What Does A Principal Do?
The Hidden Work of Memetic Engineering

What does a principal do? This question seems straightforward, yet the answer reveals something surprising. 

Every principal performs a critical function without even realizing it. 

Understanding this hidden work opens the door to deliberate improvement rather than accidental progress.


The thing every principal does, without knowing they are doing it, is memetic engineering. 

This concept deserves careful unpacking before exploring how it applies to school leadership.

What Does A Principal Do, Memetically Speaking?

Memetic engineering is analogous to genetic engineering. 

Both are based on finding a set of basic units that can be mixed and matched to change the forms and functions that emerge at higher levels of complexity. 

The key to using any such code is knowing what the most basic units are, then developing the ability to skillfully manipulate them.


In the alphabet, the basic units are letters. In genetics, they are base molecules. 

In memetics, they are needs. Across all these examples, basic units combine in ways that allow evolutionarily meaningful forms and functions to emerge at higher levels of complexity.


If you know what you are doing, operating effectively at the lower level enables powerful changes at higher levels. 

When a geneticist manipulates base molecules, changes occur within an organism. 

In memetics, we are talking about a basic unit in psychology—the most basic components of your mind. 

Your needs are the components that combine to make up who you are and how you behave. 

Powerful differences are made at the higher levels of organizations and societies when needs are either systematically supported or thwarted.


In this model of memetics, there are four key kinds of needs: primary, secondary, derivative, and particular. 

Within the category of primary needs, there are two kinds—physiological and psychological.

Psychological Needs

Most people are familiar with physiological needs for air, water, food, and shelter. If these are systematically thwarted, death follows. 

The psychological need for sleep is also widely recognized. 

There is no credible scientific evidence that lack of sleep directly causes death, but sleep deprivation leads to anxiety, depression, and other forms of psychological distress. 

If death occurs while sleep deprived, it results from the effects of psychological distress, not directly from lack of sleep.


Three other psychological needs have been subjected to rigorous scientific research over many decades, verifying that they are also primary. These needs are for relatedness, autonomy, and competence.


Relatedness is the need to belong to a group and be recognized within that group for who you are. Autonomy is the need to be the causal and volitional source of your own behavior.

 Competence is the need to be effective at achieving your goals and aspirations.

Secondary, Derivative, and Particular Needs 

Many other needs have been proposed as primary, but two recent candidates help clarify the other categories.


Beneficence, or benevolence, when supported, was shown to consistently boost well-being above and beyond the effects of the three established primary psychological needs. 

However, when researchers tested the effects of thwarting the need for beneficence, there was no effect. 

Beneficence is good to have, but it is not missed when it is gone. This makes it a secondary need.


Meaningfulness, or purpose, was also examined alongside relatedness, autonomy, competence, and beneficence. 

When researchers mathematically controlled for the effects of the other needs on well-being, nothing remained to be explained by meaningfulness. 

In other words, meaningfulness is the result of meeting all the other needs. It is a derivative need because meeting the other needs satisfies it. 

It is still valid to talk about meaningfulness as a need, but it does not add anything to well-being beyond what the primary and secondary needs already provide.


The final category is particular needs. All primary needs are universal—that is one criterion for being considered primary. 

Particular needs arise from the uniqueness of an individual, the specific cultural dynamics of a group, or the properties of a given situation.



In memetics, primary needs are the most basic unit, like letters of the alphabet or molecular base molecules of DNA. 

They are mixed and matched to create patterns of behavior, activities, roles, and more. 

Just as the replication of genes through cellular machinery is always occurring within a principal without their awareness, every principal also lacks awareness that their mental and social machinery are constantly replicating memes.

What Does A Principal Do, Engineering-wise?

What if the principal of a school could be as consistent and reliable in his socially helpful output as: 

  • an aeronautical engineer creating a commercial passenger jet by practicing applied physics,
  • a pharmacist compounding a pain-relieving medicine by practicing applied chemistry, or 
  • a doctor using gene therapy to cure a deadly disease by practicing applied biology? 

