Why Good Plans Fall Apart (And How to Prevent It)

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. You know, Eisenhower said that, and he was talking about the army, but he could have just as easily been talking about school change. And today, we're exploring that. We're exploring that crucial moment when planning meets reality.

Hey, everyone. I'm Shane Leeney. Welcome to Education Leaders, the chat-topping leadership podcast for school leaders just like you. I'm an organisational coach, and in this show, I get to know the teachers, leaders and innovators making a difference in education across the world.

But before we jump in today, I'm really excited that this episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association and the University of Warwick's Centre for Teacher Development. Stay tuned to learn more. All right, so for those who've been following this podcast for a while, you'll know I've been doing a bit of an organisational change series. That's my background as an organisational coach.

And with my co-authored book, Change Starts Here, coming out in the summer, I thought it would be good to kind of go over some of those principles. So I've been doing this change series over the last few months. You can see the episodes marked Change Series. And we're coming to the end of the change now.

This episode is all about the deliver stage, that time where planning stops and implementation really starts. It's funny, most models for organisational change focus heavily on this part of the change because it's where the action happens. Purposefully, the model that I've shared with you, this double diamond model, which you can access using the link in the show notes, is purposely heavy on the front to get your foundations set. So this deliver is actually coming fairly late, but it's still really, really important.

We've been through six stages of change. We're now at the deliver stage. By the way, if you want to go back and listen to those other episodes, go about, listen to them in order. They're super useful to do in that way, but this episode will stand really well on its own as well if you just want to listen or you're at that stage of delivery in your change.

So what do you need to consider? Well, firstly, when we get to the delivery stage, we've looked at all of our options, right? We've gone really wide and gone, what are all of our options to solve this challenge? What are all the things we could do?

And now it's time to choose and deliver. Now choosing that most appropriate option, there's a few things that you need to think about because often you can get stuck here. One is which option that you've developed feels most appropriate for the community. And when I say with community, what you're doing here is you're looking at your own strengths, your own values, your own established foundations and going which one fits the best with that.

If you're really struggling, remember that question of what we would do if there was no constraints, here you're putting back those constraints. You're saying which options are gonna be most realistic for us. In addition, what you need to be doing when you get to a delivery phase, it can be so easy to just think really positive. We can have this optimism bias, right?

It's gonna be great, it's gonna be great. But really, we also need to be acknowledging some of those consequences of the action. Every action we do will have a consequence. Don't think that you're just adding something into the school and it's just gonna be all nice and daisies.

It's not, there's gotta be some consequence. So it's better that you have a good think about that. What do you commit into? And what are you potentially giving up?

Most of our schools are at full capacity, right? So there's always something that gives when we bring in something new. Make sure you know that really clear. And then we're thinking about making something happen.

All too often, what happens is we go, here's the idea, let's go, go, go. And actually, the key thing that is gonna make your change successful is clear accountability at this stage. So who's responsible for what? How are successes gonna be handled?

How's failure gonna be handled? All of these questions are gonna be really important to getting a well-delivered project. And that's gonna need you going into some good introspection, some good honesty with yourself to ensure that you're really ready to deliver. Now, the good news is if you followed those prior six stages of the model, if you've done really good quality work into your goal and then really good quality work around alignment around that goal, and then you've gone really wide with making sure we've got a good community-based set of ideas of what we could do, the deliver stage shouldn't be as hard as if you're just going in cold into delivery.

You shouldn't, at this stage, need to be thinking too much about buying. That's often the mistake that I see in so many change projects. They get to delivery and then they're just trying to get people to buy into the ideas. If you've gone through these six stages, buying is much less important here.

I wanna take a moment to tell you about this event from the ICA. It's called the Learning Effect, Play Paradox Passion. And I would encourage you to join the International Curriculum Association for its two-day event, which is gonna bring school leaders and educators together for engaging keynote presentation and a diverse range of teacher-led workshops. In this day, you'll get to explore and examine how thoughtful integration of play, paradox, and passion can create transformative learning experiences.

All under the guidance of International Curriculum Association professionals. This is taking place in Amsterdam in the Netherlands on the 20th and 21st of March, 2025. And you can find the tickets and more information using the link in the show notes. You know, recruiting and developing great teachers is one of the biggest challenges we face in international schools.

That's why I'm excited about the University of Warwick Centre for Teacher Education. Their QTS and PGCEI with QTS programs are specifically designed for international schools, combining online learning with hands-on classroom experience. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more how they develop teachers in your school. But there are a few questions, ask yourself as we're in delivery, just to make sure we're on track.

Firstly, when choosing the option, do you remember that word resonance I've talked about before, the idea of resonating change? We need to determine which option resonates most deeply, which one aligns with our values and strengths. In Jim Nye, he talks a lot about when setting a goal, setting a goal that energizes the person. And I think this can be the same as a goal for a team, a goal for a school, which energizes you.

Because there's one thing more than anything else in a change that is gonna really drive your change forward and that is passion and enthusiasm of your team. Passion and enthusiasm are gonna be the driving force that propels your change forward. If everyone feels really passionate and enthusiastic, it's likely to happen without too much pushing. If people are feeling resistant, not really wanting change, a bit change fatigued perhaps, you are gonna have to do a lot of pushing from your side.

Another question to ask is, what are you saying no to by saying yes to this? I'm saying yes to this, what am I saying no to? It's coming back to that point of trade-offs. Understanding these trade-offs make sure you are really working with the full awareness of the broader impact.

And then, who's gonna provide feedback when things go wrong? Who's gonna offer encouragement? Remember, we talked right at the beginning in terms of connection within our team about Amy Edmondson's brilliant work on psychological safety. If you don't know it, go and check it out.

She has some brilliant books, including Right Kind of Wrong and The Fearless Organization, that talk about psychological safety and creating a psychologically safe environment in the team. As part of psychological safety, you need to identify how people are going to be able to feed back in a safe way. How are you going to collect that along the way? So there are just a few little pointers on the delivery phase.

I think if I was to advise you to go anywhere, if we was to look at some external work at this phase, two things come to mind. One is John Cotter's eight-step process. If you've gotten to this phase and you're struggling, look at John Cotter's work. He has an eight-step process, which I think is really good at kind of just driving forward change.

He really talks about a lot in this delivery phase, so go check that out. Or you can look at some of the good delivery work from the Education Endowment Foundation. They have a great model for implementation in schools, and this is very much the implementation part of change. So go check out those two resources and we'll make sure I link to them in the show notes.

In the next episode of the change series, we're going to look at sustainability, that last part of change. How do we make change more sustainable? Education Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning. Huge thanks to my show editor, Pete McGill, and for the original music by BMA Silver.

Thank you so much for tuning in today. And if we don't speak before, I'll see you here next week. If you're interested in the work of my show's partners, the University of Warwick and the International Curriculum Association, head to the show notes to get links to learn more.