How to Impact Change... and What We Can Learn from Puffins.

(lively music) - So hello everybody, and welcome to our breakout session on how to impact change. My name is Jonathan Perry, and I have the privilege of managing the client services team in EMEA. And the team that I manage delivers implementations and learning consultancy to support institutions in achieving their pedagogical goals. Now, joining me is one of Senior Implementation Consultants, Danny Monaghan. So, I'll let Danny introduce himself. - That is good.

Nice to be here today. And I think I'd just like to focus on that point that John made there. Our primary goal when we're working with customers is to help them achieve their goals. That is the main focus of what we deal with day to day. - Yeah and I think that's definitely what drives us and everybody in our team is really passionate about, and that's student experience.

Now, to sort of help with that continuous improvement around student experience. Our presentation today, what we want you to take away from this is a simple framework that you can apply to managing any change. And I think when we talk about this change, you know, we often talk about the rollout of maybe Canvas as the full learning management system as being that change. But often it can be smaller changes and, you know, improved usage of other tools or certain tools within Canvas. And so, what we're going to talk about is going to apply to any of those situations.

And I think the key thing with this about the takeaway is the simplicity of this. So, is to try and sort of emphasize this idea that, and what we're going to go through. I'm gonna ask Danny a question. So, Danny, the question is, you're walking down the street, you get to a road and you need to go to the shop on the other side of the road. What do you do? - Well, the simple answer to that is as particularly as a kid growing up in the 70s in the UK, 'cause we were all taught this, you stop, you look, and you listen.

- And then what do you do? - And then you cross the road. - Okay. Now, I'm gonna challenge that point because I think we're missing a fundamental part of this, which is after we've stopped. The reason that we stop is to gather information by looking and listening. And so, before we cross the road, we actually take that information that we have about the situation and we make a decision.

Because if we stop, if we look, and we see a car, or if we stop, we look, and we listen, and then we hear a car, you're not going to still cross the road. So, the decision that we make is based on the information that we gather. And so this framework we're going to talk about, it's not necessarily just a process of things to do. It's a process of questions to ask. And I think asking the obvious questions and the simple questions actually has the most impact on change.

And so, the first question that we're going to talk about, and as we go through this, I'm gonna tap into Danny's experience of working with, you know, many, many organizations rolling out technology. But I think the first question is really, really important is what actually needs to change? We can often present solutions when we haven't really truly assessed the situation and identified what the actual problem is and why we need to change? So, the first part of our framework is the three Ss where we think about what we sustain, what we start doing and what we stop doing? So, I'm gonna ask Danny the question really from working with institutions, what do they put into these columns? What are the things that they say that they should keep doing? What should they start doing? What should they stop doing? - Well, we all work with sort of great teachers, you know, delivering excellent teaching. We definitely want to sustain those good practices, and those teachers will be looking for ways to improve. One of the things that is quite common is that we hear that students want a greater level of consistency in their teaching. Well, target one, to do we'd say for instance, feedback.

So, maybe that's something that we want to consider starting to do. We might want to think about a particular tool to support that as well. So, we might look at rubrics as an example of being able to support that. - Okay. I'm just going to talked to you that just a little bit, because you say that you quite commonly hear that, but where are the institutions getting that information from to say, we need to improve feedback? You know, where is that information, you know, getting to them that they decide that that's something they should start to do? - Well, this information come through in a number of different ways.

There's the you could call them more traditional roots of surveys. It's very common for institutions to survey their students both internally, but also maybe something on a national level like the UK's National Student Survey. You can also get that information from data being gathered from within the systems that you might have. So, if you have a tool such as Impact, then you can see the usage of tools. And I'll use the rubrics example I've just given, you might be able to see that there's a very low level usage of rubrics or a very unevenly spread usage of that particular tool across an institution.

You might also be able to gather data from tools like the Canvas Data Portal, which, of course, allows you to bring data from Canvas and combine it with data from other systems into a customized dashboard that allows you to create custom reports to be able to see this kind of information that you can then make decisions on. As well as information from other sources like surveys. - Okay. So, I think sort of the point that we're making there with this then is actually, you know, we need to consider what sources of information we actually have available to us and ultimately how that points us into a direction to make a decision and make an informed decision, you know, based on those sources of data that we have. You know, be it anecdotal evidence through conversations with teams, surveys, you know, the data that's from the systems.

