting the impact we were hoping to out of this investment? No. Do we have strong confidence that that’s going to adjust for next year?
No. Okay, so now we’re going to have to make a harder pruning decision.” And of course, often people don’t make that decision because they think, “Oh, well, I’m going to look like I made the wrong call. I’m going to look like I’ve wasted some funding.” And what I want to keep saying to people is, “No, no, sometimes you’ve got to spend that time or spend that money to learn that wasn’t a good fit for you.”
And one of the things that pruning does is it helps release us from that sunk cost and sometimes make a harder sharper call to cut off or to cut back or to stop something. Because what we want to do is to make sure that next year we’re investing our staff’s precious time and energy and our limited budget in the things that will create the most benefit.
And the money and time we’ve already spent is a sunk cost, that is we can’t get it back. And so I would say sometimes there are opportunities to do a little bit more harder thinking at harder decisions. And pruning gives us, I think the language to say, “”Actually, we’ve learned a lot from that, but we’re going to stop at this point and then we’re going to redirect that energy and resource to that which we think is going to make the biggest potential difference next.”

Alec Patton:
There’s a paradox in your book that I want to tackle, which is this. So pruning is necessary because the staff at many and probably most schools are operating above their capacity. But one thing that stood out to me in your book is that doing pruning takes a lot of time. So when a school is already operating above their capacity, how do they carve out the time they need to go through the pruning process?

Simon Breakspear:
It’s such a good question, Alec. And I think what you’ve actually understood here is that one of the reasons why the additive trap is so problematic, and even though we spend all of our times talking about teacher workload and burnout, why can we not get ourselves off this additive trap that’s become an addictive trap is that we’re so exhausted we can’t pause enough to do the thing that we need for the future.
So the first thing I normally suggest is to do very, very small pruning because the first round of pruning isn’t going to save the day, but should build an appetite and build up the sort of muscles that we’re going to need later on to do the heavier cutback pruning. So these ideas of say, try to find a meeting back a week, try to dump or delay one task that was stressing you that isn’t at your highest level of contribution.
Have a look through your curriculum plan or your program for the coming month and drop off or drop out something that isn’t absolutely essential to learn, to create space, to do something more deeply. And I think in the first ways would be that very much those micro pruning experiments that don’t require necessarily new blocks of time, but get people thinking into subtraction, get people experiencing some small benefit.
And if they’ve experienced that small benefit and they’ve developed a bit of agency, I find that then they start to believe that things could be better. And I’d actually say, mate, I think when I talk to educators and school leaders, I say, “What do you think the likelihood of next year being better than this year with regards to being on top of workload and focusing on fewer things?” I often just hear people say, “I doubt it.” Like, “Oh, I hope so, but I can’t see it being any different.”
So first thing is to run small experiments to build agency, build muscle and experience and benefit. And then the next thing I do, mate, is people are much more able to give away future time. So I’ll say, “Okay, for how long is it crazy, crazy?” And they’re like, “The next three months.” “Great. Okay, so when’s the first month where you can look ahead and you say, there are some blocks of your calendar that’s not fully booked?” I say, “Let’s go after that time.”
And so I would go after something where I might say a quarterly pruning block, where I might say half of a day. And so go out as far as you need to and start to set up some regular things in your schedule, which is pruning time. So whether it’s a quarterly individual pruning time, I try to do a quarterly reset. I do that sort of in non-teaching time when it’s not as busy and I think, “Okay, ah, I’m so on the wrong side of a lot of good work right now. I’m drowning.
Now is not the time for me to sort of somehow prune my way out of this.” But I do need to start to look at in front and say, “Okay, in three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now, I’ve got a half a day booked in a time that I think’s likely to work for me personally.” In my team meetings, I get out in front and I might say, “All right, the meeting agendas are full, Alec, for the next couple of weeks or months. Okay, but in that month I could add a twenty-minute pruning conversation to that staff meeting or to that school improvement meeting.”
So just get out in front, put it there as a block. You can use some of the free tools we’ve got at pruningprinciple.com, know the different matrixes, the conversation starters that we use. And that’s what I would suggest. If you are serious about wanting things to be different in the medium term, then I understand that right now you’re in total overload. So what I’d love to do is to plan ahead for a period in the future where you might be coming up for air and hold that space now so that we’re not still in this position in 12 months.

