It's About Learning

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 provides an exceptional explanation of how to start behavioral change.

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 (4DX) change process that has proven to be an effective strategy in executing organizational change. Once one or two aspects of the traditional environment are changed you can then move on to the next one or two activities and so on. The key is to have an effective strategy and to execute.

4. Enlist and empower self-differentiated leaders – Edwin Friedman in the book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix posits that having the conviction to keep on moving forward when everyone in your organization is screaming for the status quo is a key ability of the self-differentiated leader. These people do not need validation from the group but are able to see beyond the challenges to the broader goals of serving learners in new and productive ways. These people practice change by living it and have the ability to lead by example and can show people why they like the “new stuff” and why liking the new stuff is better for our learners and for our society as a whole.

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.