Overcoming the Immunity to Change: Robert Kegan
by Beverly Breton Carroll
Today’s educational leaders bear an unprecedented responsibility in preparing K–12 students to enter a global knowledge economy. These students will graduate into a world more demanding than anything envisioned when their teachers and administrators were in school. How do the classrooms, schools, and districts these administrators lead need to be different? How can they bring about these changes? And, most importantly, How may the leaders themselves need to change in order to bring these changes about?
Such are the questions Meehan Professor Robert Kegan explores on a daily basis. A lifespan-developmental psychologist, Kegan believes that if schools and districts are going to change fundamentally, their leaders will need to, too. “It’s going to require something more than inloading new skills, just as students need more than mere training,” Kegan says. “It’s going to require that everyone in a school system—children and adults, as well—be supported to keep growing and developing.”
At the forefront of meeting this challenge is the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Change Leadership Group (CLG), codirected by Kegan and Tony Wagner, M.A.T.’71, Ed.D.’92. Founded in 1999 with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CLG’s mission is to build school and district leaders’ capacities to ensure success for all K–12 public school students. Kegan’s input stems from his investigations into the complex meaning-making systems people can develop over a lifespan, and, more recently, his discovery, with CLG Associate Director Lisa Lahey, Ed.M.’80, Ed.D.’86, of a hidden dynamic that ordinarily prevents change. This driving force, which Kegan and Lahey refer to as “the immunity to change,” has attracted the interest of leaders in business, government, and the public sector in the US and around the world.
“We think we have discovered a powerful dynamic that tends to keep us exactly where we are, despite sincere, even passionate, intentions to change,” he says. “A recent study concluded that doctors can tell heart patients that they will literally die if they do not change their ways, and still only about one in seven will be able to make the changes. These are not people who want to die. They want to live out their lives, fulfill their dreams, watch their grandchildren grow up—and, still, they cannot make the changes they need to in order to survive.
“If wanting to change and actually being able to are so uncertainly linked when our very lives are on the line,” Kegan asks, “why should we expect that even the most passionate school leader’s aspiration to improve instruction or close achievement gaps is going to lead to these changes actually occurring?”
What this implies, says Kegan, is that more knowledge is needed about the change process itself, and more understanding of the “immunity to change.”
“Our work pays very close—and very respectful—attention to all those behaviors people engage that work against their change goals,” Kegan says. “Instead of regarding these behaviors as obstacles in need of elimination, we take them as unrecognized signals of other, usually unspoken, often unacknowledged, goals or motivations.” The countervailing tension between these two sets of equally sincere motivations creates the “immune system,” and sustains the status quo.
Kegan offers an example. “We worked with the leadership team of a California school district serving kids from low-income families. The student body is 80% Hispanic; 20% Anglo; the administrative team is just the opposite. Their unaccomplished goal is to hold their kids—especially their English-language learners—to higher expectations. Try as they might, they can’t get the system to succeed at this goal. Nothing could happen until they discovered the ‘immune system’ they were trapped in. They were preserving ‘a povrecito culture’; a culture that took pity on these ‘poor little ones’ by not ‘burdening’ them further with high academic expectations. The big insight, as another administrator put it, was seeing ‘that we could sell our kids short, not out of disrespect for them, but out of our love for them.’ That was a big eye-opener.”
“This is a simple idea,” Kegan says, “that has proven to have powerful, widespread application.” Originally described in Kegan and Lahey’s book, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work (Jossey-Bass, 2001), it is an idea that at the moment is being used to help a national railway in one European country get traction on a number of stalled improvement projects; the health ministry of another European country tackle the health epidemic of obesity; and the senior leaders of one of Massachusetts’ most challenging statewide agencies become a higher performing team.
But a central focus of this work has always been education and the schools. “Lisa and I began the work that led to this discovery while serving a school leadership team 20 years ago, and we are still working with school leadership teams today,” Kegan says.
To help school leaders achieve effective and lasting change, CLG has developed an original “leader’s curriculum” and a novel framework for learning it. Now regularly oversubscribed, CLG’s 3-day “learning labs” invite school leadership teams twice a year to come to HGSE where, among other things, they learn specific steps for uncovering and addressing these ‘immunities to change.’ This process, and the entire curriculum of the ‘learning lab’ is now described in the CLG’s pioneering book Change Leadership, A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools (Jossey-Bass, 2006).
Uniquely constituted to bring together thinking about both organizational and individual change to address the needs of America’s schools, the CLG established multi-year relationships with the leadership teams of two school districts, Grand Rapids, Michigan, a larger urban district, and West Claremont, Ohio, a smaller suburban district near Cincinnati. “The work that the Harvard group has facilitated for me and for our district,” says West Claremont Assistant Superintendent Mary Ellen Steel-Pierce, “has not been mere skill-training. It has been consciousness-raising.” Grand Rapids Superintendent Bert Bleke says, “We have experienced a fundamental shift in our mental model.”
And what are the results? “Student achievement has increased significantly, especially in the area of literacy, our primary focus,” explains Steel-Pierce. “In 1999, 52% of our 4th graders [excluding special education students] were reading at or above grade level. In 2005, 86% [including all special education students] were reading at or above grade level.
“For the first time in over 20 years,” Bleke says, “the district is experiencing higher test scores in reading and writing at the elementary level.”
