Dr. Desheila Rumph

  • Aligning Organizational Attention for Improvement

    Desheila Rumphdesheila2230Edit Profile

    A Priority Is More Than Something We Say Is Important

    Series: Clarity Before Change

    Take the quiz: Is your next priority ready for action .Or still just an idea? Find out in under 10 minutes.

    Take the Priority Today!

    Organizations are rarely short on important work.

    There are achievement goals, instructional priorities, professional learning needs, new programs, accountability requirements, organizational concerns, and unexpected issues that surface throughout the year. Many are legitimate and deserve attention.

    The challenge is deciding what requires concentrated attention now.

    When I think about priorities, I look beyond what is written in a plan or identified during a meeting. I pay attention to what happens after the priority is named.

    Where is time being spent? What are leaders consistently discussing? What is professional learning supporting? What are coaches reinforcing? What gets monitored? Where are resources being directed?

    Those decisions tell us whether something has moved from being important to actually being prioritized.

    A priority becomes meaningful when the organization begins making decisions around it.

    When Everything Feels Important

    In improvement work, several plans and expectations can operate at the same time.

    A school may have an improvement plan with identified goals and strategies while also responding to instructional needs, professional learning priorities, district initiatives, accountability requirements, student needs, and emerging concerns.

    Each piece may make sense on its own.

    The problem becomes visible when we look at them together.

    The improvement plan may identify one priority while meeting agendas consistently focus somewhere else. Professional learning may emphasize another area. Coaching may concentrate on something different. Leaders may monitor several additional expectations.

    At that point, I begin asking:

    What is actually being prioritized?

    The answer cannot come only from the document where the priority was written. It also has to come from how the organization operates.

    People make decisions every day about where to place their attention. When the system does not make those choices clear, individuals begin making them for themselves.

    The result can be a great deal of activity without the alignment needed for improvement.

    Stated Priorities and Operational Priorities

    I think there is an important distinction between a stated priority and an operational priority.

    A stated priority is what the organization says matters.

    An operational priority is what the organization’s decisions demonstrate matters.

    You can learn a lot about operational priorities without looking at the improvement plan. Consider how the organization uses its time and resources. Pay attention to professional learning, coaching, leadership conversations, and monitoring.

    Together, those decisions tell a story.

    Sometimes that story reinforces the priorities identified in the plan. At other times, it reveals that several other expectations have gradually begun competing for the same attention.

    This does not necessarily mean leaders intentionally abandoned the original priority. Conditions change. New needs emerge. Requirements shift. Unexpected problems require attention.

    But every addition creates a decision point.

    Does the new work support an existing priority? Can it be integrated into what is already underway? Does it require us to adjust something else? Or are we simply adding another expectation?

    Those decisions shape what people ultimately experience as the organization’s priorities.

    What This Can Look Like in Practice

    Consider a school that identifies strengthening small-group instruction as a priority.

    The improvement plan reflects it, and leaders communicate its importance.

    Now look at what happens around that priority.

    Professional learning focuses primarily on other initiatives. Teachers have limited collaborative time to examine student data and plan groups. Coaching conversations address several competing expectations. Walkthroughs do not consistently examine small-group implementation, and leadership conversations rarely return to the evidence.

    Small-group instruction may still be the stated priority, but the surrounding system is sending a less consistent message.

    Now consider what changes when the priority begins shaping organizational decisions.

    Professional learning develops the knowledge teachers need. Collaborative time supports data analysis and planning. Coaching reinforces implementation. Walkthroughs gather relevant evidence. Leadership teams examine what that evidence shows and determine where additional support is needed.

    The priority did not change.

    In my Systems Approach to Improvement, the work begins with Create Clarity: developing shared understanding of the current reality, desired outcome, priorities, expectations, responsibilities, and measures of success.

    The alignment around it did.

    That is the distinction I want leaders to notice.

    Priority-setting belongs there for a reason.

    Before determining what deserves concentrated attention, leaders need to understand what is happening. They examine available evidence, identify patterns and gaps, consider what may be contributing to those conditions, and clarify the outcome the organization is trying to achieve.

    The question is not simply:

    What needs improvement?

    Most organizations could create a long list in response.

