Negotiating The Grand Canyon Of Change

School Administrator, Jan, 1995 by Jennifer James

During the past decade of chaotic change, school leaders have struggled to cross the most difficult Grand Canyon of Change ever negotiated as a result of an accelerating pace of change in nearly every aspect of our lives.

Today, the magnitude of change experienced in our lifetimes compares with what once took place over three generations. As a consequence we are crossing the greatest learning abyss ever in history. School leaders have faced these enormous changes alone, in part because many national leaders have become paralyzed and unable to lead except in the outmoded, hierarchical ways that prove inappropriate, even disastrous.

The Waco stakeout offers a metaphor for the 1990s. It revealed the thin line between the way those inside the compound chose to lead and those outside tried to manage them. Clearly, that the U.S. government resorted to playing heavy-metal music as a negotiating technique shows the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms leaders had sunk to a low awareness level.

I would argue that school leaders who fail to transform their leadership style in line with the times will trigger devastating consequences. Those rigid people may end up in a corner like their peers in Waco.

To be fair, most of us recognize our own inadequacies in the face of today's chaotic and complex changes. We express our ambivalence and confusion about the role we should play. We recognize some policies are obsolete and wonder if we will be able to handle new conflicts successfully. Those with such healthy skepticism about their abilities will weather these trying times well. These people understand the chaos. Their minds are open. They risk asking for help and questioning established orders.

The people who are in trouble are those who think they know exactly what to do, especially because what they believe needs to be done is to "take charge." Yet Waco taught us that ultimatums often prove ineffective today.

Deming's Advice

W. Edwards Deming--the late corporate quality management guru--discovered that corporations and schools share many of the same beliefs about workers and managers. For example, corporations pin fault for problems on individual workers. In reality, Deming said, individual workers were usually doing a decent job considering the ineffective work policies and practices mandated by management.

A more effective leadership style bridges the cavernous gaps that appear in times of change. Deming pinpointed four requirements for changing the status quo.

* First, people must be willing to change. Yet significant numbers of people in administrative and executive positions in this country, not just in education are unwilling to change. They are planning early retirements, trying to hold onto a dying system.

* A second requirement concerns the need for data. Leaders, obviously, have to know what is going on. I contend that leaders know what is going on; we don't need more data. Instead, other problems mitigate against more effective leadership.

* A third need is a belief system that lets people see and acknowledge the data and be aware of what is going on. We are struggling with that right now.

* Finally, people must be committed to act. Too often leaders have the data, their people are willing and pulling together, yet these leaders remain gripped by a "lodge" mentality and fail to act. By a lodge mentality, I refer to a sealed culture mentality that endures despite its obvious ineffectiveness.

Wide Disaffection

How likely is change? Not very.

School leaders cannot continue to defend tenure and expect any profound changes in the educational system. In times of rapid change when educational professionals who teach kindergarten through graduate school are tenured, mediocrity results.

Not that teachers and administrators don't deserve job stability; they do. However, I believe that a five- to seven-year employment contract and higher pay for these professionals would prove better alternatives. Very few professionals outside of education now have tenure.

It alarms me when teachers give a despairing response to my questions of how they are going to manage today's demographic, technological, cultural, and economic changes to bridge this unbelievable gap. From soft-spoken, compassionate teachers of all ages comes a singularly depressing answer: "We are waiting for the school administrators to die." Administrators may feel the same way about teachers they cannot fire.

Of course, they really don't mean die. They say this as a way to express their fears. Like many school administrators, teachers are paralyzed. Like administrators, they believe the changes are so great that they will be unable to make the major proactive shift that is required.

Vouchers reveal only the beginning of the disaffection of parents, which is growing in intensity. The public school system will continue to lose its best students until major changes in management and teaching are instituted.

As an urban cultural anthropologist, I have studied adaptive strategies, how people change and think. I also have looked at Howard Gardner's theories of multiple intelligence. I am interested in people who think on the edge of the society--the visionaries and the deviants. Anthropologists study cultural systems.