GUEST EPISODE: Organisational Change: In Conversation with Shane Leaning

Hello, and welcome back to the second season of the Edgapulse podcast. Feel free to sit back and enjoy our conversations with leading educational thinkers, movers and shakers with a keen focus on helping our ITT and ECT colleagues navigate the choppy waters of education. Good morning, everybody. And I mean morning because we are back. We are back with Edgapulse

podcast. We're here with me. I'm Chris. Adam, how are you doing?

Tired. Now listen, we're not going to start this podcast moaning, Adam, because you suggested this time, and I'm going to put that out there for the world to know and to realize because we're here with the deeply legendary Shane. How are you, Shane? Yeah, I'm much more awake than you two. It's 11 o'clock over here.

At what time in the day? 11 a.m. Look at that. It's a perfect time.

Because what part of the world are you in? I'm in Shanghai in China, so seven hours ahead of you at the minute. And this is where, despite maths being one of Adam's specialisms, he needs to really have a look at this, this whole. It's great. You think like in seven hours, that's what we're going to look like.

God help you. Something to look forward to. Go on. And so I want to crack with this episode and just basically say, Shane, that we are deeply grateful for this episode with you, but also for you, because you were actually before anyone, before wives and mothers and supporters, you were the first person to listen to our podcast, the first ever episode, and give feedback on it through Twitter and let people know that we were out there and that you liked it. And I distinctly remember we launched the

first episode and I pulled up on the car park at work and you'd messaged or you'd sent something out and I phoned Adam and I was like, Oh my God, oh my God. Not only is someone listen to it. It's Shane Leaning. Because having come across your podcast, your really successful podcast before, and the fact that it was you saying that as a kind of a little bit of a loving to begin with, thank you, because it's tough out there in this market and you just, if you build it, they will come type thing, which is really great for your support from the beginning. So thank you.

No, no, absolutely. And thank you for your kind words. Honestly, for me, like podcasts, I really love to support other people doing podcasts. I think the more of us that are around these great discussions that come, because I think education has this wonderful blogging sphere that's got a rich history, podcasts, a little bit less so, but podcasts allow for something quite different, which is discussion and just seeing what you you two are up to and how much you've achieved in such a short time hats off to you with eduples. It's just going from strength to strength. So yeah, I'm a fan.

That's really kind. Thank you. Thanks, Shane. Like Chris says, it does mean an awful lot. So to actually have you on as a guest

is like super exciting for us. There's something like quite a circle of life about it. Ooh, somebody else from John, a bit early in the morning for Disney, isn't it? It's been very warm and fuzzy, isn't it?

Adam, do you want to kind of introduce what we're going to be chatting about today? Yeah, definitely. So Shane, we're going to talk about change. All right. So we're going to talk

about organizational change, obviously within the context of schools, but we might branch into kind of other organizations that you work with and look at kind of some of the parallels around change across different organizations. Just before we launch into that though, should we start with the question we always start with? It's like, what's your story? Yeah, it's a good question to start with because obviously I'm based over in Shanghai, so there's a story there. Most of my education career has been in international schools actually.

I started as a teacher in the UK, came out and worked abroad. I've been in China now for 12 years. And a lot of that time in international school positions as a teacher, and then as middle leadership and senior leadership, and eventually also in regional working across a group of schools as head of teaching development. And my journey is a little bit interesting in education and how I've kind of got interested in change at least, in that what I was very, very, very fortunate in one British school that I worked at. At the time I was head of EAL, so English is Additional Language, so supporting students,

big demographic in international schools. And I got fairly good at teaching that. I really enjoyed teaching it and I was leading the department, feeling pretty good. Started hosting a few little conferences at our school. And my principal at the time was super supportive

of me. And I got asked by a few schools, Shane, can you come and do some training at our schools, a few schools across Asia, near here. And my principal was, maybe he came to regret it, but he said to me at the time, gosh, Shane, anytime if you want to kind of go to another school on a Friday, no problem. Just let me know. And as long as they kind of cover the cost

of your salary for the day so we can get covering, you can do that. And that kind of spiraled a bit because I started working with a lot of schools around Asia quite quick and really grasped onto that opportunity. But when I was going into schools, I was kind of happily doing training and loving it and getting really nice feedback and flying in, flying out. But when I called up with these schools later, I found that many of the strategies that we talked about, even though there was great energy around them, or we'd had great ideas or the leadership felt like they were really bought into the ideas.

I would say at first, four out of five, there was very minimal change after a bit of time, just very, very minimal change, which I found frustrating and kind of inspired me down where I am now, was thinking, well, how do we actually look at sustainable community-led change in school? It's kind of brought me to where the current work I'm doing now. I'm currently independent the last year. I'm still in Shanghai, but working independent on a few different projects. That's fascinating.

Yeah, it's really interesting, like a journey of opportunity as well. It seems like you've sort of seen the opportunities that have been there and kind of shaped the next step based on what kind of presents itself. Yeah, it's funny that because I think you're right. I've never been a person who's had this big goal in mind, like, this is my five-year plan, this is where I want to be.

We used to have to do that as part of our performance management at school, what's your career aspiration there? I used to really struggle with that because I didn't really know because I like to take it year by year. But in a funny way, I think that flexibility has been what helped me, has helped me to achieve a few really cool things over time because it allows you to see the opportunities in front of you. Sometimes when you've got a goal so clear in your head, it can really kind of put the blinkers on to what might be an opportunity to go down this road or go down that road.

So yeah, I think that's been something that, I mean, a lucky personality trait that's served me well. Yeah, I really like that. Yeah. Yeah, no, you're right. There's definitely something in that and we've had sort of similar

experiences with that, I guess. I would say, Chris, that's sort of where like, because Chris and I met when we started a master's degree and that is, I would say that's sort of similar as well. I wasn't sort of ever sort of looking for that. It was just an email that popped into my inbox on a particular day and I thought, okay, why not? Maybe look at this and I know it

was sort of similar for you as well, wasn't it? Yeah, I think the my career journey is different anyway, but I think that the opportunity to look for change is something that people lack in a way. I don't know whether it's an evolutionary thing or a societal thing or a cultural thing, certainly where we have that, as you said, the blinkers on to go for that singular goal. Derren Brown did a fabulous one of his programmes where he went to, I think it was Cockermouth in the north of England, and he went there to a town that was particularly downbeat on itself.

He'd had a lot of floods and did a couple of things. He put a dog statue in the middle of the park and put some rumours around that if you touched it, you would get lucky and loads of people started going over and touching it. And then there was one guy who's working particularly, he left £10 notes on the floor on his route to work. He drove a lorry past that said something like, Dave, you've just £100 and the man never saw a single bit of it because he wasn't open to see that. He didn't pick up any of the £10 notes. He didn't see them because

they weren't here. He had no right to get them. And the blinkers of my life is just this one singular thing meant that he wasn't open to change. In fact, he was resistant to change on an almost atomic level. I don't deserve it. I don't need it. It isn't for me,

even though it was like, hi, Dave, this is for you. It was like, must be another day. I'm fine. Fascinating.