    A need identifies something that should improve. A priority reflects a deliberate decision about where the organization will concentrate its attention.

    A more useful question is:

    Of everything we could address, what requires our greatest attention now, and why?

    Priority Is Part of Creating Clarity

    That decision should become visible in the work that follows.

    Creating clarity establishes direction, but clarity alone does not produce improvement.

    Once leaders establish a priority, people need to understand what it means for their work. Leaders also need to determine whether the organization has the capacity and systems necessary to support what people are being asked to do.

    This is where the broader Systems Approach to Improvement matters.

    From Clarity to Action

    Create Clarity establishes shared understanding and direction.

    Build Capacity ensures people have the knowledge, skills, resources, practice, feedback, and support they need.

    Strengthen Systems creates the structures, routines, roles, communication, and processes that support consistent practice.

    Implement With Purpose moves the work from intention into disciplined practice while keeping actions connected to the desired outcome.

    Learn Through Evidence helps leaders understand implementation, impact, barriers, strengths, and needs.

    Adapt & Sustain uses that learning to determine what should continue, what needs strengthening, and what should change.

    The priority does not become a separate process or a new framework. It creates direction for the work across the system.

    A Priority Alignment Check

    Once something has been identified as a priority, I would ask:

    • What evidence led us to this priority?
    • What are we trying to change or improve?
    • Can people explain why it matters now?
    • Are our goals and actions aligned with it?
    • What are people expected to do differently?
    • Do they have the knowledge, resources, time, and support to do it?
    • Are meetings, professional learning, coaching, and leadership conversations reinforcing the same direction?
    • What evidence are we monitoring?
    • How will we know whether implementation is occurring as intended?
    • What will we do if the evidence suggests an adjustment is needed?

    These questions move priority-setting beyond naming what is important. They help leaders determine whether the organization has begun to organize itself around what it says matters.

    Prioritizing Also Means Making Choices

    This may be one of the more difficult parts of leadership.

    Adding something can be easier than deciding what should receive less attention.

    But organizational capacity is not unlimited. People have finite time. Professional learning has finite time. Meetings have finite time. Leaders have finite attention. Resources have limits.

    When a new priority or expectation enters the system, I think another question has to follow:

    What does this mean for everything we are already asking people to do?

    Perhaps the new work strengthens an existing priority. It may replace something, integrate with work already underway, or require another expectation to wait.

    Without those decisions, organizations can unintentionally create competing priorities while continuing to describe each one as essential.

    That makes clarity harder to maintain and implementation harder to sustain.

    A Simple Priority Check

    Imagine walking into an organization without seeing its improvement or strategic plan.

    Spend time observing leadership meetings, professional learning, coaching, team conversations, resource decisions, and monitoring practices.

    Then ask:

    Could I determine what this organization considers most important simply by watching how it operates?

    Now ask the people closest to implementation:

    What are the most important things we are working to accomplish right now?

    Follow that with:

    What are you expected to do that contributes to those priorities?

    Compare their answers with what leadership intended.

    The alignment, or misalignment, can tell us whether the priority has traveled through the organization and begun shaping action.

    Implications for Leaders

    Start with the need. Understand the problem the organization is trying to address and what the available evidence suggests before adding another program, strategy, or initiative.

    Make the choice clear. Help people understand both the priority and why it deserves concentrated attention now.

    Connect existing work. Look across plans, initiatives, professional learning, coaching, meetings, and monitoring. Identify where they reinforce the priority and where they compete with it.

    Consider capacity. Naming something a priority does not create the time, knowledge, resources, or support necessary to implement it.

    Protect attention. New issues will emerge. Leaders have to decide whether those issues strengthen the current direction, require an adjustment, or can wait.

    Watch what the system reinforces. What leaders consistently discuss, support, resource, and monitor communicates importance, whether they intend it to or not.

    Closing Thought

    A priority is more than something we say is important. It becomes visible in the decisions that follow.

    When an organization says something matters but its time, resources, expectations, support, and monitoring consistently point somewhere else, people receive competing messages about where to focus their attention.

    That is why I would not assess priorities only by reading the plan.

    I would also ask:

    What would someone conclude matters most by watching how we operate?

    The distance between what we say matters and what the organization consistently reinforces can tell us a great deal about clarity.

