Headmaster’s Weekly Comment

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.  Jim Rohn

The School is about to go through a significant change with the retirement of the present long-serving Headmaster and his replacement with someone else.  The process is being guided by the Board of Governors and they are very conscious of the need to be both professional and objective, while also taking into account the School community’s understandable jitters.

So I thought I d address some aspects of the change this week, by looking at the Change Cycle itself.

The classic Change Cycle looks at six phases of response to change and analyses the characteristic feelings thoughts and behaviour in each phase.  These can be put into a table:

Moving from left to right the first responses are negative and passive moving to negative and active.  Then there is the Danger Zone where the negative responses transform into more positive energies.  At the point between 3 and 4 a person or an organisation can retreat and the change fails to stick.

An understanding of theses phases and careful leadership and peer support can help bridge the gap and then the positive energies can begin to flow around the change. 

All of us would clearly like to see the School in a buoyant, positive frame characterized by Satisfaction, Focus and Generosity.  And it is.  But with significant change in the offing, we may need to exercise patience and understanding with our own feelings and those of others before the change is fully integrated.