Yeah, you can really... I love that example. You can really draw the parallels in education as well. Currently, how often are we just set on a goal? So clearly set on a goal or what we

think is a goal, a perceived challenge. And we're just going for it, going for it. And we miss all these things around us and this change that is happening around us. It's difficult though, isn't it? There's a balance, obviously. You can't just be

a hippie about it all and just kind of flow with everything that comes your way, like strategy is important. But I think strategy is often flawed, like both our personal strategies in life and also our strategy as schools because of that fixed approach that we can fall into. Can I just draw one more parallel before we kind of move on? Is that something that's personally happened to me with English, which is another reason why Egepulse kind of gone in the way it has with Adam? Because one day he just said, oh, I know

you're into English. Why don't you listen to this podcast? It was an Ollie Lovell episode of the E.R.R. with Sam Gibbs. And it was just transformative for me because I listened to the

podcast. I read the book. It was about concept-led English curriculum. Then I read Sarah Cottingham's book. That blew me away on another direction completely. And it's changed our outcomes at school

because instead of us having the blinkers of, you've got to read this book and then pass this exam, because it's concept-led, it's opened everybody's mind at all the other things, and it's made it so that English can make you a better person and have a better experience of the human condition, not just study this book. And the grades went like that for listeners. I did something with my hand that went vertically up. The GCC grades went through the roof.

Because of that, we took our eye off that blinker. We've got to get you through the exam. Here are the questions and the game you need to play. Made it about the human experience.

Instead of reading every word of the book, an absolutely fascinating approach that just blew open the doors of what could be achieved by even the lowest grade was just, yeah, mind blowing. It's a wonderful, wonderful story, Chris. And it's a powerful example to me of just being able to think just slightly to the left of where you're looking. And sometimes the answer lies there. If we're in analogy mode, I have one I share sometimes, which is around

English traditional language. We had a Korean child join our school. He was joining a British school in China in primary school. And he was doing okay when he first got here. But his

English just wasn't progressing very quick and we couldn't quite work out why. And when we spoke to... We'd done all the things that we should be doing, like sending reading home with him, doing lots of practice, good quality scaffolding in the classroom. It was really just his English wasn't progressing. And when we spoke to the parents to explore it, one thing we realized is

that they'd stopped nurturing his Korean at home, his home language. And they'd replaced it with English, trying to really support him. Replaced his books with English books, replaced the TV with English TV programs. And we ended up realizing, and this was a big fundamental shift for me, because we actually did an experiment in the school and said, can you flick everything back to Korean? And we stopped even sending home reading books for three months for him in English.

We had a little Korean library. We send it that. And his English scores went up dramatically, dramatically just by allowing him to focus on home language. And it's that example how sometimes the answer is not exactly what's set out in front of you. It can be on the side and

you've got to be careful, haven't you? Yeah, amazing. Yeah, absolutely. The roots can end up shifting and changing so much as the sort of journey goes. And yeah, big shout out to Sam

Gibbs as well there from what Chris was saying, because she's... I know Shane, he knows Sam as well. She's just an incredibly generous, intelligent, and super impactful leader. Yes, well, we can't do a podcast with her because I'll just sit staring at the screen going, thank you so much. It can't happen yet. She needs to be on this podcast now, yeah.

You know, she is. We're going to get that in the diary. It was just... I think that what's fascinating me already about this conversation is the fact that, from your analogy, Shane, it's the fact that the destination isn't in the direction we often think it is.

We can get there, but you risk so many other things along the way. You risk so many other rich opportunities along the way that will ironically bolster the destination you're going to get to. And, you know, we're going to go on Miley Cyrus and it's the climb. But, you know, it isn't about the destination. It's about the journey. But for education,

it is about the destination. You've got to get to where you've got to get to. And for some schools that are on a massive, massively steep improvement journey, a lot of that stuff, you know, will get rid of all the... What do we call them over here, Adam?

The bucket subjects. Open bucket. We're talking about progress, the open bucket subjects. Get them gone. You know, English is the gateway subject, so let's pile everything into English

and everything else just goes. And the risk that we lose, all the other stuff around it, all the other opportunities, I think is too high to even contemplate, really. I think it's like, overall, it sort of seems like what we're saying is like two things really. So it's like, it's difficult because ideally, we want like process over outcome, so that we can like really enjoy the process and like be aware of all of the process pieces that are happening around us. But that's hard because working in education,

like outcome, outcome, outcome is something that's pumped at you all of the time. And also like living in this world as well, like outcome and destination is like a thing that is something that's really pushed at you. And so kind of trying to reconcile those two things is really, really difficult. And perhaps that is a big part of change and why change is challenging.

And like our first sort of big question to you, Shane, really is like, why is change so hard? Particularly in the context of schools, but just generally speaking, why is change so hard? Yeah, I love this question. And it's something to explore with my co-author, Ephraim Lerner, in our book. It's going to be out early next year. But

I think there's a few reasons why change is hard. One, is that we all have what we call like a status quo bias, like a bias to kind of continue where we are. I think like that's borrowed from an economist term, but there's kind of like, some people call it also as on an organizational level, institutional inertia, where like Newton's law, we're just always coming back. We're always coming back to that center where we think we are. And I think

that's just built into us. Change feels quite scary. I think change is also the word change has become a real dirty word. Like it's become this thing that is to be feared.

In fact, I think there's a lot of people who now have kind of replaced the word change in their vocabulary with words a little bit like innovation or this kind of word. But for me, that's problematic. And we actually, we've called our book change starts here and we had a real grappling over whether to use the word change or whether people would think, Oh, I've had enough of change. Let's just get these things that we're doing done well, which sounds good. But I think that's a misinterpretation of what change is,

because the reality is, is that change is actually really the ultimate irony in our organizations in that it's the only thing that's constant. It's the only thing that keeps going is change, right? Like it's the only thing we can even guarantee in social science such as education that change is just happening. Whether that be small scale change in the classroom, a student turns up and someone's happened at home and you have to deal with that.

Or whether it's just, you know, big external Sharath Jeevan talks about in his talk about inflection, which is about all about inflection moments. He talks about sometimes you've got asteroids that come out from the side as well. Like, and these, that hit us as a school and they can be things like AI or even things like, you know, the rise, the prevalence of cognitive science research or something like that, that's kind of an asteroid that hits our school from the side and we have to react to it. So I think there's a lot of reasons why change is hard and why it's very scary. The problem is, is that our response to that is

sometimes to just ignore it or to hold tight or to go through a process that simplifies change into something very, very discreet, such as a real, you talked about outcomes just a moment ago, like how we got obsessed with outcomes. It's because outcomes are really easy, right? They're a future. They're a certain future where we go, this is the certain future. How do we get there?

