Learning to De-implement

by Anthony Poullard

𝐀 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐌𝐢𝐜-𝐃𝐫𝐨𝐩

During this past school year, a colleague walked into my office with a morning mic-drop: “We need to learn how to de-implement things because there is a lot on our plates.”

De-implement? I laughed first because it sounded like the kind of word schools invent when we are trying to make a simple problem sound more strategic.

I later looked it up because I wanted to know if de-implementation was actually a word. It is. The term has roots in implementation science, where it is used to describe the intentional process of reducing, replacing, restricting, or stopping low-value practices. It shows up most clearly in health care, but the idea has started making its way into education too. Phew!

But she was right. Underneath her comment was a more compelling leadership question for me, personally: what needs to stop so adults have capacity for the most important work?

𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐬 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐅𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

In education, we implement new programs, frameworks, schedules, interventions, communication plans, forms, meetings, metrics, and systems.

Most of the time, those additions are necessary to support students, colleagues, and families. But how many schools have the same discipline, or even courage, to stop, pause, or de-prioritise something that was once the shiny new solution?

And maybe that is the problem.

In schools, almost everything begins with good intentions. A student need becomes visible, so we add support. A parent concern surfaces, so we add communication and partnership. A strategic priority is named, so we add a working group. A gap appears, so we add a process. A teacher asks for clarity, so we add another document.

None of those moves is wrong. Actually, I would argue that most of these solutions are needed. But over time, the solutions accumulate, and we do not tend to this additive approach strategically. We keep adding to the system, often for good reasons. But at some point, we have to ask what that accumulation is doing to the people inside it.

Someone I deeply respect once asked, “How many more times do we have to tell people about X?”My response was, “Maybe the issue is not that people have not been told enough. Maybe we are just asking them to hold onto too much at one time.”

This is the part I am paying more attention to now. I am trying to become more disciplined about asking a different kind of leadership question:

What if the truest measure of a healthy, sustainable campus is not how much it can keep adding, but what it has the courage to subtract?

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐢𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐀𝐝𝐝

This question has also shaped my dissertation research on adult working conditions and adult capacity as they relate to student belonging. Leidy Klotz’s work on subtractive change has been one of the research threads helping me think more about this connection. His research shows that when we try to improve something, we are often more likely to add another layer than to remove one that is no longer supportive. In some cases, we would rather work around what is not working than make the harder decision to take it away. This bias to add has helped me think more intentionally about what de-implementation could look like in schools.

Stopping something in schools is complicated because most things have a reason, a history, and people who care about them. Sometimes the thing we need to stop was once the exact thing we needed to start. Maybe that is what makes leadership hard. It is not always choosing between what matters and what doesn’t. Sometimes it is deciding what matters most when everything can no longer remain equally important.

𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐈 𝐚𝐦 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠

I am not pretending this is easy. This is an area of growth for me. And many of the leaders reading this, myself included, have more influence over what gets paused, simplified, or stopped than we sometimes recognise.

I cannot say I have mastered de-implementation, but I am noticing accumulation differently.I changed the default length of my calendar meetings from 30 minutes to 25, and from 60 minutes to 55. I also turned about half of the recurring coaching meetings with the leaders I supervise into optional touch points, so the agenda is driven by what they need rather than by the assumption that every standing meeting needs to happen. More recently, I asked our counsellors to identify non-counsellor tasks that could be removed from their responsibilities to better protect time for work with students.

None of these is big on their own, but they reflect the same commitment: before asking people to do more, I am asking what can be paused, simplified, or removed. Maybe it starts with questions we are willing to ask and answer.

𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐬𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠

Not only: What should we launch?
What support can we add?
What else do people need from us?

But also: What can we stop?
What can we pause?
What can we simplify?
What has become noise?

What is taking up space that the most important work actually needs?

Sometimes the most powerful transformative leadership decision is not what you start doing, but what you purposefully choose to stop.

I would be curious how other leaders are thinking about de-implementation, especially in schools where everything important is competing for the same limited time, attention, and capacity. Feel free to leave it in the comments. 

Anthony Poullard, Deputy Principal, Singapore American School

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