Even more fundamentally, discovery-driven planning produces good strategy. Horn says that “In a discovery-driven planning process, start with the desired outcomes in mind. From there, the crucial next step is to list all the assumptions that must prove true to realize the desired outcomes.” This echoes the brilliant strategist Roger Martin, who advocates asking, “What would have to be true?” rather than “What is true?” before committing to a strategy.

Another cognitive bias at play was a failure to calculate opportunity costs. By investing finite resources in choices that would not differentiate them, the school was foreclosing opportunities to serve their community better while “playing to win,” as the strategist Roger Martin puts it.

Hygienic factors include things like compensation, status, and work conditions. These are “table stakes” for schools. Just as poker requires each player to pay an ante (the “table stakes”) to join the game, so too must schools invest in “good enough” hygienic factors to attract and retain faculty and staff.

Schools certainly need the right “interfaces” so that “modular” solutions can “plug in.” For example, does the daily schedule built-in time for students to access an outside provider for self-directed learning? Does the school transcript have space for credentials earned elsewhere?

To be clear, shifting from a zero-sum to a positive-sum model of school won’t be easy. As one of my former colleagues likes to say, “Teachers cannot create an experience for students that those teachers themselves have not had.” So if we want to initiate a shift in our schools from a zero-sum to a positive-sum worldview, we should begin by inviting teachers into new professional learning and growth experiences.

To be sure, a full shift from threat rigidity to opportunity will take more than answering those four questions—and the rest of From Reopen to Reinvent explores that territory. It begins, as Horn implies, with having enough empathy to understand that threat rigidity makes perfect sense when you’re in the midst of a crisis. But if we remain in that place, we will merely “reopen.”