And other things that commonly come through, which institutions say, you know, that they want to stop. You know, if we need to pick something up new, we also need to consider what we need to put down so that we've got the capacity to do this new thing. So, what sort of things do institutions talk to you about not wanting to do anymore and things that they want, you know, people to stop? - Well, I'm keeping on the same theme around feedback. Again, quite a common one is students not wanting to receive feedback on paper. That students like to be able to go to one place to get everything.

And when you've got some people doing electronically, some people doing it on paper, that provides frustrations for students. But there's also a financial side to that as well, because from an institutional level, there could well be a drive to reduce the costs that are using paper actually creates because that has to be printed. The paper has to be bought. And so, it's not just the decision based on one view on that as well. And that's also really useful to take into consideration.

- Yeah, no, that's really good points. I think, you know, with this, you know, when we're working with customers on this process, this can be a huge conversation. And I think with the ideas of the things that we need to start, it causes a need, a place where we are then able to prioritize those and think about which changes we can actually action. So, I think what we do is we we'll stick with that example of student feedback as we go through our framework. But for people watching this, please remember, we're trying to give you the framework, not the example of the change specifically.

But the next question that I think, you know, we ask after this and the thing that we need to do is to really clarify the purpose then. We prioritize one of the things we want to start doing, and what we've gotta do is get everybody aligned on what the purpose of that change is actually going to be. And I think the really important question here as well is who is this actually going to impact and how is it going to impact them? So, what we'll do then is we'll go to the three Ps. And we've got purpose. The people that this change effects.

And the particulars, which might be sort of key milestones or dates that we need to align to. So, in this sort of circumstance, you know, I think the key thing that always comes up is the purpose of change. Can we articulate clearly why change is necessary? And with this, you know, we can turn around and we can say that the people involved in this would be basically instructors and it's going to be a change to their process. And an example of the particulars could be, it needs to be the by the new academic cycle or the new assessment period that we're working towards. But when you are working on this process with organizations, what other advice would you offer around this part of the thought process, Danny? - Well, guess we're focusing on one particular group here, instructors.

We have to bear in mind, obviously we'd be looking at all the different user groups that are in an institution. However, it's very relevant from an instructor viewpoint to bring in the voice of other groups. In this particular example, we could bring in the voice of the students. Why do the students want this particular change that helps the instructors in this particular example, understand that it's not just something that's benefiting them, but it's benefiting their students, which helps decision making on those individuals on how they and why they're going to change their process around this particular topic? - Yeah. And, you know, I agree completely, and I think it is that situation.

We can identify all the stakeholders, how it's gonna impact those and think of their perspectives. It's gonna help us with the decisions that we need to make later in terms of our communications, you know, to those individual groups and, you know, having things ready for them. So, you know, the key takeaway from this part of this is identify all the stakeholders and make sure that we have a clear message about why change is necessary. And I think once we've got that, what we can start to do then is build out our timeline. And as we go through this process, we often think of this framework, we think of the timelines as being very linear and simply putting one block after another.

Now, what we'd like to do is change the approach on that. And we're going to think about our timelines in layers as we go through our framework today. And the first layer is ultimately just for us to map out when these goals need to be in place? So simply for our feedback example, it may be the assessment and feedback is taking place with the new policy, maybe by September 2023. Really, depending on your academic cycles and what change you're trying to implement. But if we can map out the high level goals with the timeline, we can then start to think about other aspects of this change, which are going to be key and important.

And the next question is ultimately my favorite question. It's the pirate question. - Now, you're gonna have to explain that one, John, I'm afraid. - Okay. The pirate question.

So, the pirate question is about challenges that we're going to have on our journey. We've set out a timeline and a goal and a journey that we're going on, and there's gonna be challenges along the way. And the pirate question is the three Rs, which pirates always say, as we're going to go through resistance, reasoning and response. And the idea behind this is resistance isn't people being awkward. It's not people challenging what we're necessarily doing.

