Campbells Bay School .::. Principal

Change. It’s happening all the time. It’s all around us. We can’t avoid it. It’s part of our lives. As George Will, a writer for the Washington Post, once said: “The future has a way of arriving unannounced”. I must admit that I like change. My nickname at home is “Gadget Girl”. I have an iTouch, a touch-screen phone and I belong to Facebook. I am saving for an iPad. Because of all my gadgets I can’t afford any new furniture so I satisfy my need for change by just moving around the furniture that I do have!

Lucky for me perhaps the world today is characterised by continual change. And indeed the world is changing fast. I was born in 1963 so I have thoroughly enjoyed watching the recent TV series “Mad Men” which is set in 1963, the year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. What else happened in 1963? Well, 10 years I ago I would have phoned my mother and said to her: “Mum, I’m writing a speech about change and I need to know how the world has changed in my lifetime. What was the world like in 1963?” Now, instead, I just Googled it, and had 33,400,000 results in 0.23 seconds. Not even my mother’s memory can compete with that. So, in 1963, a hurricane and resulting tsunami killed 22,000 people in Pakistan and Bangladesh, American Express introduced credit cards, the Berlin Wall opened for one day passes, the Great Train Robbery took place in Buckinghamshire England, Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” speech, the Beatles released their first album, the film Laurence of Arabia was released and the Dick van Dyke Show was very popular on TV. Closer to home, Keith Holyoake was our Prime Minister, Sir Dove-Myer Robinson was the Mayor of Auckland, Tauranga became a city, Bob Charles won the British Open, the British Overseas Airways Corporation began a twice-weekly jet service between London and New Zealand, and Lynnmall, our first American-style shopping mall, opened in Auckland.

Yes, change is certainly happening all the time in every area of our lives and the pace of change seems to accelerate as time goes on – whereas we might have kept our first mobile phone for 3 or 4 years, now we happily exchange it every year (or more often) as technology advances. Who would have thought even five years ago that we would be downloading the songs and videos of our choice online, shopping from our desktop, ‘skype-ing’ our friends on the other side of the world, and watching TV on demand? These rapid changes in technology are just one set of examples of change. We also experience change in many other aspects of our lives such as science, medicine, politics, and even the climate.

And what is ‘change’ really? It is commonly defined as: making different, causing a transformation, altering the known, and/or exchanging or replacing something. What we do know that is that change is all around us – it is a certainty that nothing remains the same for long. Some changes happen to us whether we like it or not, and others come about because we choose them or cause them to happen. Some change is externally-imposed; some is internally-generated. Sometimes change seems to return us to the past, such as the current renewed interest in home cooking and baking, organic food, vegetable gardening, shopping in our local shops and markets, and buying locally-produced or manufactured goods. Sometimes change moves us forward into the realm of the new and novel, such as computer technology, the advent of hybrid cars, and the recent proliferation of self-tanning products. Sometimes change is localised and discrete; at other times, one change leads to a myriad of other changes. Some people love change while others actively resist it. Some people work in order to achieve change; others wait for it to happen. Whatever its nature, change has been talked about and researched for many years, and is an established field of study in both the generic sense and within particular contexts such as education.

In fact, I am so sure that everyone knows this that I think it is time to stop talking about change as an event, a phenomenon or a blip on the otherwise smooth and tranquil journey that is life. If I hear one more speech where the speaker declares that the world is changing so fast that we are educating children for jobs that don’t even exist yet, I think I will scream. As Nobel Prize in Literature winner Pearl S Buck would say, you can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come into contact with a new idea. Frankly I don’t think we need to worry about our children too much anyway – they don’t even notice change. Their young, still short lives are so characterised by change that they are no longer characterised by change. That sounds confusing and it is difficult to explain. But I don’t know that resistance to change will be such an issue in the workplace as our school children of today hit the workforce – change is so much their whole way of operating as individuals, consumers and thinkers, that it is no longer identifiable. The world is transforming itself at so great and consistent a pace, that it is no longer possible to really identify “how things were before” and what it was like “in the good old days”. This 1999 quote from Peter Drucker, one of the world’s most widely known and well respected experts on leadership and management, captures this notion particularly well:

Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes — it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm (Drucker, 1999).

So I think we need to think about change as a continual and ongoing process, and try to make it as smooth as possible in our organisations, always building on what we already do and what we know works. There will always be times when organisational life is relatively tranquil, and there will always be times when there are a few bumps in the road, but overall, in my view, change rules the day.