Executing Change

Projects & Learning/Organizational Change/Executing Change

Using 4DX to give students the ability to learn at their own pace.

“My Why” talks about the changes I believe are important to help our students learn at their own pace, and my plan for change talks about the influence strategy I wish to employ to make those changes. Developing an idea and a plan, though, are only the first steps. If the plan is not executed properly it will only remain a plan. You will never see real change.

To execute my plan successfully, I intend to use the 4DX model from the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals, (McChesney, Covey, and Huling, 2016). Below, I describe each discipline and how I intend to use them to execute my plan.

Image retrieved from

http://franklincoveysouthasia.com/events/4disciplinesofexecution/assets/img/discipline1.png

Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures

There are two types of measures that support the WIG: Lead measures and Lag measures.

Lag measures will tell you if you have achieved your goal, but by the time you have data for your lag measure, it is too late to influence change toward your goal. Lag measures are data from the past. What we need to focus on closely are the lead measures. These are the measures that are predictive and that we can influence. Achieving our lead measures tells us if we are likely to achieve our lag measure and ultimately our WIG.

Lag measure: All math students have learned using interactive video lessons.

Lead measures:

Each content team will create 1 video lesson per week.
Each teacher will devote 30 minutes per week to learning video technology.
Each teacher incorporates a video lesson at the digital learning station every week.

Discipline 1: Focus on the Wildly Important

In my blog post “…But what about the whirlwind?” I talk about our whirlwind of daily tasks. These are the tasks we must do just to get the bare minimum of our jobs done. It is a never-ending list, and it grows daily. This to-do list, and the lack of extra time in our schedules, contributes to the death of a change initiative. Any change requires a conscious effort to enact new behaviors, and new behaviors require time. The solution to this is to focus only on the wildly important and discard other “good” ideas that can detract from the most impactful ones.

What change can we make that will have the greatest impact? Students need the chance to learn at their own pace. To make that happen is the Wildly Important Goal (WIG):

By December 2021, all math students will learn from interactive video lessons in their digital blended learning station at least once per week.

Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

People want to win. When you keep score, people play to win. When you don’t keep score, it is hard to motivate people to play to win. If you want your plan to succeed, make it a game and take score.

A motivational scoreboard should have four characteristics:

be simple,
be seen by the team,
show both lead and lag measure progress, and
display if you are winning or losing immediately.

Because the math department is scattered around our large school, we need a convenient spot where everyone can see our progress. Our scoreboard will be kept on our Math Department Schoology group, where we go for resources and information about our department. The scoreboard will be in a format where each team leader can update the chart with their team’s progress.

Example of our scoreboard on Schoology

Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability

Having a scoreboard is great, but if no one talks about the scoreboard and what they can do to improve it, it will get lost and forgotten in the whirlwind. Each team member needs to make a personal commitment to moving the ball forward each week. For this reason, each team will devote 20 minutes a week in their weekly meeting to discussing solely what they have done during the week to contribute to moving the scoreboard, and what they intend to do the following week. Each team member will:

review their efforts on the lead measures,
share successes and failures, and
make new commitments for the week.

Each team member will hold the others accountable for contributing the one or two things they can do the following week to impact the lead measures. During this meeting, the team leader will update the data in the scoreboard and review the updated scoreboard with the team.

As I stated in my “Leading Change” post, change is hard. The authors of The 4 Disciplines (McChesney, Covey, and Huling, 2016) have found that most teams go through 5 stages of behavior change. It is necessary to work our way through these stages to implement the 4DX plan.

What will it take to install 4DX in my department?

Stage 1: Getting Clear

Simply having the WIG, the lead measures, the scoreboard, and a session for accountability is not going to be enough to enact change in our department. The urgency of the whirlwind is always waiting to overtake the importance of our WIG. To successfully reach our WIG, we must make sure everyone in the department is crystal clear on the WIG and the 4DX process. The influencers in our department (Team Leaders and Curriculum Coach) must model the importance of the WIG and hold team members accountable for moving the lead measures on the scoreboard.

Stage 2: Launch

This phase will require a lot of energy for the leaders in the department. This is where the rubber meets the road, and where we will identify the members of the team who are models, potentials, and resisters.

Models are the team members who take on each task with gusto and model the behaviors we want everyone to have. For our WIG, these team members are the ones who are already comfortable with technology and video. These team members can be used as mentors for the potentials.
Potentials are the team members who may struggle at first, but really do want to succeed. They may need extra training or encouragement but could become models with the right help.
Resisters are the team members who do not want to change. They may not see a compelling reason, or they will resist because of the effort required to move the lead measures forward. The key to helping the resisters is identifying why they are resistant to the change and addressing the issue.

Stage 3: Adoption

During this phase, team members will adopt the behaviors to move the lead measures and adopt the 4DX process. Resistance to change will start to fade, but this phase takes time. For this stage to be successful, we must adhere to the process or the whirlwind will take over. For adoption to occur, we must:

hold each other accountable in our weekly WIG sessions,
track our results on our scoreboard and make necessary adjustments,
train and mentor the potentials, and address any issues necessary to clear the path for resisters.

Stage 4: Optimization

We will reach this stage when the team has a shift in mindset. At this stage, team members will take ownership of the plan and will contribute ideas of their own to move the lead measures because they are playing to win. It is important at this stage the recognize team members’ contributions and ideas for moving the lead measures forward. This is the time to celebrate successes, recognize when potentials perform like models, and encourage team members to clear obstacles for each other. Working together is the only way to win.

Stage 5: Habits

With successful completion of our WIG we can implement a new WIG to continue improving our team. Installing the habits of working on lead measures, keeping a scoreboard, and setting aside time each week to hold each other accountable creates an atmosphere where excellence is the norm. Once we reach our WIG, why would we want to stop there?

How the Influencer strategy and 4DX Work Together

The Influencer Strategy (Grenny, Patterson, Maxfield, McMillan, Switzler, 2013) I discussed in my change plan works with the 4DX plan by helping us focus on the behaviors that will drive our lead measures. The influencer model provides structures to support the changes we need to make our WIG come to fruition. 4DX helps us define our WIG, which determines our lag measures. To achieve the lag measures we need to successfully move our lead measures. And to move our lead measures, we must have influencers in place to support the leveraged behaviors which need to change.

References:

FranklinCovey. (2012, April 19). Executive overview of the 4 disciplines of execution [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZR2Ixm0QQE

Grenny, J., Patterson, K., Maxfield, D., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2013). Influencer: The new science of leading change. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

McChesney, C., Covey, S., & Huling, J. (2016). The 4 disciplines of execution: Achieving your wildly important goals. New York: Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.