Future planning

Future planning - matching capacity to reality

How to prioritise initiatives for 2023

Rob Clarke

CEO of Learning Architects

Before you start the process of planning for the new year, cast your mind back over the past 12 months. Apart from it being really tough to get relievers, what have been some of your most significant challenges?

The demands of constant communication due to Covid? Or maybe your staff or community struggled with hybrid learning? And what about your significant wins? What’s gone well for you? Similarly, in which areas did you ‘knock it out of the park’ for your students, staff and community? How have they excelled or made the most progress? How this has panned out for you will be similar in so many ways across our 2,500 schools. For example: delivering hybrid learning, identifying issues to overcome related to equity, helping teachers to plan for what is most important. And for you, perhaps it is just about getting through in one piece while keeping your school open!

The fatigue is real

Whatever your wins have been, with all the demands that you’ve been under for the past two and a half years, the fatigue is real and it is likely that you, your staff and students have diminished energies. Rather than creating grand plans for the future without fully considering your school’s capacity to implement them, now is an opportune time to take stock of what is most important for your school and community, and plan for the future with renewed positivity and hope; after all, there is much to be excited about for the future of the NZ education system. For example, the refresh of the New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa are just two exciting changes in the pipeline. Both of these initiatives will help open the doors for educators to teach in ways that are increasingly holistic, inclusive, relevant and engaging.

How to avoid implementation-itis

The impact of the current changes upon education, coupled with the ongoing challenges of the context you are leading in, means that it’s more a test of how to spread limited energy rather than a lack of desire to embrace change. And the last thing anyone wants to do is fall into the trap of implementation-itis, where one initiative is layered over another, and possibly another, without checking to see if the first one has embedded properly. The solution to this is figuring out which initiatives are most important to your school or kura, and then balancing the capacity your staff has to implement these. If you have already spoken with staff, community and board regarding the NELP, then you’ll likely have a good sense of which priorities are the most important for your school to focus on next year.

Evaluate what worked well in the last year

As part of your planning process, it’s useful to evaluate the success (or otherwise) of recent initiatives to identify what worked and what could be improved. Using a framework to go deeper helps to ensure a rigorous evaluation of how well plans have been turned into action.

The Effective Change Model

One tool that is useful for this is the Effective Change Model first put forward by Tim Knoster, professor at the McDowell Institute that details five elements of successful change. The useful thing about this model is that it illustrates when any of these five elements are lacking, then there will be a negative resulting impact. These elements are: 1.Vision - a lack of vision leads to confusion. 2.Skills - a lack of skills means anxiety. 3.Incentives, commitment or motivation - a lack of incentives or motivation can lead to resistance. 4.Resources - a lack of resources can lead to frustration. 5.Action plan - poorly put together action plans can lead to false starts. The author Grant Lichtman has added the following three elements to this model: • Leadership • Communication • Inclusiveness. The value in using this model is gained when you determine which elements of a particular initiative could have been more effective. This helps to improve how you might design future initiatives.

Use it as a review tool

An easy way to use it is to get your team together and follow these steps: 1.Select a recent initiative and draw a table with eight elements across the top and put your team’s names down the left side. 2.Next, get your team to give each element a rating 1-10. 3.Add up the totals and then have a discussion about which element(s) could have been better, and why. 4.Finally, make a plan for how you will lift the elements you want to improve in. This will give you ideas of how to better support your team in future, any potential gaps in understanding relating to the initiative, plus insights into their perceptions. Doing this together may give you valuable information about the quality of the initiative, and you may learn more about one another which is always a bonus! For example, you might gain insights into mindset, motivation, commitment and skills of team members.

Balance organisational energies with bigger priorities

Given that peoples’ energies are likely to be diminished at the moment, it is really important to consider your teams’ capacity when planning future initiatives. This is an exercise in prioritising the available energies. Again, using a tool or framework will help with this.

Tools to help you prioritise

Two useful tools that can help you evaluate whether you are ready to take on a new initiative, or if that initiative is even right for your school are the Impact vs Effort matrix, and another (which sounds like it is out of a Star Wars movie) a Force Field Analysis. The Impact vs Effort matrix is a simple tool to use. Draw a table on a whiteboard or piece of paper with four quadrants. The vertical axis represents Impact, and the horizontal axis represents Effort. Each square in the matrix is labelled as High or Low Impact and High or Low Effort. Label the four squares starting from the top left moving in a clockwise order as follows: 1.Low effort, High impact = Quick wins (Yes!) 2.High effort, High impact = Major projects (Maybe) 3.High effort, Low impact = Time wasters or thankless tasks (No!) 4.Low effort, Low impact = Fill ins, which are often unimportant (Maybe)

Beyond the pros and cons

A Force Field Analysis goes beyond the pros and cons by taking into account that most of the time, any particular pro (or con) are not weighted the same, instead it adds a relative weight to each, which helps you weigh up the forces for and against change, in a visually clear way. Take a piece of paper and list the decision you’re making at the top (eg. Implement the Aotearoa NZ Histories Curriculum). On the left-hand side, list the forces for change (the pros). That is, the pros of the decision. On the right, list the forces against or the cons of the decision.

Next, assign a score of between one and five for each item - for and against. A score of one means that this item isn’t that important; a five means it is very important. Once you’ve done this, add each column up. If you can turn the numbers into a graph, it will make it even clearer to see.

Where the magic happens

Of course, the real magic happens when you involve your team in this process, so you can discuss areas where people have differing viewpoints about various aspects of the decision - this will help you to get better alignment. Once you’ve done this, you’ll have a more accurate assessment of your decision.

Do a reality check

If you were at the recent NZPF conference in Ōtautahi, you might have heard Professor Russell Bishop’s challenged attendees to look at the ‘fidelity of implementation’ of initiatives. What he means by this is gauging how consistently initiatives are being supported by checking them against the following areas: • Goals • Pedagogy • Infrastructure • Leadership These seven areas, according to Dr. Bishop are essential to ensuring that whatever you decide to implement, has a higher chance of success. So it is worth considering each of them as you plan. • Reach • Evidence • Ownership