Transforming Change into Culture

So today I want to explore a little bit about sustainability. About when we’re pursuing our improvement work, how we can have from the very outset a real desire to embed our change into the culture, structures, processes, and norms that will continue even after we move beyond our current role or organization. Now this is a really hard thing to do, especially early on in our work, when we really are so embedded in the change initiatives we’re leading. We’re kind of trying to lead from the front and we’re trying to bring our energy and our passion, our knowledge to the work. And of course, in the early part of change, it’s crucial to systematically bring your full self to that work so that people know this matters, that you care, and you’re going to see it through. And yet I often say to leaders, early on, think beyond you.

Once you’ve got the initial phase of improvement work going, start to in your mind, think about a process of making yourself redundant as quickly as possible. John Cotter, the terrific academic and theorist in change wrote in Leading Change, only leadership can get change to stick by anchoring it in the very culture of an organization. And I think this is important. In his step eight, of leading change in his latter part of his model. He actually says, anchor the new approach in the culture. I wonder if you’ve got experiences that come to mind when you think, hey, what’s an example when change has truly become embedded in the culture of the organization? That is, when the person who led the work, who kind of embodied it, viewed passion and interest to it, when that person moved on or took some leave, did it kind of sustain? Perhaps you’ve got different experiences at time where change has dropped off, faded, and you’ve seen a quick return to old defaults once that individual was no longer the active person leading it. See, I think early on, all of us in the changes we’re leading should imagine a scenario where we are no longer there leading it day to day, and ask how close is this change initiative to being able to be continued even if I wasn’t here. So think about something you’re working on, maybe something you’ve been working on for six months, 12 months, 18 months, and start to think about a bit of a checklist in your mind of the sorts of things that might be good indicators to you that this work has the ability to continue even when you’re not the one actively leading it.

I mean, there’s some basic things, things like, hey, what are the levels of commitment and positivity for continuing with the approach amongst the core leaders and staff? How often are successors of the approach recognized and shared and celebrated? Are we really in that point where people are saying, this stuff is working? We want it to continue. What about other things? How are you going with things like setting up clear frameworks and rubrics that could be used for review and guide practice?

Have we got some systems and policies and processes with the approach now embedded into it? If I looked at the yearly or four yearly plan, can we see the approach has now built in and incorporated into the long-term improvement work that we’re doing? Is it kind of in now within school policies and procedures? Is it included in the longer term professional learning plans and professional learning goals? all of these are just little indicators of, hey, is this on track to be embedded? Because the really strange thing to get your head around is this. The majority of the impact from the change initiatives that you’re leading will actually come probably after you’re no longer actively leading it. Think about this, if you’re leading a change for two, three years, maybe even half a decade, you want that change initiative to be so embedded in the structures, processes, norms and cultures that it continues and continues to add value and create benefit for another five, 10 years after you finish. The whole point of doing improvement work is to embed it in the ongoing ways of working so that all future teachers, students, parents, whoever you’re trying to focus on will get the benefit from that work. We need to start thinking in that longer term way, and in our own minds, get ourselves ready to become redundant in the change work we’re leading and have a bit of a sustainability checklist in our mind about what would be good signals that we’re on track to make this embedded or irreversible. Now, often people say, yeah, yeah, I know, but I’m not planning on going anywhere yet. I’ve still got kind of a real commitment to this. And I want to say often people get an opportunity to move to a new role or move to a new organization or something happens in their broader life, a little bit earlier than they wanted. I often coach these leaders and they kind of bring a real intensity to the last weeks or months because they know they’ve left it a bit late to get to embeddedness. And you can see they’re trying to rush this last bit. I wasn’t planning to go for another two years, but now I’m actually going in six months and they’re trying to push, push, push. And it’s because they kept delaying on this sense of planning, planning for sustainability without them. So have a think about how you can build these approaches into structures, how you can build these approaches into processes, how you can build your change work into the norms and stories, how you can get it into that embeddedness of what Michael Barber, a great researcher and thinker on educational system change, taught me. He said was all about irreversibility. How can we get our change to that point of irreversibility? I love that concept. And yet to build on this, I had a terrific, leader in a workshop last week, and she said, I get this point of embeddedness and irreversibility, but don’t we also want the people left with the work to also have the capability to kind of adapt it over time? And I said, actually, that’s a really helpful lens on this. Sometimes it’s helpful to say, how do I make this durable and embedded and sustainable and irreversible? And how do I make sure the people who are left implementing it also have the agency and understanding of what they’re really trying to do here?

Such that if they do need to evolve and adapt the approach to better meet the need of changing conditions, they understand how to do that. They’re not just blindly following procedures, but they understand the problem that this was designed to solve, the underlying strategies and the mechanisms and the research behind it, so that they don’t just make sort of, you know, willy-nilly kind of just adjustments to it, but they are capable in that long-term embeddedness to keep up evolving the approach. I thought that was a really great insight from that leader in my workshop. So where are you at? We’re thinking about transforming change into culture. How do we actually embed this in a way that can truly last? As one program I was running last week in partnership with the Queensland government put it, let’s move beyond leaving a legacy and let’s think about actively leading a legacy. I wonder where these ideas take you as you think about the terrific change work you’re leading with your teams across your organization, across multiple schools perhaps. How could you start to think about getting yourself out of being the key active ingredient in the work and start to make yourself redundant because you know that the long-term impact of getting this stuff embedded in your organization most of that benefit will come later on. To give a really common example in my work, particularly my work over the last decade on professional learning, many of you will have engaged with my teaching sprints model, which is a simple open source model that helps people who are getting their teachers together in teams to work through iterative cycles of evidence-based improvement. And sometimes when we’ve seen this work implemented in schools,

Well, actually always early on in the work, it needs a really dedicated instructional leader ahead of teaching and learning ahead. I’ve really just committed to driving that work, working with teams, helping them understand it. But then there’s often two paths. Some schools stay dependent on that key person. And when that person who’s normally unbelievably capable and exceptional kind of leader, an amazing instructional leader, they’re the kind of people that get a lot of opportunities and often they move on to lead a school elsewhere, to lead a project elsewhere. And I have seen some of my schools and teaching sprints then just sort of drop off. What looked like great change early on wasn’t actually embedded into the culture. It was driven mostly by that individual. But in other schools, they make a transition. They start to really build out teaching sprints into the structure of the school. They start to make sure many people understand the process and have confidence in facilitating and leading it, that the norms of the group work, what I would call building a professional growth culture, gets so inculcated in the place that when that terrific early leader moves on, actually the school is still running terrific cycles of evidence-based improvement. I think in all of our work, we should think about how we can take our ideas, embed them in our organizations, such that people working two, three, four, five years after you either move on from that role or move on from that place are still getting the benefit of the work that you did. They’re still sitting under the shade, if I can use that, of trees that they didn’t plant because you built things into your organization that were meaningful, that were realistic, and that could last.