So, it's not obstruction by people. Resistance is about the challenges that we may incur along the way. And if we can predict that and understand the reason why that resistance exists, what we can do is we can formulate a response prior to the resistance occurring. So that that challenge doesn't cause us issues on the journey. So, what resistance, you know, gets highlighted to you in a consultancy session with a customer, Danny? - Well, one of the most common ones that's presented, and I've experienced many times over the years is time.

People say they don't have time. They don't have time to learn how to use a new tool. And they don't have time to use that new tool in a process. And the reasoning behind that is that they may have a very sort of ingrained process that they are following and they just don't see how the new system will fit into that. It's very difficult for them to picture these changes around them.

It may be that they've got a very ingrained process that they've got on the basis of longstanding practice. And so, and these all sort of facilitate the idea that time is something that they just don't have to be able to do this. - And I think sort of the thing that you're emphasizing there then is not ability to picture the change, is that they need to see people in a similar role to them, you know, carrying, you know, being able to do that change and they need to see some benefits of this as they go through. So, you know, we'll put this up, the acronym is what's in it for me. And so, it sounds like what you're saying is that emphasis around, you know, the advantage will be that there will be a speed up in the process of, you know, for you actually to give feedback, it will maybe make sure that the, you know, the accuracy of the data is there, is an improvement with those side of things.

And we could talk about success stories there, but, you know, how sort of do we identify people to be the success stories if this changes partly taking place by some people. You know, how do we find out where those success stories exist? - Well, again, a number of different ways that you can identify people who are championing, either a new process or a new tool. You can use word of mouth. You can use those connections and contacts that exist across an institution. It may be that out of internal surveys.

Information comes out that there's a particular sort of hotspot of activity around something with tools like Impact. You can identify champions of a particular tool, and these allow you to make some sort of informed choices. Because then, this starts the trail to a conversation that you can have with people to find out more about the practices they're following, the successes they're having. And then that allows you to turn those into stories that can be shared with others. And stories of success coming from within an institution, people find easier to relate to than a story from somewhere elsewhere in the world.

- Yeah, no, that makes, makes perfect sense. And I think it is just that case again, isn't it? It's that same thing, obvious question we're asking earlier, what data sources do you have to gather this information? And I think with this, it makes what you've said. And sharing the stories internally, it makes me think about a famous story, which is "The Clever Puffin that didn't share his success. " - Okay. This one's, you're gonna have to explain how this fits into this.

- Okay. So, this is another John Random tangent, but bear with me. So, many, many moons ago when I was a biology student in South Wales. One of the research projects that we worked on was on an island called Stockton, off the south coast of Wales, beautiful place. Try and shorten the story, lots and lots of puffins live there.

And they live on the slopes above quite steep sea cliffs. Now, puffins during the summertime will fly out in rafts to the sea and basically gather sand eels and bring them back to the burrows, to their young. Now, one of the challenges they have to do that is other birds, such as lesser black-backed gulls will go and steal the sand eels from the puffins prior to them getting them back to their young within the burrows. Now, as we studied these, there was one puffin, the clever puffin, that would land at the bottom of the cliff. Not the bottom of the cliff, the bottom of the slope, and basically turn around and walk backwards to the burrow.

And every time it got the sand eels back to its young within the burrow. Now, over the space of the week, we numbered the burrows. We knew exactly which was which. This was the only Puffin that was successful in getting the sand eels back to the burrow all the time. The other puffins would either land near the burrow and that was quite dangerous because it was on the slope and they'd maybe roll down the slope and could risk injury.

Whereas if they landed lower down and tried to walk up towards the burrows, the lesser black-backed gulls would come and take the sand eels. So there was one Puffin that was successful and this information was never shared across that colony of puffins. - I mean, it's a fantastic story and fascinating. How do we apply that to education? - Okay. For me, I think it's this sort of social structure that we have.

There was no facilitation. There was no opportunity for this very clever Puffin to really share that with other puffins. They would have to see it, learn it, and basically they had conflicting priorities. They had to get those sand eels back to the burrow. They had puffins and other cha, sorry, they had goals and other challenges coming and making their life more difficult.