This is kind of simplifying the change. We opened this episode talking about how we've all taken these opportunities that have come to us from somewhere. And it's only because we've been open to them that success has come. That wouldn't happen if you're just totally future oriented the whole time. So I think you kind of get a sense that change is both complex

and incredibly messy and any time where we try to simplify or to codify can sometimes just make it even more messy. That's kind of what we find. That's really, really interesting. There's a couple of bits that really jump out from what you said there. So one thing is that

outcomes are a really certain and safe type of knowledge that schools produce. Because I think the idea of knowledge is really closely linked to change, particularly in school. Outcomes like quantitative data that schools produce is a really safe, certain, measurable type of knowledge. So I think we're always kind of biased towards making sure that whatever we're doing is measurable because we're in a really high accountability. What's the word? System. Environment. Environment,

yeah. Thanks. There's a bit of 4am for you. We're in that really high accountability environment.

And so something that produces us a measure gives us a certain type of knowledge about what's going on in our organizations. And when things change, often we end up changing the type of knowledge that we value. So you think about schools moving away from being really exam and outcome driven and trying to make this shift to sort of wider curriculum and enrichment and wellbeing. All of that change brings with it a shift, I think, to a different type of knowledge, a more kind of narrative type of knowledge. And I think that that change can feel uncomfortable

because it changes the way that we work, but it also changes what we value fundamentally as schools in terms of the type of knowledge that we find interesting and find important. Yeah. At my school, we've just launched a brand new curriculum. Many of our students, correct myself, a few of our students really struggle with the kind of the instant knowledge that is needed for GCSE to sit in the exam to take it. It's a measure of what you know

and remember on the day. And they've really, really struggled with that kind of sitting still for two hours, exam based, you know, how many years of study is your one moment of judgment. So what we've done is we've introduced a new curriculum that is built around knowledge into skills, obviously, but not many schools think like that at the moment. Definitely knowledge into skills. And we've CPD registered, which costs a bit of money,

but we've gone CPD registered. We've sent in to them this two year course that has the equivalent of well over 200 guided learning hours, equivalent to a GCSE of 180 guided learning hours. And we're currently in the process of beginning talks with colleges and further education around us to go. These won't be GCSE, but it will be the equivalent. You know how BTECs in the UK are like the

equivalent of two A levels. They're not, and everybody knows they're not, but it doesn't stop them being valid. So actually, we're trying to smash open a glass wall on the glass ceiling by going, GCSEs aren't possible for these kids who have intelligence in other areas, they're brilliant gardeners and builders. And they can look at a problem, you know, they can solve the IKEA desk when it's flat packed in their brain in two seconds and it's built and done. And how do you measure that? But there's been resistance to that change from people who

measure outcomes from a pretty normative level. What about my GCSE? My parents have had to be convinced along the way and the change management process has been quite drawn out because people have been scared and they've been reticent to embrace that change, even though we know, as the visionaries of that change, that it's going to be a better world. But we've got to convince a lot of people that it's better. And the knowledge, as Adam said, has had to change

fundamentally from one that's quantitative on a daily basis. Oh, we've read that book, so let's move on to measuring skills that are far more holistic. It's scary, but it's exciting. Mason It sounds like, you know, both of you described incredibly rich change. And I think it points to the fact that often we get,

we confuse two things. We confuse outcomes with performance indicators. And, you know, I think, you know, when we think of exams or we think of, you know, GCSEs, A-levels, whatever it is, these, you know, and we talk about them as the overall outcomes of school, you know, we are setting ourselves up for a big problem if we see that. They're not. They're performance

indicators. They give us one indication, maybe the best indicator we've got, but they're an indicator that we need to combine with other indicators to make, you know, make an overall judgment. You know, how many people, we know how many people get to the end of school with, you know, top GCSE results, and then maybe struggle to find a job later or struggle with, you know, relationships later on. There's a million different things that, you know, that the one indicator doesn't necessarily help. And the problem is that when we confuse an

indicator with an outcome, we get distracted and we get, you know, we get single-minded and the system then gets designed around that outcome, you know, so strongly that actually we lose ourselves in that moment. We lose ourselves as to, you know, as Simon Sinek says, we lose our why as to where we're going, because it's not easily measured. It's just a tendency to prefer things that can be easily measured, right? Yeah, I think you've just hit on something that struck me in the past couple of days, where are we? We were in the middle of October, 2024. So the past couple of days has been a lot

of learning inquiry-based play arguments that have been happening. You've got EYFS leads on Twitter have it being jumped on by secondary school leads going, plays ridiculous, it doesn't work and then inquiry learning doesn't work. We've got a couple of people on Twitter saying discovery learning, I've never seen it work. And if you want to get the kids to get their best results, then direct and explicit instruction is the only thing that works and is the only thing you should be doing because that's the only thing that is going to, it's the fastest thing.

And I read it and I go, you are completely correct. Like I can't argue with your anecdotal evidence, I can't ignore your physical evidence that you can produce. But part of my heart goes, that can't be the only thing that school is about. There has to be time for both, there has to be. Otherwise, I'm just sat in an institutional exam producer and I can't,

then my soul is not in it as much. So I can't deny that these people are correct. This is the best and fastest way to get the results. But I'm not all about the results.

And that's where we will always differ with those people, because they're like, sorry, but the results are everything. And if you can't get good progress, say, you're a bad school and you're a bad teacher, I don't want to know. The reason why edger pulse was started was to go, it's time to stop the binary. Let's have a look in the gray area. Let's have a look at, what about both?

Yeah, these straw man arguments help no one. And I find deeply frustrating. And I work in the international education space. So a lot of schools of which are run by the IB international baccalaureate, famously inquiry-led schools and having outcomes that are incredible outcomes.