    Before asking people to do more, leaders may first need to make clearer choices about what deserves attention and then align the organization around those choices.

    Because creating clarity is not simply about telling people what matters. It is about building enough shared direction for people to act on it.

  • A Strong Plan Does Not Guarantee Strong Implementation

    Series: Systems Shape Success

    Team discussing a 2024 strategic organizational action plan
    A diverse team reviews a 2024 strategic action plan during an office planning session.

    I have seen organizations invest significant time developing an improvement plan.

    The data are analyzed. Needs are identified. Goals are established. Strategies are selected. Action steps are written. Timelines are developed. The plan is reviewed, revised, and eventually approved.

    Then implementation begins.

    And that is often where a different set of problems emerges.

    People may agree with the plan but have different understandings of what they are supposed to do. A strategy may require collaboration, but no time has been protected for people to work together. A new expectation may depend on data or resources people cannot easily access. Someone may be responsible for monitoring the work without having a clear process for doing it.

    They may mean that the organization did not build a sufficiently strong bridge between planning and implementation.

    None of those problems necessarily mean the plan was weak.

    A plan identifies what an organization intends to do.

    Implementation requires the organization to create the conditions that allow people to actually do it.

    The work changes when the plan moves into practice

    Planning can create the impression that many implementation questions have already been answered.

    We identified the strategy.

    We assigned the action step.

    We established the timeline.

    We named the evidence.

    So we are ready.

    But once people begin doing the work, the plan meets the organization’s reality.

    Schedules matter.

    Communication matters.

    Access matters.

    Existing responsibilities matter.

    Leadership attention matters.

    People’s knowledge and skills matter.

    The routines already operating within the organization matter.

    And the way all those pieces interact can either support implementation or make a reasonable strategy much harder to carry out.

    This is why I do not think implementation begins with simply telling people to execute the plan.

    There is another question leaders have to ask:

    What has to be true within our organization for people to carry this out successfully?

    Beneath the surface

    When implementation begins to struggle, it is easy to return to the plan and ask whether the action was completed.

    I think leaders need to look deeper.

    People needed data but lacked access to the platform.

    Coaching was expected, but time for coaching had not been protected.

    A team was responsible for an action, but ownership within the team was unclear.

    A process depended on collaboration between people who were rarely in the same meetings.

    Professional learning occurred, but there was no structure for continued practice, feedback, or follow-up.

    That distinction matters.

    These can easily appear to be individual performance problems.

    Sometimes they are.

    But before reaching that conclusion, I want to understand whether the system surrounding the work made successful implementation possible.

    Leadership insight

    An action step is not the same as an implementation structure.

    Writing an action into a plan identifies an expectation.

    It does not automatically create the time, routines, communication, access, knowledge, support, ownership, or monitoring necessary to carry it out.

    That work still has to be designed.

    For me, this is where implementation becomes a leadership responsibility rather than simply an expectation placed on the people closest to the work.

    Leaders have to translate strategy into operating conditions.

    From Plan to Practice

    A timeline existed, but the people responsible for the work had different understandings of when something was expected.

    I have encountered implementation barriers that had very little to do with whether people believed in the work.

    When I think about that translation, I look for several connected conditions:

    Clarity
    Do people understand the strategy, the intended outcome, and what implementation should look like?

    ↓

    Ownership
    Is it clear who is responsible for what, including who leads, supports, monitors, and follows up?

    ↓

    Readiness
    Do people have the knowledge, skills, access, resources, and time required to begin?

    ↓

    Structures & Routines
    Where does the work live in the organization? What meetings, schedules, protocols, processes, or routines will support it?

    ↓

    Support
    What coaching, professional learning, feedback, modeling, collaboration, or problem-solving will people need as they implement?

    ↓

    Monitoring & Adjustment
    How will leaders know whether implementation is occurring as intended, where barriers are developing, and what needs to change?

    These conditions do not operate as a simple checklist that leaders complete once.

    Implementation changes what leaders know.

    Monitoring may reveal a capacity gap. A capacity gap may require additional support. Support may uncover unclear expectations. A change in staffing or scheduling may require redesigning a routine.

    The system must be able to learn and adjust as the work progresses.

