Transitions

Letting go (what we don't do in education)
How familiar does this sound?

ORGANIZATIONAL RENEWAL - William Bridges
A whole book could be written on the way that repeated changes are today sapping the energy and confusing the purpose within corporations and public institutions. Many of the initiatives launched by leaders—initiatives that are intended to lead to organizational renewal—all too often simply add to the burden of change. The new strategic, structural, and or cultural plans are all meant to bring new life to the organization. But few of them do justice to the natural renewal sequence of letting go, embracing and exploring the time between realities, and then setting off on the chosen path to the future. 

and

TRANSITION AS 'THE WAY THROUGH'

Transition is not just a nice way to say change. It is the inner process through which people come to terms with a change, as they let go of the way things used to be and reorient themselves to the way that things are now. In an organization, managing transition means helping people to make that difficult process less painful and disruptive.
. ..In what sense, could it be time for you to let go of that particular way to use your talents? In what way are you outgrowing the identity that you've been trading on for these past years? And if you can't get appreciated any longer in your old work situation, is that loss in any sense a timely one?
Such questions give you a place to start, a path to follow. Every one of them suggests some learning, some discovery that may lie ahead. Each of them represents a gate in that change-wall that blocked your path.

This ties in with the idea that cognitive dissonance, which some traditional educators regard as an evil to be avoided, is in fact the signal that learning and growth are possible. It may be uncomfortable, but it is important. 'Cognitive dissonance' is a way of describing the state of transition between the old way of understanding and the new, the "neutral zone".

Presence

This is the same phenomenon that Otto Scharmer describes at the bottom of the U in his Theory-U. In the executive summary to his book Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges he says this about it:

On that journey, at the bottom of the U, lies an inner gate that requires us to drop everything that isn't essential. This process of letting-go (of our old ego and self) and letting-come...

That process of simultaneously letting-go and letting-come is another way of describing the experience of cognitive dissonance - what we experience (and do) in the neutral zone.

Conference notes: transitions

Jennifer Garvey-Berger on change / transitions

• Rilke quote - cf transformative learning 

• linear change - "how our brains understand change" - thats why we find change hard, don't like it... cf visual-spatial: non-linear, not same issues with change
• spontaneous orders instead of linear progressions  (eg curriculum)  

• ball in trough diagram - change by evolution (go over) or revolution (through)?

• fear of loss - what is it that you fear to lose?
• what will become of it when you change? 

• The neutral zone - have let go of one reality but not yet embraced the next
• [??being PRESENT (Senge)  is the key to the neutral zone?? / ??Theory U??]

•  new beginnings are like babies - need nurturing
• will falter sometimes, don't  start fully formed
  

The Shifting Thinking Conference

First, let me acknowledge that I love conferences! I love the luxury of having days set aside just to mingle with other people with similar interests; the stimulation of being exposed to different expertise, different environments, different world views, different experiences; the discussions; the sense of new possibilities and perspectives; and the revelation that there are so many other people in the world who care about the things I do.

Shifting Thinking was like that, and with the extra bonus of being a bit outside the square. I came away at the end of the two days feeling a bit excited about the conversations we had begun, and a bit unsettled by some of them, a bit frusrated about the sessions I didn't get to.

The best of it
The Day 1 highlights for me were Jennifer Garvey-Berger's conversations about the nature of change and the four thinking tools she introduced us to.

The Day 2 highlights for me were Perry Rush's session, called "Who says schools have to look the way they do?"  and the group session with parents from local schools, called "Who are the experts?" (I'm glad I read the synopsis, because the title almost put me off.) As it turned out, two of the people presenting this session had children in the same class as my youngest,  so we had a considerable amount of shared experience to draw on.

And in between, no less exciting was the opportunity to visit Te Papa Tongarewa's new interactive Our Space with Diana-Grace Morris, to explore the interactive map, an interactive multimedia feature called simply "The Wall" and the High Ride.  It was great to see our little group of middle aged respectable educators (me included) squealing like kids with the excitement of exploring and creating. Woo-hoo!

The whole conference had a real buzz to it, with an exciting combination of willingness to challenge existing mindsets and positive attitude.

And the rest
The only exception was the second speaker on Day2, Cathy Wylie who didn't really seem to get the point of the event. Where other speakers used the opportunity to reflect on their own professional and personal journey, on tools for creating collaboration and positive change, and on mapping out the way forward into the 21st century, Wylie gave a muddled, negative and inaccurate address that added nothing of value. She'd obviously not prepared properly and seemed to have only covered about half of her material, so maybe the good stuff was yet to come. Although she's positioned herself over the past 20 years as an expert on the New Zealand version of school self-management and community ownership, Wylie really doesn't ever seem to have got the point of the reforms, and this address bore that out, with inaccuracies of fact, and very little evidence of analytical insight or fresh or original thinking.

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always had
The lesson I suppose is that we all have to work with what we've got - and shifting the mindset of the system as a whole will need us to engage a large number of practitioners in all kinds of roles who don't understand, or don't have the energy or the insight to look beyond what they have always had. So part of the challenge will be how to re-frame those people and those characteristics in our own attitudes and practice that are currently "part of the problem" in ways that allow them to become "part of the solution".

So how do we learn to stop doing what we've always done, in search of what we've never had? It's not easy. Perhaps the first step is to practice stepping out of the comfort zone and doing things differently. This is one of the things Jennifer Garvey-Berger challenged us to think about - but that might be a separate post.