A constant tension exists in every organization for persons who see a need for change. How can I cause necessary change in the window of time that change requires before I become institutionalized and part of the status quo? Change takes time. Time creates status quo. Ugh!
What do we know?
Change is a constant. It happens all the time and everywhere in our world. The more we think things are staying the same, the more naïve we are about our world. What seems to be staying the same actually is in a slower motion compared to other things that are changing more rapidly.
Change is a dynamic of motion, sometimes slow and evolutionary and sometimes immediate and revolutionary. Yet, everything is in motion relative to its momentary position.
Change can be a pendulum swinging over a more normal status. They direction of swing is not just back and forth, but also elliptical. We feel the change when the pendulum swings beyond the center or area of normalcy one way or the other and we feel normal when it swings back toward and over the center.
Though revolutionary change can be quick in terms of time, quick change can cause unanticipated consequences. Some the of the unanticipated outcomes may be less desirable than the pre-revolutionary status. Revolutionary change can have a life of its own.
Though evolutionary change can be slow and inevitable, it experiences an inertial resistance of the status quo that limits its full potential for change. Evolutionary change is a series of compromises.
Yesterday’s change is today’s institution. Every significant and successful change redefines the institution until the institution looks like the change. Institutionalization is as inevitable as the motion of change.
What more do we know?
Planned change is a bumpy road. Planned change experiences immediate opposition from the status quo. Stalwarts of the status quo and doomsayers oppose change that upsets their normal. Often the opposition to change is so strong that it not only defeats change, but moves the institution backwards. If that resistance can be overcome, there is a brief acceptance lull. This feels like “wait and see”. The second bump in the change effort is the learning curve. Planned change requires new behaviors, new attitudes and dispositions, and new skill sets. Sometimes, new people. It takes time for new behaviors, dispositions, and skills to be learned and new learning always experiences unsuccessful initial learning and a need for second-instruction. More ugh! This is all uphill work against the inertia of the past. Once “new” is learned, there is trial and error time. This is a series of less severe bumps. Working with the newness will expose its problems and “See, I told you so” from recalcitrants. Objective and subjective data is required to demonstrate that what is new is better than what was old. Eventually, the “working it out” brings back some of the old to be mixed in with the new resulting a hybrid that is mostly new. Voila! Change.
How does this play out?
Consider the evolutionary change in the automotive industry from gas-powered to battery-powered motors. This change may seem revolutionary, but it has been in the making for decades. With a step back, one can observe initial opposition, a break through in technology, a wait and see, slow learning of new attitudes about cars, changing skill sets within the industry, compromising with hybrids, a second break out with more commitment, and, voila! – change in the industry.
Planned change with its calendar of initial presentation, resistance, learning curve, adaptation, and institutionalization takes approximately seven to eight years start to finish. Changing things is easier. Changing people and their behaviors is harder and takes a lot of time, energy, and constancy.
The status quo counts on change agents losing energy because of the opposition of time and the entrenched past. Time is not on the side of planned change. In order to overcome the opposition of time, change agents must engineer micro-changes. A series of changes, each one a significant change in itself, but just a link in the chain of change, allows change efforts to surpass the usual clock of seven to eight years.
Institutionalization of change agents carries its own clock. Every person in an institutionalized organization slowly becomes institutionalized. That process is inevitable. A rule of thumb is that within five years of accepting an employment assignment the employee is routinized into the status quo of that assignment. Once institutionalized, change agents are part of the normal and defenders of the usual. They have been neutralized.
A second rule of thumb is that within five years the institution will weed out revolutionary change agent personnel. The objective of an institution is stability, predictability, and minimal change. This definition explains why so many of our social institutions are in trouble. Life is changing faster and institutional change is slow; they can’t evolve fast enough to be viable servants of their stated missions.
What does this mean for education?
Change in public education is constantly happening in an evolutionary way. The world around public education historically exerted a drag effect that moved the institution to change across time. Slowly and sometimes defiantly.
Integration of schools. Title IX and girls sports. Mainstreaming of children with special needs. EL learners. School choice, charters, and public support of private schools. The schools of 2021 are not the schools of 2011, 2001, or 1991. With hindsight, we can observe the change phenomenon of demand, opposition, acceptance, learning curve, compromising, and creation of a new order within education.
Schools feel the shift of Republican or Democratic administrations. Consider how Leave No Child Behind affected teaching and learning and the power of statewide testing. NCLB was a change or suffer event that slowly was resolved by the recalcitrance of those being asked to change and the anticipated pendulum swing back toward the status quo. Although NCLB seemed revolutionary, its story was foretold in conservative fiscal policy and perception of public education’s lack of accountability for academic outcomes. Too much money and too few results. The concerns have not gone away, only the popular use of NCLB as its title.
Ironically, the more institutional public education acts in opposition to change demands, the more it attracts demands for faster change. This has been observed in school district policies during the pandemic. Schools were never just about teaching and learning. Schools are the nation’s largest day care operators and when schools closed their doors as a pandemic protocol, business, government, and working families became demonstrably oppositional to school policies focused on the safest way to protect children and teachers in a school. The need for day care was greater than child and teacher health. Millions of families left public education and may not return when schools are open to in-person teaching and learning. The institution of public education will be changed by the pandemic in ways we yet do not know. That story is still playing out.
The Big Duh!
If you want to be a change agent, understand the dynamics of change theory. Understand the nature and machinations of the status quo and that institutions are based defined by their status quo. Understand the calendar for change activity and the calendar of institutionalization. Understand that revolutionary change brings unanticipated outcomes, hello pandemic. Understand that planned change and micro-changing can modify our world, hello Tesla.
Above all else, understand that your world is changing and there is nothing you can do about this fact other than understand and work within its phenomenon. Or, become a revolutionary and look out!