Alec Patton:
That’s a great point that even if most people are completely slammed week to week, their calendar isn’t yet slammed a month, two months, three months out. And if you can actually put the pruning time in your calendar, particularly if it’s something that everybody’s agreed to and knows is happening, then it’s actually the pruning in the calendar that’s stopping something else from happening.

Simon Breakspear:
Nice.

Alec Patton:
Rather than the other way around.

Simon Breakspear:
I think that’s right. And if you take kind of this analogy of pruning is seasonal and it’s in a rhythm, right? And so it’s not a one and done. I often have to say to people like, “You know we’re going to have to work collectively at this problem for the rest of our careers, right?” Because there’s so many good things to do and the problems aren’t going away and probably they’re becoming more challenging.
So this is getting out and saying if we were gardeners and when we retire, Alec, maybe we will get a little bit more into the gardening side of things. And you think, “Oh, well when did the roses need pruning and when did that need pruning?” And you’d get out there and you’d know roughly which month. And so if I was in North America, I’d be sitting there saying, “You know what? I know I do school improvement planning around.
I know we start a good conversation late April, we’re getting into it in May, we’re writing it up in June. I’m going to go out, when would be a good time to prune? You know what? Mid-April Or whatever it is, I’m going to just go in there. I’m going to put in my calendar, I’m going to put two blocks and it’s going to put pruning block. And then actually across that whole week, I’m going to write pruning week.”
And everyone already knows that there’s a week we’ve got there where it’s subtractive conversations only. We’ve got the data and an analysis of about what’s working and we’re having lots of conversations. Not making the decision about what we’ll prune, but actually making decisions about potential things that we might prune going ahead. And I think, wouldn’t that be great to do that pruning season before we enter that planning season?
Or you might say, “Oh, you know what? It’s week six of term. I’m like totally overloaded. What a terrible time to prune.” That’s a time, you know wish past you pruned. So you say, “Well, when would be a good time to prune?” I like to prune after a bit of a holiday, coming back maybe a few days before term starts. Because if I try to prune straight at the end of the term, I’m just tired and grumpy and dysregulated.
But there’s this period where I then, okay, so I’ve got an hour and it’s 8:30 till 9:30 and it’s in my calendar and I’ve already sort of said to my team or my wife, my partner, my husband, “Hey, I’ve got this slot.” And I go to a certain cafe and I sit down and I click through the last term and I look at what’s coming up ahead and I actually think through areas where I could strategically subtract. And I normalize that.
And that just turns up in my calendar. So whether it’s personal team, whether it’s overarching work. And then lastly, if you’ve got system levers at play here, Alec, and some of your community will. I mean, have you put in a pruning box within your school improvement template? Is there a requirement for people to say, “What are we cutting back or cutting off before we move forward?”
In your professional conversational norms, whether you have one-on-ones or team meetings, can you slip in a conversation starter, a question norm, a question stem, which is in your one-on-ones, in your team meetings, “Hey everyone, as we’re entering into the next term, I’m just going to ask you, we’ve got a 15-minute tool here and I want to reflect and then talk.
What are some things that you need to cut off or cut back in order to make your highest possible contribution?” So you just slowly add them as time blocks, as templates, as conversational starter norms. And I think over time we might be able to just normalize subtraction in the same way that we have really good rhythms and norms for addition.

Alec Patton:
Okay, final thing. I want to return to the 3D where we began, the dump, delay, delegate. So dump I gut. That’s very straightforward.

