The Smallest Unit of Organisational Improvement

There is something reassuring about a roadmap. It tells us where we are going. It gives sequence to complexity and allows leaders to explain what happens first, what follows and how progress will be recognised along the way. In organisations carrying the responsibility of educating young people, there are good reasons to value that kind of clarity.

I believe deeply in knowing where we are trying to go. I am much less certain that the people who establish the destination can ever know, in advance, the only way of getting there.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

I have sat in enough leadership rooms to know how easily clarity of purpose can become certainty of method. A group of thoughtful, experienced people gathers around a table. The evidence is considered. The problem is discussed. The desired future is articulated. A plan is developed, milestones are identified and responsibilities are assigned. None of this is inherently problematic. In fact, much of it is necessary.

The difficulty is that by the time the plan reaches the people expected to enact it, much of the thinking may already have happened.

We may still call what follows consultation. We invite questions, establish working groups, gather feedback and leave time for discussion. Yet underneath all of this can sit an assumption so quiet that nobody thinks to name it: we already know where this conversation needs to end.

That is different from knowing where the organisation hopes to go.

Peter Senge's work on learning organisations helps illuminate why. Shared vision is not simply an organisational statement that people have been persuaded to support. His wider account of organisational learning places shared vision alongside mental models, team learning and dialogue because collective learning requires more than individuals receiving and implementing somebody else's thinking. It requires the organisation to develop its capacity to think together.

This distinction between direction and route matters because ownership cannot simply be communicated. People may understand a destination perfectly well without believing that they have any meaningful part in shaping the journey towards it.

And that raises a question I find increasingly interesting: what is the smallest thing that has to change before we can say an organisation itself has begun to improve?

We tend to discuss improvement at scale. We talk about strategy, culture, leadership, systems, structures, capability and outcomes. Even when our attention turns towards people, we often retain the same logic. We develop individual capability so that individual practice improves. Better teachers create better learning. Better leaders create better teams. Better professional learning creates better professional practice.

There is truth in all of this. An organisation cannot improve while every individual within it remains unchanged. People learn. They develop expertise, reconsider assumptions, become more skilful and sometimes more courageous.

But individual improvement and organisational improvement are not necessarily the same thing.

Suppose one teacher becomes extraordinary at something. They understand formative assessment more deeply, change their practice and create markedly better learning experiences for the students in their classroom. Something important has unquestionably happened.

But what if nobody else knows why? What if that learning remains contained within the classroom? What if colleagues never encounter the thinking that produced it? What if the teacher's changed practice never alters a team conversation, an expectation, a shared understanding or another person's sense of what might be possible?

The individual has changed. It is less clear that the organisation has.

Albert Bandura's work on efficacy gives us useful language for this distinction. Personal efficacy matters because people need some belief in their capacity to produce effects through their actions. Yet Bandura's later work on collective efficacy deliberately moves beyond individual agency, arguing that increasing interdependence places greater importance on people's shared beliefs in what they can accomplish through collective action.

That movement from I can affect something to we can affect something is more than the multiplication of individual confidence. Something has to happen between people.

Perhaps this is where some of the smallest moments of organisational improvement are hiding.

They can appear almost inconsequential. Someone asks a question and, rather than answering immediately, another person allows it to sit. A teacher disagrees and the leader becomes curious rather than defensive. Someone admits that an initiative may not be working as intended, and nobody rushes to protect either the initiative or the people who championed it. These exchanges are unlikely to appear in an annual report or be celebrated as evidence that an improvement strategy is succeeding. Yet I have come to think they may be among the smallest observable moments in which an organisation actually changes.

Amy Edmondson's research into psychological safety offers one explanation for why these moments matter. Her work describes psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking and found it associated with learning behaviour in teams. The important word here may be shared. Whether I ask the difficult question, admit uncertainty or challenge an established idea depends not only on something within me, but on what I have learned about what happens between us when people take those risks.

Research into relational trust in schools makes this even more relevant to educational organisations. Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider located relational trust in the ordinary social exchanges of school life rather than treating trust as a vague quality of culture. Their work in Chicago schools showed how the quality of relationships among teachers, leaders, parents and communities became a significant resource for improvement.

This makes me wonder whether we sometimes search for the unit of improvement in the wrong place. Perhaps it is not the teacher, the leader or even the team. Perhaps it is the interaction through which what one person knows, notices, questions or believes becomes capable of changing what somebody else knows, notices, questions or believes.

Consider a teacher who rarely speaks in whole staff conversations. They know their students exceptionally well. They have watched an initiative unfold in practice for months and can see something that does not quite fit the way the work is being described elsewhere in the school.

Eventually, they say so.

The significant thing is not simply that the teacher has been given an opportunity to speak. Schools have become quite good at creating opportunities for voice. Surveys provide voice. Working groups provide voice. Consultation sessions provide voice. Sticky notes placed enthusiastically around a room can provide an impressive quantity of voice.

The more interesting question is whether that voice has consequence.

Leadership listens. Not politely while preparing to explain why the existing plan remains correct. Not long enough to demonstrate that consultation occurred. Not in order to identify how the teacher might be brought back into alignment. They listen because it is possible that this teacher knows something they do not.

And something in the conversation changes.

Perhaps the plan shifts slightly. Perhaps nothing changes immediately except the question everyone is now asking. Perhaps the leadership team's explanation of the problem becomes less certain. Perhaps somebody else adds an observation that would otherwise have remained unsaid. The particular outcome matters less than the fact that the conversation was capable of producing an outcome nobody had completely predetermined.