The goal is for principals to lead their schools by practicing applied psychology. 

This dream can come true with a proper understanding and application of the psychology of engagement.


A note of caution: history includes questionable practices that followed from similar ambitions. 

Social manipulations have sometimes caused more problems without solving the original ones. 

In this case, the suggested management practices avoid that fate by directly monitoring the well-being of those subjected to them. 

Monitoring well-being is not merely an afterthought to protect against backlash; it is a central design principle. 

Enacting the moral imperative of being an education leader is central to memetic engineering, so it is critically important for the well-being of those subjected to memetic engineering to be both supported and monitored.


Cognitive linguists have found that morality is fundamentally about well-being. 

What makes any action moral is creating or maintaining well-being. 

The challenge is that we live at multiple levels of existence simultaneously. 

What is good for one person's well-being might not be good for another's. 

What is good for one group might not be good for another. The highest moral aspirations aim at creating well-being for the largest possible group, but taking all the ways humans diverge from each other seriously makes that a tricky proposition. 

What matters now is that we have a better understanding of the components of well-being, which means a better chance at systematically supporting it and developing systems that more consistently produce moral benefits.

You Know More Than You Think

Memetic engineering is closer to common sense than other forms of engineering. 

The scientific basis is not esoteric theories in physics, chemistry, or biology, though it is consistent with those. 

The basis of memetic engineering is psychology, which has some difficult parts, but the primary subject matter is you and your mind. 

You have a unique perspective on the science of psychology because all your experiences result from events in your own mind—no particle accelerators, test tubes, or petri dishes required.

Many memetic engineering techniques are simply the kind of common sense actions expected from any reasonably competent leader. 

You were a memetic engineer all along; you just did not know it. And since you did not know you were an engineer, you did not know how to deliberately get better at the engineering you were doing. 

This science offers a better way to fit all your leadership ideas together and refine your understanding to better achieve the outcomes you want for your school.


If you aspire to being a good memetic engineer, you will strive to create a pervasive cultural norm in your school that supports deeper learning for everyone.

What Does A Principal Do to Build Professional Capital

Deeper learning for children is the transformation of playfulness into professionalism by building professional capital. Playfulness is the starting point. 

Without playfulness, learning is always shallow. Once playfulness has been established as a baseline expectation, the deepening of the learning process can proceed. 

For adults, the shared premise is that professionalism is the shared goal committed to achieving together.


In their book Professional Capital, Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan use an analogy to capital in the business sense. 

The basics of memetic engineering map their three components of professional capital onto the three primary needs from Self-Determination Theory. 

When you suspect that psychological needs are not being satisfied, examine capital-building behaviors to choose how to offer better support or to evaluate suggestions from others.

What Does A Principal Do to Create Equity?

Another consistently stated goal in education today is building equity. Memetic engineering provides us with a clear four-step process for building equity:

1. Define needs scientifically

2. Distribute resources fairly to satisfy needs

3. Remove structural barriers to need satisfaction, and

4. Satisfy needs with parity among groups

To ensure needs are being satisfied, triangulate school climate measures that incorporate need satisfaction, motivation, and engagement instruments derived from Self-Determination Theory. 

When measures indicate unsatisfied needs, more external motivations, or lower quality engagement, analyze the situation to determine which form of professional capital building will correct the pattern of non-optimal experiences.


If more relatedness is needed, relational capital building is indicated. If more autonomy is needed, decisional capital building is indicated. 

If more competence is needed, human capital building is indicated.


When asked, "What does a principal do?" the correct answer is that the principal is the lead memetic engineer who makes the school work. 

Memetic engineering is a new model for more consistently facilitating deeper learning. 

All schools that succeed at this task and have the data to prove it are examples of what can be called Catalytic Pedagogies. 

This article was printed from HolisticEquity.com

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