John Gruber, one of my favorite bloggers, made a stark contrast when commenting on a current event — unrelated to schools entirely — but nonetheless seems apt to apply to leadership.
Last April, the New York Times published a crossword puzzle grid with the wrong clues. The correct puzzle was available in the app and on the web — the whoopsie was just in the print version. John thought the moment taught us something important about the difference between hardware brain and software brain:
Print, effectively, is hardware. Atoms, not bits. The web is literally software. If you make a mistake in software that results in incorrect mathematical results, you ship an update. If you make a mistake in a CPU such that it results in incorrect floating-point math, perhaps only in 1 out of every 9 billion calculations, people will remember the mistake 30 years later.
He draws a parallel that print is the successful deployment of hardware, whereas a web application is the successful deployment of software. It got me conceptualizing the idea of schools as oscillating between two analogous instincts.
When a School is like a Printing Company
Or, when does a school display hardware-brain thinking?
When engineers do chip design, they are seeking permanence. The logic is going to be etched into silicon, and the other pieces all route back towards it. It is the focus point of the architecture.
Likewise, schools operate on annual budget cycles, multi-year staffing contracts, and physical infrastructure with long lifespans. When you build a timetable, hire for a department, or set an assessment calendar, you are cutting hardware. They are not easily modifiable mid-year. International schools have accreditation bodies with fixed cycles and certain expectations that schools need to demonstrate competency at fulfilling.
Two other artifacts that schools hard-wire into the world are the transcript and the report card. Unlike a website that can silently correct an error, a report card issued with a mistake requires a formal reprint and a notification. The grades determine things like GPA or credits — there is no shipping a patch.
When a school carries its hardware brain to the fore, every choice carries irreversible downstream weight. This demands a particular kind of thinking: slow to commit, precise in execution, deeply attentive to the why.
When a School is like a Web Application
Software engineers treat lines of code as behaviours whose correctness is defined by tests. It is more iterative, exploratory, comfortable with contextualised framing; software is done when it simply meets the expectations. It is not up to the software itself to define the expectations.
Similarly, a school’s learning initiatives and community development initiatives are about building layers for the next round of leaders to stand on. The school culture cannot be written into the mission statement — instead it is a series of actions responsive to established norms.
Many of the pivotal roles in schools live almost entirely in software-brain mode. A counsellor supporting a student won’t follow a fixed script — they read the student, adjust the conversation, and respond to what surfaces. An admissions coordinator fielding enquiries from prospective families will need to recalibrate messaging depending on a changing market. Activities and learning coordinators cooperate to synthesise academic standards with other competing priorities, such as wellbeing.
When considering how a school utilises a software brain, it’s about being able to adapt to the moment, and reflection is often used as the substrate for this activity. The kind of thinking here is more about voicing how the school meets its goals.
The Tension, Demonstrated
Hardware-thinking defines the architectural pillars; software-thinking services the community. Schools both “write code” when confronted with new realities, and also fall back on “logic gates” that have withstood the test of time.
Consider this as an example that demonstrates the tension: When ChatGPT arrived, schools everywhere were suddenly confronted with a competent robot essayist. They responded either by utilising hardware-thinking or initiating software-thinking. Either pen and paper, timed conditions in invigilated rooms became the new standard — and/or training was prescribed. The first explicitly removed software entirely and fell back on architecture. The second is like rewriting a module that doesn’t suit some new use cases.
These aren’t abstract philosophies. They describe two recognisable modes that leadership can recognise. In education, both will be present, perpetually in tension.
And now…
Organizations of every shape and color face existential challenges, leading to perhaps dramatic changes, just as newspapers had to pivot from print to the web. Likewise, the advent of agentic AI tooling provide schools a lot of runway to re-imagining what it looks like to nurture young minds from toddler to young adult.
The next era of schooling will have to figure out how to etch the approaches in silicon, and compile the details on demand. Distinctions such as those above provide a deployable mental model, summed up as the following:
- The hardware brain is going to ask: how do we protect what we know works well?
- The software brain will ask: where can we innovate next?
The reality is that there are times in an organic community when one sits at the forefront more than the other; collectively, both questions are equally pertinent to what comes next.