I’m not teaching anymore.
I’m still working in education, still working in the same school, but I moved into a new role about three months ago – I’m a Dean of Operations. Operations is responsible for everything that’s going on in a school besides instruction. This is something that I’ve been interested in for a few years now, so I’m excited to finally be working on the operations team.
One major change from teaching to operations is that as a teacher, you spend a lot of time thinking about what you can do to change children’s behavior. In operations, you spend a lot of time thinking about what you can do to change adult behavior.
In my school, teachers are responsible every day for tracking the students who get school breakfast and lunch. We have to record this to be reimbursed from the federal free lunch program. The problem is that teachers are also have a lot of other things that they have to do every day, and they sometimes forget to track breakfast and lunch.
So how do I change that? How do I alter the behavior of adults who also have many other responsibilities, and build a habit that they will complete twice every day at school?
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard goes into changes that like this, and the different ways that people drove those changes.
“In 1992, Target was a $3 billion regional retailer, a pip-squeak compared to its competitors Kmart ($9 billion) and Wal-Mart ($30 billion). But it aspired to be different. Even in those days, the chain’s advertising was hip and fashionable. Unfortunately, the store’s merchandise didn’t deliver on the advertising’s promise.”
I think the transformation from Target in 1992 to Target today is fascinating, particularly because it happened with pretty limited power and resources inside of the organization – Robyn Waters, who was a major force in driving the change, did not have a ton of people on her side.
“For a time in retail, trendy clothing was neutral in color. Everything was gray, white, khaki, tan, or black. Then, one season, color exploded at the fabric shows and in retailers in London and Paris. It wasn’t an obscure trend; it was a big wave. So, as design champion at Target, Waters needed to get her merchants excited about color. But the merchants, being numbers driven, would review the past few years’ sales at see that color hasn’t sold.”
“Waters had to get creative. She went to the candy store at FAO Schwarz, where you could buy M&Ms in whatever color you wanted, and brought huge bags full of bright colored M&Ms to her internal meetings. She poured the candy into a glass bowl, creating cascades of turquoise and hot pink and lime green. “People would go ‘Wow,’ and I’d say, ‘See, look at your reaction to color.’
“She brought in samples of Apple’s recently released iMac computers – in lime, strawberry, grape, and tangerine – which had been a sensation. For the first time, consumers were choosing the color of their computers with the same seriousness they used to choose the color of their cars.”
This makes me think – what is the vision that I can sell to teachers to help them see how important tracking meals every day is?
There are other pieces of this change too – teachers have to see that it matters, but also build a habit of tracking breakfast and lunch for their class every day. The book goes over building habits, discussing how tools like checklists can be used to improve accuracy with which tasks are completed.