The Long Game of Change

Sunday Morning Coffee Reflection

I’m not a particularly patient person. People who know me are probably laughing right now.

When I see something that doesn't make sense, I want to fix it. When I see a better way to do something, I want to try it. And when the answer is, "We've always done it this way," some part of my brain immediately starts developing a PowerPoint presentation explaining why we should stop.

This has served me pretty well over the course of my career. Mostly.

But four decades of working in education and corrections have taught me something I probably needed to learn: meaningful change usually takes much longer than the people trying to create it would like. Sometimes much, much longer. And sometimes, you don't get to see the ending.

We Like Change We Can See

There's something satisfying about launching a program because you can point to it. Here's the classroom. Here are the students. Here's the curriculum. Here are the certificates. Here's the data. We did something, and there's tangible evidence that it exists.

But when I think back over my career, some of the most important changes I've witnessed haven't happened that way. They've happened quietly, often long before there was anything impressive to put into an annual report.

I've watched someone who initially opposed an idea become one of its strongest advocates. I've seen a teacher try something new because another teacher down the hall had success with it. I've watched correctional officers who were skeptical about education programs become the people making sure students got to class. I've seen students who never thought of themselves as "college material" enroll in college. I've watched leaders move from asking, "Why should we do this?" to "How could we make this work?"

Those moments aren't ribbon-cutting moments. They're often barely noticeable while they're happening.

But that's how systems begin to move.

Systems Are Very Good at Staying the Same

Anyone who’s tried to change a correctional system knows what you're up against. There are policies and budgets, contracts and staffing structures, security procedures and regulations, politics and decades of institutional history. Then there are the four most powerful words in organizational life: We've always done it this way.

It can be incredibly frustrating. You can see something that would clearly improve opportunities for students or staff and still spend months, or years, trying to make it happen.

Early in my career, I probably interpreted resistance primarily as an obstacle to overcome. I understand it differently now. Sometimes resistance is fear. Sometimes it's fatigue. Sometimes people have watched five leaders arrive with five different initiatives and learned that waiting is a perfectly effective strategy because initiative number six will probably arrive shortly.

People may also have seen promising programs launched with enormous enthusiasm only to disappear when funding ended or leadership changed. And sometimes the people resisting your brilliant new idea know something about the system that you don't know yet.

None of that means we stop pushing for change. It means we get smarter about how we push.

Planting Seeds Is Work

I've had conversations throughout my career that seemed to go absolutely nowhere. I made the argument. Presented the evidence. Explained the idea. Nothing happened.

Then, months or sometimes years later, I'd hear someone repeat almost exactly the same idea, occasionally as though they'd just invented it.

This is another moment when patience comes in handy, because if the goal is actually change, it doesn't matter nearly as much who gets credit for the idea. What matters is that the idea took root.

I've come to think that leadership requires a willingness to plant seeds in places where you may never sit under the tree. That's difficult in organizations where we're accustomed to measuring progress through quarterly reports, annual goals, grant deliverables, and strategic plans. We want to be able to draw a straight line between what we did and what happened next.

But systems change on a different clock.

The same is true of the people we serve.

We love the dramatic success story. Someone enters a program, embraces every opportunity, earns a credential, gets a great job, reunites with family, and never looks back. Those stories happen, and they're wonderful, but human change is usually messier. Someone takes three steps forward and two back. A student drops out and returns. A person gets a job and loses it. Someone makes a terrible decision after months of good ones. A person hears the same message twenty times before something about the twenty-first time lands differently.

That doesn't mean the first twenty times didn't matter.

I think we sometimes underestimate how much change is happening before we can see it. Confidence may be developing before someone’s willing to take a risk. A student may be reconsidering something they have believed about themselves for years. Someone may be watching an adult show up consistently and slowly deciding that maybe this person can be trusted.

Not everything important announces itself when it happens.

Sometimes Your Job Is Just to Move the Ball

I've been fortunate during my career to lead some significant changes. I've also worked on things that didn't move nearly as far as I wanted them to, and that's harder for me to accept.

We want our chapter to have a satisfying ending. We want to be able to say, We fixed it.

But most of the problems we're trying to solve in corrections, education, workforce development, and reentry weren't created by one person, one policy, or one administration. We're probably not going to solve them that way either.

Sometimes our job is simply to move the ball farther down the field.

Maybe we make one policy better. Build one program. Change one assumption. Develop one partnership. Open one door. Prove that one thing everyone said couldn't be done actually can be done. Then someone else takes it from there.

That counts.

In fact, I'm increasingly convinced that some of the most important leadership work we do is creating possibilities that other people will eventually expand.

Don't Confuse Slow With Stuck

This may be the lesson I need to remind myself of most often.

When you're close to the work, progress can be difficult to see because you're constantly confronted by everything that hasn't changed. You see the policy that still makes no sense, the program that still isn't funded, the leader who still doesn't understand, the student who still isn't getting what they need, and the system that still seems stubbornly committed to making simple things complicated, but every once in a while, it's worth zooming out.

Think about correctional education twenty or thirty years ago. Think about the expansion of postsecondary education in prisons, the use of educational technology, the growth of career pathways, greater attention to trauma and executive functioning, stronger reentry planning, peer support, and a growing recognition that preparing someone to return home requires considerably more than a bus ticket and good luck.

Is everything where it should be? Not even close.

But it's not where it was either.

Slow isn't the same as stuck.

The Long Game Requires a Particular Kind of Hope

Working for change over decades requires hope, but probably not the kind we usually put on motivational posters. I've been around too long for the version of hope that assumes everything will work out simply because good people are trying hard.

I mean a more stubborn kind of hope. The kind that looks directly at what's wrong without pretending it isn't there. The kind that survives disappointing budgets, leadership changes, programs that disappear, policies that make no sense, setbacks you didn't anticipate, and good ideas that simply weren't ready yet.

It's the kind of hope that understands you may never see the full impact of something you started and decides the work is still worth doing.

Maybe that's what the long game really is: not believing that change will happen quickly, but believing that what we do today can make tomorrow a little more possible.

Keep Moving the Ball

There are days when people doing this work wonder whether they're making any difference at all. I know because I've had them.

On those days, I think it's worth remembering that we don't always get to see the full arc of our work. The student you encouraged may remember something you said years later. The staff member you mentored may become the leader who changes something you couldn't. The program you piloted may become the model someone else expands. The question you kept asking may eventually become the question everyone starts asking, and the door you managed to crack open may someday be pushed wide by someone you've never met.

That's the long game.

We don't have to finish everything we start, but I do think we have a responsibility to leave something better for the people who come next, to move the work a little farther than we found it and make the next step a little easier for someone else to take.

So plant the seed. Ask the question. Build the pilot. Challenge the assumption. Mentor the person. Move the ball.

And when change feels impossibly slow, remember that you may simply be standing in the middle of a story whose ending you won't get to see. That doesn't make your part of the story any less important.

And for goodness’ sake, if someone before you leaves you with the seeds of change, grow those suckers instead of leaving them to wither away in dry ground.

Cheers on this chilly feeling-like-fall morning. Here’s to a productive week and the dream of change. May your dreams offer solutions and first steps!