And I see what the students are doing when they leave these schools, just doing the most incredible things and getting into positions where they're changing the world for the better. And having been in those schools and seen those students engage with these kind of inquiry projects, and I've seen that passion ignited in them that I know wouldn't necessarily have come through all through other methods. But it comes back to the mistaken outcomes for indicators. Again, they're not wrong. And if we want to get these students to get high

grades in these exams, yeah, there's probably a better way to do it. But we are just conflating an outcome for an indicator. And as soon as we do that, we're losing other things. Yeah, there's so much more nuance and difference in it dependent on context. And I think that's

so important. And that's what we tried to do really is just try and bring the other sides of all of these debates together and kind of try and position all of the different positions on different things in the same space and try and let them sort of peacefully coexist really. So why has changed so hard? There's a few things that we've drawn out so far. We tend to have

a currency bias. So a bias towards sort of the status quo and keeping things as they are, because that feels safe and secure. That sort of jars with the fact that like change, and this is Neil Gilbride said this at Research Ed National Conference in September, that like change is actually the aim of schools. And like sometimes we sort of shy away from that. And there seems to be like, it sort of jars with the fact that it feels

like the status quo should be the aim, but actually change is literally the aim of schools, you can't avoid it. And you shouldn't try and avoid it, it's there. We can sometimes get outcomes and performance indicators confused. And we see change as like, generally speaking, we tend to see change and talk about change as like, oh, we're going through a rocky time or the language around change is quite negative sometimes, isn't it? And that can be as

an industry, I think that can sort of make it harder for us to kind of embrace change, but also to like take some control of change as well. And that's, I suppose that's actually, that's probably true more of society and human beings. So that stuff that we've talked about so far is really sort of rooted in what it is to be a human. What is it about schools, aside from that sort of outcome piece, what is it about schools that makes them particularly hard to get them to kind of embrace change and use change in a positive way as an organization, do you think? So it's a good question. It's a challenging question in a way.

I think one of the things about schools that makes them so challenging is that the communities of schools are by their nature, big and diverse. So you have these huge, huge teams that exist. And when I talk about a team, I'm not talking about a leadership team or a department team. I'm talking about the team as in the school, the students, the parents, the community that surround the school. All these people, you might call them stakeholders. I think stakeholders does a dis

service sometimes, like they just own a tiny stake in the organization. But actually there's a complexity of people who are deeply passionate and deeply need for the school to succeed, coming from all directions. The challenge is that the way schools are operated is often teachers, you're responsible for your classroom, leaders inputting over here saying, actually, we've got some whole school things over here, parents putting on a pressure that's sometimes seen as a nuisance or a barrier to overcome. Like, oh, how do we appease the parents? Like I hear that a lot. Like how do we appease our parents? You've got a community

around which is seen as an extra challenge. Like, oh, look where we're situated. These things going on. If only we were in a vacuum. So all of these things are seen as kind of

these negative influences on the school that if only either a teacher was just left to it, or if only the leaders were able to execute what they want without parental interference, or if only from the parent side, they were able to get the school to do what they wanted in the best interest for their children, then everyone would be happy. And the reality is it's a community and that's just incredibly, incredibly complex. And I think that's where the work of good quality change management has to start with community. It has to start and end with community. And if it doesn't, you're going to encounter those problems and

you're going to see them as obstacles along the way. And that's going to potentially negate some of the good changes you're trying to make. That's absolutely gold, I think. So essentially what you're saying then is that we have this natural community within school. So you've got

all of those, again, people do often call them stakeholders. I agree, actually. I think stakeholders is almost like it sort of suggests we've got something transactional to gain from this, which actually I don't think we do. Obviously we do have something to gain, but it's more about the sort of emotional attachment and the emotional gain that we take from that overall relationship. But ultimately you're saying that we often see each of the parts

of that community and we see our part within that community is kind of sat and situated on its own with its own sort of set of goals and aims that are distinct and different from the aims and goals and wants of the other parts of the community. And actually we see each of those other parts of the community as almost problematic to us achieving our aims within it. So you almost end up with the different parts of the community kind of pushing and pulling against each other, which almost ends up with this kind of, if I can have a go at an analogy, it almost ends up with like this tug of war thing, but like a four way tug of war almost. And everything sort of just stays where it is because we just keep canceling each other out. And perhaps

that's why change is so difficult because we feel like we're kind of fighting against the other parts of the community. Whereas if we could just get all of those parts of the community, and perhaps this is where we could go next with this, if we could get all of the parts of the community pulling the rope in the same direction, then change might actually feel easier and also safer because we're all doing it together and we're all believing in the direction of change. What do you think about that? I really love how you just put that. I think I would add that

while it's ideal that we're all pulling in the right direction, that is very rarely the case that we're all going to be pulling with equal force in the right direction. So I think a potentially more healthy way to look at it is how can we make sure we're all pulling in the general direction, but when someone starts pulling in a different direction, we know what to do. We've been there before and we're able to handle conflict well. If you can do that, you've got a much better chance, but that requires strong, strong foundations well before the change begins. I think what can happen if we were to break down a change? I'm a co-founder of

an organization called Work Collaborative, so we're putting together some minds thinking about how we can do work differently in a more collaborative way, specifically with schools. One of the issues that we have is that we often get straight to a goal far too quick, so in that every change has a sponsor that's someone who initiates that or is invested in that particular change. Often we think that's a leader, but sometimes it can be a teacher who's gone, this is just not working for me, I need this change. Or it might be a parent coming in who's saying, this thing is not working, we need to make a change. What can often happen is

from that sponsor's perceived challenge, we can jump to an implementation cycle of, what should we do about this challenge? The problem with that is that you come face-to-face with the community, and what you do then is you have to generate buy-in. It's that term that I struggle with the idea of buy-in because it implies that a decision has been made and someone needs to be bought in. It is the stakeholder view of this. You need to get buy-in

from your stakeholders that they own shares and you need to get them involved. However, a much more healthy way to do that is to go all the way back. We're a way back to that sponsor's perceived challenge and say, can we do some connection work with our community? To A, go, we've got a perceived challenge here, but what do you think? Is this your perceived

challenge? Does this perceived challenge align with the challenges that you're facing? Then let's do a bit of discovery work around that, almost using that coaching approach of what else? What else is possible? What could it be? If you were to be in my shoes, what would

you say the challenge is? Really get all those challenges on the shelf and it might surprise you what comes up. You might find that the perceived challenge is the challenge. More likely, you're going to find that the perceived challenge is part of the challenge or a piece of the challenge or that there's something underneath. The challenge was just

an outcome. Actually, there's something underneath that that was actually presenting a better challenge. Maybe that's revealed to you through teachers, through students, through parents, through community, through staff at your school, through other avenues. Then once you've got that challenge in a better way, better defined, better aligned at the beginning and you go, are we kind of agreed on what this challenge is now?

Then you can create your goal. When you then move forward with your goal, you're all going to be kind of pulling in the similar direction at that point. You're going to come across conflict as you go forward. At the general, you've got this generally community-defined goal.

The concept of buy-in then seems quite alien. Why would I then have to start generating buy-in? We've kind of agreed the challenge. Instead, what your job will be is to re-articulate, re-articulate the mission, the vision, is to communicate really well with the community as that change unfolds. When things start to change within the change, which is kind of

going to happen, your job will be about communication and engagement rather than generation of buy-in. I think one of the things that jumps out immediately for me, because you mentioned coaching and I was nodding furiously, is that part of what you're talking about there is establishing some kind of shared language, which Adam and I have spoken about lots before on the podcast. Because without that, with our change, with the curriculum at school, we were saying GLD and guided learning hours and our community didn't know what that was. They didn't know that 180 guided learning hours was equivalent to GCSE. They weren't even

coupled with the word equivalent. Does that mean the same as or not the same as? Is it equity or equality? It was hugely complicated because we hadn't potentially done the groundwork on getting that shared language to then speak. You can only get shared language

by sharing the language, which indicates that you've got to actually have a communication that's really simple and clear and defined, but that's thought through. To go back to Adam's analogy of the took of war, which I quite like because it's flawed in the sense that what are you going to do? You're going to pull harder, you're going to set it on fire, you're going to flick it and get all the annoying people off. None of those things are appropriate, but neither is digging your heels in.

