Consider what matters to your colleagues and identify how the change you propose will provide tangible benefits to them and specific reasons to engage with the organizational changes. 

• When thinking about benefits, consider people’s personal motivations for wanting organizational change. For example, common faculty motivations include enhancing students’ engagement, learning, persistence, and social equity/justice; reducing their time, effort, and resource burdens in their faculty workload; preparing students to become informed citizens for the future; contributing to an innovative workforce; and being recognized and respected by colleagues. If no shared advantages are obvious, adjust your position until you find shared advantages. 

• Ella Ingram writes about meeting people where they are and utilizes Jon Wergin’s (2001) ACRE motivation model to help guide conversations. The ACRE model of faculty motivation consists of autonomy, community, recognition, and efficacy. While the model does focus on faculty, Ingram indicates that it can also be applied to staff and administrators. By framing organizational change initiatives with ACRE in mind, departmental change teams and leaders can develop thoughtful and engaging change statements that center around people’s motivations and their specific academic context within their institution.

• Change leaders and teams can also incorporate tools that specifically guide team discussions and consensus building, such as the NCWIT Tech Inclusion Journey® for Undergraduate Programs (TIJ-UP).

Identify and approach colleagues (e.g. faculty, staff, chairs, deans) and students who are ready-made allies to help with the work. Harnessing support early on in the change process can distribute the workload and add capacity, generate more and better ideas and messages that appeal to a wider range of audiences and people, and establish that systemic change has value and generates interest for more people than just the initial change leader.

• • Communicate the overall vision in a variety of ways with multiple audiences (e.g., speak at faculty meetings, invite talks by industry partners, share in newsletters).

  • Ask your colleagues what their bandwidth looks like, and what activities and efforts they would be both willing and able to engage in.

  • Bring attention to your efforts not only within the institution (e.g., informing the dean and provost), but also by generating additional momentum outside of the institution once you have support (e.g. press releases, conference presentations). This can reify decisions and create external pressure to succeed.

Utilize and provide research-based resources with your colleagues on existing best practices to effectively broaden participation in computing. NCWIT TIJ-UP and the associated NCWIT Resource Pages point to evidence-based resources for implementable, inclusive practices that broaden participation across the six NCWIT Undergraduate System model components.

Point to free support for organizational change efforts, such as NCWIT’s Gearing Up for Change resource which talks through the change process and the ways in which departmental change leaders and teams assess and address readiness for change.

Utilize the NCWIT Tech Inclusion Journey® for Undergraduate Programs (TIJ-UP), an online decision-support tool that enables a local team to assess the practices and conditions in their computing program, connects the team to relevant resources and information, and provides the basis for strategic planning. 

Use multiple sources of data and illustrative examples, stories, analogies, and metaphors. Share compelling evidence in multiple formats, so that the data will speak to different stakeholders and their interests. For example, quantitative data and tables will engage some audiences, whereas qualitative data and quotes will resonate with other audiences.

Consider both internal and external sources of information, and various data points such as:

• • Present longitudinal and current enrollment and graduation rates for women, genderqueer, and non-binary students in your department.

  • Describe national trends in women’s participation in computing, both in earning degrees and in the workforce. 

  • Share information from departmental culture and students’ experience surveys.

  • Report anecdotes and quotes from students’ stories, obtained through focus groups or interviews, presented in a way that protects their anonymity.

  • Describe the loss of specific students who had the interest and talent to succeed in the program, but ultimately left for another degree major or another institution.

  • Benchmark peer and aspirant institutions that have made organizational changes with positive results and share the outcomes with your own department.

For more information and ideas, check out the Data & Evaluation Resource Page. 

Change leaders and teams should not only think about the communication process outlined above, but also the various audiences and stakeholders impacted by the organizational changes. For example, communication strategies for promoting the adoption and sustained use of inclusive pedagogical and curricular innovations in a computer science department might differ across audiences. 

When talking with different stakeholders about the use of inclusive pedagogical and curricular innovations..

• With faculty members, the focus should be on improving students’ learning and course experiences (e.g. engagement and participation), as well as providing support for faculty workload and addressing logistical issues with implementing new curricular innovations. 

• With undergraduate students, team members may want to focus on how this is a student-centered approach shown to increase learning and sense of belonging, as well as provide transferable skills for diverse working environments.

• With staff members, such as academic advisors, inclusive pedagogy aligns well with the National Academic Advising Association‘s (NACADA) core values that shape effective advising.

• With provosts and deans, improves retention and rates of academic success.

For additional guidance, Julia Williams provides a helpful template for change teams to think through this process with her Lightning Talk Template (posted with author’s permission). 

Ella Ingram recommends in her blog post, that change teams should consider using Jon Wergin’s ACRE motivation model (2001) to help craft statements that will engage people in change processes by tapping into their different motivations. 

Similarly to how departmental change leaders and teams need to think about the various audiences and stakeholders impacted by the changes, they also need to tailor their communication strategies as they move through the different organizational change stages. 

In NCWIT’s Gearing Up for Change resource, we note that change models often follow an iterative process where leaders and teams assess what’s currently happening in their department, build momentum for change, lay the foundation for change, introduce and support the change/s, and ultimately institutionalize and stabilize the changes. 

The departmental change leaders and team may find that the messaging at the beginning of the change process when the team is building momentum might look different than the communication strategies and stories shared during institutionalization. For example, in the initial stages of the process, the communication focus might be on conveying the vision for the department’s strategic planning. When institutionalizing the changes, the team may shift the communication to center on impact stories.