Effective School Management

16
Antecedents of Successful Change
ORGANIZATIONAL CONDITIONS CONDUCIVE TO
SUCCESSFUL CHANGE
Fortunately, enough surveys have been made of organizations that do
implement change successfully for us to give some useful guidelines to heads
and senior staff wishing to bring their schools into this category.
Some of the surveys have focused on commercial organizations, others on
schools. Some schools have tried to apply the results of the former surveys to
themselves, and found that many of the criteria are transferable. Her
Majesty’s Inspectorate’s Ten Good Schools (1977), Peters and Waterman’s  In
Search of Excellence (1995), Goldsmith and Clutterbuck’s The Winning Streak
(1984) and the National Commission on Education’s Success Against the Odds
(1995b) are examples of such surveys.
Peters and Waterman believe (p. 110) that a major reason for excellence in
the 75 most highly regarded American companies is the habitual acceptance
of change, or ‘intentionally seeded evolution’: the excellent companies are
learning organizations, which have developed a whole host of devices and
management routines to stave off ossification. They experiment more with
change, and encourage more tries. Likewise Goldsmith and Clutterbuck
(p. 10) identify this as one of the eight distinctive characteristics of successful
British companies: ‘These companies have a continuous interest and commit-
ment to things new, to the process of change.’ All this is also patently true of
the Barrow Community Learning Partnership (BCLP) which will be used as a
case study (see page 229) to illustrate how the generic approach to the
management of change described in this book is reflected in a real
educational situation.
Professor Beckhard, of MIT, has stressed the critical importance of
managerial strategy in keeping an organization healthy, and quick on its feet.
The top managers need to have a model or a philosophy of how the
organization should work, and how it can be changed; then they must
constantly update this in the light of hard experience. They should strive to
build an organization with distinctive approaches to purpose, structure,
process, people, realism and the environment.

---

244
EFFECTIVE SCHOOL MANAGEMENT
Purpose
Effective organizations tend to be purposeful and goal directed. Their
managers, departments and the individual members work towards explicit
goals and have a clear sense of direction. The development of purpose is a
continuing activity providing a focus and a framework for understanding the
whole and linking it together. Thus schools without explicit aims and a whole-
school policy would not meet this criterion of effectiveness.