And so trying to work out how you're going to bring those people along from the beginning, it's like, well, I'll just stick everybody on skateboards. And then when we're all pulling on the took of war, people are going to start automatically coming along with me because I've already set that piece up for the future. I love that. This analogy is getting out of hand and I love it.

Chris does this with analogy. Before you know it, there'll be something under the skateboard. It will be like, I don't know, some sort of oil or something that makes it even faster, but a particular type of oil so that people move in a certain way and it will be quite an expensive oil as well. So a couple of things that have come out of that bit then.

So we've got this importance of a community defined goal that needs to be driven by a shared language. So if we get a shared language, that leads to a shared understanding. If we've got a shared understanding, then we've got something that the whole community is on board with. I actually share your sort of reticence about buying and also actually the words I've just used there, like on board with. When we had Jim Knight on, he actually said,

we asked him about buying. He was like, I don't really want anyone to buy into anything. I'd rather they just believe in it. And that was like a real light bulb moment for me. I was,

oh, of course, actually, yeah, if everyone just believes in this thing, then we're not actually going to have to work nearly as hard to get everyone to come along. And so if we have that, if we have belief rather than buying, and it's going to be much easier for us to kind of, if we have belief over what the challenge is, it's going to be much easier for us to kind of create a goal in a more collaborative and co-constructed way, rather than trying to engineer a situation whereby everybody is doing our goal because that's what we want. So yeah, I mean, there's there's absolute gold in there. And I think it's so interesting just sort of hearing the way you've got real clarity, Shane, on like, what do people how do people usually think about change? And how might it

be more helpful for them to think about change? Like, you see that so, so clearly. I know that's going to be really helpful for anybody that's anybody that's listening. So just here's a bit of a question for you, then. Do schools ever get to the point of like

being stable, or are they just always changing? Because I for one, feel like my life has essentially just been me going, well, if I can just get through the next few weeks, then it'll then it will settle down. And then it'll be easy, then I'll be on top of things. And I've been doing that for like 15 years. Yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. It's like the promised land that we never reach, isn't it?

Yeah. And look, there's a bit of a challenge. I think also you have to be careful when talking about changing the way we're talking about it, because you can easily fall into naivety like about change. So for example, when we're talking about getting people, I love what you said about that, Jim Knight said about buying, but actually about believing, getting people to believe. But also, I would also say we have to be careful with those kinds of statements too,

because there can be a naivety in saying, let everyone's going to believe in what we're doing. The reality in the complexity of a school with that many people involved, you are not going to get to a situation very rarely where everyone believes. Maybe some people who work at Apple and Google, some of these are really believing behind their mission and these kind of organizations. But we have to instead think about how do we build our organizations a little bit around what Amy Edmondson talks about, about being psychologically safe. So that when we're

making change, we're able to go, do you know what? It's okay if not everyone is fully believing, or not everyone is just swimming in that perfect same direction. But what we can't do is ignore the outliers. And what we can't do is not approach that head on. But the way we approach it,

it's not by saying get in line, but it's saying, tell me more, tell me what you're thinking. Or one of the first questions we pose in our book, Change Starts Here, to have with your team. One of the very first questions we say when going through change is you should say with your team, when was the last time we had a disagreement? And when was the last time we disagreed well?

Can we dig in to the way we have conflict around here so that when we're approached with the inevitable conflict of change, we can see where it's worked, we can see where it didn't work, and we're kind of, we're prepped for it. We're becoming a bit more psychologically safe to have that productive failure, that safe failure in our school, because that's the guarantee, right? We're going to fail, fail, fail time and time again. We have to get a little bit comfortable. So I would say on one sentence, be careful of the naive illusion that you can

generate 100% buy-in on any change or that you can generate this wonderful belief that everyone will just understand your why and go for it and get behind it. And anyone who's out of that is a frustration because it's very rare you're going to get a change like that. I think just for anybody that isn't familiar with Amy Edmondson's work as well, it's worth coming back to that because I think it's incredibly powerful. And correct me if I'm wrong on this show, I'm going to try and explain it a little bit. So yeah, do jump in if I get this wrong. But

Amy Edmondson's research was from the medical world. And she found that she was comparing medical teams that made more mistakes and less mistakes. And what she found was, and then sort of looking for a correlation between the outcomes that they got. And what she found was that the teams that made more mistakes seemed to get better outcomes.

And that sort of gave rise to the question of all that doesn't seem to fit. Like if you're making more mistakes, how do you get better outcomes? And so they dug a little bit deeper, the research team, and they found that actually the teams that were getting worse outcomes were making just as many mistakes as the team who was getting the good outcomes, but they were just not being open with them. So the teams that got the best outcomes were making the mistakes, embracing them, and taking on that role of vulnerability. And just a little shout out

to Chris who did a wonderful blog on vulnerable leadership recently. But that vulnerability of we've dropped the ball here, we've made a mistake. That's the thing. That almost seems like the active ingredient in catalyzing the good outcomes that you then get. So that's just

for anybody that isn't familiar with the research. It's really, really interesting stuff. I'd urge everybody to go and have a read of it for sure. Yeah, I totally, totally agree with that. And

sadly though, it's missing from many of the written models of change management in that. It's not missing in that there's always a part in the cycle where you say reflect and learn, evaluate. And then all of a sudden these cycles, which cracks me up, is you go back to the beginning. We purposely didn't put our model in a cycle for that reason, actually. The reality and

change, you don't go all the way through and then go back to the beginning. The reality is you've got lots of many implantation cycles happening all over the place, all of the time. That's far too complex to even put into that. But also, you're right. One of the core of good

change is being able to fail well, being able to feel safe to fail well and know what you're going to do when that failure inevitably comes in that particular change and then move on from there and work on that. And I guess that's where potentially to come back to what you were talking about is change ever complete. Can you ever be stable? I guess that's why you can't ever be fully stable because you're always going to be learning. You're always going to be working with your

community, having different conversations, and you're always going to be tweaking as you go. Great. So essentially then Shane, what you're saying is that I'm going to be stuck in this cycle of if I can just get through the next few weeks, then everything's going to be all right for basically the rest of my career then. Decades. Decades of this to look forward to.