    Questions I would ask before calling something an implementation problem

    When a strategy is not moving as expected, I would want to know:

    • Do the people responsible for the work understand what successful implementation looks like?
    • Is ownership clear, or are responsibilities assumed?
    • Do people have access to the information, tools, and resources the work requires?
    • Has time actually been created for the work?
    • Are existing schedules and routines supporting the strategy or competing with it?
    • Did professional learning prepare people to begin, and is there continued support after the initial learning?
    • Are the people responsible for supporting implementation included in the conversations and decisions that affect their work?
    • Is there a consistent process for monitoring implementation?
    • Does monitoring examine what is happening, or only whether an action was marked complete?
    • When a barrier is identified, is there a way to adjust the support, structure, timeline, or approach?

    Those questions help separate two very different situations:

    The strategy itself may need to change.

    Or:

    The organization may need to strengthen the conditions surrounding the strategy.

    Leaders need to know which problem they are solving.

    Completion can hide implementation problems

    This is also why I am cautious about using completion as the primary measure of implementation.

    A meeting occurred.

    A training was delivered.

    A resource was distributed.

    A schedule was created.

    A walkthrough was conducted.

    A box can be checked beside each of those activities.

    But completion tells us that something happened. It does not necessarily tell us what happened because of it.

    Did the training increase people’s ability to implement the practice?

    Is the schedule actually being used?

    Did the resource clarify the work?

    Did the meeting result in clear decisions, ownership, and next steps?

    Did the walkthrough evidence lead to feedback, support, or adjustment?

    Monitoring implementation requires leaders to move beyond Did we do it?

    The more useful question is:

    Is what we did helping the intended practice take hold?

    The connection to strong people and weak systems

    In the first article in this series, I asked whether the system is supporting the person or whether the person is compensating for the system.

    That question remains important here.

    A strong person can sometimes overcome unclear ownership, missing routines, limited resources, poor communication, or insufficient support.

    That can make implementation look healthier than it is.

    But an improvement strategy should not depend on extraordinary individual effort to survive.

    A stronger test is whether the system makes successful implementation increasingly possible for the people responsible for doing the work.

    That is how a practice begins to move from individual effort toward organizational capacity.

    Implications for leaders

    Do not treat approval as the end of planning.
    Once a plan moves into practice, leaders will learn things they could not fully anticipate during development.

    Translate every major strategy into operating conditions.
    Determine what people, time, access, routines, communication, resources, and support the strategy actually requires.

    Clarify ownership beyond a name on a plan.
    People should understand who leads the work, who participates, who supports it, who monitors it, and who responds when barriers emerge.

    Build support into implementation.
    Do not assume initial communication or professional learning is sufficient. Complex work usually requires opportunities to practice, receive feedback, solve problems, and refine implementation.

    Monitor the work beneath the outcome.
    Outcome data matter, but leaders also need evidence about what is actually being implemented and under what conditions.

    Use barriers as information.
    When implementation struggles, determine what the barrier is telling you about the system before assuming the solution is greater pressure on the people doing the work.

    A simple implementation check

    Take one major strategy from your current improvement plan.

    Then temporarily put the plan aside.

    Ask the people responsible for implementing that strategy:

    What exactly are you expected to do?

    Then ask:

    What do you need in order to do it well?

    And finally:

    What happens when something gets in the way?

    Compare their answers with what leaders believe has been established.

    The gaps between those answers may tell you more about implementation readiness than another review of the written plan.

    Closing thought

    Strong planning matters.

    Organizations need clear goals, thoughtful strategies, meaningful actions, timelines, and evidence.

    But a plan cannot create implementation conditions simply because those conditions are implied within it.

    People still need clarity.

    Ownership still has to be established.

    Capacity still has to be developed.

    Structures and routines still have to support the work.

    Implementation still has to be monitored.

    And leaders still have to respond when the reality of the work does not match what was anticipated during planning.

    That is why I do not judge an improvement effort only by the quality of its plan.

    I also look at what happens after the plan leaves the page.

    Because ultimately, improvement is not produced by what an organization intended to implement.

    It is shaped by what the organization has built the capacity and systems to actually carry out.