So, they didn't actually have that time to stop and share that information. And I think for us, we can learn from that as change things, we can offer training. We can communicate around change, but it's not always communication coming directly from us. We need to think about how we're going to communicate about this change, but also enable that two way communication and that self-organized learning between the individuals in that organization. So, we would need to facilitate that puffin and share that success story with the other puffins.

And so, it does bring us to the next sort of part of the framework that we use, which is how are we going to communicate? And we'll talk about the three Xs. Now, that's not my personal history. That's more about the ways that we will communicate. What expected communication is that? What we're going to exclude? And what we could maybe experiment with and do differently that's going to get people's attention? So if I ask, you know, you worked in a UK university for a long time, Danny. What would be the expected communication methods or the excluded communication methods? What would be your advice on this table? - Well, I mean, very definitely from a higher education perspective that UK focus, but I suspect broader than that as well.

There'll be an expected communication through things like departmental meetings and also the faculty meetings and the learning and teaching. Well, of all the committee structures, but let's focus on the learning and teaching strand of that. So, there'll be a regular expected line of communication, both up and down the hierarchy of the institution through those well structured meetings that are in place along those kind of things. There's also an awful lot of email messaging that's sent out. All staff emails, which we could easily say we could exclude because a lot of the time, most of the time, I think you'll find that a large portion of the people being targeted by those emails don't actually read them because they're disappearing to inbox with lots of other me emails coming in and they get put on one side to be looked at again and they never come back to.

So, I think you can have a look at those as being very, very common in institutions. - Yeah. And I think, you know, things that I've seen as well is sometimes the idea of using posters and banners, which, you know, may seem like a nice idea. But I think in those, we really need to think about, you know, the benefit of them and when we're using them. You know, the pop-up banners, I think are useful, but the thing that triggers maybe more interest in them is when people see a large group of people attending sort of an event or a training session and wonder why are they all there? What's going on? And, you know, maybe then the banner would support them.

But for our example, we'll exclude that. We spoke before actually around the puffins. And you gave the example when we were talking about the resistance of finding the success stories. And that gives us the ability to find people with shared values. We can identify people that, you know, are using certain tools and value them that maybe we can connect them together for the self-organized learning.

But, you know, are there other ways that you can think of that we can message things to people that may be a bit different to what we traditionally do that can be useful to institutions? - Yeah. I mean, one of the key considerations on these sort of group activities is trying to get that cross curricular connection. Because people very often, will stay very much in their own particular specialty, and not be aware that something going off on a different subject matter will have real relevance and benefits. So, the activities like those Canvas Cafes and things like that are really important. But you can also use tools like Impact to provide much more focused and targeted ways of passing information on.

So, you can use, say for instance, the Impact Proactive Messaging to provide those stories to people so that they don't have to be in a physical location to talk to somebody. The information can be given to them at a place where they are gonna be working more, you know, more often than not, every single day. And so, it's a way to be able to provide a quick bit of bite size information about something that will trigger that thought in somebody to say, "I want to find out more about it. " - Okay. And so if we put these in, we've spoken about the Canvas Cafe.

And, you know, I think, you know, one of the things we're talking about there as well is yeah, we can use Impact to do that and we can share these videos, but there are varieties of ways of sharing those little bite size pieces of information with things like the Canvas Announcements. And ultimately, what we can do is, you know, still at this point, we can be looking at that data, the information that we've got to make sure that we're sharing, you know, the success stories to the people that need to see them. I think is the important aspect there. So, let's move on there. We've talked about the ideas of, we've thought about how we're going to communicate, and this may be the why that change is necessary and the benefits of it and why people should adopt this? But then we've got to communicate with them about how to actually get the knowledge and be able to do that.

So, the final part of our sort of framework that we use, or the thought process that we're talking through, is the Ws, the what, who, and when? And to me, I think this is really important. We can often set a long term, large goal in terms of adopting, you know, certain tools, but we need to think incrementally about how we're going to get there. So in our example, we've been talking about earlier, you know, it would be quite easy to say that the outcome, what need people need to be able to do is how to grade with a rubric. That comes to instructors and then we could say that they need to basically do this during a new academic term. Now, you know, Danny, you said earlier on when we spoke about, you know, the sort of stakeholders that we need to identify all of them.