There's a dose of realism for you on a Tuesday morning. But the thing is, it's a really refreshing way to look at it as well actually because if you just sort of learn to embrace that way of being, then I think you end up much happier anyway. I think sometimes as humans, but definitely, definitely in education, we're kind of striving for this point of stasis, aren't we? If we can just get to that bit, then we can just go and stop. Actually,

if we were to ever get to that, that would probably be a problem because again, you go back to that central point about schools are places of change and the world is constantly evolving. So we've got to constantly be changing and moving with it. That sort of static point shouldn't really be the aim. It should always be about embracing the change.

I suppose the point that I would then make and ask next really is to what extent are there lessons from outside of education about how to... I don't know what the right word is, whether it's lead change, control change, like get hold of the change. But I always think of this as like there's two particular examples here. So when Apple brought out the iPhone, they knew that they were killing the iPod, but they still chose to do it anyway, right?

So they absolutely controlled that change. On the other hand, if you look at an organization like Manchester United, and for anybody that isn't familiar, Manchester United was a dominant football team back in the... Well, from the 90s through to like the early 2010s, and then had a manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, who retired, and they definitely didn't get sort of control of that change. And they've kind of just been very reactive with change after change after change following that. And the team has really declined in terms of the success that it's

had on the pitch. So those two always seem to me as like two really good examples of like one organization that like controlled the change and got ahead of the change, and another one that was entirely reactive to it. And like, are there lessons from outside of education about how to handle change in that way for school? I think there are... I love the two examples

you just gave, and I think there are plenty of lessons to learn from outside of education. It's funny, what comes to mind for me is that in the corporate world, there has been a real trend towards a move away from consultancy as a main method of getting better, like let's find someone who knows and helps us towards organizational coaching. And education is quite far behind, I would argue in this regard. Like coaching is a buzzword in education at the minute, but you usually find it in one of two areas, either executive coaching, where a leader, an individual leader gets an individual coach, right? And that kind of

happens and they kind of have their little leadership coaching conversations, or instructional coaching maybe where a teacher is paired with an instructional coach and works there. What has happened actually though over the last 20 years in corporate world is there has been a lot of what they call organizational coaching where they realized, actually, we need to get really good as an organization asking powerful questions of ourselves, and we can employ coaches to help us do that. And I actually was privileged to do a course as an organizational development coach, and my whole cohort were from the corporate world. And I was there, the only educator.

And not only from the corporate world, it was a US-based, this is quite a US-based thing. So I was on this coaching course with a load of brilliant Americans who love role play. My God, our US colleagues love role play. So we were like role playing every lesson, and my British sensibilities were just getting destroyed piece by piece on having to role play these different situations. But in that, I learned so much that actually so many businesses are

spending a lot of money on the idea of organizational coaching in that maybe someone doesn't have the answer out there. Maybe someone doesn't have that exact solution that we're looking for. And maybe that's not where we should looking. We've not got a problem and let's go find someone who has the answer. Maybe we've got a challenge and we need to look

inwards at our community and ask ourselves some really powerful, provoking, or invoking questions that help us to see this in a different frame, help us to open some doors, both physical in our institution, but also like some mental doors that we might not have considered before. And it's through asking ourselves those powerful questions with our community that we can come to some real innovative and sustainable solutions. And I imagine the reason to take Apple as that example is that they were able to ask themselves some powerful questions. They were going, we've got this success, which is the iPod and it's doing so well, but we've got this phone.

We know it's going to take over, but let's just ask some challenging questions about our customers, about what we think people want and where things are going to go. And let's sit uncomfortably with that and then make a decision from there. I imagine they took that kind of approach. And I think in education, we should be thinking in similar ways.

So not just going, okay, here's that cognitive science research, we need to just implement it in a classroom, or here's some instructional coach, everyone's doing instructional coaching, let's do instructional coaching, or this is what we should be doing, this is what we should be doing, or these experts are telling us this, God knows we've got too many consultants and companies flooding our education industry, all with brilliant ideas and brilliant solutions, but not your solution. The problem is that educators, we're so quick to jump to a solution and without actually fully knowing what our actual challenge is. We go straight from that perceived challenge and someone presents us with a solution. And I often say to leaders who I work with, the problem with engaging with external companies and consultants too soon is that the way they will sell to you is to identify a pain point. That's how you do it

in business. What's your pain point? The problem is in schools, we've got a gazillion pain points at any one time. The reality is there's loads of pain points. And so any company could probably

approach a school and say, I've got a solution for you and be right that it is one solution to one part of your school. What you've got to go as a school is to go, actually, they're pointing out a perceived challenge, but what are our community defined goals? And then let's approach the people outside who meet that, not the other way around. Do you think there's something to be said in that British sensibility that you were talking about that links all of this because Adam did a blog recently on rehearsal and coaching. And that's a word that really triggers a lot of British people because

they're like, I am not role playing and because that's what they think it is. And they think they've got to stand up and pretend there's a class in front of them and tell little Jimmy off and then grab this kid's attention and cold call a child that doesn't exist. And those British sensibilities really get in the way of having a bit more of an open mind, a bit more of a natural innovation that happens because we have shut ourselves down because you were right. That British sensibility of absolutely not. I went to a thing that was run

by the RSA and I took my head teacher and they started with a drama game and we just wanted to die. I've run a former arts background and I just wanted to die. I had to hand a hat round and pretend it was something else. And we were just like, what on earth is this? It was just

hideous. We were like, no, thank you. Where's the wine? We couldn't get wine until we'd done the hat thing. So you did the hat thing then? Of course we did the hat thing, Adam. We're

team players. It was, I don't know, it just struck me there that there are some elements of change not accessible to us. If we shut down those areas of ourselves, of which we're scared to approach, which were reticent to knock on the door of, just in case we ironically change. It's just something that's coming to me now, because I've just got comfortable, it's fine. Everything's okay. I've got my same stuff every day. It's not a problem. And

