The Process of Change Implementation

Step 1:

Understanding the problem– Understanding of the problem can come from research findings and/or from our own experiences. For example, a combination of research and my own experience as a provider and professor tell me that our field needs practical guidance on how to meet the needs of diverse families. We know that we need to make changes to how we screen, intake, assess, and serve families with young children with disabilities because we have a growing research base that shows that Black and Latine families are not able to access EI (McManus et al., 2020; Magnusson et al., 2015) and even when they do, their families’ cultural and language needs are not being met (Magnusson et al., 2017; & Durán et al., 2023). We also know that while about 83% of EI special instruction providers in the U.S. are white and English Speaking (Childress et al., 2024), only about half of all babies born in the last three years are born to White, English-speaking parents (United States Census Bureau, 2024).   This situation leaves much room for cultural mismatches that many providers have not been trained to navigate. Meanwhile, my own experiences indicate that when I tried to find guidance for how to better engage with the families on my caseload, there were very few resources available.  Additional experiences training pre- and in-service early intervention providers who were looking for the same guidance further demonstrated that our field lacked the practical guidance we sought.

Step 2:

Assessing readiness to change– Once there is a clear understanding of what we need to change, the next stage is to evaluate our capacity for change. During this phase, we determine the will for change, what our current capacity for change is, and what identity resource gaps there are.

Sometimes, the will for change exists, and there is a relatively simple fix for a capacity or resource gap. For example, when our local school district decided to make their enrollment forms more inclusive by adding a nonbinary category to gender and changing mother/father categories to guardian 1/guardian 2, district technology experts had to work with the company that supplied the software to make the changes. In this case, there was the will for change, and the school district could work with the outside vendor to get the change made.

One of the most common barriers to change when organizations are in the beginning stages of making culturally responsive institutional change is a lack of will that manifests as repeated calls to slow down the work. Most people will not or cannot readily admit that they are not comfortable or do not want to make sweeping changes to their practices or policies. Instead of conveying outright opposition, they will ask for more time to gather data, more meetings to talk through the data, more opportunities to ideate about what changes to make, and more time for their staff members to ready themselves for a change. While we do need solid data and planning time, I’ve seen multiple organizations say they need additional time to “gather more to dig deeply into the issue,” rush a solution,” or “investigate what our peers in the field have done” and never actually get to a place where they ever implement a change. While we have to be conscious not to rush headfirst into addressing a problem we don’t understand, we also have to be weary of slowing down so much that we never act.

All changes, even positive ones, involve a loss of some kind. When people are reluctant to change their practices or even outright unwilling, this reluctance is often felt because they are not ready to confront and grieve this loss. One of the losses that I have had to grieve, and I have seen many of my colleagues grieve, is the loss of their expertise. EI providers have an incredible amount of expertise in child development, disability, special education, and family coaching. When we engage in the work of understanding the sociohistorical context, understanding our own identities, and becoming more culturally responsive, many of us have to start from a beginner’s place where we haven’t been in a very long time.  We no longer have the comfort of having mastered the knowledge and skills of our discipline. That realization is hard to accept. As we assess our readiness to change, we must balance the need to give ourselves and the organization the grace to process these losses with the urgency of making the changes our clients deserve.

Step 3:

Identifying the appropriate policy and practice changes- Once we have identified the problem, we have to figure out what kinds of changes to make to our EI practices to address it.  Sometimes, solutions that seem obvious take more work to implement. For example, it’s already written in the law that families should have EI documentation and services provided in their home language.  The obvious and most culturally responsive solution would be to match EI providers fluent in the same languages as the families on their caseloads. Though an obvious solution, this isn’t realistic as Americans speak more than 350 languages (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024). With existing early childhood workforce shortages, there just aren’t enough bilingual people seeking EI jobs to meet the language needs of all the families enrolled in EI.

