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The Trouble with Top-Down Change: Leadership Insights from Making Change Stick

Writer's picture: Dr James MannionDr James Mannion
Illustration of a person resting their head on their hand. Holding a sign with a pyramidal org chart
What could go wrong?

Two posts ago, I wrote about the ‘mind-blowing question’: What proportion of school improvement initiatives actually improve anything? (Spoiler: vanishingly few, it would seem).


In this post I’d like to explore a second big reason: there are many problems associated with top-down change, and this is itself is a problem because top-down change is our default model.


A top-down world


Much of society is predicated on the idea that top-down change is the best way to organise human affairs. In politics, business and healthcare, for example, there’s usually a small number of people at the ‘top’ of the organisation – cabinet ministers, board members, NHS directors – who make decisions about what needs to happen and then just kind of ‘announce’ those decisions to people further down the hierarchy.


Education is no different, with the Secretary of State at the top of the pyramid – down through myriad layers of junior ministers, civil servants, regional schools commissioners, trust CEOs, executive headteachers, headteachers, deputy heads, assistant principals, heads of faculty, heads of department, lead practitioners, seconds in department, classroom teachers, teaching assistants and learning support assistants – and with children and young people at the ‘bottom’. Throughout this hierarchy, decision-making is largely one-directional, and it flows from top to bottom.


When top-down works


To be clear, top-down change can be useful – usually when a situation calls for swift action or lends itself to a straightforward solution.


For example, I used to work at a school where we had a significant problem with litter. There have been some fascinating studies looking at how the presence of litter can affect people’s behaviour, even increasing the incidence of criminal and antisocial behaviour.[1] 


There was not an epidemic of criminal or antisocial activity at my litter-strewn school. However, it’s likely that having so much rubbish lying around may have adversely affected the pupils’ sense of respect for the school, their behaviour and perhaps even their learning in lessons.


One day, the senior team took decisive action. From that day forth, pupils would only be allowed to eat and drink in the canteen. Despite some initial grumbles, everyone soon adapted to the new rule, the litter problem went away overnight, and the school was a much more pleasant place to be.


Beyond education, the introduction of seat belts and the indoor smoking ban are two commonly cited examples where top-down change led to improved public health outcomes.[2] Generally, top-down change is effective when there’s a simple cause-and-effect relationship between two factors (seat belts save lives, cigarettes shorten them) and where a single policy decision gets to the heart of the matter.


When top-down is less effective


When we’re dealing with more complex, multi-dimensional issues, top-down change tends to be less effective. The areas of school life that often feature in school improvement plans, such as improving reading, reforming the curriculum or improving behaviour, tend to fall into this category. At the level of national education policy, this includes things like fixing the attendance crisis, closing the disadvantage gap or improving mental health and wellbeing. Wider societal examples include things like averting climate catastrophe, fixing the social care crisis or addressing the fact that life expectancy has started going down for the first time in decades.


Top-down change is not only ineffective at solving complex problems such as these, it’s often counterproductive. Here are six ways in which top-down change can inhibit school improvement.


1. Black box leadership


When the ‘people at the top’ make all the big decisions, they often keep things to themselves. Senior leadership teams tend not to publish the minutes of their meetings, nor do they open their meetings to a ‘viewing gallery’ as happens in local council meetings, courts of law and the House of Commons. Instead, senior teams usually hold meetings behind closed doors. All the key decisions are made inside a ‘black box’ that the wider school community cannot see into.


As a consequence, the wider school community does not get to play a meaningful role in shaping the decisions that affect their daily lives, or even to see how these decisions are made. Instead, people further down the hierarchy often feel that change is ‘done to them’. This brings us to the second way in which top-down change can be counterproductive.


2. Human nature


Put simply, people don’t like having change ‘done to them’ – even when it’s a really good idea. This is a well-documented aspect of human nature – as a general rule, people don’t like being told what to do. Conversely, people really do like to have at least a small amount of say over what they do, how and when.


This hard-wired need for autonomy becomes apparent at a very young age, when a parent tries to put their child’s shoes on, for example, and the child says, ‘No! Me do it!’ This pattern persists long into adulthood. Indeed, several studies have found that autonomy is more important to employees than how much they get paid.[3]


Research has found that giving people autonomy in the workplace can improve staff retention, increase wellbeing and enhance productivity. It’s what you might call a win-win-win. But these benefits remain unrealised in a top-down culture where the autonomy of the wider workforce is constrained or suppressed. As Michael Fullan memorably puts it: ‘If you want to kill a good idea, mandate it.’[4]


3. Consultation exercises


In a top-down culture, leaders often undertake a consultation exercise at the outset of a change initiative. Broadly speaking, this is to be encouraged – when they’re done well, consultation exercises draw on a wide pool of experience to help inform decision-making. They can also help make the wider school community feel included in the change process.