I don't want to bring it full circle. I know certainly teachers that just go, no more change. Please no more change. I really like how you put that. And I think you're right. It's funny, I think you mentioned

in that blog, it was Josh Goodrich's work on rehearsal. One of my favorite episodes on my podcast was with Josh as well, talking about rehearsal, something that we also talked about that deep discomfort we have with the concept of just kind of rehearsal. I think there is some work we have to do actually. I think you're totally right. There is some

work we have to do in terms of getting past that discomfort. And I think we can sometimes be a little bit, we can find it a little bit uncomfortable to open ended questions. We're not very good with it. And I think to be fair to ourselves, it's because we're busy and because especially in education, we've just got so many things to do. We just need to know what

to do, when to do it, and let me just kind of crack on. I think you raise a really good point about our psyche and being ready for that. And I guess that would link all the way back to why. When we're going into change and we're asking difficult questions or we're asking difficult things of our teams, we need to make sure we don't miss the very first step of any change, which is connection. Have you deeply connected your team together? Is there

a connection between the different community members? Do the team members feel safe to make mistakes? Have you ever had challenging conversations together? Have you done change well and do you know where change has been done well before? Does your team know where

change hasn't been done well before? These are all kind of specific change, agnostic questions that will just survey the land of where you're at and you need to do some good development work. Sometimes when I'm coaching with a school, they'll be wanting to commit to a particular change and actually we'll get to a point where we go, do you know what? We're just not ready for this change yet. We have to stay at the connection phase

for a little bit longer and do this connection work for six months and then see whether we're ready for a change after that. Because if we jump into change, we're going to try starting to connect the team way too late. It's going to get into a buying problem and we're going to either extend that change out way longer than it needs to be to implement because we've just constantly having to deal with conflict, or it's just going to fizzle out as soon as the people who have the, as soon as the sponsors leave the room. Yeah, to come back to Adam's tug of war, so many times you'll find change. You're like,

this is really easy. This has been brilliant. You're pulling the rope behind you and you look behind him. There's nobody there. They've all let go. You're looking behind her.

I thought that was a little too easy. Or you are dragging it. This is really heavy. It's just a load of dead bodies hanging on the rope behind you because they've all just burnt to death because you've got no change no matter what. I think sometimes that you've got to

be vulnerable enough to go all the way back to that starting point, like you just said, and go, we aren't ready yet. We aren't ready for the change. Otherwise, we are literally just going to be dragging Adam's metaphor across a desert. Which I must say, your metaphors and analogies are top quality, especially for 3am, 4am call.

I feel like we should have a call more often because I feel like I need to steal all these metaphors. They're brilliant. I mean, that last one was a little bit violent, a load of dead people on a rope, and to continue it on because they aren't holding on voluntarily. This is great, Adam. They aren't holding on

voluntarily. You've strapped them to it. You've strapped them to this change. They've got no choice. You're dragging them along. They're screaming, no, please let me go.

No, but this is good for us. Yeah. We need to get someone to visualise this. If Oliver Coviglioli or someone's listening, they need to...

It took a ward of change into this triumphant man going, we did it, and just a load of corpses behind just hanging onto a rope. God, yeah. There's definitely something there. There's definitely a visual, isn't there?

I'm going to do a blog, and then we're going to tweet Mr Coviglioli. I'm going to go, wouldn't this look great? And then finally, our dream of being immortalised as an Ollie Calve picture will be it. That is the dream.

It is the dream. You've not made it otherwise. There's loads and loads in there, and I think that connection piece is fantastic. If I may, just because we just mentioned Josh Goodrich and Step Lab and rehearsal, I do think that that's a part of Step Lab that is often misunderstood, is this importance of connection. And I know

that we see this debate quite a lot around instructional coaching in particular, and people are going, it's just about drilling the technique and getting someone to do this technique. I think that's really misunderstanding what a lot of the really good work that people like Josh and the organisation of Step Lab, and there's others as well, but they're probably the most prominent one at the moment, certainly in the UK. And I think that sort of misunderstands the message. No one, definitely nobody is saying there that connection isn't important.

And actually, the first part of a coaching relationship is Step Lab, they call it connecting and clarifying. And the importance of getting that bit right is absolutely fundamental for getting people to be okay with the change that is inevitably going to come when you enter into that coaching relationship. So that connection piece is fundamentally important. And I think it's, yeah, it just feels like an opportunity to say actually, everybody's saying that that's really important. I don't think there's anyone out there that is actually saying, no, no,

you just go straight to the technique, tell people what they need to do, drill it into them and watch them do it. It's a massive oversimplification, I think. Yeah, I think so. I think one of the biggest challenges that comes with, say you're implementing a Step Lab model for instructional coaching, or you're implementing an inner drive model for currently sized, whatever it is, you're implementing something. I think schools are

just sometimes a little bit too quick to approach these external organizations as solutions to challenges that they're not quite sure exist or they're not able to fully articulate. And I think I know too many schools that have jumped on instructional coaching before they even knew what their teacher development needs were in their school. And I think this causes a huge problem because then you've made a massive leap and you're going to be trying to fix something that hasn't been properly diagnosed and properly diagnosed by the community that it's served. So I always advise caution. In fact, our model is a double diamond model.

The idea is the first diamond is all around going from the challenge, the sponsor's perceived challenge to the defined goal, the community goal. And the second one is around implementation to get to that solution. I often say that that first diamond, you don't need externals in that. You need to be having good quality internal conversations to understand yourself well. And in that second diamond,

when you're coming to work out, well, how are we going to approach it? That's when you might go, do you know what? Constructional coaching might be the thing that helps us here and let's investigate that, or this is going to be our solution here. But if you find you jump into a model, any one of those products that exist are models and you don't fully understand your why and your community doesn't fully understand where you're going or why you're going in that direction. Are you going to have challenges

no matter how good the coach, no matter how good the person is in the room? Yeah, you probably are. You probably are. And do you know what to do with that when that challenge comes? Probably not because you've rushed in too quick. So I think it's all about

just taking a step back before you jump into your next initiative, before you jump into your next change and going, are we ready? And do we fully understand the challenge that we're facing? It's like giving everybody some protective gloves. I'm going back to the metaphor again. While I'm on the skateboard.

While I'm on the skateboard. Yeah, so it's about giving them knee pads, about giving them helmets. But more importantly, on a fundamental level, it's about giving them gloves because if they aren't holding on tight enough to the rope or the rope in the right kind of way, they're going to get burned. They need to be aware of how the proper technique, the grip. I'm being serious about this metaphor now because I

do actually think that that first diamond encompasses all of that. You can't just say, here's a rope and come with me. People are going to go, well, hang on a second. So that internalized diagnosis is so important to the preparation for change. Otherwise, you're just going to be going, I don't know what the problem is, but

the solution is this. And then you've got to look to the person's motivations. Why are they suggesting that? Are they getting something out of this?