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    Excerpt: A strong improvement plan identifies what an organization intends to do. Strong implementation requires more than that: the clarity, ownership, capacity, structures, support, and monitoring that enable people to move the plan into consistent practice.

  • When Everyone Has a Different Answer, You Have a Clarity Problem

    Series: Clarity Before Change

    One of the quickest ways to assess organizational clarity is simple. Ask several people the same question and listen to how many different answers you get.

    What are we trying to accomplish? What are our priorities? What does success look like? What are we expected to do differently? How will we know whether it is working?

    If those answers vary widely across an organization, the issue is bigger than communication. It is a clarity problem.

    I have walked into environments where there was no shortage of effort. There were plans, initiatives, professional learning, meetings, consultants, goals, and people genuinely trying to improve outcomes.

    But when I began listening to the people doing the work, something became apparent. Different people were carrying different understandings of what mattered most.

    Ask about the goal, and you might hear different numbers. Ask about the priority, and you might hear different initiatives. Ask what teachers were expected to implement, and the answer could depend on who had most recently provided support. Ask how progress would be measured, and the answer might change again.

    No single person created the confusion. In many cases, everyone was doing exactly what they believed they were supposed to do.

    That was the problem. The organization had information, activity, and effort. It had not yet developed enough collective clarity to turn all of that effort into aligned action.

    Beneath the surface

    When I see this pattern, I do not immediately conclude that people are resistant, ineffective, or unwilling to do the work. I start looking at the system.

    Conditions like this tend to travel together. Watch for:

    • multiple priorities competing for attention;
    • different interpretations of the goal;
    • inconsistent language across teams or departments;
    • unclear roles or responsibilities;
    • conflicting messages from different levels of leadership;
    • communication that happens once but is never revisited;
    • meetings that share information without producing clear actions;
    • initiatives operating independently rather than toward a common outcome; and
    • Monitoring processes that track activity without checking whether implementation is aligned.

    These conditions can make capable people look inconsistent. They can also lead leaders to believe they have a performance problem when they may first have a clarity problem.

    Leadership insight

    Communication is not the same as clarity.

    An email communicates. A presentation communicates. A meeting communicates. A memo communicates. But the fact that something was communicated does not mean people developed the same understanding from it.

    Collective clarity becomes visible when people across the system can independently articulate a common understanding of the work. They know where they are going, why it matters, what matters most right now, what their role is, what they are expected to do, and how they will know if it is working.

    That is different from simply receiving information. That is when communication begins to produce alignment.

    Visual / framework

    The Collective Clarity Framework

    Questions I would ask

    • Can people across different roles independently articulate the same primary goal?
    • Is there a common language for the work?
    • Could people explain why the priority matters, rather than just naming it?
    • Do individuals understand their responsibilities and how their work contributes to the larger outcome?
    • Are expectations recognizable across teams, departments, classrooms, or settings?
    • Can people distinguish what is essential from what is supplemental?
    • Is important communication accessible after the original conversation, meeting, or email?
    • Do meetings result in documented decisions, responsibilities, timelines, and follow-up?
    • When implementation begins to drift, is there a process for identifying and correcting the misunderstanding?
    • Can the people closest to implementation explain what success is supposed to look like?

    That last question matters most to me. I do not want to assess clarity only by asking the person who developed the plan. I want to know what happened to the message as it traveled through the organization.

    The sequence loops back to Vision & Outcome through a cycle of clarifying, adjusting, and reinforcing.

    Clarity is not something leaders establish once at the beginning of the year and assume will remain intact. People change. Conditions change. New initiatives appear. Priorities compete. What seemed clear during planning may become far less clear once people begin doing the work. Leaders have to monitor clarity itself.

    Where do you Stand?

    Click of the link below to view the clarity rubric.

    Clarity Starts Here!

    Implications for leaders

    Make the destination unmistakable. People should understand the outcome the organization is working toward and why it matters.

    Reduce competing messages. Not everything can be the priority at the same time. New initiatives should align with the broader direction rather than become another disconnected demand.

    Create language people can share. Common language makes complex work easier to communicate, monitor, coach, and improve.

    Make communication retrievable. Important information needs to live beyond the moment it was communicated. People need ways to revisit expectations, decisions, resources, and next steps.