However, there are several ways in which consultation exercises can be counterproductive. The worst case is when consultation exercises are conducted to create the appearance of having listened to people, when in fact most of the key decisions have already been made.


Even when consultations are conducted in a spirit of genuine curiosity and collaboration, if people feel their suggestions have been ignored, they may perceive the process to have been a hollow ‘listening exercise’. Rather than making people feel included, this can lead to a sense of resentment or ill-feeling towards the change initiative.


Another issue is consultations tend to take place at a particular point in time, for example within a 30-day window. Consequently, the information collected is limited to what is known at that point in time. If important information comes to light once the consultation window has closed, there may be no obvious mechanism through which the wider school community can contribute to the decision-making process.


4. An ‘us and them’ culture


Within any population, some people are more ready for change than others. Typically, there will be a spectrum with ‘keen beans’ at one end and ‘resistors’ at the other, with everyone else somewhere in between. This is a foundational concept in implementation science that we’ll explore in Chapter 13: Plan for diffusion.

When change is implemented in a top-down way, there’s often an expectation that everyone will implement the change in lockstep – ‘keen beans’ and ‘resistors’ alike. Where resistance is encountered, leaders may respond in one or more of the following ways:


  • Have a quiet word to clarify expectations.

  • Provide support to help the person adapt to the new norm.

  • Notify the person’s line manager, asking them to make clear this is a whole-school expectation and they need to get ‘on the bus’.

  • Arrange a meeting to discuss the issue formally.

  • Put something in writing, such as a warning letter, contract or agreement that the person signs up to.


Where resistance becomes entrenched, more serious actions may be considered – the dreaded ‘support packages’ and ‘capability measures’. Another approach is simply to adopt a heavy-handed tone. People sometimes refer to this approach as strong-arm leadership, or my way or the highway, where a leader essentially says, ‘I’m the boss, this is my decision – and if you don’t like it, you know where the door is.’


This approach may be effective at suppressing dissenting voices in the short term. But it can also create a culture of fear, rather than an open-door ethos of trust and mutual support where people feel they can take risks and request support around issues they’re struggling with without fear of repercussion.


Whichever of these options are used – from the quiet word to the heavy-handed ultimatum – it’s important to recognise these are all top-down moves, with one person using their authority to encourage, persuade or coerce a colleague into changing their ways. Because they rely on a power differential, all such top-down moves can create an ‘us and them’ culture, with school leaders doing the doing and their colleagues being done to. In some cases, this ‘us and them’ culture can become toxic, with the senior team and the wider staff body viewing one another as adversaries rather than as colleagues working to achieve the same goals.


5. A compliance mindset


When you’re implementing a school improvement initiative, what you really want is for everyone to get on board with a change initiative to help drive it through. In the best-case scenario, everyone in the organisation will be involved in trying out new ideas and strategies, evaluating the impact on pupil learning and sharing best practice.


However, when change is implemented in a top-down way, people often aim simply for compliance. They don’t really buy in to the change initiative, but equally they don’t want to be seen as being awkward. They simply want to be seen to be doing the right thing when somebody walks past with a clipboard, without fundamentally changing their practice. In this way, a top-down approach to change management can create a tickbox mentality, rather than harnessing the collective will of the staff body to drive the process of school improvement.


6. Groupthink


In 1971, the psychologist Irving Janis published a seminal article in which he set out to explain how ‘one of the greatest arrays of intellectual talent in the history of the American government’ could have presided over some of the worst foreign policy disasters in modern history, including the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.[5]


Janis concluded that in groups of like-minded people – even when those people are highly capable, intelligent and well qualified – decisionmaking often goes awry because of unhealthy in-group dynamics. According to Janis, members of ‘prestige’ decision-making teams often come to value the group, and their role within it, higher than anything else. They become susceptible to ‘group norms that bolster morale at the expense of critical thinking.’[6] This leads them to strive for conformity and unanimity on issues that the group faces and to not think carefully enough about the implications of the decisions they make together.[7]


Such unhelpful group dynamics can also extend beyond leadership teams. Imagine a headteacher announces a new school improvement initiative to the whole staff. A teacher or member of the support staff may think, ‘Hmmm. We tried this at my last school and it really didn’t work very well. Perhaps I ought to say something…’


However, that person probably won’t want to raise their hand in a whole-school meeting and contradict their boss, partly because it would be awkward to do so and partly because contradicting your boss in a public forum may not be the best way to advance your career. So, they bite their tongue. This is perfectly understandable. However, we can see how this tendency for people to avoid conflict in the interest of group harmony or selfpreservation leads to bad decision-making. The headteacher is not made aware of all the relevant information held in the room.


