The above quote, from W. Edward Deming, one of the founding thinkers of continuous improvement, is brutally blunt. Yes, an organization (or a group or an individual) can put their heads in the sand, like ostriches, and ignore the change going on around them in the sector that they serve. But ignoring the change doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Ignoring it doesn’t mean you are stopping it. And, most importantly, ignoring it won’t shield you or your organization from the impacts of the change. And that impact, if you are not ready for it, and proactively adapting to it or leveraging it, is probably going to be negative. History is littered with the demise of countless organizations that ignored the changes in their sectors and did not survive.
I have seen this Ostrich Syndrome, of putting your head in the sand hoping the change will go away, play out more than once, with education organizations, teams and individuals, never with positive outcomes. (Editorial Note: I have no idea if ostriches actually stick their heads in the sand or if this is just in the cartoons). Organizations or employees dig in and cling to their history, the way they have always done things. They say, “It was good enough before, it is good enough now,” or “We have been around for fifty years, we don’t need to learn or change anything.” They don’t want to put in the effort to adapt. They don’t want to take any risk to innovate. They don’t want to work with any sense of urgency. Or they are just there to get a paycheck. There are even ostriches who don’t care about the survival of their organization; they only care about their own personal agenda. Ostriches cling to the delusion that the change in the world around them will go away.
News flash. It won’t. Especially in the education sector, one of the most rapidly changing sectors out there. No amount of wishful thinking is going to halt the change.
The only solution? If you are an ostrich, it is time to wake up and get your head out of the sand. Take a dose of humility, that yes, there are things to be learned and changes to be made. Take a dose of courage to do things differently. Take a dose of energy to push away the complacency and address the urgency. Get behind change. Your organization will be all the better for it. And it may actually survive the changing landscape in which it is operating.
As Deming says, change is not mandatory… unless you want to survive. And then you have to intentionally work for it.
#changereadiness #change #changemanagement #changeleadership