We have our own safeguarding system in school and recently we've been looking into more of the systemized page four products, which are extortionate, by the way, for what they are, because they're cloud-based things. It's this amount of thousands per year plus this amount per child, even though it's a database in the sky. And it's like, well, I know that the solution is that, but I don't know what the problem is. And so we've stopped, we've put any halt on buying a product. And ironically, we've gone back to the beginning and gone, can

we first of all fix any of these things from our own internal systems before we look out and go, so we're not buying any ropes or gloves or skateboards yet. We're kind of trying to, I like that, we're in that first diamond phase. Yeah. Do you know, there's something that we're really resting with at my place at the moment, which is around equality and diversity and trying to really make sure that we thread that more through the being of the school. If you look at our curriculum, it's really diverse and

I think it does the job that it sets out to do as a curriculum in terms of the taught lessons of the school, but then I would use the word curriculum to encapsulate the entire lived experience of the child in the school. And actually, we're really struggling with what is it that's actually the problem? What is the change that we want to see? What's the issue that we've got? And it's really easy just to jump to,

we'll get this speaker in to talk about this because that will light a fire. It might, but it might not be the fire that we want lit. We want to really, really properly define and understand the problem. And when the problem and the challenge is so abstract, like that really takes some proper wrestling, but we're still in that. We've been in this space now for about

three weeks a month where we just keep going backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards on like, what is the thing that we're trying to get at? Like what is the challenge? But I think once we settle on that challenge, at that point, that's the point that we might look at then commissioning some work from outside because then, like you say, Shane, you know what the challenge is. You know what it is that you want from that person outside. Now, for me, if I then was to come across a consultant or someone

external who sort of had the approach of, this is the thing I offer, that wouldn't be something that would appeal to me because I want to co-construct it with that person and sort of commission that piece of work alongside them. And I think nine times out of 10, that's what external consultants will do. They will create something with you because there's an awful lot of brilliant thinkers outside of our schools that can add enormous value within our schools. And that's another kind of ecosystem conversation. But I think it is really important for schools to properly

understand what the challenge is and then work with an external consultant to design an approach to helping to solve that. Yes. It's funny, like I've been called, I was at a conference once and someone said, oh, yeah, you're the anti-consultant consultant, aren't you? And it's quite funny because, yeah, I do appreciate that a lot that I work as an independent consultant, if you like, you know, and I advise most of my advice to schools is, you know, don't go to that. Don't go to

those consultants. But actually, the message is slightly different to that. It's that I agree with you, consultants and companies and universities and organisations that sit adjacent to schools have such an important place within our education ecosystem. And there is so much knowledge to be gained from people who spend 100% of their time in discrete fields. Like, you know, I don't subscribe to the

idea that every educator has to be a classroom teacher. I think that you will take away some of the rich thought that's happening. But it's all about when you approach them. And I think the people who should be in the drive and see are not the companies, not the consultants, not the universities with their goals, but are the schools with their goals. That's a totally different approach. And that means

companies, I'd love to get to a point where organisations that work with schools are not trying to go, how can we identify pain points and address them? But they're actually going, how do we listen to a school that's approached to us and design something around what they need, not going for generic pain points? So I think there's a huge space for consultants, for companies, for policymakers, outside of schools. I just, my hope is that through more sustainable organisational change, models that schools can regain some of that agency and power over their own process.

Yeah. And I think that the big bit there is, is around this idea that actually, like, we need to reframe, reframe the problem, and like, be really, really clear on what the on what the problem is. And, and like I say, we're going through that at the moment, and it's quite challenging, quite difficult. And there is that temptation to go, oh, let's just decide, we've got to make a decision on something. But, but

actually, in the long term, if we stick with it, when we finally get there, it's going to be a far more purposeful, and be like far more exciting. So it might be more of a struggle to start with, but it's going to, it's going to be more sustainable and more exciting in, in the long term, for absolutely sure. We've covered so much there. So we've looked at like why change is really difficult in schools and why change is difficult for human beings generally. We've looked at like why, why schools

struggle with it and this idea of like stability and whether stability is actually the aim or whether we just need to embrace the fact that schools are change institutions. And if we reframe that, we can probably become a little bit more comfortable with it. We've looked at some lessons from outside of education about sort of getting ahead of change, and not being reactive and sort of changing in a reactive way. We've looked again, at like, momentum is something that's kind of run all the way through this. And actually, like getting momentum

is often about making sure that everybody properly understands the start point challenge at the beginning of the change, and not sort of dragging people along with a with a predetermined direction. And actually, co-construction is really, really important. There's a difference between like belief and buying. But at the same time, we've got to be realistic that actually belief is, you know, it might not be possible to get 100% belief, certainly at the outset of something. So there's there's so much that we've that we've

covered in there. So before we before we wrap up, like Shane, is there anything else that we've that we've missed? Is there anything that you think actually guys like you've got to we've got to have this this thing in there? I don't think so. We've got when you listed out, we have

covered a lot. And by the way, I so appreciate this kind of collaborative chat, you know, I think this is kind of modeling in a way like how to have conversations with your team. I think you two like excellent hosts and the idea I love the way we bounced ideas around the room and created several analogies for different for different spaces and really kind of explored those ideas. And I think these are quality conversations that potentially we don't have enough of enough of in schools and creating space for that quality conversation that's not just on the administration and what's to do, but is actually kind of digging a little bit deeper can prove very powerful and kind of moving change, moving change forward. So yeah, it's been I can't tell you how much of an

honor it is to speak to you both. I love the work you're doing and real real honor to come come on the podcast. Super super kind like with we echo it, don't we, Chris, it's like, you know, it's such a thrill for us to, to have you on to do you do so much brilliant thinking and so much like really clear talking on this stuff as well. And it's so so great to have you on but also for anybody that's that's listening to, to hear your thoughts on this stuff. You've you've got a

podcast, obviously, you got a couple of podcasts, haven't you that you do? Yeah. And you've got a book coming out. And you've got some some really exciting conference appearances coming up. Do you want to just just sort of share a little bit

about those three things? So you podcast your book and, and and appearances? Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I'm very fortunate that I sell a co founded organization work collaborative. You can find out

more about that at work collaborative.com. That's co founded with brilliant FM learner colleague of mine, who were also co authoring the book change stats here. So you can find more information about that at work collaborative.com

and also we're looking this is a collaborative we're looking for people to just be part of the conversation as well. So we're trying to develop a network where we can start to develop what good quality change looks like in school. So we'd love you to get involved there. But my my wider work at you know, my main podcast is global ed leaders as for international school leaders is kind of where I spend most of my time. I

also have a podcast on coaching with brilliant and and and most positive person in education, Jim Thompson over in the US love doing love doing that live podcast every other Tuesday. But if people want to find out more about me or kind of get in touch is the easiest ways to go to my website, which is Shane leaning.com. And it's leaning not learning. I wish I

was Mr. Learning. My first teacher badge was printed Mr. Learning. And believe it or not, my co author is his surname is

learner and and with without the A and I'm I'm leaning without the R. So if we'd swap to cuddle the letters, we could be learner and learning because it wasn't to be. But yeah, it's leaning as in leaning on a lamppost. Don't get that spelling wrong.

Of course. Shane, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the edge of Paul's podcast and make don't we do this again out of my thing. Let's get Shane back on. Did that if if if you would say that we would absolutely love to have you back on again. I if you would spare us the time.

I would love that anytime. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for tuning into the latest episode of the edge of Paul's podcast. Why not help broaden the conversation and join us over on social media at edge of Paul's code or sign up to our newsletter at edge of Paul's dot co and we'll see you next time.