According to the second law of thermodynamics “as one goes forward in time, the net entropy (degree of disorder) of any isolated or closed system will always increase (or at least stay the same)”
All systems tend towards randomness with a parallel loss of information. This is entropy. It takes energy and work to maintain order.
Nature’s Tax I recognise entropy’s effect in my own life. Domestically: I tidy the house, create order, and then kids interact with it, increasing the degree of randomness. I have to tidy it again while imploring them to put things back where they found them. And so on, ad infinitum.
Psychologically: I organise my thoughts, I plan my day, my week, and my life, then I interact with the world, and the order I have made becomes at least disturbed, if not exploded. And I must begin again.
It takes work to resist entropy. They call it nature’s tax.
The … ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.
This idea seems to encapsulate the intention behind the implementation guidance.
The Explore, Prepare, Deliver, Sustain process is a tool for resisting the inevitable entropic tendency inherent to any plan of action.
Within a complex human endeavour, such as trying to improve attendance in a school, where large groups of people are operating through an interweaving network of relationships, in dynamic conditions, there is plenty of opportunity for entropy to wheedle its way in.
If the exploration of the issue is not thorough, the preparation is not well considered, the delivery is shambolic, and no attention is given to sustaining an endeavour, then the degree of randomness will increase exponentially, and all will be lost.
So, what drives effective implementation?
Human behaviour. Through deliberate and intentional behaviour (aka work, nature’s tax) entropy can be held at bay, at least for long enough to see an impact.
The implementation guidance defines the key implementation behaviours as engaging, uniting and reflecting.
For a plan to succeed, all the stakeholders must be engaged. Crucially, with regard to attendance, this very much means the students and young people who are not coming to school. Find out why.
A Common ‘Why’ This neat arrow sums up united behaviour, with everyone unified around a common ‘why’ with a shared plan of action and the capacity in place to deliver it. But the arrow is made of people, and people behave unpredictably or for reasons outside the scope of the plan. Each individual within the united arrow is a potential point of entropy; all it takes is a loss of focus on the why, a lack of confidence in the delivery, or the pull of a more significant external influence, and the arrow begins to dissipate. Before you know it, it will be a directionless blob. Entropy.
The guidance also states that implementation is a collaborative, social process. This is key to managing entropy. Social processes are hard to control. The culture of and relationships within any community will consume your well-made strategy and turn it into something else, maybe not to your liking.
How do we work with this? Myron’s Maxims are a good place to start.
Myron Rogers is an academic and expert in systems thinking and change. His work highlights the importance of understanding organisations as complex, living systems within which change emerges from the interactions and relationships that make the system in the first place.
Schools and school communities are living systems. One of Myron’s key tenets is that you cannot change a living system; you can only disturb it. The living system will reorganise itself in response to disturbance, and it will reorganise itself in order to preserve its identity. This is partly why change is so difficult to engender, especially around a complex problem like attendance with so many unseen factors at play.
These are Myron’s Maxims
– People own what they help create – Real change happens in real work – Those who do the work, do the change – Connect the system to more of itself – Start anywhere, follow everywhere – The process you use to get to the future is the future you get.
There is so much to explore in these ideas, but the first and the last resonate with the EEF’s School’s Guidance to Implementation.
Everyone must be engaged and involved in the process, as an imposed policy will be eaten up by a living system. Unless the change emerges from the system, it cannot be part of the system.
The change process is the change. The process cannot produce an outcome which is made of a different material. If it is not collaborative, neither will the outcome be. If it is focussed on what’s not currently working rather than on finding new solutions borne of deeper understanding, then the future will be as flawed as the past.
Entropy Leads to Innovation On reflection, entropy can be a good thing. What are new realisations if not the introduction of disturbance into a rigid set of ideas or beliefs? Without entropy, nothing would ever change. The challenge is to understand the threat of unforeseen randomness while leveraging the correct degree of disturbance to affect the change you need.
This blog is interesting on entropy within organisations:
