We Need Buy-In

“We need buy-in.”

I’ve heard that sentence in schools all over the world. Sometimes it’s spoken during strategic planning. Sometimes after a new initiative has struggled to gain momentum. Sometimes when leadership can feel the energy beginning to drift and someone finally says what everyone else has been thinking.

“We just need people to buy into it.”

For years, I nodded. It sounded perfectly reasonable. After all, if people weren’t embracing the work, surely the answer was helping them buy into it.

Then one day I caught myself saying exactly the same thing.

And something made me stop.

What exactly was I asking people to buy into?

The strategy? The framework? The vision?

Or was I asking them to buy into someone else’s thinking?

That question stayed with me far longer than I expected because the more I sat with it, the more uncomfortable I became. Buy-in quietly assumes something. It assumes the important thinking has already happened. Leadership has clarified the direction, written the strategy and agreed on the priorities. Now everyone else simply needs to understand them and support them.

It sounds perfectly logical.

Until you begin thinking about how people actually come to care about something.

Looking back across the schools I’ve worked alongside, the deepest commitment has never appeared simply because someone delivered a better presentation or produced a clearer strategic plan. It hasn’t emerged because leaders communicated more often or explained the vision more passionately.

It emerged when people had opportunities to wrestle with the ideas themselves. They questioned them, challenged them and tested them against the reality of their own classrooms. They explored where they agreed, where they disagreed and, perhaps most importantly, why.

Somewhere in that process, something quietly shifted.

The work stopped feeling like leadership’s direction.

It began feeling like ours.

Only much later did I realise I had been searching for the wrong word.

Not buy-in.

Ownership.

The distinction sounds small, but it changes the work of leadership considerably.

That doesn’t mean leadership abdicates responsibility for direction. There are decisions leaders need to make, priorities they need to establish and boundaries that are not always open for negotiation. Shared ownership does not require every strategic decision to be collectively made.

But setting direction and constructing meaning are not the same thing.

A leadership team can spend months developing a thoughtful strategy. They can refine the language, test the ideas, consult widely, establish clear priorities and build a carefully considered implementation plan. Eventually, the day arrives when the work is shared more broadly.

Staff listen carefully. They ask thoughtful questions. Heads nod around the room. People leave appearing supportive.

For a little while, everything feels promising.

Then, gradually, something begins to happen.

One team interprets the work one way while another takes it somewhere slightly different. Some teachers make significant changes to practice, others make smaller adjustments, and a few continue largely as they always have.

None of this necessarily looks like resistance. There may be no open disagreement, no rejection of the strategy and no suggestion that people don’t care about the organisation’s direction.

In fact, everyone may genuinely support it.

And yet practice begins to diverge.

It is usually around this point that someone says:

“We need more buy-in.”

I used to think that too. On the surface, it seems like the obvious explanation. If people aren’t implementing the work consistently, perhaps they haven’t fully committed to it.

Over time, though, I became less interested in whether people had accepted the direction and more interested in how they had interpreted it.

Perhaps the issue wasn’t commitment at all.

Perhaps people were simply making different meaning from the same message.

I have watched teachers leave exactly the same meeting with genuinely different understandings of what they had just heard. Not because they were distracted, unwilling or unprofessional. They had listened to the same words and seen the same presentation.

But they hadn’t arrived at the meeting as the same people.

Every educator hears a new idea through the experiences they already carry: the learners they teach, the disciplines they know deeply, the successes that have shaped their practice, the challenges they have encountered and the professional beliefs they have developed over time.

Those experiences become part of the lens through which every new direction is interpreted.

That is what thoughtful professionals do. They compare new ideas with what they already know, test them against their context and gradually decide what those ideas might mean for their practice.

The difficulty is that much of this meaning-making is invisible.

Two people can nod at precisely the same moment and be agreeing with two subtly different things.

They can use exactly the same organisational language while attaching different meaning to it. They can sincerely support the same strategic priority while holding different beliefs about why it matters, what it requires or what it should look like in practice.

Agreement can be visible long before shared belief exists.

Once I began seeing that, the leadership challenge looked very different.

Communication still mattered enormously. Leaders need to articulate direction clearly, explain why priorities matter and ensure people understand the purpose of the work.

But communication could no longer be the end of the process.

It happens in the conversation between two teachers walking back to their classrooms. In the faculty meeting where somebody asks what the new priority actually means for their subject. In the staffroom conversation where one interpretation is challenged by another. In the questions people ask privately when they are not yet confident enough to ask them publicly.

The conversations after the meeting may matter as much as the presentation itself.

