As valid as these general conclusio

As valid as these general conclusions are, there are three problems. First, the time lines are too long. Given the sense of urgency, people rightly ask: Can these time lines be accelerated? Say, reduced by half? Incidentally, all these successes have involved “the
use of the change knowledge” documented in this book. The question is: By more intensive and more thorough use of the change knowledge, can we accelerate the process of successful change? The answer is yes, which we will see does not solve the problem.
Second, the number of examples of turnaround is small. There is only a minority of elementary schools, and fewer high schools and school districts, that are engaged in this manner. In other words, we have not nearly gone to scale where the majority of schools
improve. It is not enough to have a handful of successful cases.
Third, and most revealing, it takes 3, 6, 8 years of hard work to produce improvement, but the results are fragile. One or two key people leave and the success can be undone almost overnight. Thus, from the point of view of “sustaining change,” even in those small number of success cases, there are serious problems.
The main reason that change fails to occur in the first place on any scale, and does not get sustained when it does, is that the infrastructure is weak, unhelpful, or working at cross purposes. By the infrastructure I mean the next layers above whatever unit we are focusing on. In terms of successive levels, for example, a teacher cannot sustain change if he or she is working in a negative school culture; similarly, a school can initiate and implement successful change, but cannot sustain it if it is operating in a less than helpful district; a district cannot keep going if it works in a state which is not helping to sustain reform. In other words, we have our work cut out. At the individual level we must carve out a niche of meaning and effectiveness despite a less than helpful system. At the same time we must join others in helping to change local cultures and contexts so that those making improvements are rewarded, and those who are complacent are both understood and end up feeling less and less comfortable with the status quo. Finally, more and more people must address “the big picture,” exploiting the current underutilized potential for reform while strengthening the infrastructure of policies and resources. The agenda for the next decade is to “transform the system” by improving the overall infrastructure in a way that reinforces and extends local innovation in some cases, and helps to cause local development in others.
This is not a race to see who can become the most innovative. The key words are meaning, coherence, connectedness, synergy, alignment, and capacity for continuous improvement. Paradoxically, if meaning is easy to come by it is less likely to be
powerful. Simple systems are more meaningful, but less deep. Complex systems generate
overload and confusion, but also contain more power and energy. Our task is to realize that finding meaning in complex systems is as difficult as it is rewarding.