    Monitor understanding, not just compliance. Before assuming someone failed to implement an expectation, determine whether the expectation was understood in the first place.

    Listen at the end of the system. One of the strongest tests of organizational clarity is what the people responsible for implementation actually understand.

    A simple clarity check

    Ask five people in different roles this question:

    What are the three most important things we are trying to accomplish right now?

    Do not correct them. Do not explain what you meant. Do not tell them the answer. Just listen and compare what you heard.

    Then ask a second question:

    What are you expected to do that contributes to those priorities?

    And a third:

    How will you know whether what you are doing is working?

    The alignment, or misalignment, in those answers tells you a great deal about how well the organization’s message has traveled from intention to implementation.

    Closing thought

    Organizations can have talented people, committed leaders, strong programs, extensive resources, and a tremendous amount of activity, and still struggle to improve.

    Sometimes the first thing they need is not another initiative. They need to get clear.

    Clarity creates alignment. Alignment strengthens implementation. Implementation is where plans finally have an opportunity to become results.

    So when everyone has a different answer, I do not immediately ask who is not doing what they are supposed to do. I ask what our system is communicating and whether we have created enough collective clarity for people to act on it.

    That changes the conversation from blame to understanding, and from understanding to action.

  • Strong People Cannot Carry Weak Systems Forever

    Series: Systems Shape Success

    Sometimes a strategy works. That is exactly what hides the problem.

    A system can produce strong outcomes for the wrong reason. It is not always because the system was built well. Sometimes it is because someone strong enough absorbed everything it failed to provide.

    I once observed a strong teacher, someone with a track record of solid student outcomes, get placed into a co-teaching model the district believed in. The idea itself wasn’t the issue. Co-teaching, done well, has real promise.

    But “done well” requires conditions. And those conditions weren’t there.

    There was little training. Almost no modeling. Unclear roles. A partner who wasn’t matching her effort. No protected time to plan together. No one nearby has real expertise in making the model work.

    So she did what strong people do. She absorbed it.

    She figured out the roles no one had defined. She managed a partnership no one had structured. She kept her students’ outcomes strong even as everything around her remained unclear.

    By the end of the year, she’d decided to leave the school.

    I’ve seen this same pattern outside of co-teaching. A teacher strong in behavior management quietly absorbs the management load for a grade level, so no one else has to build that capacity. A coach becomes the default person every problem is routed to because no other structure was built to hold it. The setting changes. The underlying pattern doesn’t. A strong person ends up holding up what the system didn’t.

    Beneath the surface

    If leadership evaluates a new practice only by results, they’ll miss what’s actually happening underneath.

    In this case, the results were strong. They were strong because one person was absorbing an unsustainable amount of responsibility, not because the system had been built to support the practice. Student outcomes never dropped. But the system lost her.

    Conditions like this tend to travel together. Watch for:

    • little or no training before a practice is expected to be implemented;
    • almost no modeling of what the practice should actually look like;
    • unclear or undefined roles between the people sharing the work;
    • uneven effort or investment between partners, with no structure to address it;
    • no protected time built in for planning, collaboration, or troubleshooting;
    • no one nearby with real expertise to guide implementation; and
    • monitoring that tracks outcomes but never checks in on implementation itself.

    None of these conditions, on their own, guarantee failure. Together, they ensure that someone will have to make up for what’s missing. It’s usually your strongest person who can do it.

    Leadership insight

    A system is not healthy just because a strong person can make it work.

    That’s the principle underneath this story, and it applies far beyond co-teaching. It shows up anywhere a system’s success is actually one person’s exceptional effort, wearing the costume of institutional strength.

    The question I ask now, in any organization, is simple. Is the system supporting the person, or is the person compensating for the system?

    Those look identical in the outcomes data. They are not identical in what they cost.

    Implementation Readiness Framework: Learn, Pilot, Monitor, Understand, Adjust, and Scale.
    This colorful framework maps six stages for moving an initiative from research to effective deployment.

    Every step before “Scale” exists to answer one question. What does this practice actually require here—in terms of training, time, roles, resources, and support—before we ask people to carry it out?

    Skipping a step means you’re not implementing a strategy. You’re testing what people can absorb.

