The road to hell is paved with optimism and unasked questions. How do you find your off ramp?
The start of the school year is quickly approaching, underway, or well underway for schools across the country and the mention of this may have made your body tense.
The myth of transportation is we think that most of the planning and change management we implement occurs during the summer. The reality is that the most important and consequential change management practices occur in response to the realities of the successes and failures that occur at school start.
How can you put yourself in a position to succeed most frequently and prevent the need to plan and replan and replan?
Turning a nightmare into a dream
There is many a transportation director who wake up in a cold sweat when preparing for school start. There are even more whose dreams of a smooth opening become nightmares of bad data, driver shortages, and nutty drivers. One of the most important things we can do as a leader is figure out how to capitalize on the nightmares and dreams from previous years and put them in their proper context.
The challenge is that last year or even last week can feel like a long time ago and our ability to fully document and understand our own history can be a challenge. Avoiding selective memory, recalling only the extremes, or minimizing problems because we got through it before are common memory traps to avoid.
A better approach is to be proactive about possible failure by utilizing what Dr. Gary Klein coined a “pre-mortem”. This process starts with assuming the effort you are undertaking (think school start or changing bell times) has already failed. The job of you and your team is to try to figure out why. This process allows you to identify places you think may become a critical issue, and brainstorm ways to address them before they happen.
A similar, and possibly more optimistic way to think about this, is a process called backcasting. This idea, eloquently detailed by Dr. Annie Duke in her book Thinking in Bets, starts with an assumption of success and forces the team to describe in detail how that might have happened. The goal of this process is to clearly articulate the key requirements for success, the indicators of a failure, and the allocation of activities and responses to facilitate the success.
The combination of thinking about failure and success can provide you with a full understanding of what you, your team, and other stakeholders need to do to succeed in creating lasting change in your organization. It also helps you separate dreams from reality and keep the nightmares at bay.
Preventing the wheels from coming off
Consider the idea of a linchpin, a small but critical piece that keeps a wheel from falling off its axle. If the linchpin fails, the whole system fails. Thinking, analyzing, and evaluating where the linchpins are in your operation allows you to have awareness before their possible failure. What will you do if and when they fail, and how can you test your solutions before they happen to know if they will really work? Create insurance for yourself and your team, by being critical of the things you think you already know.
When something inevitably goes wrong, explanations are abundant – in hindsight. Think about your leadership style and how you respond when people identify something might be wrong. How do you handle it? Do you handle it differently if they are correct versus if they are incorrect? Encourage forums for you and your team to sit down and discuss your linchpins and what you will do if they start coming loose.
Having a plan for a crisis and never using it is a thousand times better than being in the midst of a crisis trying to create a plan. Utilizing preventative strategies rather than relying on history and hope to get you through will ultimately train you and your staff to be cool under the inevitable pressure of school start.
Things to make you smarter:
Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
Stop thinking about what you should be doing, and start worrying about what you shouldn’t be doing