Help! I'm Stuck! When Your Big Initiative Stalls

Whether standing up an initiative, guiding an organizational change, retooling, launching an online program, or creating a digital learning project of any type, those charged with guiding projects face an ever-complex organizational landscape requiring them to work with leaders at all levels in their institutions. This type of highly complex working environment calls for careful and conscious leadership. Alumni from OLC’s Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (IELOL) are among the leaders in our higher education institutions paving the way to the maturity and ever-innovative nature of online education, and as such can benefit from maintaining their built-in personal learning network they cultivated during their program experience, and are perhaps too busy to cultivate throughout the year. Other emerging, mid-career, or seasoned leaders, too, have impetus to transform their online education environment in a meaningful, impactful method. 

Participants will have an opportunity to identify a challenge or possible innovation they are currently embarking upon at their institutions, map it to the Managing Change Model framework to identify areas of focus, and then work directly with peers on solution engineering or innovating. Considerations for instituting a project or change will involve choosing an approach based on context, climate, and culture of the set of activities to be implemented in a strategic, successful, integrated method. Audience members will leave this highly interactive workshop with a reinvigorated plan for project success, as well as a renewed sense of belonging to a large and helpful personal learning network that can be leveraged throughout the year as project success ebbs and flows. 

This session utilizes the Managing Complex Change Model developed by Dr. Mary Lippett (1987).  This helpful framework provides a platform for problem ideation and helps to pinpoint gaps in successful change projects for solution creation by focusing on five key focus areas:

1. Vision

2. Skills

3. Incentives

4. Resources

5. Action Plan

This framework allows us to assess multiple dimensions in project management through a powerful and easy-to-grasp diagnostic tool.  By selecting a project and focusing on its current or desired outcomes through this change model framework, participants will continue to discover creative ways to facilitate valuable impact for their institutions. 

To fine-tune change strategies through project implementation, integrating key expertise will need consideration. Considerations should include focusing on the people side of the project to source those willing to contribute to the activities and to build a guiding coalition for the efforts (Kotter, 2012), partly achieved by participants’ opportunity to build informal professional learning networks external to their higher education institution to shape their own professional journeys during this workshop. Additionally, considerations of how the people side of any change effort integrates with managing communications, ensuring quality, and adjusting the set of activities planned are key to managing a defined set of activities (PMI, 2017). This should result in creating champions (Rogers, 2003) and success stories to intentionally showcase short term wins (Kotter, 2012). To maintain the momentum of success for achieving the larger vision, continued dedication is necessary to initiate the next set of activities within a change effort (Kotter, 2012). Exploring and honing in on the gaps and next steps to achieve the vision for a strategic, successful, sustainable solutions or innovations through a network of peers would serve to strengthen transformative, conscious leadership capacities.

For continuing to strengthen leadership capacities, participants may be interested in other opportunities to stay connected to the IELOL community. Perhaps a series of problem-solving and fellowship workshops in-person at OLC Conferences, for example, or sessions hosted quarterly through Zoom would enable formal methods to network and engage with other leaders. Participants could also determine other ways to continue their efforts from this session with their group members to further give and receive professional advice and support. Leveraging leaders’ experiences, recent research, or optimizing the utility of personal learning networks, these opportunities for the IELOL community to stay connected, could serve as a platform for a much larger change initiative in online education through creating nationwide networks facing similar challenges, solving them communally, and in doing so, raising the profile and potential transformative impact of online education in the process. 

The Help! I’m Stuck! When Your Big Initiative Stalls is a workshop facilitating a fast-paced think-tank of peers, collaborators, and friends from the extensive IELOL program and beyond. This workshop aligns proven change management and problem solving frameworks with practice as well as a network of leaders assisting each other in planning a thoughtful and strategic path forward when challenges or opportunities arise in their higher education workplaces.   

Participants will: 

1. Explore a problem or challenge they are currently experiencing, 

2. Utilize the Managing Complex Change model to pinpoint areas of focus, 

3. Solicit ideas from peers and devise a strategic or tactical plan to overcome the problem or challenge, 

4. Walk away with different perspectives to solving their project dilemmas or innovate.

5. Gain a renewed sense of purpose for their project success.

6. Create, cultivate, and sustain a personal learning network to remain in contact throughout the year for productive conversations and ongoing problem-solving.  

Agenda: 

• Participants will work through a quick assessment to identify affinity groups.

• Participants will reflect on and document a challenge or problem they are currently facing in their institution

• Participants will map the challenge or problem to the Managing Complex Change matrix to quickly identify the gaps that need focus

• Presenters will frame up the challenges to act as prompts to activate thinking around the leadership challenges each attendee may be facing; participants will then be put into affinity groups by project topic area, institution type, or other criteria (small groups of 6-8 each).  

• Time allotment: 

  • 10 minutes of completing the opening assessment 

  • 5 minutes of framing of the issues and the task demand(s) (e.g., table conversations) that will follow

  • 55 minutes of semi-structured conversation with multiple pivot points/prompts (breakdown:)

    • 20 mins to describe projects at table 

    • 5 mins to review Managing Complex Change grid handout

    • 30 minutes to describe small case studies as prompts to refocus and drive the conversations around solutions 

  • 15 minutes for share out with prompts to further push analysis on problem/project management

  • 5-min wrap up to exchange contact info if desired and suggest possibilities to continue your new PLN 

References

Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Review Press.

Lippitt, M., (1987).The managing complex change model.

Project Management Institute (2017). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK, 6th ed.).

Rogers, E. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations (5th ed.). Simon and Schuster.