That changed what I began looking for.

Instead of asking whether people had understood the message, I became more curious about what they believed the message meant. Instead of treating different interpretations as evidence that communication had failed, I began seeing them as an inevitable part of professional meaning-making.

And instead of trying to eliminate those differences immediately, I became interested in making them available for people to explore together.

That matters because shared meaning is not the same as identical thinking.

The goal isn’t to create a room full of people who interpret every idea in precisely the same way. Professional judgement requires variation. Different experiences and perspectives can deepen an organisation’s understanding of its own work.

But those differences need somewhere to become visible.

Without that opportunity, leaders can easily mistake common language for common understanding. Variation remains hidden until it begins appearing in practice, by which point the organisation may interpret the difference as inconsistency, resistance or lack of commitment.

What if, instead, we became curious earlier?

What do you think this priority is asking of us?

Why does it matter?

What would it look like in your context?

Where do you see tension?

What are you uncertain about?

What would need to be true for this to become meaningful in practice?

Questions like these do something a presentation cannot.

They allow people to reveal the thinking beneath their apparent agreement.

And when that thinking becomes visible, people can begin working with it together. Assumptions can be questioned. Differences can be explored. Misunderstandings can be surfaced without immediately becoming problems to correct. Leaders can hear how the organisation is actually making sense of its direction rather than relying on what they hoped people had heard.

This is where my understanding of ownership began to change.

Ownership isn’t created by handing people complete control over the direction.

Nor is it created by persuading them to support a direction leadership has already determined.

It develops through the meaning-making in between.

People begin recognising themselves in the work. They connect organisational priorities with the realities they know. They contribute professional judgement rather than simply receiving instruction. They influence how the work comes to life while remaining connected to a shared purpose.

Gradually, the question changes.

It is no longer:

“Do I agree with what leadership wants us to do?”

It becomes:

“What does this mean for us — and how do we make it work here?”

That is a very different kind of commitment.

It also changes the role of leadership.

Strategic conversations become less about transmitting meaning and more about creating the conditions in which meaning can be constructed. The quality of the questions matters alongside the clarity of the message. Dialogue becomes part of implementation rather than something that happens before implementation begins.

And leaders become more interested in variation.

Not because every difference needs to be resolved, but because differences reveal something.

They show where beliefs are converging and where they remain apart. They expose assumptions that have previously remained hidden. They reveal where language sounds shared but meaning is not. Sometimes they show that people are far more aligned than leadership realised. At other times, they reveal important differences that no amount of repeated communication would have surfaced.

Perhaps that is why the strongest improvement cultures often feel different. They aren’t necessarily characterised by universal agreement. They are characterised by an organisation’s capacity to think together about what matters.

People can question an idea without being labelled resistant. They can expose uncertainty without appearing uncommitted. They can bring different interpretations into the room and allow those differences to strengthen rather than threaten the work.

Over time, something important happens.

Shared understanding becomes richer. Professional judgement strengthens. People begin carrying the thinking into places leadership could never directly reach.

And eventually, the direction no longer feels like something people have been asked to support.

It becomes something they know how to carry together.

I still hear leaders say, “We need more buy-in.” I understand exactly what they mean because I used to say it too. Usually, what sits underneath those words is a genuine desire for people to care about the work, contribute to it and move forward together.

I simply wonder whether buy-in is the condition we are actually searching for.

Because if our goal is buy-in, we may keep asking how to make the message more compelling.

If our goal is collective belief, we begin asking a different question.

What meaning are people actually making from the direction we believe we share?

And perhaps that is where ownership really begins.

Not when everyone agrees with leadership’s thinking.

But when the organisation has enough opportunity to think together that people can begin making the work genuinely their own.

Organisational Truth

Direction can be communicated. Agreement can be observed. But belief has to be constructed.

Leadership has an important responsibility to establish and communicate direction. Yet hearing the same direction does not mean people will construct the same meaning from it.

Every person interprets organisational priorities through existing experience, knowledge, assumptions and professional judgement. As a result, apparent agreement can coexist with significant variation in what people actually believe the work means.

This does not necessarily indicate poor communication or resistance.

It is a natural consequence of meaning-making.

The leadership challenge is therefore not to eliminate variation as quickly as possible. It is to create enough opportunity for that variation to become visible, explored and increasingly connected to a shared organisational purpose.

Where We Chose to Begin

Every organisation enters improvement through a different doorway. The doorway illuminated by this story is Belief.

