Most change failure isn’t an idea problem. It’s an absorption problem.

I used to teach Year 9 science.

Metabolism is the set of processes by which a living organism transforms and regulates energy and materials to stay alive. It breaks things down, builds things up, and constantly adjusts to maintain balance. The key idea isn’t just speed. It’s how well the system can absorb, process and regulate inputs without becoming overloaded. Push past that capacity and things don’t just slow down. The system becomes inefficient and eventually dysregulated.

I keep coming back to this when I think about school improvement.

The Idea: Every school has a metabolic change rate. Before asking what to change, ask how much your school can currently absorb.

30-Second Version

• Metabolic change rate is how fast a school converts new initiatives into genuinely embedded practice, without breakdown
• When change demand exceeds capacity, initiatives don’t disappear – they accumulate as undigested change
• Leaders routinely misjudge this because their personal rate is almost always higher than their school’s capacity
• Metabolic capacity isn’t fixed – it builds through progressive, well-supported experience of successful change

The Full Read

You’ve identified a real problem. The evidence is solid. The initiative is sound. So you launch. The question you didn’t ask first: how much change can this school actually absorb?

Schools, like living systems, don’t just take in inputs. They have to process and regulate them. When demand exceeds that capacity, the excess doesn’t vanish. It accumulates as initiatives that were announced but never embedded, language that is used but not understood, processes that exist on paper but not in practice, and staff who learn to perform compliance rather than change. I think of this as undigested change. And like undigested food, it doesn’t sit there neutrally. It creates drag in the system.

The first effect is visible: the initiative graveyard. Every staff member can point to past changes that didn’t stick, and each one makes the next push harder to land. The second effect is more serious. Chronic overload doesn’t just fail to build capacity. It disrupts it. A school pushed repeatedly beyond its ability to process and regulate change becomes harder to move. The system adapts by slowing down — not because people don’t care, but because they are protecting themselves from overload.

There’s a misread that runs underneath much of this. Leaders who move into senior roles often do so partly because they process change quickly. Over time, that personal rate becomes the assumed rate for the school. It almost never is. This isn’t a capability gap. It’s a systems gap. Staff are operating at a different rate, often with less clarity and more competing demands.

The way through isn’t more change — it’s improving the school’s ability to process, regulate and embed what matters. Douglas Reeves found that schools pursuing fewer, focused priorities consistently outperformed those attempting many simultaneous initiatives, with staff describing “initiative fatigue” when overload set in.¹ Seen through a metabolic lens, the pattern makes sense. Fewer inputs, better processing, less residue. Capacity grows through a small number of changes, well supported, followed through to the point where practice actually shifts and sticks.

Small step → Before your next leadership conversation, ask: what is still being processed in this school right now? Not what’s been launched — what has actually embedded. The gap between those two lists is your metabolic backlog. That’s the honest place to start.

¹ Reeves, D.B. (2011). Finding Your Leadership Focus: What Matters Most for Student Results. Teachers College Press.