Climbing Out the Chasm: Advanced Lessons in Selling Change

$125

Course Description: 

This learning experience is a follow up to “Crossing the Chasm,” a foundational concept in change leadership. If you are trying to bring a truly new innovation to your community, you will inevitably fall into the chasm that sits between the first 15% of your adopters and the rest of your community. As a change leader, you need to know how to climb out of that chasm so that the change you want to see continues rather than stalls or dies. This course will teach you how to climb out of that chasm.

Who Should Take This Course:

This course is for anyone who wants to implement a change in their school or system. You might be an innovative teacher trying to create a course that didn’t exist before. You might be a department chair trying to convince your department to adopt a form of assessment that none of them has used before. You might be a principal or head of school trying to launch a program for parents that your community is unfamiliar with. These are “zero to one” problems, meaning you’re trying to activate something brand new. These are just a few examples of who should take this course.

What will you walk away with?

The asset you will build through this course is “A De-Risking Playbook,” which will include:

• Revised Annotated Innovation Diffusion Curve (ie, names of stakeholders who can influence the “purchase” and “implementation” of the change)

• Analysis of emotions and objections that you can anticipate from influential stakeholders.

• Moves to de-risk change for visionaries and pragmatists

• A consolidation of your learning.

The skills you will develop through this course include the ability to:

• Articulate the very different ways that each psychographic in the Innovation Diffusion Curve experiences “risk” when it comes to a true innovation.

• Identify pressures and objections from each psychographic.

• Choose the right move at the right time to climb out of the chasm.

Your Instructor: Christian Talbot

Christian Talbot is the President & CEO of the Middle States Association Commissions on Elementary and Secondary Schools, one of the world’s original K12 accreditors. He is also the co-founder of Juno, a strategy + design consultancy. He was previously the President of Regis High School (NY) and Head of School at Malvern Prep (PA). 
He incubated the Center for Social Impact at Malvern Prep, and later founded Expeditionaries, a social entrepreneurship bootcamp for middle school and high school students. Christian continues to teach through his work in the Nonprofit Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served on the board of trustees of several independent schools. He is a judge for the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition. He also served as a mentor in Penn's Education Entrepreneurship Program. Finally, and most relevant to this course, he has led dozens of change projects in his three decades in education. Some of those projects were small, some were big. Some happened when he was a teacher, others happened while he was an administrator or consultant. They all have one thing in common: they confirmed that learning to “cross the chasm” is vital for anyone who wants to lead change.

Prerequisite:

You should take this course after you have taken “Crossing the Chasm.”

Recommended reading: Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore (rev. ed. 2014)

Time Commitment: Estimated time to completion is 90 mins.

Certificate of Completion or Digital Badge/Certification: Upon successful completion of this workshop, participants will receive a certificate in “Crossing the Chasm.” This digital certificate links to a webpage outlining the learning outcomes covered in the workshop. You can display your certificates on LinkedIn or your CV. You can also share it directly with your school or prospective employers.