Step 4:

Developing and training leaders who will support the change- Once we have identified the strategies we need to implement for change, we have to train leaders in the field to make these changes so that they are able to support the EI practitioners on their teams. For example, when I am contracted to facilitate professional development on culturally responsive early intervention, I almost always begin with a smaller cohort of the management team. I use this practice not because I think that managers are more important than direct service providers; rather, it is because, in most organizational structures, managers are responsible for supporting the professional growth of their employees. Managers cannot support change initiatives if they are not well-versed in the changes they expect their employees to make. Additionally, working with leaders first helps me to identify any potential structural barriers to implementing change that we can work to remove before they become obstacles to change.

Step 5:

Communicating the vision for change- This step seems to be simply “just tell people about the change!” but it extends beyond just informing people about the change and how to implement it.  Change leaders need to also help people see the value of the change. For example, when I work with early intervention providers to teach them about culturally responsive practices, we always start with identifying their values, how those values brought them to early intervention, and what they hope their legacy as an EI practitioner will be. Every EI provider I have ever met does this work because they want to help children with disabilities and their families lead full and meaningful lives. Connecting this goal and their values to the outcomes of culturally responsive EI practices has been an effective approach in achieving buy-in from EI providers who may not initially see the need to change their practices.

One pitfall I’ve witnessed when agencies implement change is that leaders aren’t transparent about the change process because they resist communicating about the change until they feel it’s completely ready to implement or they resist communicating about the process of the change.  In my experience, this is often the case when the process is a little messy and or when leaders know they will meet with resistance. I’ve watched leaders at several organizations opt not to communicate about upcoming changes in an effort to avoid pushback or to avoid the anxiety that comes with knowing there is a change afoot but now knowing what it will be.  A complete lack of transparency creates mistrust, so effective change leaders must learn the most effective ways to communicate their upcoming changes, striking the balance between too much and not enough communication.

Step 6:

Identifying change agents with social influence to champion changes– When there are new initiatives or policy changes, there are always small groups of early and enthusiastic adopters who are integral to the success of implementation (Rogers, 1971).  Early adopters make up just over 10% of most groups. They tend to be well-respected and liked by their peers because of their proven success in their field.  Early adopters are those people who others go to for advice or opinions. These early adopters are important change agents because they set the example for the early majority, the next subset of the group.

Step 7:

Implementing the change- This is the “Just do it” part of the institutionalization process. Again, it’s simple in writing, but much more complicated in reality. First, the new policy or practice has to be clearly planned for, and leaders have to ensure that the organization has the resources to support the change in the implementation process fully. One challenge I encounter quite regularly is that early intervention agencies want their staff to improve their abilities to provide culturally responsive services, but then the agencies don’t provide any time during work hours for their staff to do the work and won’t (or can’t afford) to compensate employees for personal time spent learning and reflecting. In other situations, leaders don’t actually do their learning or reflecting. Hence, they aren’t able to be reflective supervisors for staff, nor do they have the capacity to make decisions that actually further the equity goals they’ve articulated. While these are considerations that should be taken into account in the early steps of the change process, they often arise at the implementation stage.

Once the change is planned and supported, it has to be effectively communicated.  Then, we get to the “just do it” phase of implementation. Then,  to “just do” a new practice, we have to have the opportunity to acquire new knowledge and skills and time to practice. Implementation requires vulnerability to try something we are not yet proficient at doing and grace for ourselves and others. At the same time, we work toward proficiency, patience for the time it takes to become proficient, and access to high levels of support as we figure out and address gaps in our knowledge and skills. Reflective practice should always be a part of the implementation process.

Once your organization has begun the official change implementation process, you’ll slowly start to see the early majority group embrace it. Early majority members will adopt change only after seeing its effectiveness with the early adopters. They make up about a third of all groups. In every institution, there will always be roughly another 30% of people who are late majority adopters. The early majority helps diffuse the change to their more skeptical peers, who will accept the change only after it’s been proven to work. Successful institutionalization requires buy-in from socially connected members of each group. The late majority make the change because they have to, and only after it’s been diffused through the early adopters and early majority. These folks often need additional incentives and support to make changes (See Elena Aguilar’s Coaching For Equity for strategies to successfully move late majority adopters in a more culturally responsive direction).

