Tag: change

⚖️ How to Lead Change with the ADKAR Model (and Why It Works)

Innovation, LeadershipPublished onUpdated on

Dialogic #322

Leadership, learning, innovation

Your Snapshot

​ A summary of the key insights from this issue

⬩ The ADKAR model of change consists of five elements: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement.

⬩ The model of change shows you how to move from awareness to intention, and from intention to implementation

⬩ The real challenge of leading change and transformation is how to balance between planning and adapting, between order and chaos.

explosion of creative ideas, duotone --ar 3:2 --v 5.1 --s 250

In today’s issue, we explore a model of change which begins with changing awareness.

I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with several school teams over the past few weeks, discussing various areas of professional learning, including fostering a culture of feedback, creating conditions for innovation, and building a more effective cognitive toolkit.

Throughout these sessions, I’ve reflected on the transition from “I am aware…” [Awareness] to “I am going to change this…” [Intention], and the potential for encountering a stall in our growth efforts.

Hence, I was eager to explore models and frameworks of change that emphasise transforming awareness. Below, I have outlined the ADKAR model from Jeffrey Hiatt, a British author and change management expert.

This model encompasses five stages: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement. Incorporating the ADKAR model can provide a structured approach when leading new projects or addressing the question of “how do I get buy-in?”—though not my preferred phrase, it is a concept that often arises in educational change.

Additionally, the ADKAR model can be instrumental in personal growth and individual change endeavours, helping to overcome potential stalling points along the way.

Awareness

The first step is to create awareness of the need for change. This means communicating the reasons, goals, and benefits of the change to colleagues in a clear and compelling way. It also means addressing any questions, concerns, or objections that they may have. The aim is to help people understand why the change is necessary and desirable. What might be obvious to us, could be unknown to others – don’t make assumptions.

This step addresses the challenge of lack of understanding about the need for change. If individuals don’t understand why change is necessary, they may resist it or be apathetic.

Some strategies to create awareness are:

  • Use multiple channels and formats to communicate the need for change
  • Provide data and evidence to support the change (e.g., research findings, best practices, success stories)
  • Take your time and create spaces for feedback and dialogue

Desire

The second step is to generate a desire to support and participate in the change. This means motivating employees to embrace the change and commit to it. It also means addressing any barriers or risks that may prevent them from doing so. The aim is to help employees feel the change is in their best interest and aligned with their values.

Your focus on Desire tackles the issue of resistance to change. Even if individuals understand the need for change, they may not want to change. This could be due to fear of the unknown, comfort with the status quo, or disagreement with the change.

Some strategies to generate desire are:

  • Highlight the intended impact, positive outcomes and benefits of the change on personal or professional growth
  • Address the negative consequences and costs of not changing. The missed opportunities, student disadvantage, diminishing wellbeing or cultural stagnation.
  • Involve employees in the change process and empower them to build a rationale, co-design opportunities, pilot innovations, and share feedback.

Knowledge

The third step is to provide knowledge of how to change. This means educating employees on the skills, behaviours, and actions required for the change. It also means providing the necessary resources and support to learn and apply them. The aim is to help employees acquire the competence and confidence to change.

Address the challenge of not knowing how to change. Individuals may understand the need for change and desire to change, but if they don’t know what to do differently, they can’t change.

Some strategies to provide knowledge are:

  • Offer training and coaching programs that are relevant, timely, and accessible.
  • Provide tools and materials that are practical, user-friendly, and flexible.
  • Create learning communities that are supportive, collaborative, and diverse (e.g., peer groups, mentors, experts, etc.)

Ability

The fourth step in the ADKAR change framework is the ability to implement the change. This means facilitating employees to practice and perform the new skills, behaviours, and actions required for the change. It also means monitoring and evaluating their progress and performance.

This step tackles the inability to implement the change. Even if individuals know what to do differently, they may not have the skills, resources, or support. Our focus here is on capacity and capability building.

