Last week I participated in a meeting hosted by Hawken School in Cleveland, Ohio. I worked at Hawken for four years as Upper School Director, and much of what I have learned about change management comes directly from that experience.
The TWO, FIVE, TEN approach I describe below is something I developed later though it is derived from my experiences at Hawken, which was bold and smart in its work to move the school forward both in improving the quality of what it delivered to its students and in positively impacting its place in Cleveland’s crowded school market.
During the meeting last week much of the conversation was less about what we envisioned for the future of our schools than HOW we might best move incrementally toward those strategic visions. We know more now about how students learn (and there is much discovery doubtlessly on the way); however, the HOW question looms before us and often paralyzes us.
Because of the imposing presence of the HOW question, we risk continuing to operate in ways that fall short of what we might do to serve students better because we don’t know how to move from where we are to where we want to go. I offer the TWO, FIVE, TEN approach as an option for becoming assertive at the moment we might turn back from moving in a direction we believe has value.
Below I have copied a post I wrote in 2012. At St. George’s Independent School we used this approach to create our new 6 – 12 daily academic schedule. The new schedule has landed extraordinarily well (you can see the survey data HERE). In this post I have added some more detail to original in order to put a bit more flesh on the idea. I marked the new additions I made in bold.
TWO-FIVE-TEN: A Change Management Framework
TWO: “The Non-Negotiables”
I believe there is room for two priorities that are non-negotiable. These are the goals that, if not met, should result in abandoning or re-starting the process. For me, the TWO is an opportunity for leadership to create the all important frame for the process. I have used the TWO as synonymous with a CHARGE. Leadership should not in my opinion define more than the two, but the TWO allow leadership to provide the larger compass for the scope of the work
FIVE: “The Critical Ingredients”
There is room for five critical items. The hope is that all five will be largely intact at the end of the process; however, there has to be a recognition from the start that compromise and a kind of horse trading is likely. The FIVE create an opportunity for the larger community to impact the direction and purpose of the process without the possibility of high-jacking it to a role in conflict with the TWO. In this way there is clarity from the beginning that while the FIVE are hugely important, there is no doubt that they may have to undergo some compromise to get to the ends of the process described in the TWO.
TEN: “’The Wouldn’t it be Nice if’ Group”
These are the items that capture other hopes for the initiative. Getting all of them would be like hitting the lottery, getting six of ten would be good news. The TEN provide the community with the chance to dream about what would be ideal. A community conversation involving the TWO can also provide leadership with unique insight into what the school community values. Thus it is important to give this aspect of the conversation enough breathing room even though there is little chance the process will lead to a place that accomplishes everything on the TEN list.
Approaching a change initiative this way does several things:
- Creates appropriate and manageable expectations for progress.
- Prevents a business or school from overpromising and under-delivering.
- Positions the people leading the conversation to maintain focus on what is most important. Nothing is more important than the TWO, nothing on the list of TEN should stand in the way of getting as much out of the FIVE as possible.
- Provides a disciplined framework with some flexibility. While it is important to stick with TWO and FIVE, the TEN may indeed be a slightly shorter or longer list.
- Gives the community affected by change a vitally important voice in that change without giving them a veto.
I set this down here knowing that the muddiness of an actual change process will confound this approach to some degree. Getting everything to fit neatly in this form will always be difficult; however, the exercise of pushing the conversation toward these guidelines will demand a kind of discipline that is lacking in many change processes.
I believe schools have often confused an earnest approach with a disciplined one. An earnest approach is one in which we express our earnest desire to reach for a new and improved program or vision without providing any understandable system for getting there. In so doing we try to insert belief in the correctness of a direction where the labor of change management should be.
With a disciplined approach, a school has a far greater likelihood of building a kind of consensus of understanding that empowers the eventual proposal for change. Done well such consensus will also accelerate the adoption of the change.
The lesson I have learned through being a part of both successful and unsuccessful change processes includes this: having the right (or more accurately a thoughtfully appropriate) proposal doesn’t matter unless enough people believe in its validity. In order to make something really work to the advantage of the students we serve, many, many people (students, teachers, families) need to be invested from the beginning in achieving success.
I have written a great deal about aspects of change management in schools. I linked three examples that you may find relevant here:
“Approaching School Days as Architecture” …and“School Transformation: Becoming a Progress Culture” …and“Creating a Progress Culture Through Pilot Programs”
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