Effecting Change Change comes to the universe of schools slowly, if at all, and only after perturbations that rock the firmament. Leaders come to schools, almost inevitably, as change agents: Often they are hired precisely to effect the changes that were needed but impossible to embrace under the old regime. New leaders have only a short time to establish their own leadership credibility and trust, to develop some political capital (all of which and more will be expended on the first major change), and to guide the change process to success. It is the unusual leader who does so continuously, over time: Too often the changes come at such high costs that change agent leaders either leave after a short time or themselves shift roles to become co-conspirators of preserving the status quo, since they, eventually, become the embodiment of the status quo. Long-term leaders, on the other hand, can be a school's greatest resource precisely because the credibility is deep, their stock valued, and hence the opportunities for risk-taking (a pre-requisite for change) more available and less dangerous to the health of the leader himself or herself. The literature on change, from many scholarly sources 1, posits seven predictable stages of change that leaders could and should anticipate and prepare for, including the following 2 : Business as Usual: the routine; the "frozen" state; the status quo. External Threat: potential disaster; propitious change event; an ending; a "death in the family"; an "unfreezing" via the introduction of the foreign element; disequilibrium; dissatisfaction with the status quo. Denial: refusal to read the Richter scale; anger and rage; chaos. Mourning: confusion; depression. Acceptance: letting go. Renewal: creativity; the incubation state of new ideas and epiphanies; new beginnings; movement; vision of what "better" might look like; reintegration; first practical steps; practice of new routines. New Structure: sustainable change; the new status quo; new "frozen" state of restored equilibrium; spiritual integration; internalization and transformation of self. For lasting and meaningful change, the simple equation of change is D+V+F+S+S >R: i.e., for any change to be permanent... Dissatisfaction with the status quo + Vision of a better way + First practical steps + Structure built for lasting effect +
Spirit that helps people to internalize the change... must be > Resistance to change. Without all of the left side of the equation, regression occurs and innovations are effete. Herein "lies the rub": In schools, resistance to change is so formidable that leaders sense the left side of the equation needs to be monumental in scope and seriousness for any chemical reactions to percolate. Ironically, there is consensus, even among that most conservative of populations, school faculties, that for children to succeed in the 21st. century (and thus for the civilization to prosper), our schools must change and do so rather dramatically. One must wonder, then, why schools are so much more change-averse and change-immune than other institutions in the culture (such as those Fortune 500 companies that have survived and prospered in the last 20 years by embracing change--as opposed to those which have disappeared by ignoring change). One could speculate that the elemental bases for the general human aversion to change is exaggerated within school populations: There must be visceral and biological roots for our aversion to change: literally, people feel sometimes nauseous, almost always threatened, by the introduction of change; fear almost inevitably produces the adrenaline response of "fight or flight." Witness, for example, the high anxiety level when a new principal or head of school enters the scene. It is the rare transition in school leadership that is not accompanied by some "fight" (active or passive-aggressive resistance to new initiatives) or "flight" (departures from the school). Institutional leaders and their boards should recognize and acknowledge that the level of fear is palpable upon the arrival of a new leader with a fresh vision and agenda and should therefore create mechanisms for trust and political capital to be built, quickly, before the changeagenda is introduced. There must be political roots for our aversion to change: Coretta Scott King speaks of transformational change leaders as those who "speak the truth to power," but of course those already in power see truth very differently from those who challenge the current power base. What is unique about schools is that power is diffused among several constituencies: the board, the administration, the faculty, and the parent body. So while the new head of school is the titular leader of an organization, "speaking the truth to power" in schools means confronting faculty (those who in fact are "in power" operationally) in terms of who they are and how they operate. Such confrontation is often seen as a serious challenge to a faculty's integrity, identity, and ego, and often perceived as personal and political attack. Leaders should recognize and acknowledge that what they may consider as requesting innocuous "procedural change" is often perceived as asking for a much deeper "identity change."