Some strategies to enable ability are:

  • Provide safe opportunities to apply and experiment with new skills, behaviours, and actions. Test and tinker together.
  • Offer feedback and celebrate the efforts and achievements teams have made.
  • Provide coaching and ongoing support in building capacity. Respond quickly to difficulties and challenges.

Reinforcement

The fifth step is to ensure reinforcement to sustain the change. This means reinforcing the new skills, behaviours, and actions. It also means celebrating and sharing their successes and learnings.

This final step addresses the challenge of change not sticking. Even if individuals have successfully implemented the change, they may revert to old behaviours if the change is not reinforced.

Some strategies to ensure reinforcement are:

  • Create stability and certainty in the messaging by maintaining focus on core areas of change. Don’t jump to something else!
  • Offer regular reminders and cues for consistent adoption and integration. Share and highlight stories of change and success.
  • Create opportunities and resources for ongoing learning and development. Invest in reminders, refreshers and retraining.

⏭🎯 Your Next Steps

Commit to action and turn words into works

⬩ Use the ADKAR model to reflect on the current level of awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement of your change experiences.

⬩ Analyse the results and identify the gaps and barriers that might prevent change and innovation.

⬩ Tap into the history of change in your organisation. What works? What’s missing?

🗣💬 Your Talking Points

Lead a team dialogue with these provocations

⬩ Why do we need to change and innovate? What are the goals and benefits of doing so?

⬩ How do we feel about the change and innovation? What are the key motivations for change?

⬩ What does co-design look like for us?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Still curious? Explore some further readings from my archive

⟶ 3 Mental Models From Economics For Educators To Enhance Your Innovation – Tom Barrett (edte.ch) My article introduces three mental models from economics that can enhance innovation in education: the network effect, the sunk cost fallacy, and compounding.

⟶ Adapting education innovations and their ‘knock-on effects’ in the time of COVID | Brookings​
The article from the Brookings Institute argues that adaptations not only address the direct challenges but also trigger other changes and effects that alter the larger system. Some of these effects are positive, some are negative, and all will continue to evolve.

⟶ The ADKAR Model: Why it works​
This article highlights the benefits of using the ADKAR model, such as being easy to learn, outcome-oriented and applicable to any type of change. The article emphasises that change happens one person at a time and that the ADKAR Model is a powerful tool for supporting individuals through change.

How You Can Stick With A Tough Problem – Key Lessons From Cognitive Science

InnovationPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on How You Can Stick With A Tough Problem – Key Lessons From Cognitive Science

David Badre shares some ideas about working on complex and challenging projects

David Badre is a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and author of On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done.

I have edited some of the authors’ critical points about practising problem-solving habits and added some keyword labels in bold.

In general, we can get better at structuring hard problems with experience. This is one reason that practice makes us more efficient and successful at hard tasks and that experts outperform novices. Finding work habits that encourage this process helps us to stay focused.

  • Stay with it. Finding the right structure often takes time. [Persist, Stamina, Effort]
  • Be open to reconceptualising problem structure. [Disposition, Curiosity, Perspective]
  • Take breaks. It’s not helpful to insist on trying to get everything done at once if it just isn’t working. [Pace, Time, Incubate]
  • Interact with others. Just like taking a break, interacting with others can help us conceptualise a problem in new ways. [Collaborate, Share, Connect]

I find the idea of being open to reconceptualise problem structures one that resonates with my current facilitation.

I am paying attention to moments when I shift perspective. This is often during group design and development sessions.

For example, during a recent curriculum design workshop, I asked a group of teachers:

If some of your students were here with us, what might they share about the ideas we have developed so far?

This is a deliberate facilitation move to change the perspective.

The problem structure [learning + curriculum design] was shifted [from curriculum] and seen from a different vantage point [student].

This propelled us in a different direction and led to some new ideas.

5 Questions For Team Leaders To Challenge Willful Blindness And Create An Open Culture

Mental ModelsPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on 5 Questions For Team Leaders To Challenge Willful Blindness And Create An Open Culture

Willful blindness is a cognitive bias that explains ‘the deliberate avoidance of knowledge of the facts.’