Step 8:

Taking in feedback and monitoring the change process, institutional leaders ideally would involve stakeholders from the beginning by seeking out their input when identifying the problem, developing solutions, and monitoring the change implementation process. Additionally, leaders need to be open to constructive feedback from EI practitioners and families during implementation. Unfortunately, there is not one magic policy change we can make to improve the experiences of our minoritized clients, so we are sure to try new things that may need a bit of tweaking or that may not have the desired outcomes we wanted. Seeking feedback and monitoring the change process helps leaders discover cracks and fix the inevitable cracks in the process.

Many state and county-level institutions I’ve worked with default to survey data to gather feedback. Survey data can be an effective strategy to get a good amount of data in a short amount of time, but we have to be mindful of what kind of data our surveys are designed to collect.  For example, if you ask EI providers to rate their confidence or their level of satisfaction on a 1-5 Likert scale, you will get an average score of how the staff is feeling at one moment in time. You’ll need to be mindful of the context in which EI practitioners are filling out the survey. Are you asking them at a particularly busy and stressful time of year when there are many new referrals? Are you surveying providers on a Tuesday morning when they may feel less tired than on a Friday afternoon? When you’re surveying things such as confidence, are you familiar with the literature that demonstrates that people frequently rate themselves as better and more confident at something the less they know about it, so it’s likely that your staff will show an initial decrease in their self-assessment scores as they undertake learning how to be more culturally responsive during home visits (Kruger & Dunning, 1999)?

Often, a numerical score on its own is much less useful than if you ask EI providers to provide a rating and then a comment to explain their rating. As a qualitative researcher, I can assure you that asking for additional context will help you get meaningful data about the changes, but reading through those comments and finding themes is time-consuming. Additionally, people are complicated, and the scores they provide on a survey do not always convey their full truth or experiences. When we’re seeking feedback from either our employees or the families we serve, we have to be mindful of the power dynamics at play. Employees may not feel secure giving feedback, even when they are told a survey is anonymous, because they don’t want to risk their jobs and paychecks if they answer in a way they believe their boss will think is wrong. Families that are currently enrolled in EI may not feel comfortable criticizing the government program services they receive to the people providing them. In fact, Durán and her colleagues (2023) found that when Latine families were surveyed about their EI services, their responses were largely positive. Then, when these same parents and grandparents participated in a focus group conversation in Spanish, they shared myriad examples of biased treatment from their EI providers and an overall lack of access to resources in their home language. The focus group feedback was in direct contrast to some of the numerical ratings families had given on a written survey.

Lastly, feedback cycles can present themselves as opportunities for the late majority adopters and the Laggards (those that will never internalize new practices or implement changes) to stymie institutional change. As mentioned above, sometimes this will come in the form of calls to slow down and move at a pace that matches the willingness of the most resistant (lots of feedback of things moving too fast, or being forced onto employees without an appropriate amount of time). Too much feedback from people who benefit from not making the change is detrimental to making real progress, especially when it comes to equity initiatives. While stakeholder input and feedback are essential aspects to institutional change, leaders have to be mindful of whose feedback they are taking into account and the implicit or explicit intentions of those giving the feedback.

In addition to verbal or written feedback, an effective strategy for monitoring the process of any change is to observe what is happening in real-time. You may notice, for example, that many of the EI practitioners at your agency are complaining about the same thing, perhaps the cumbersome nature of a new intake form meant to help them learn more about family cultures. What kinds of challenges are staff members bringing to reflective supervision? These complaints or requests for clarification can help identify parts of the change that need to be tweaked to do what they were intended to do or realize that staff have gaps in their knowledge and skills that need to be addressed before they can successfully use a tool. Another helpful observation is to be mindful of things like family cancelation rates and employee absenteeism. Are these rates increasing or decreasing over time once the change has been implemented?=

Step 9:

Fully Institutionalizing the Change- Once your organization has completed all the steps in the change implementation process, the change has become fully operationalized. Now is the time to check in and ensure that all the other systems in the organization are working to implement the change effectively. Things to consider at this time include whether the human resources department is able to screen applicants that have the skills needed to implement the new system or policy, how to onboard new employees to this system, and, of course, to check in from time to time to ensure that the new policy remains culturally responsive as the communities we serve evolve.