Resources for Changemaking

We use the best available evidence and approaches to inspire and guide our action, while being continuously curious, emergent and evolving, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Articles about our changemaking

Learnings and tools for transformational change and student wellbeing
NIRSA
Erin O’Sullivan and Allison Smith
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Pursuing Transformational Change for Better Student Well-Being: Key Learnings From Eight Universities
NASPA Leadership Exchange – Fall 2022
Allison Smith, Carlo Ciotoli, Catherine Craig
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Call to action: Better care, better health, and greater value in college health
Journal of American College Health
Carlo Ciotoli, Allison J Smith, and Richard P. Keeling
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Frameworks that have inspired ANEW’s approach to changemaking

Frameworks and tools for how change is made and who needs to be involved in changemaking

Collective impact brings people together, in a structured way, to achieve social change. Collective Impact Initiatives are long-term commitments by a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem. Their actions are supported by a shared measurement system, mutually reinforcing activities, and ongoing communication, and are staffed by an independent backbone organization. Collective impact has been widely adopted as an effective form of cross-sector collaboration to address complex social and environmental challenges.

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Improvement science is a systematic approach to making changes that leads to better outcomes, stronger system performance, and enhanced professional development.  Improvement methods include tools and structured process to facilitate disciplined inquiries to improve systems and practice. Undergirding these methods is a distinctive epistemology about what we seek to learn and how we may come to understand it well.

Improvement science grounded by the interaction of systems thinking, understanding variation, psychology of change, and the theory of knowledge that are applied to improve the performance of tools, processes, services,  work roles, and relationships, organizations, and communities.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching identified six core principles for improvement:

  1. Make the work problem-specific and user-centered. It starts with a single question: “What specifically is the problem we are trying to solve?” It enlivens a co-development orientation: engage key participants early and often.
  2. Variation in performance is the core problem to address. The critical issue is not what works, but rather what works, for whom and under what set of conditions. Aim to advance efficacy reliably at scale.
  3. See the system that produces the current outcomes. It is hard to improve what you do not fully understand. Go and see how local conditions shape work processes. Make your hypotheses for change public and clear.
  4. We cannot improve at scale what we cannot measure.  Embed measures of key outcomes and processes to track if change is an improvement. We intervene in complex organizations. Anticipate unintended consequences and measure these too.
  5. Anchor practice improvement in disciplined inquiry.  Engage rapid cycles of Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) to learn fast, fail fast, and improve quickly. That failures may occur is not the problem; that we fail to learn from them is.
  6. Accelerate improvements through networked communities. Embrace the wisdom of crowds. We can accomplish more together than even the best of us can accomplish alone.

Sources:

  1. Bryk AS, Gomez LM, Grunow A, LeMahieu PG. Learning to improve: how America’s schools can get better at getting better. Cambridge (MA): Harvard Education Press; 2015. 280 p.
  2. Deming WE. Out of the crisis. First MIT Press ed. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press; 2000. 524 p.
  3. Langley GL, Moen R, Nolan KM, Nolan TW, Norman CL, Provost LP. The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance. 2nd ed. San Francisco (CA): Jossey-Bass Publishers; 2009.

Frameworks for inspiring ideas about what changes are needed