    Questions I would ask

    Before evaluating whether a new practice is “working,” I’d want to know:

    • Do the people implementing it understand what it’s supposed to look like?
    • Do they have the skills and time to do it well?
    • Are roles and responsibilities actually clear, or assumed?
    • Is anyone monitoring the implementation itself, not just the outcomes it produces?
    • If this practice is succeeding, is it succeeding because the system is working, or because someone strong is quietly making up the difference?

    That last question matters most to me. Outcomes alone won’t answer it. You have to ask the person doing the work.

    Implications for leaders

    Watch for outcomes without capacity. Strong results don’t automatically mean a practice is well-implemented. Check whether the people producing those results have what they need, or whether they’re filling the gaps themselves.

    Monitor implementation, not just results. Build in a way to check whether training, roles, time, and support are actually in place. Don’t assume a strategy is succeeding or failing on its own merits until you’ve checked.

    Pilot before you scale. Something working somewhere else doesn’t mean an organization is ready to implement it everywhere. A practice can be genuinely effective and still fail in a new context if that context hasn’t been prepared for it.

    Ask who’s absorbing the gap. When a new practice is going well, ask directly what is making this work right now. If the honest answer is one person’s extra effort, the system hasn’t solved the problem. It has just found someone to hide it.

    Look through the system, not at one person. The administrator here was also implementing something without full clarity or support. The district likely encouraged the practice without first working out what it would require locally. Responsibility runs through a system. It moves from district to leadership to implementation structures to the people doing the work. When something breaks down, the more useful question isn’t “who failed here.” It’s “where did the system stop providing what people needed to succeed?”

    A simple implementation check

    There’s a quick way to test this in your own organization.

    Pick one initiative currently underway. Ask three people involved in implementing it:

    What training or preparation did you have before this started?

    What support is available to you now, day to day?

    What would you be doing differently if you had more of what you needed?

    Don’t correct their answers. Don’t explain what was supposed to happen. Just listen.

    If the answers point to real structure, such as training that happened, support that’s available, and resources that exist, the practice is likely standing on its own. If the answers point mostly to effort, persistence, and figuring it out, you may be looking at a strong person holding up a system that isn’t ready yet.

    Another simple check is to use the implementation readiness rubric below:

    Implementation Readiness Rubric
    Implementation Planning: Any Initiative, Any Category

    Implementation Readiness Rubric

    Use one copy of this rubric per initiative (a new curriculum, an MTSS structure, a PD model, a behavior system) regardless of which category it falls under. Mark the stage that reflects where the initiative actually stands today.

    Initiative
    e.g., Tier 2 reading intervention block
    Category
    e.g., Instruction · Culture & Climate · Operations · Family Engagement
    1
    Learn
    Research, gather knowledge, train teams
    2
    Pilot
    Test in a controlled environment, collect feedback
    3
    Monitor
    Track key metrics, observe performance
    4
    Understand
    Analyze data, gain insights, assess results
    5
    Adjust
    Refine strategies, make improvements, iterate
    6
    Scale
    Expand scope, deploy wider, maximize impact
    Staff have been introduced to the initiative, its purpose, and the evidence behind it.
    The initiative has been tested with a small group in a controlled setting, and feedback has been collected.
    Implementation is tracked against defined indicators on a regular, scheduled cycle.
    Data on the initiative is analyzed to determine why it is or isn’t working, not just whether it’s happening.
    The initiative has been refined based on that analysis, and the changes were communicated to staff.
    The initiative is expanding to additional classrooms, grades, or sites with the supports that made it work.

    How to use this

    1. Fill in the initiative and category, then mark the stage that reflects current reality, not the stage the plan says you should be at.
    2. Run one copy per initiative. A school will have several of these in play at once, at different stages, and that’s expected.
    3. An initiative stuck at the same stage across two or more checkpoints is a root cause flag in its own right, and should be treated as an action-planning priority.
    4. Don’t advance to the next stage on the calendar alone. Use that stage’s descriptor as a go or no-go check with the team doing the work.

    A successful roadmap for effective deployment

    Download the rubric (PDF)

    Closing thought

    The health of a system isn’t measured by whether your strongest people can make something work.

    It’s measured by whether they have to.