Five for Friday, March 6-10, 2023
This week I took a break from the daily emails. Mara did a great job filling in, but rather than try and tell her story today, I thought I’d share a bit about what waterfalls can teach us about school change.
I often think about leadership, and the prevalence of water in the Smoky’s almost guarantees that it will feature prominently in my thoughts, so here are some things we can learn about school change from understanding waterfalls:
1. Waterfalls don’t start out as waterfalls, they start in many places and slowly collect together.
a. Change should come from the individuals furthest upstream – the teachers
b. Allow people to come to the change in their own time
2. Water takes the path of least resistance – meaning that the waterfall occurs because there are barriers blocking water in some places and low points making it easier for water to flow in others.
a. Make it easier for people to adopt the change by providing support and removing obstacles
b. Make it more difficult to avoid the change by adding barriers
3. The power of the waterfall is dependent on the flow of water, when water is diverted or in short supply, the waterfall slows.
a. Taking your attention away – diverting – will slow the change
4. Leader is like the land, contouring and shaping, but not controlling. The water does the work, the land just creates the conditions
Change is a strange feature of organizations:
· Schools rarely stay the same but also resist many efforts at change
· Everyone can and needs to grow, but many change initiatives take the attention away from individual improvement, thereby making each teacher’s development more challenging
· Change should be driven from the bottom and adopted by the entire organization only when it has demonstrated success, yet we often go the opposite way, driving mandatory changes from the top and abandoning them only after they fail.
· Change is a natural process and leaders need to shape change, but they can’t control it. The waterfall I build in my backyard can never rival the majesty of those in nature, so know the difference between what you are trying to build and what is naturally building itself. And remember, people want to get better, they want to grow – that is the natural course of things. Think about how to work with that rather than trying to control or usurp it.