The challenge was not simply whether people understood organisational direction. Leaders could communicate priorities clearly and staff could genuinely support them, yet different interpretations could still sit beneath that apparent alignment.

This changed the question.

Instead of asking:

“How do we get people to buy into this?”

the more useful question became:

“What do people actually believe this means?”

That shift moves leadership away from trying to infer belief from agreement and towards becoming curious about the meaning people are constructing.

It also recognises an important distinction: collective belief does not require identical thinking. What matters is whether differences can become visible enough to be explored, understood and connected to shared purpose.

Creating the Conditions

Collective belief develops through opportunities for people to make meaning together.

That requires more than another explanation of the strategy. People need space to question ideas, test assumptions, articulate what they believe, encounter different interpretations and connect organisational direction with the realities of their own context.

The purpose is not unrestricted co-creation. Leadership remains responsible for decisions that appropriately sit with leadership. Nor is the aim to manufacture consensus.

The work is to create conditions in which professional meaning-making is treated as part of improvement rather than an obstacle to implementation.

When different perspectives can become visible without immediately being judged or corrected, leaders gain access to something far more useful than apparent agreement. They begin seeing the organisation’s actual landscape of belief.

These observations now inform EIA’s work through Direction × Belief™, the Strategic Alignment Lab™ and the wider School Improvement Pathway™. They reinforce the importance of distinguishing between communicating direction and developing the collective belief required to carry that direction into practice.

The work is not about persuading people more effectively.

It is about understanding how meaning is being made.

What Changed

The first shift was in what leadership became curious about.

Rather than measuring success primarily through whether people could repeat the language of a strategy or express support for its priorities, attention moved towards interpretation. What did people believe the work meant? Where were understandings similar? Where were they different? What experiences or assumptions sat beneath those differences?

Professional conversations became less focused on clarification alone and more open to exploration. Questions were no longer automatically treated as evidence that someone had failed to understand. Difference was not immediately interpreted as resistance.

Instead, variation became information.

That allowed leadership to work with what people actually believed rather than what leaders assumed they believed.

Over time, staff increasingly contributed to the meaning of the work rather than simply receiving it. Organisational direction remained shared, but professional ownership became stronger because people could locate themselves, their learners and their judgement within it.

Leadership did not disappear from the process.

Its work became more sophisticated.

It stopped trying to secure agreement and became more intentional about creating the conditions for shared belief.

Framework

Direction × Belief™

Direction and belief are related, but they are not interchangeable.

Direction provides organisational clarity. It helps people understand where the organisation is going, what matters and what leadership is seeking to strengthen.

Belief concerns the meaning people construct around that direction: why it matters, whether they believe it is possible, how it connects with their experience and what they understand it to require of them.

An organisation can therefore possess strong Direction while holding considerably more variation in Belief than leadership realises.

The Direction × Belief™ framework provides language for recognising that distinction. It helps leaders move beyond assuming that clarity automatically creates commitment and towards understanding the relationship between what an organisation says matters and what people actually believe together.

The framework did not create the observation at the heart of this story.

It gave language to something organisational experience had repeatedly revealed:

People can share a direction without yet sharing its meaning.

School Improvement Pathway™

Entry Point: Belief

This story enters the School Improvement Pathway™ through Belief.

Direction may already be relatively clear. People may understand the priorities and genuinely want the organisation to succeed.

The next stage of improvement requires greater insight into what people actually believe about that direction and the opportunities they have had to construct its meaning together.

When those beliefs can become visible, leadership is better able to understand where meaning is shared, where it varies and where further professional dialogue may strengthen the work.

That creates stronger conditions for Leadership — not simply leadership through position, but the organisation’s collective capacity to exercise judgement and carry shared direction into everyday practice.

If This Feels Familiar...

You may recognise something of your organisation in this story if:

• leadership frequently finds itself saying, “We need more buy-in“;
• strategic priorities appear widely supported, yet their meaning varies across teams;
• people leave the same meeting with different interpretations of what has been agreed;
• leadership repeatedly communicates the same message but sees inconsistent translation into practice;
• common organisational language creates an impression of alignment that may be deeper or shallower than it first appears;
• questions or disagreement are sometimes interpreted as resistance rather than opportunities to understand belief;
• leaders know what they hope staff believe but have few opportunities to discover what people actually believe;
• staff appear committed to the direction but interpret what it requires differently within their own contexts; or
• leadership is working hard to strengthen commitment without being certain whether commitment is actually the issue.

None of these necessarily suggests that people lack commitment.

They may simply indicate that collective belief contains more variation than apparent agreement allows leadership to see.