Sir Steve Lancashire is Chair of Forum Strategy’s National #TrustLeaders CEO network. He also provides mentoring a number of CEOs across our network and through the Being The CEO programme. In this month’s blog, Steve reflects on change management, drawing from his own personal experience leading a trust through significant growth.
According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, it is not the strongest, biggest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those that can best manage change.
I reflected on this a lot in the early days when I was thinking about growing the trust. Not in a dog eat dog, survival of the fittest, king of the food chain kind of way but more in the way that the concept, if we apply it to inanimate organisations rather than living, breathing organisms, emphasises that growth is not just about expansion or getting bigger but about evolving in response to changing conditions. I soon came to realise that organisations that best manage change grow in ways that strengthen their resilience, relevance, and competitiveness, positioning themselves not only to survive but to thrive (a concept we hold dear at Forum Strategy) in a constantly evolving educational landscape.
And once again, growth of trusts is on the minds of many CEOs, even within the changing landscape within which we find ourselves; it’s currently the most popular topic of conversation I’m involved in. I’ve covered the reasons why growth can be a good thing in another blog, so I won’t repeat those arguments here, but an essential truth intrinsically linked to growth is that it goes hand in hand with change. One is not possible without the other. Yet this is a fact that is often not given enough consideration, particularly when it comes to what it means for us as CEOs.
Such was the pace and scale of the growth of my own trust that it pretty much was the case that after three years and having gone from one school to forty schools I did the Sleeping Beauty wake up from a dream ‘How did THAT happen and ‘WHERE’ am I?’ kind of thing, looking around at an organisation that seemed to have little resemblance to the tiny trust that was the genesis of it all. But what was different? What does change look like as organisations get bigger?
