Flexibility is a style of thinking that focuses on your ability to adapt to new situations, improvise, and shift strategies to meet different types of challenges
The perfect storm
How is thinking about flexibility useful or even relevant to a school setting in the 21st century? Most schools currently face a series of major challenges in a number of areas – curriculum changes, funding reductions, new competitors, local authority actions, a sector shortage of teachers, rising sick leave levels, changing stakeholder expectations, rising legislative compliance penalties and, of course, rising costs – what some might label a, ‘perfect storm’.
These challenges, arguably, also contribute to the creation of a ‘VUCA environment’ – an acronym which describes or reflects the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations – creating a need to manage uncertainty, manage change, manage risks and solve problems.
Given the perfect storm and VUCA environment, if new approaches are needed, flexibility thinking and flexibility creation may be able to help.
What are some examples of flexibility thinking and using flexibility as a deliberate tool?
If, for example, dealing with DfE curriculum changes, applying flexibility thinking to the speed of those changes being imposed can help alleviate stresses.
Three avenues to pursue are:
- Using a set of compelling arguments to negotiate a one-year deferment with the DfE re. adopting the curriculum changes;
- Embracing the curriculum changes by entering a partnership arrangement for one year with a peer school nearby to provide these for referred students, or;
- Simply ceasing to offer the changed curriculum for a year in order to ensure a more successful changeover.
The point is to plan early, control the implementation rate and create interim arrangements to preserve flexibility.
What about handling EFA and local authority per-student funding reductions?
Use flexibility thinking to clarify the funding changes early; then make rapid changes to preserve operating and strategic flexibility also.
Pre-programmed user choices and outcomes: Many people despair when ‘phoning up a large organisation, only to encounter layers of pre-recorded messages saying, ‘…press one for…, press two for …, press nine to hear all these options again’! A smart competitor will develop customer loyalty by investing in personalised (flexible) call interactions. If designing computer application software with ‘pull-down menus’, it’s wise to have a category called ‘other’ to account for issues out of the ordinary. The same goes for user surveys.
Fixed costs: Fixed costs represent finite capacity and dedicated use. Variable costs respond to change, scaling up or down as required.
Incentives favouring things that increase inflexibility: Obvious, but not so obvious, given how often these inflexibility incentives arise. Flexibility can be risky. However, opportunities worth seeking incur natural business risk, whether the organisation is a not for profit, government agency, SME or corporate.
The speed of business change: The faster change happens, the less chance there is to foster flexibility as a response.
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