Simon Breakspear:
I don’t know-. Can I just jump in here? I don’t know whether, this is fine. I’m happy to do. But I reckon it’s pretty low. I think one of the things that I reckon that’s most interesting here as well, Alec, is just this, why is it even if someone does the dump, delegate, do, this, the personal pruning kind of framework, which is super simple, why is it often they still come and say, “I can’t.” Right? “I’ve got nothing on those.”
Or they fill them out and they say, “I can see that these would be good, but I’m not going to do that.” And for me here, the number one learning here I’ve got is that it’s about the underlying beliefs and the underlying license that the most committed educators and leaders aren’t willing to give themselves, which is they fundamentally often look after other members of their team. They fundamentally encourage other members of their staff to get their workload under control.
They send them home, they say, “Don’t worry about that,” but they’re unwilling to do it for themselves. And I think this is sort of deep down on this sense of it’s on me and if I care about it, I will always work all the way up till my limits. And to say no to something or to not pursue something somehow for them is kind of a, almost like a moral failing or they can’t give it to themselves.
I just think there’s something there about, the thing I most discover in myself and in trusted colleagues that I work with on this is that the biggest reason they can’t do it is not actually finding the time to do it. The deepest reason they can’t do it is those underlying beliefs and rules they have for themselves as an educator or as a contributor to educational change around other people can have this, but I can’t have it for myself.

Alec Patton:
Which of course means that other people can’t have it because if you’re working at a school and your school leader says, “Oh, take time for yourself,” but you know your school leader’s working all weekend, you don’t feel like you can take the weekend off.

Simon Breakspear:
Exactly right.

Alec Patton:
Because it’s what they do that sets the culture, not what they tell you.

Simon Breakspear:
And so I often have to get people to sit at that level below, that assumption level, and I say, “What’s that about?” And sometimes I’ll just say that, “What’s that about?”

Alec Patton:
And you say you’re not qualified to teach people about well-being.

Simon Breakspear:
But it’s this sense that I think this is at the deepest level, Alec, the deepest level. We could get into delegation and how delegation pruning takes some more time because often that’s about building the capacity of another in order for that to occur, or what should be a delay and are we just putting off things that need to be pruned anyway and we push it down into the future?
Yeah, you do. It’s a little bit like when you clean up. Sometimes you’ve got to move it to the garage or to the attic. You know it’s going to end up getting thrown away, but you can’t quite do it to yourself yet. And so you could put it in a bag or a box and then in a few months later you say, “Oh, that’s got to go.”
But I think that the number one thing for educators who are looking at the sheer scale of the challenges, whether it’s in core literacy and numeracy, whether it’s in high school graduation and college readiness, whether it’s just in we’re backsliding here in Australia on graduation from high school, how are we going backwards in graduation from high school in 2024? Social emotional learning, attention.
And there’s just this is overwhelm that for those of us who care deeply about this sector, we kind of feel like sometimes we carry the weight of the world. And the only way we know we’ve done enough is that we’ve literally exhausted ourselves, time, energy, and then we finally have the moral license to say, “Okay, we can’t do another thing.” And I’m questioning whether or not that is the best way to make long-term contributions to complex problems and to long-term institutions like schools.
And I just wonder whether the deeper work we need to do, and the thing that pruning unlocks for you is it can liberate you to say long-term trees, long-term orchards, long-term things, they need regular cutting off and cutting back. And so you no longer have to tie subtraction with not caring or giving up. And in fact, you can now tie subtraction, not even to your own well-being.
Because I haven’t found that works for these leaders. They’re willing to exhaust themselves. But you can tie subtraction to long-term vitality and impact for the institutions and systems you care about. And once they get that, then they start saying, “Ah. So you’re saying that if I don’t prune now, I’m going to hand something off to the next person who leads this team, this school, this system that actually will have less vitality and less impact.
And under my stewardship, I’ll actually leave it in a situation that I was able to hold it all together, but for the next person, they’re going to collapse under the weight of my own educational hoarding?” And I think if you think long-term about impact, suddenly for people pruning can liberate them to connect this kind of subtractive work with long-term vitality and impact. And if they can get there, then they can do it.
But if they can’t actually acknowledge that, that’s the thing holding back, they’ll often tell me just, “Oh, I can’t right now” or “I don’t have time” or “The tool didn’t quite work.” I’m like, “Yeah, those things are all solvable, but you first need to give yourself license that we need all you can give, but we don’t need more than that.” And if you try to do more than that and you try to model that, it’s very likely we’re going to make the overarching problems worse.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. When you think about it with yourself, you can really get into, “Oh, well I can do more. I can do more. I can handle it.”

