How often in education (or the public sector as a whole for that matter) is planning a matter of one issue=one solution via one distinct journey?

I’ve stood on the sidelines and watched with a curious interest so many school, authority and national education initiatives, projects, systems and policy changes take place, with varying degrees of success or failure. As an ex project manager (I worked in the retail and property sectors) I often wonder why these change projects are managed by people with a background predominantly in teaching or education and often with no management training. This is never more apparent than in interviews when experience outside of education counts for little or nothing when set against time in a classroom or already being in the job in some form or other. Why is it that when, say, an establishment  or organisation needs to make an appointment involving extensive change and project management would they not look for experience of those environments from the successful candidate? perhaps because of a complete lack of any experience (and perspective) outside of the education sector on the part of the ‘establishment’ management itself maybe…Is this not going to lead to a very introspective, inwardly focused and even nepotistic management structure and process?

Now, we live in a fast moving and ever changing environment where the conference presentations from the change guru’s tell us that today’s school children will be doing jobs which don’t exist at the moment. This may be true, and if so, surely education needs to be positioning itself for the inevitable changes which will need to take place. I’m not just talking about the curriculum and the way we teach (ACfE and GLOW are a start but may be hamstrung by a dismal failure by national government to properly resource either) but in the way current education management structures plan for future change…

When Alexander Bell invented the telephone, he took his idea to Western Electric, who turned him down. They considered that their business was in the telegraph. perhaps if they had tried to look a little forward into the future they might have envisaged a scenario involving a change in the way people communicated over distances, and they might still have been in existence competing with the current digital communications companies. Scenario planning should also be a major part of current education management structures, as assuming one future and planning towards this can no longer be regarded as adequate in this day and age as the pace of change accelerates. We need to try and look forward far enough into the future so that we don’t fall into the trap of simply extrapolating from where we are today, and so that solutions are free from vested interests and empire-building (the assumption being that planners won’t be in their current posts that far into the future) and avoid simply formulating ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘one-off’ scenarios. Outsiders should be brought into this process to provide a little perspective which is not linked to an organisation’s inevitable internal politics.

The process of scenario planning should include:

- a review of the nature of the current environment, auditing influences and identifying change drivers and agents. This might lead to possible future scenario situations.

- An analysis of resources which currently exist (including a skills audit involving all staff).This might also examine the capability of an organisation or establishment to cope with change, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A TROPICS/PEST test could be used to assist this part of the process.

- Stakeholders with involvement or influence need to be considered within an overall cultural context which examines both internal and external values and assumptions.

-Evaluation of options for suitability, feasibility and acceptability to all stakeholders internal and external to the organisation/establishment. Force-field analysis could be useful in helping to evaluate thinking here.

- Finally, action planning for the identified scenarios needs to be undertaken which should then become an integral and embedded feature of an organisation’s culture so that the whole process of scenario planning becomes a feature of strategic planning.

Perhaps if this had been a feature of the GLOW project, then the current IPR/QA issue, which is threatening to have a serious impact on the national roll-out might not have arisen.

After all, if the big bad wolf had thought a little about scenarios involving the three little pigs, he might have realised that ignoring or even worse, blowing at brick walls was not a good way to achieve his particular ends or desired outcome….