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Closed minded? Photo by Bart Christiaanse

if there’s information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you’re willfully blind. You have chosen not to know.

What are you wilfully blind to? — Forward Institute

What Harm Might We Cause

Just recently, I learned of a school leader pushing the idea of learning styles. They used the flawed concept and strategies to frame student needs.

Readings and examples that explained the issue were ignored. They chose not to know.

Ideology powerfully masks what, to the uncaptivated mind, is obvious, dangerous, or absurd and there’s much about how, and even where, we live that leaves us in the dark. Fear of conflict, fear of change keeps us that way.

Why We Ignore the Obvious: The Psychology of Willful Blindness – Brain Pickings

Every minute counts with students; that is why these mental models are essential. We have to peer into our gloomy thinking shadows and ask:

Conscious Avoidance of the Truth

According to Margaret Heffernan, as much as 85% of employees report people are afraid to raise issues at work.

This compulsion not to rock the boat is a survival impulse that protects us from conflict and confrontation. “We can’t notice and know everything”.

We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital beliefs. It’s a truism that love is blind; what’s less obvious is just how much evidence it can ignore.

How many issues and negative work habits in schools are ignored? Perhaps wellbeing and health are where willful blindness in education is most prevalent.

Your Talking Points

  • How might we be wrong?
  • What process might surface any negative work habits?
  • How might we reduce the discomfort and fear of change?

This is a snippet of my Dialogic Learning Weekly. ⚡A weekly email designed to build your cognitive toolkit and enhance your practice. It saves you time and provokes your thinking.

Exactly the nourishment I need on every week.

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The Shape of the Lens

Featured, Leadership, Mental Models, ThinkingPublished onUpdated on2 Comments on The Shape of the Lens

Inspired by an optics metaphor used in ethnography, this mental model explores our perception and understanding of behaviour. Use it as part of your team’s developmental dialogue and process.

Seeing through a lens

We all bring a different perspective to the challenges we face. My story and my experience is my bias. Recognising this foundational truth to collaboration is an important step.

Explore with your team the lenses that can be held up to view the situation you are in. Consider the lenses that are present in your group and those perspectives not immediately present.

However we are not just looking through a lens, we are attempting to see. Consider what it takes to shift our perspective and reveal gaps in our understanding. Follow your curiosity and deepen your understanding of alternative perspectives.

Your Talking Points

  • How does my bias impact what I see here?
  • Are we all using the same lens on this situation?
  • What combination of lenses might offer something new?
  • Which lenses are more opaque to us?
  • Which perspective should be represented more clearly?

Hold up a mirror

A further step is to hold up a mirror and consider our own participation in an issue, problem or challenge. Am I part of the problem?

When we look back, at first, we may identify the role we play or acknowledge our influence on an issue. We may reflect on the positive, negative or neutral impact we have on a situation.

When we look closer and see ourselves, we increase self-awareness which is an important trigger for learning and growth. Reflexivity is that circular loop of seeing and changing because we see.

Look through a lens, but hold up a mirror too.

Your Talking Points

  • How does this situation provoke my thinking?
  • What am I noticing my thinking is drifting to?
  • How might I change as a result of this?
  • What harm might I be causing?
  • This has helped me to change because…

What’s in the shadows?

Ethnographic studies of human behaviour often refer to the goal, to uncover the unmet needs or poorly defined issues. For our model here we describe that as exploring what is in the shadows.

These are issues or challenges at the root of behaviour. However they may be masked, obscured or in shadow from everyone. With your team explore the shadows and consider what is poorly represented, unspoken or missing from your dialogue and discussion.

It is a challenge to see what is cloaked and obfuscated. This takes time. Commit to your inquiry and use a range of data sources to reveal more and more. Perhaps data becomes your torch exploring and illuminating the shadow.

Your Talking Points

  • A blind spot for me is…
  • What are we not paying attention to?
  • How do we know this is the right problem to be solving?
  • What is distracting our attention here?
  • If we looked in the opposite direction what might we see?

See through a lens ~ Hold up a mirror ~ Explore the shadows

Photo by Jon Eric Marababol