Improving institutional change management is critical to increasing agility, staff satisfaction and responsiveness. It is also critical to the long-term viability of the higher education sector in the face of ongoing policy and funding uncertainty.
Flipping the lid on traditional learning and development, empowering staff to solve problems, and harnessing the power of hidden influencers in your workforce can dramatically shift your organization’s culture from one where change is “done” to people, to one that champions change through employee-led improvement .
By running a continuous improvement programme, the University of Newcastle has learned what can be achieved by equipping frontline staff (ie not just managers, HR professionals and formal change units) with the skills to apply change methodology to improve business. Aimed at a cohort of professional staff not typically involved in institutional problem solving, this program aims to build the capacity to demonstrate that small changes (rock blasting) can have a big impact.
Pebble busting refers to a type of problem solving. The analogy comes from the idea of having a small stone in your shoe that is uncomfortable and hinders your movement. It’s not until you remove it that you can feel relief and realize how much of an impact it had on your everyday life.
The program, where participants identify a “stone” in their everyday work life that they want to solve or improve, is a week and a half long, divided into a series of one-day workshops over six months. During the program, participants learn basic project and change management methods, skills such as how to develop audience-centered communication, embrace a change mindset, curiosity, innovation and resilience. The coaches support the participants at all times, and their managers are involved at key milestones so they can create the right environment for their staff to thrive.
As the program’s designer and convener, my reflections from the past two years of the program are that just as we ask our colleagues to become more comfortable with change, so those of us who design education programs must also become comfortable with doing things differently. Below are some considerations for educational designers.
Put learning back in the hands of the student
Resist designing the entire program; instead, let it be guided by what the participants need as it progresses. By using the concepts productive failure(a reversal of the learning sequence – start with the problem first, then provide the skills and tools needed) and civic development (a popular IT concept that makes it possible for anyone to be a programmer), we encouraged participants to see mistakes or setbacks as opportunities for growth and to self-identify what they need to move forward with their rock blasting. We used barriers and roadblocks to guide coaching conversations and inform program design.
Things to consider may be:
Whether you’re building a community that supports growth. What can you do to encourage continuous learning? Maybe it creates one peer learning an environment where participants can review each other’s work and be accountable to each other between formal learning opportunities. Need to go one step further and create a concurrent skills session for managers, arming them with skills to be comfortable leading a culture of continuous improvement?
Where you create opportunities for the participants to make choices and take responsibility. Can you weave in Glasser’s choice theory, based on the premise that individuals can only control themselves and not others, to help participants understand more about how they and the people around them react and adapt to change?
Instead of a traditional training needs analysis, create an experience map that focuses on desired outcomes, rather than a rigid structure.
Ask more than tell and fail quickly
To facilitate a culture of continuous improvement and agility where change happens quickly, you must deliver the program in the same way.
Creating a trusted space where we can collect feedback at the end of each program session is key to ensuring that training content and design is relevant and meets staff needs. As a program team, we forced ourselves to work to the same minimum viable product model (to release a new subject or skill used to validate participant needs and requirements before developing a more complete training program) that our participants were encouraged to adopt in their learning journey and pebble blasting. The key to this is using the insights to inform the best course of action.
After each session we thought about:
- Did today’s content help our program participants? What didn’t hit the mark for them?
- What do our participants need to resolve or move a roadblock to continue with their project?
- How can the program team help participants continue to build their case for change when they return to their roles (hopefully having resolved their original stumbling block/problem and now ready to pitch their idea for business improvement)?
Benefits and effect
Establishing a way to demonstrate and track benefits is critical. We used a benefits mapping tool to monitor and focus efforts and to demonstrate impact. The key benefits we monitored were:
- Organizational change maturity
- Staff’s feelings of empowerment when presenting ideas
- The staff’s feeling that change must be handled well
- The staff feel supported through change.
Two important things to consider when drawing up a benefits map:
- Use a tool like a benefits realization framework or a one-page benefits map to visually connect the tangible results to organizational impact to provide clear lines of sight for planning
- Include the benefit map in briefing sessions with other involved parties and regularly review conversations to keep everyone aligned and ensure expectations are being met.
Changing capabilities and culture takes time, and in a rapidly changing world, a new approach is needed. With a new lens, you can humanize change and develop a workforce of empowered, change-ready, agile people who are less afraid of the unplanned and planned changes that lie ahead.
Kristy-Jai Chantrey is a specialist in change management at the University of Newcastle.
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