Friday 11 December 2009

The roller coaster of change

If you have been following this blog you will know that one of my schools is going to have to move one of its buildings a couple of miles away from its current location. Those few of us that have been involved so far have been up and down the change curve, in depression and delight, in fear and fancifulness - all natural, and almost inevitable, responses to imposed change. Now I know that it is important to 'take control' as much as possible and avoid a feeling of 'being done to'. We had managed to get to this point.

Now the game changes - the proposal is in the public arena for examination by parents, other staff, other governors, etc - each of which is startinjg where we did 3 months ago; each of which has to go through their own process of denial, despair, resistance, depression before starting to see a way forward. Each individual moves at their own pace and our role as leaders is to help the progress along its' way, to be supportive, to acknowledge the pain that people will be going through and to help them move forward constructively.

Too often it is easy to forget the journey that we pathfinders made and to expect everyone else to be up to speed instantly; this is where we can lose people if we do not recognise the need for time to heal the pain of loss before taking a newe direction It is also too easy, especially for those of us brought up in the rational world (engineers, chemists, etc) to fail to recognise the affective issues that come into play. Whilst moving from Site A to Site B might seem like a perfectly sensible and practical thing to do, for many of the people involved if affects them much more deeply than our left-brain thinking might suggest. We need to work with the heart as well as the head and that takes time...

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