Another interesting topic came up about the challenge of investing in change during tough economic times.
One line of thought is that we need to prepare now for the better times ahead.
Another line of thought is that we need to change now even during these tough economic times.
Businesses often face difficult times, certainly during recessions, but also during periods of discontinuities in their marketplace, their product line, or even their customer base. They must respond or risk going out of business. Protecting the investment in R&D may be difficult with other funding priorities, but those ideas and new products become the basis for accelerating the organization when economic times become easier.
My belief is that education must respond to your current budget challenges with vision and innovation -- or risk going out of business, too.
School districts have lots of resources, several billion dollars and thousands of dedicate people. Maybe you don't have the resources you want or need to continue to do things the way they were. But you still have lots of resources at your disposal.
My analogy of change in Xerox was the competitive response to Japanese copier companies. It happened during a period of recessions in the early 1980s. Xerox transformed the company with a vision of quality, serving customer needs with products that worked really well. The vision imagined new ways of working, doing smarter work rather than more work, and doing them with different resources. Two key collaborators with the product engineering groups were the labor unions who assembled the products and the technician groups who serviced the products. Xerox management clearly understood that change was needed in the way those two groups did their work. What was unconventional was the vision of Leadership Through Quality spread company-wide and empowered these groups to innovate their own work. Who better understood the breakdowns? Who better understood the work steps that could be done more efficiently? It was these people themselves. Xerox received two Malcolm Baldrige Awards, once as a manufacturer in 1989 and again as a technology service provider in 1997.
Education leaders have a similar challenge. You are producing products with known defects. Rather than fixing them after production, better to change the way we produce them with higher quality.
How would you adapt this analogy to your situation?
What can you do now that will accelerate innovation in your site or district?
Which stakeholders can you enroll in the vision of higher quality production?
Cheers
Rick