The catch-up period

In August 2023 I turned in a literature review called “Leading Through Chaos.” I reread it this fall expecting to wince a little, and I did. The paper is enthusiastic. It argues that chaos is the new normal, that organizations only really change when they get shaken out of their routines, and that leaders should learn to see chaos as an opportunity. I wrote it during my first months in a new executive role, while taking two doctoral courses at once. I was not short on material.

The framework at the center of the paper still holds up. Picture a line. At one end is stability: process, procedure, structure, everyone knows what happens next. At the other end is anarchy: no fixed process, everything flexible, everything up for grabs. Every organization sits somewhere on that line, and so does every team inside it. In a school, every classroom sits on it too, and the teacher is the one deciding how much change that room can take. The research I read said that real change happens when a group moves along that line, away from stability and back again, and comes out the other side with new habits.

I believed that then and I believe it now. What I missed was the sentence in the middle of my own paper.

The warning I wrote as a caveat

In a section about how leaders can push a team too far, I summarized one study this way: a group that stays at the anarchy end too long, without anyone stepping in, ends up with people who are burned out and exhausted. The authors recommended that leaders deliberately give people a catch-up period. I wrote that down, cited it, and moved on to the next point.

Three years later I finished a dissertation on why teachers leave one school. The leadership there was good. Emotional exhaustion was still the highest burnout score in the building. Two of the things teachers talked about most were initiative fatigue and losing their planning time to coverage. Nobody in that building was against change. They had just never been given a catch-up period.

That 2023 caveat was the dissertation in one sentence. I just didn’t know it yet.

Where the catch-up period goes missing

I see the same thing in almost every district rollout I’ve been part of. A school year is often a stretch of planned change. A new platform in August, a new evaluation rubric in September, a curriculum adoption in January. Each one makes sense on its own. Each one has a launch date, a training plan, and someone accountable for it.

What almost never has a date or an owner is the stretch after go-live, when nothing new lands and teachers get to turn the new thing into a habit. Vendors plan the launch and the renewal. Districts plan the next initiative. The weeks in between belong to no one, and those weeks are where adoption actually happens. When usage stalls in March, everyone calls it resistance. Most of the time it’s a team that went straight from one change to the next with no room to absorb either. People don’t resist change. They run out of room for it.

The objection I hear is that nobody can afford a quiet month. That used to be true. A lot of what fills the weeks after a launch is derivative work the new system creates: reformatting old lessons, rewriting the parent email, rebuilding the gradebook template, answering the same five questions over and over. That is the kind of work AI tools now take on well. A catch-up period used to cost you a month of output. Now it can cost a few hours of setup, if somebody plans for it.

So here is the change I’d make to my own paper. Chaos can be useful. Moving along that line is how organizations grow. But the catch-up period isn’t a footnote to change. It’s the part where the change sticks, and it belongs on the plan with a date and an owner, the same as the launch.

The last page of that literature review listed questions for future research. One was what communication should come before, during, and after a period of change. Communication turned out to be the biggest reason teachers in my study thought about leaving. I wrote down my next three years in August 2023 and didn’t notice.

Next week: Managing the Contemporary Organization, and the first time I studied how a diverse team actually works together.