Simon Breakspear:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
But if you ask yourself, okay, when I go to see my doctor, do I want them feeling as overloaded as I do when they’re making decisions about my health? Or when I go into surgery, do I want the surgeon to be in the mindset that I’m in right now or do I want them to have a little more spaciousness and how they’re thinking about things? I think that becomes really different.

Simon Breakspear:
Nice. I agree. How do we think about other professionals? And then how do we think about ourselves? And then just like I said, what’s that about? And then, do we really think this set of beliefs or these ways of working is in the best interest of the long-term institutions and people that we care about? And if just in the simplicity of the word pruning. I was with the head of our Australian education research organization, Jenny Donovan, and she was saying, “Oh, we need a new word for implementation.
It’s not a very nice word to say. And it’s sort of five syllables.” And I said, “Well, you need an even better word for de-implementation.” And six syllables. It’s ugly to say. It’s a good idea out of healthcare, but it doesn’t quite land. And the thing that I love about pruning is that it has resonance. I hear people say it back to me.
And when you get to prune, they say, “I think I need to prune.” Yeah. And it becomes this language now where we can say to each other not, “Oh, you need to look after your wellbeing” or “No, you need the verb Alec. Oh, you need to have done less. You needed your life to be calmer.” I know that, but how do I get there? Well, the verb is to prune. That’s the action.
And in the short term, don’t assume you’re going to solve your total overload as a school, as a system, as an individual. The first thing you need to do in running your pruning experiments is to actually build your own agency and believe that you are allowed to, and you need to cut something off to gain some small benefit from that. And then to build that momentum by sharing it with others and doing it with others as a collective action problem.
And I think that’s the most important thing. And then when you start doing it and you find yourself, “Oh, I couldn’t come up with anything,” or “I’ve come up with some things, but I’m not willing to move to step two,” conscious removal, just sort of smile at yourself, the kind of generous curiosity and say, “Hey, what’s that about?” And you’ll have to do this to your colleagues as well. Hey, what’s that about?
You’ve generated these things. We’ve all told you. They sound like really smart ways to prune. And then you’ve said, “Oh, but I can’t” or “Not yet” or “I shouldn’t” or “I can’t hand that to that person.” And you say, what’s that about? And then you kind of smile and you’re generous with yourself and you sort of think, oh, you found another person with the whole weight of the world on them. Because they got into this game of education wanting to change, change as much as possible for those need it most.
And they’ve got themselves tied up into a situation of working individually and as teams and as organizations. That is fine over the very short term, but it really isn’t a good way to be vibrant and to work well over long-term. And schools are long-term, the problems we’re solving are long-term, and we need all of us to find ways to think in decades and work in decades. And I think pruning and to prune is the verb we’ve been missing to make this work over time.

Alec Patton:
That’s a perfect spot to stop. Thank you so much, Simon.

Simon Breakspear:
Always great to connect with you, my friend. Thanks for what you do in getting these ideas out into the hands of educators. And sounds like I’ll be seeing you in the flesh, Deeper Learning. Look forward to being there, a conference it sounds like no one should miss.

Alec Patton:
Yes, indeed. All right. Thank you so much. High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Dr. Simon Breakspear for this conversation. We’ve got a link to the Pruning Principle website in our show notes. There are lots of great free resources there and links so you can buy the book yourself.
We’ve also got a link to another episode we recorded with Simon. It’s got one of my favorite titles ever, “If It Doesn’t Work For Teachers, It Doesn’t Work.” That’s a mantra that Simon uses. And of course, we’ve got a link to Deeper Learning 2025. Simon will be there, I’ll be there and you should be there too. Thanks for listening.