I think, you know, in our talk today, we could go through each of the individual stakeholders, the admins and the students with this. But for the purposes of time, let's go through that one example that we've got here. But what sort of ways do you advise on transferring that knowledge to maybe people like instructors who need to know how to use rubrics. And they need to know how to do it by the new academic term. How would you advise that? - I mean, a multifaceted approach is usually very effective.

You can target a large number of people with this. Traditionally face to face training. There are some people who much prefer that particular environment to any others. You could also use say an online knowledge base that you've created somewhere so that people can go and search that and find the information they're looking for. With tools like Impact Support, that gives a much more focused approach, because you can say to people, if you want to know more about in this particular example, rubrics, you'll find the information right next to the tool that you're trying to work.

That's okay. It's almost trying to find the knowledge on how to use the tool, but how do you actually pass the message on? Well, you can include videos and other content. Bringing in that student voice again, to reinforce the message that we've talked about earlier. There's lots of different ways and we'll stay with Impact, sort of walkthroughs. Some proactive messaging will allow you to sort of provide a very guided and almost personalized approach to helping someone gather the knowledge around in this particular example, how to grade with rubrics? - And I think actually what you've said there about that personalized sort of journey for those individuals.

One of the things there, again, what we're talking about this is, is basically being able to sort of measure the progress against this. So, things like Impact Insights, like you identified earlier. It means we could identify users that are the success stories, but we can also identify people that maybe haven't adopted the tool yet. And we can target sort of communications, you know, to those people to support them through that change if they need it. - Yeah, exactly.

- Okay. So, I think, you know, we've come to sort of the end of the questions that we're sort of asking ourselves, which gives us all these ideas of the things that we should do. And so, what we do now is we go back to layering up those timelines that we spoke about before. Now, for me, after we've got the high level goals, the next place I like to go to is the technical pieces that we need to put in place. So, I'll start to map these out with an institution against those goals.

And so, we're putting the technical pieces in place means that we can then sort of align those to make sure that these are available for when the tools actually need to be used. - Okay, John, can I just interrupt there a second? Is it, you know, throughout this process, we've been talking about the people, the knowledge, and things like that. So, why do you start with the technical there in this particular process? - It's a great question and I think the real reason for this is we need to think about how people respond to change and think about things like their emotions. So for example, if we tell them that a change is going to take place and is going to take them time to learn that, people are gonna respond to that emotionally. And different people will respond differently.

But one of the things is we can try and reason with them and tell them that it's going to be a better system, but really we need to demonstrate it. We need to be able to show them how it works and show them that it's going to be easy. So, demonstration always trumps argument. Reasoning does not trump promotion. So basically, if we can put the technical pieces in place, it means we're gonna have that ability to demonstrate things.

If we then put the knowledge and training as the next layer on top of that, what we've got is this knowledge of when things are going to happen. So, the reason why we put the communication and layer up this last on what we're going to do is because to be able to give effective communication, we need all the information. And that includes the when. So, if we want to know that, well, we know we're going to need to communicate about training, or we know that we're going to need to create some walkthroughs within Impact to be available at the right point in time. We need to map those out first, because then that means we can put this adoption piece, the communication and adoption pieces in at the right time.

We're not delivering messages too early. We're delivering messages from the right people at the right time, so that people can actually adopt the change. So, that's the reason why we take it through those stages and those levels. And what it does is, you know, we call it the office wall, but it means that everything we've spoken through now, we can present in five simple tables and a timeline. And if we work through this and take that time to think, you know, this is sort of the takeaway, and this is the thought process, which could be put on one wall, can be put digitally, can then be taken into other project management tools if need be.

- I've really enjoyed this. I think it's been really interesting, really informative. And just going back to that stop look and listen idea that we talked about right at the beginning. I think this really highlights what happens in that thinking between the listen and the actual crossing of the road. Well, I hope that's been as interesting and as useful for everybody here as it has been for me.

It's been great. Thank you. - Thanks, Danny. And yeah, thanks everybody for attending.