The Myth of Buy-In + 2 Real World Steps for Initiating Substantive Educational Change

From time to time, I get inquiries from higher ed leaders asking “How can I get buy-in” to this or that change plan, but the inquiry itself is wrongheaded as it does the one thing a leader must not do at the start of a change process, and it misunderstands the cultural and emotional nature of change itself as was discussed in earlier issues of this newsletter (here & here ).? In this issue, we discuss the one key thing a change leaders should not do, and 2 preparatory steps to get your unit (department, faculty, school) ready for substantive change.? In the interest of lively prose, I start by addressing myself directly to a change leader in the second person.

Step 0: Don’t Cook Up and Present A Well-Defined Change Plan

Your buy-in inquiry itself signals that you have some pretty definite ideas about what should change, and maybe you’ve already cooked up a brilliant change plan to present to your faculty for their adoring approval; doing so, of course, is the surest way to get their immediate, forceful, and long-lasting (and frequently passive-aggressive) resistance to the plan regardless of its quality or insightfulness.? It’s fine for you as leader to have ideas about what needs to change, but a good change process uncovers stuff that even someone as smart as you didn’t think about.? Moreover, many of your faculty believe (repeatedly joke) that you’re only an administrator because you weren’t very good at teaching or research; that is, if you were really smart, you wouldn’t have climbed the ladder, so any plan you present is red meat to their inner smartest-guy-or-gal-in-the room carnivorous selves.?

Step 1: Prepare a Why-How Change Softening Deck

OK, mister smarty pants change coach, if I shouldn’t present a plan of what to change, how do I initiate a change process? ?Interestingly, at most inflection points in higher education change, the “what” of change becomes pretty obvious. For example, when we initiated the iFoundry incubator at Illinois in 2007 (Chapter 2, here ), there were already a good many documents about what to change ?in engineering education that caused widespread head nodding among deans and department heads.? The trick was to figure out how to make change outside the normal (and largely ineffective) change processes of engineering departments and college.

So, the first step in making changing is to communicate an urgent need for change by preparing a pitch deck outlining, (1) the broad historical forces that have led to the status quo, (2) reasons why change is now urgent within that historical background, and (3) how change might take place more urgently outside routine departmental-university change loop. For example, before iFoundry was established in April 2006 I was asked by then Coodinated Science Laboratory (CSL) director Ravi Iyer to present some ideas about change at a seminar at the UIUC’s Coordinated Science Lab.? That deck, The Times They Are a Changin’ (here ) with modifications based on iterative feedback became the iFoundry pitch deck in 2007. This process of making (and iterating) on a pitch deck for a change initiative is similar to that entrepreneurial companies use in seeking funding.

Step 2: Train Faculty to NLQ (Notice, Listen & Question)

The key to substantive change processes is having great conversations, but it’s not unusual for faculty members to be absorbed in their own teaching and research.? As a graduate student, I idealized departmental life as a place where intellectual exchange would be robust and never-ending, but once I joined a department, like everyone else, that ideal gave way to the routine buzz of committee work, course prep, student advising, proposal and paper submission, and all the other activities that compete for a faculty member’s time. The idea of taking time to have conversation and listening to students or one’s colleagues about needed change seems extravagant and off the beaten path.

Nonetheless, it is those conversations that will enable change to take place without tears, without calls to overthrow the head or the dean, but do faculty actually know how to listen to others enough to have that kind of conversation?

In 2010, toward the end of the founding of iFoundry at the University of Illinois, I hired an executive coach to help me figure out what was next in my career journey. Her questions and listening skills were off the charts, and I asked her where she learned to become a coach (Georgetown), looked into the program, and signed up to become a coach myself. That experience helped me make NLQ = noticing, listening, and questioning training central to the Change that Sticks workshops that have helped so many programs make meaningful change.

But I’m Already a Great Listener

I remember the first day at Georgetown leadership coaching program with 35 other student coaches like it was yesterday. ?After introductory pleasantries, our instructor asked us “What do you notice?” and my reaction wasn’t a good one. "What do I notice?? I just paid five figures and a bunch of travel money to come to DC and you want me to “notice.”? When are we going to learn some real skills?"?

Of course, my reaction was as premature as it was incorrect. ?Soon thereafter, I came to realize that noticing together with ?listening, and questioning—the basic skills of what I call curious listening—are as fundamental to coaching as they are to effective higher ed change processes, and helping your faculty supercharge their NLQ skills is a good early step in change processes that can make a lasting difference.??

More detailed information about NLQ is available in Chapter 5, Curious Listening, Keystone Habit of Educational Change of A Field Manual for a Whole New Education (https://www.amazon.com/Field-Manual-Whole-New-Education/dp/0986080055 ).

2 Preparatory Steps, Then What?

Ok, so you’re urgently communicating the historical context, need, and process of substantive higher educational change, and you've gotten your core change faculty some NLQ training, now what?? In subsequent issues, we’ll discuss the core mindsets, habits, and skills that facilitate substantive change called the 5 shifts (threejoy.com/5shifts ). We also survey the 4 sprints and spirits (4SSM) process of rational-emotional-cultural change (threejoy.com/4sm ) that leads to substantive change that matters.

DAVID E. GOLDBERG (Dave) is an artificial intelligence pioneer, engineer, entrepreneur, educator, and leadership coach (Georgetown). Author of the widely cited Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning (Addison-Wesley, 1989) and co-founder of ShareThis.com , in 2010, he resigned his tenure and professorship at the University of Illinois to work full time for the improvement of higher education. Dave now gives motivational workshops and talks, consults with educational institutions around the globe, and coaches individual educators and academic leaders to bring about timely, effective, and wholehearted academic change.? Is latest book is A Field Manual for a Whole New Education: Rebooting Higher Education for Human Connection and Insight in a Digital World . Contact Dave at [email protected] .