Organisational Change 101 | Change Series 1.1

Change is hard, and yet we're faced with change all the time. In this episode, I'm going to start off a short series on how you can lead effective community-led change in your school. Hey, everyone. I'm Shane Leaning. Welcome to Global Ed Leaders, the chat-topping leadership podcast for international schools.

I'm an organizational coach, and in this show, I get to know the teachers, the leaders, and the innovators making a difference in schools around the world. And every other week, I share bike-size strategies to supercharge your leadership, and that's what today's episode is. Before we jump into the conversation, I'm delighted that today's episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association. Stay tuned to learn more about them and their brilliant upcoming conference.

So as I mentioned at the start of this episode, today I'm going to start off a short series. This series is inspired by an organization I co-founded called Work Collaborative, and it is all about organizational change, and I want to share with you the change model. This is all open-source. Work Collaborative is an organization set up for research and advocacy, and you can get hold of any of the things I mention using the links in the show notes.

So this first episode, I'm going to give you a bit of an overview of a model that will help drive sustainable, community-led, and effective change in your school, no matter what the project. So we'll start with an overview, and then over a series of several episodes, let's say about 10 episodes, I am going to break down each step for you. So you have got a guide to lead effective change in your school. A lot of training around organizational change and model can end up costing quite a bit of money.

This is free. So go through these episodes in order, use them to direct change in your school. So let's start today with that overview. What is this model?

Well, it's going to be useful if you're looking at it. So go to the link in the show notes, and there is a direct link to the Work Collaborative website. If you then click on the model, it will take you straight there. This model for change is not designed as a framework, and it is definitely not a strict instruction manual.

The model is based on a lot of research and a lot of people who have come before us. We didn't want it to be super directive, because this is where we can end up getting hung up on strategies that are not working for us. Instead, the model helps you to connect meaningfully with your community and really encourages you to ask powerful, context-aware questions in your school. Now, you will notice it's two diamonds. The model is a double diamond model,

and it's based upon the double diamond model from the British Design Council. It's actually a design model. We think this is a really great model, because that double diamond is actually all about expansion and contraction, expanding into big ideas and then contracting to come to decisions. That's the way good decision-making happens, and it's a way advocated by many coaches. It's a very established coaching approach.

But the double diamond model from the British Design Council, while brilliant, is very much targeted on creating products and designs. What we've done is we have tried to embed human interaction and organisational change into the model, so we've built upon that great work. Now, let me talk you through this model. You're going to see eight stages within two diamonds.

The first diamond is all about exploring the challenge, exploring that challenge that we've got coming ahead, or exploring the opportunity. And the second diamond is all about solving the problems, solving the challenges, so exploration and solving. So let's look at those stages. We start off right at the left-hand side with a perceived challenge.

Again, I'm going to go into detail of all these stages in future episodes, but let me give you a high-level overview. We start off with a perceived challenge. Every change starts with something that is perceived, either someone or a group of people who see something they want to change. Maybe you've seen something outside that you go, I want to bring that into my school.

Or maybe there's something challenging happening in your school that you know you need to sort out. So there is a perceived challenge, and we call that perceived because right at the beginning it is not the challenge, it is the perceived challenge. What we then do is we move into the double diamond, so that first part is connect. Here we're looking at building foundations of trust and psychological safety.

No change can be truly effective if you haven't got a team that feel there is a sense of trust, psychological safety, as Amy Edmondson talks about in her brilliant work, change cannot happen effectively without this. So that's why we start right at the beginning. Irrelevant of the change coming, have you got good quality connection within your team? And if not, do you need to kind of hold off a little bit and then go back later once you've built that?

In with that part is the discovery phase. This is where we go wide. So we're going to look, what is this challenge? But we're going to look at that challenge from multiple perspectives.

We're going to see what the community think about that challenge. We're also going to go, is this the real challenge? Are we sure this is the challenge that we need to tackle? What other challenges are we facing?

Let's be expansive in this part. I want to take a moment to tell you about the International Curriculum Conference that is coming up from the International Curriculum Association. This will be held from the 11th to the 13th of November in 2024 in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. It is so exciting. The theme of this is global perspectives, local impact.

And I was at their conference last year. I can't recommend it highly enough. This is a focal point for the global community of schools, part of the International Curriculum Association. There is going to be amazing keynote speakers and a wide range of school led workshops delivered by classroom teachers sharing their practice and experience.

Seriously, with the incredible insights and showcasing of learning, I really do recommend the International Curriculum Conference because it offers a unique level of enrichment connection and learning for all. If you're interested, check out the link in the show notes to register. Please go there. It's going to be great.

Once we've generated all the different ideas of what that challenge could be, it's time to start bringing it down together. We are going to start defining. This is where we go. OK, of all those challenges, which one do we think is the one A, we want to tackle now and we need to tackle now.

And here we're going to be creating a shared vision and aligning on our goals for the future. And that's why the align section comes in because we cannot move forward with the change unless we have alignment within our community. That community means teachers, leaders, parents, community leaders, staff in the school, students. Alignment across all stakeholders is really important to effective change.

And that brings you right to that middle point, which is where you get to the goal. Do not rush to get to this goal. Having a collective community defined goal is so much more powerful than a goal that is just driven by one or driven by a small team. You are going to increase your chances of success exponentially.

We then go into the second part of the diamond where we go into develop. So we're expanding again. We've got a goal. What are all the potential solutions that we could take to this goal?

And we're also going to learn in this part of the diamond because we are going to have knowledge gaps. There are going to be skills that we need to learn to be able to get to the point where we want to deliver. So we're expansively looking at all the options without committing to a specific option, looking at what's ahead of us. And we're learning. And here's a point where we might approach people external.

We might look at organizations that can help us. We might be looking at people that can support us in that journey. And once we get to the end of this diamond, we're going to contract again in the delivery stage. Deliver means we're going to choose which of those solutions speaks the loudest to us.

Which are we going to do? And we're going to go through a delivery process. And of course, the process doesn't end there because we finish with sustain. It's all well and good having a goal and we go tick done, met.

But a lot of the time, goals can just disappear. Solutions can disappear after a few years, especially in international schools where we might have a higher turnover of staff. So we need to ensure long term success and adaptability. So what habits, what tactics are we putting in place to make sure that we get that long term success?

That brings you to the end of the process. So that's the idea. There are core principles that drive this model. One is that it's community centric. We want collaboration.

We want collective wisdom to be a part of it. Two is that it's iterative. There's flexibility in this model. It is not rigid. It's not split into 20 odd stages.

There are eight clear parts, but split into four sections really. And you can kind of wiggle within these sections so that you can adapt to your need. And also the model's open source. We wanted that open source spirit.

We want you to play with this model, adapt it. You can take it, use it as you wish. It's your model to use and we'd love to see the adaptations that you make. So that's an overview of the model and model for organizational change.

I hope that was a useful overview to get you thinking about how a change unfolds in front of you and what could be useful. But as I said, this is part of a series. We're going to come back to this. We're going to explore each step of the model in greater detail so that you have a roadmap to drive successful, community-led, effective and sustainable change in your school.

Global Lead Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning. Thanks to the show editor, Pete McGill, and for the original music by Guillerme Silver. Thank you so, so much for tuning in today. And as ever, if we don't speak before, I'll see you here next week.

Remember to find out more about the International Quickulum Association and that fantastic International Quickulum Conference in November. Check out the links in the show notes.