Archives For Change
I have been exploring how to bring about effective organizational change for many years. A quick search for the word “change” on my blog will reveal many posts. My analysis and evaluation started back in 2010, when I was still advocating for Kotter’s Eight-Stage Process of Creating Change but I was starting to see that there were some significant challenges to this process. By 2012 I was starting to explore broader ideas and looking for more of a synthesis to leading change as the post Recommended Readings on Leading Change In Education will reveal. I was recognizing that if you really wanted to bring about effective change you had to Practice Change by Living It and you had to acknowledge that The Head Won’t Go Where the Heart Hasn’t Been.
My synthesis of thinking about change started to come together after some significant failures in a few change strategies I had undertaken in 2011-2012. I had religiously used Kotter’s Eight-Stage process and I even focused on creating a sense of urgency but there was something missing. Without going to significant details on the situations my evaluation of what had happened and my analysis of what could be doing better revealed that there were many other factors that all had to come together. The following is an excerpt from a 2014 post I made in reaction to Seth Godin’s post – People Who Like This Stuff. This post is where the synthesis of effective organization change that is outlined in the Learner’s Mindset Discussion had its formation. Most of my thinking is still the same but in the last six years, I have added a Crucial Conversations component to the self-differentiated leader’s section because of the challenges everyone is facing today in trying to have conversations about even the smallest things.
One of the advantages of working through authentic projects is that they force one to continually evaluate what is working and what can be done better. If one hopes to change their own world and the world for their learners one must remain in the higher-order thinking of evaluation, analysis, synthesis, and creation which is also a key aspect of the Learner’s Mindset.
To see the full post you can go to People who like this stuff…like this stuff.
Why is change in education so slow and so difficult? I think Seth Godin offers one of the most simple and elegant explanations…
“People who like this stuff…like this stuff”
Godin goes onto explain that:
“…for those that are already in it, you can’t push too far, because they like the genre. That’s why they’re here.”
Those who have walked away probably aren’t just waiting around for you to fix it. Those who have never been, don’t think the genre has a problem they need solved.”
If we apply this elegant thinking to the challenges we face in improving education, then most educators who like this stuff [traditional learning environments}… like this stuff. Most people who don’t, have walked away as we can see by homeschooling, unschooling, and uncollege movements. Perhaps more importantly, for those (students, parents, and politicians) who have never been behind the scenes of our traditional educational system, there is no problem. Or the problems that they can see are simply ones that appeal to emotions like class size or special needs. These issues become hot buttons for political sound bites and the 6:00 news but sound research by people like John Hattie reveals that student achievement is not impacted significantly by class size but by many other factors that just aren’t as newsworthy.
How then do we get people who like this stuff (traditional education) to like new stuff (digital learning environments)? While innovating the learning environment has been a significant challenge for the past century (John Dewey was calling for a change to progressive education almost 100 years ago) it is possible and involves the following four steps.
1 Start with Why – In his popular TED talk Simon Sinek makes the argument that “people won’t buy what you do they buy why you do it”, so rather than telling traditional educators what they should or need to be doing to improve learning you need to provide a reason why they would want to add to or improve the current system. This has to be an emotional appeal. Sinek provides a fully developed argument for starting with why and how to use the Golden Circle in his book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
2. Identify and enlist key influencers – There are key social leaders within all organizations that have the influence to bring about the small activities that can start the behavioral change that leads to organizational change. Once you can identify one or two key activities and give these influencers the reason why they should be making these changes you can start the process of implementing digital learning to enhance the traditional learning environment. Once these influencers like the new stuff they will give others reason to like the new stuff as well. The book Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, Second Edition
3. Install an effective execution strategy – You can’t change everything within an organization at once. You still have the whirlwind of the day-to-day activities that will consume 80-90% of your efforts. However, the key activities that your influencers are willing to change can become the one or two wildly important goals (WIG) that make up the foundation of The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals
4. Enlist and empower self-differentiated leaders – Edwin Friedman in the book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix
This is not an easy process but we owe it to our children and to the young men and women who are going to our universities and colleges with dreams of building a better world.
Source – https://advisor.visualcapitalist.com/the-5-fastest-growing-industries-of-the-next-decade/
Viewing the infographic is worth the time but if you just here is the list if just want to know what they are without having to go any further:
- Software Publishing – Companies involved in software publishing activities such as designing, installing, and providing post-purchase support.
- Information Services – Companies that supply, retrieve, search for or publish information.
- Oil and gas extraction – Companies involved in the preparation of oil & gas up to the point of shipment from the producing property.
- Computer system design – Companies that primarily provide IT expertise.
- Outpatient care centers – Facilities where the patient is not required to stay overnight.
A recent question by one of my graduate students reveals that while the name or phrase may change or fall out of favor, but if the idea is good it will persist in a slightly different format.
In an online class meeting, I cautioned my graduate students on using the phrase “disruption” or “disruptive innovation” in their innovation proposals because disruption has a tendency to convey a negative connotation in an educational setting. Teachers don’t like disruptions to their classes.
The following question and response (which I do have permission to share) reveal the challenge of conveying meanings especially when some names or labels have the potential to be misunderstood.
Question
I do have a question about using the word “disruption”. As that is the name of this course, I understood it to be one of the qualifiers of our proposal. As a student, I now understand that disruption is not negative. Could it be part of my charge to change that rhetoric? Is there something more fundamentally wrong with the theory of disruption? Why did we read Clayton Christensen’s article in week one, if it is a term we should avoid? Do you agree with Christensen?
My Response
You do ask a really good question about disruptive innovation. If I recall my memory correctly Christensen coined the term disruptive technologies back in an article in 1996 and then he later referred to this as disruptive innovation in his 1997 book Innovator’s Dilemma. Many people now refer to Christensen’s ideas on how technology can disrupt the change process as the theory of disruptive innovation which I would argue is still quite well supported, but like any theory, there are supporters and detractors. I am on the supporter side, but I am also aware of the limitations. In a much earlier (2009-2010) version of this disruptive innovation course which was called a different name in a different institution, I had my students read Christensen’s book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World. Back in late 1990, I would have my students read the Innovator’s Dilemma, so I have been a longtime supporter of Christensen’s ideas. While I may have shifted the way I talk about disruptive innovation and more importantly ask my students to talk about disruptive innovation, I still believe we need to be aware of how it works and take advantage of the opportunities it offers.
The change in language is just a matter of applying the old adage/proverb…you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. People don’t want to be disrupted and it can often scare people, especially those who want to be safe. Over the past 10 years, we have seen a shift in our campuses toward the use of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and in 2015 when Lukianoff and Haidt argued in the Atlantic article The Coddling of the American Mind that overprotection is having a negative effect on university students I knew I needed to shift the language a bit in the course where I used the notion of disruptive innovation. I have been trying to bring about change in learning environments since the late 80’s so I have learned many valuable lessons. I learned that you have to take a very broad approach and consider many different factors and while the facts or data may be right many people are still afraid of the data and some just like things the way they are…they don’t want to be disrupted. In the post People who like this stuff…like this stuff I point to 4 key factors that you need to address to bring about change in the learning environment. I will be asking my student to apply these ideas in an upcoming course on organizational change.
To summarize, the adage you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar is very true, especially in an educational setting. Be careful how you use the term disruptions but still use the ideas. Remember we want to improve or change the world one learner at a time.
It took me a while to realize I could speed up this process if I didn’t scare my learners first.
In the blog post Toward Tired Seth Godin makes the argument that “you’ll need to figure out where to put the fear when you do work that matters”.
Have you figured out where to put the fear?
If this isn’t an issue then you may want to consider if you are making a difference, being creative or leading.