Later, another teacher hears what happened. They were not in the room and did not hear the original conversation, yet they have learned something important about their organisation. Someone spoke honestly. Leadership listened. The thinking shifted because of it. Their own understanding of what is safe, worthwhile and possible may now be slightly different.

Nothing about that exchange would appear on an improvement plan. Yet something has travelled. One person's experience of being heard has altered another person's expectation of what might happen if they speak.

Next time, perhaps they do.

This is how a moment between a few people begins to acquire organisational scale.

It is also why I think presence matters more to improvement than we sometimes acknowledge. By presence, I do not mean simply being in the room. Nor do I mean endlessly suspending decisions while everybody has their say. Schools cannot spend their lives sitting in circles waiting for every possible perspective to emerge. Leaders have responsibilities. Deadlines are real. Some directions are non-negotiable. Expertise matters, and there are moments when leadership requires decisive action rather than another conversation.

Presence is something more demanding. It means entering a conversation with enough clarity to know what matters and enough humility to accept that somebody else may alter how you understand the way forward. It means listening not simply for agreement, resistance or misunderstanding, but for information that might require you to reconsider your own thinking.

The moment a leader has already decided what a conversation is allowed to change, it is no longer really a conversation.

It may be communication. It may be explanation. It may be implementation planning. It may even be entirely necessary. But it is worth being precise about the difference, because genuine conversation carries a risk that consultation often does not: we might leave knowing, thinking or intending something different from when we entered.

Chris Argyris wrote decades ago about the difficulty organisations experience when the assumptions governing action remain protected from examination. His distinction between correcting problems within existing assumptions and learning that examines the assumptions themselves remains useful because organisations can become very effective at discussing improvement while leaving the reasoning beneath it largely untouched.

To be genuinely present in a conversation is therefore not passive. It requires enough confidence to hold a direction without needing to control every step towards it, and enough humility to accept that expertise is distributed throughout an organisation in ways formal authority can never completely capture.

The people closest to everyday work know things.

That does not mean they always know best. Proximity can illuminate some things and obscure others, just as leadership perspective can reveal patterns that are difficult to see from within a classroom or team. The point is not to replace one hierarchy of knowledge with another. It is to recognise that organisational intelligence is distributed, and that improvement depends partly upon whether what people know can travel far enough to affect the thinking of others.

This is where individual qualities such as courage, agency, confidence and conviction become more complicated than they first appear. We rightly value them, but none is self-validating. Courage does not make an action wise simply because it was courageous. Confidence does not make an interpretation accurate. Agency does not free us from responsibility for how our actions affect other people. Conviction can sustain difficult work, but conviction without openness can harden into certainty.

Humility and vulnerability matter because they make our thinking permeable. They allow one person's expertise to encounter another person's experience without either being automatically diminished. They make it possible for someone to say, I know something, while remaining open to the possibility that what someone else knows may change it.

A highly capable organisation, then, is not simply one filled with highly capable individuals. It is one in which individual capability can move, combine, challenge, strengthen and sometimes correct other individual capability.

This is where the familiar puzzle metaphor begins to fail us. People are not static pieces waiting to be assembled correctly. We alter one another. What each person contributes can itself change through contact with what somebody else knows. If ten excellent teachers work beside one another while remaining intellectually untouched by one another, we have ten excellent teachers. If their expertise begins to circulate, if their questions sharpen one another's thinking, if one person's uncertainty gives another permission to examine their own, and if disagreement can produce a better idea rather than a damaged relationship, something qualitatively different becomes possible.

The organisation begins to acquire a capability no individual possesses alone.

This also changes the question of how readily we declare improvement. A strategic plan says an initiative has been implemented. The data has moved. Professional learning has occurred. A new structure has been introduced. Staff completed the programme. The policy changed. A target was met. All of these things may matter enormously, but none of them alone tells me what I most want to know.

What became possible because it did?

That question is not dismissive of evidence. Quite the opposite. It asks us to take evidence seriously enough to investigate what it represents. A moment in time can show that something happened. A document can confirm that something was introduced. Data can tell us that an outcome changed. Organisational improvement asks us to look further and wonder what changed in the organisation's capacity to think, respond, learn and act.

Who can now influence something they could not influence before? What knowledge can travel that previously remained isolated? What conversations can now happen? What can people challenge without threatening belonging? Where has confidence become shared rather than privately held? What happens when the person furthest from formal authority notices something important?

If nothing changes unless the same few people are in the room, the organisation may have achieved an outcome without increasing its capacity. If improvement disappears when a particular leader leaves, we should wonder where the improvement actually lived. And if the people closest to the everyday work remain recipients of improvement rather than participants in shaping it, perhaps the organisation has changed less than its documents suggest.

I began by wondering about the smallest unit of organisational improvement. I am no longer convinced that it can be located inside a person.

The individual matters enormously. Personal expertise matters. Agency matters. Courage matters. Leadership matters. But an organisation is not simply the sum of its individually improved parts. Something becomes organisational when it travels: when one person's observation alters a shared interpretation, when another person's question changes a decision, when a leader's willingness to be influenced changes what someone else believes is safe to say, when expertise moves beyond the person who possesses it, or when trust makes disagreement possible.

Perhaps this is why some of the most consequential moments in organisational improvement look so unimpressive while they are happening. Nobody launches them. Nobody places them on a roadmap. Two people may simply be talking, and one of them says something the other did not expect.

The other person is sufficiently present to be changed by it.

And because something changed between them, what happens next is different.

Perhaps that is the smallest unit we have been looking for: the moment something changes between people, and because it changed between them, something else becomes possible.

It is small enough to miss.

It may also be where an organisation begins to move.