There must be social roots for our aversion to change: The line is narrow between a leader's showering the community invigoratingly with fresh thinking/enthusiastic idealism and inundating them with a flood of unwelcome challenges. There is a strong "kill the messenger" instinct in schools. Mirroring the society at large, schools consist of competing power bases: the power elite (the political and corporate leadership--in schools, the head and school board) vying with the cultural elite (the intelligentsia and media--in schools, the faculty and parent network), often seeing one another as adversaries rather than allies. Literally, there are sometimes social status issues, with board members often assumed to be rich and powerful and therefore suspect from the perspective of the faculty and some within the parent bodies. Finding common social ground and bringing the opinion leaders from outside the power elite into the tent are important factors in addressing the social roots of the resistance to change. In leadership circles, there is an old saying: "Being right is only one-quarter of the battle." Given what we know about the general aversion to change held by most people and its exaggerated reality in schools, what might be effective strategies in schools for effecting change? At the conscious or unconscious level, leaders have always known that crisis propels action, so the conventional wisdom has always been to increase volume (dissatisfaction) levels: Declare a war, demonize the enemy, mobilize the public has been the strategy for effecting change in cultures and civilizations and institutions, whether the war is literal ("The Cold War" fight against "the Evil Empire") or figurative (the "war" on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy, etc.). Skeptics and intellectuals that teachers are, the declaration of war seems too often hollow and unwarranted: Witness three decades of education reforms in the public schools, each one heralded by fanfare and gun salutes, none of which have really "taken" to transform school operations and school cultures. In independent schools, the greatest impediment to the declaration of war is that peace and prosperity have, generally, prevailed: Since independent school graduates test better, on average, than public school students and are coveted by colleges, there seems little evidence that teachers and parents see that a revolution is called for. Nonetheless, since we are in the midst of a revolution (the shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age), change is needed in public and in private schools: The skills our graduates must have to be successful and to lead the culture and economy successfully in the future are very different from those of prior generations.
Perhaps what we need to do in schools to effect change is not raise the volume (create crisis and increase dissatisfaction) but reduce the noise (make change less threatening and more palatable). We might try to reduce the noise by two strategies: Abstracting and personalizing change; and Betting on the fastest horses. Abstracting and personalizing change: Since schools are learning communities and since teachers actually like to intellectualize about issues, why don't we abstract and personalize change: i.e., teach about change (predictable stages to anticipate) before we actually try to implement change. One means of teaching about change is to demonstrate the predictable patterns and stages of change by having individuals in small groups track major change events in their own lives: e.g., marriage, onset of middle age, birth or death of a family member, loss of a job, etc. Some small group processing on these topics turns out to be quite engaging for faculty: They learn much more about themselves and their colleagues, and most importantly they learn to objectify and understand the resistance to change they are feeling, to see change as part of a larger pattern and process but one that they can identify with rather than resist. By analogy, once we learn how the change pattern works for us individually, we can see how it works for us collectively, as the school takes on a change agenda. The point is that we need not aggravate a crisis or declare a war in order to overcome the resistance, if we all see and accept that there will be some rockiness in the ride ahead that comes with the territory of change. Betting on the fastest horses: A second, complementary strategy for lowering the noise rather than raising the volume for change is to evaluate what change is more efficiently effected by large buy-in (i.e., the consensus model) and what change is more efficiently effected by more targeted buy-in via modeling (i.e., betting on the fastest horses who create themselves the momentum for others to join the race). Schools, deeply vested in the collegial model of consensus-building, too often are paralyzed because without dire crisis, consensus is often notoriously difficult to reach given the naturally discursive and disputative nature of faculties. Thus, we are often pretty good at process (including everyone in the conversation) but pretty bad at outcome (actually getting to the decision point of making a universal and comprehensive change). Sometimes to effect change, one has to start with a handful of folks who are excited about the initiative, and let the masses retire to the sidelines to observe what happens. As Margaret Mead admonishes us to remember, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
The introduction of technology into the classroom is a classic example of the competing models: Some schools created a crisis by top-down directives to faculty (learn or leave), a strategy that worked well in some places and failed in others; other schools adopted the "fast horse" strategy of placing their bets (i.e., investing their resources) in the handful of risk-takers eager to experiment with the new technologies, a strategy that more gradually and less threateningly worked by osmosis in generating buy-in as other faculty saw the demonstrated advantages of using the new technologies in their own professional and personal lives. A blending of the models can be the most effective of all: Seek general consensus on the vision and goals for a change, but stock the stable of an implementation task force with the fast horses who will lead the rest of us around the track. In short, as school leaders, when it comes to change, we need to change. Sources/Resources: 1. William Bridges, Transitions; Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science; Virginia Satir, The Satir Model; George David, Compressed Experience Workplace Simulation; Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death & Dying; Tom Peters, In Search of Excellence. 2. Center for Ethical Leadership (Bill Grace, Pat Hughes, & Pat Turner), Kellogg National Leadership Program Seminar, Snoqualine, WA, 7/10/97. Author: Patrick F. Bassett, 11/16/98. Published in NAIS Leadership Forum, Fall '98. Reprinted with permission