When making decisions that affect many people’s lives, it’s a good idea to have highly capable, intelligent and well-qualified people in the room. What you don’t want is to have only highly capably, intelligent and wellqualified people in the room. You also need people who are looking at the problem through fresh eyes. And you especially need people who aren’t afraid to ask so-called ‘stupid questions’.


Because when someone says, ‘Can I ask a stupid question?’, what they often really mean is, ‘Am I missing something, or is this a terrible idea?’


Groupthink has been responsible for many terrible incidents over the years, including aeroplane crashes, space shuttle disasters and financial meltdowns. It’s the most serious problem associated with top-down change. And it’s far more common than you may think.[8]


Some organisations have developed practices that minimise the extent to which groupthink happens. For example, Toyota have developed an approach to lean manufacturing known as ‘The Toyota Way’[9], which includes a number of key ideas such as:


  • Nemawashi – making decisions slowly by consensus.

  • Hansei – self-reflection.

  • Kaizen – continuous improvement.


These ideas, which are woven throughout the Making Change Stick programme, have also been put to good use in the public sector.


However, such approaches are the exception to the rule. In education – as in business, healthcare and politics – top-down rules the roost, and there remains an urgent need to learn how to systematically avoid groupthink in schools – and in the wider society.


It doesn’t have to be this way


To recap, there are two main reasons why so many school improvement initiatives fail to achieve their intended goals:


  1. To date, school leaders haven’t been taught how to implement change effectively – and this is a significant part of their role.

  2. There are many problems with top-down change – and this in itself is a problem, because top-down change is our default model.


The good news is that neither of these problems are insurmountable, and the Making Change Stick programme tackles each of them head on.


In my next post, I'll explore the way in which the Making Change Stick programme draws together ideas from a wide range of fields, and is an attempt to creates a synthesis of two fields in particular: implementation science and improvement science.


Until the next time...!


Footnotes


[1] Keep Britain Tidy (2014). How Clean is England? Local Environmental Quality Survey of England 2013/2014. November, London: Keep Britain Tidy. See also Keizer, K. E. (2010). The spreading of disorder. [Thesis fully internal (DIV), University of Groningen]. [s.n.].


[2] Høye, A. (2016). How would increasing seat belt use affect the number of killed or seriously injured light vehicle occupants? Accident Analysis & Prevention, 88, 175–86. Strassmann, A., Çolak, Y., Serra-Burriel, M. et al. (2023). Nationwide indoor smoking ban and impact on smoking behaviour and lung function: a twopopulation natural experiment. BMJ Thorax, 78, 144–150.


[3] Reisinger, H. & Fetterer, D. (2021). Forget Flexibility. Your employees want autonomy. Harvard Business Review, October 20. Retrieved from: https://hbr. org/2021/10/forget-flexibility-your-employees-want-autonomy. See also Maestas, N., Mullen, K. J., Powell, D., von Wachter, T. & Wenger, J. B. (2018). The Value of Working Conditions in the United States and Implications for the Structure of Wages. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 25204: 22.


[4] Fullan, M. (2024). It is about being specific about the change but not mandating it. (If you want to kill a good idea, mandate it). If it’s good AND specific most people will adopt it. Retrieved from: https://x.com/MichaelFullan1/ status/1770542102855713227.


[5] Janis, I. (1971). Groupthink. Psychology Today, 5(6), 43–6.


[6] Ibid, p43.


[7] Janis, I. (1972). Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.


[8] NeuroLeadership Institute (2020). The Worst Aviation Accident in History is a Case Study for Giving Employees a Voice. August 6. Retrieved from: https:// neuroleadership.com/your-brain-at-work/speaking-up-can-prevent-aviationaccident; Janis, I. (1991). ‘Groupthink’ in E. Griffin (ed.) A First Look at Communication Theory (pp 235–46). New York: McGraw Hill; Esser, J. K. & Lindoerfer, J. S. (1989). Groupthink and the space shuttle challenger accident: Toward a quantitative case analysis. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. 2(3), 167–77; Nichols, P. E. (2010). Groupthink Theory and the Great Crash of 1929. Honors Theses. 1112. Retrieved from: https://repository.lsu.edu/honors_etd/1112.


[9] If you want to learn more about The Toyota Way, you can visit the Wikipedia article at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way.

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