Lots of Motion, Very Little Movement: Active Inertia in Independent Schools
Not paralysis
When a school gets into trouble, we tend to assume the problem is paralysis: a leadership team frozen in place, a board that won't act. In my experience, that is rarely what's happening. Struggling schools are often busy. Very busy. And there is a name for this: active inertia.
Active inertia
In 1999, Donald Sull, then at London Business School, published a Harvard Business Review article on why successful companies fail when their environment shifts. He expected to find leaders frozen in the headlights. He found the opposite. The leaders he studied saw the threat early, analyzed it carefully, and launched one initiative after another. They still failed.
Sull called this active inertia. Physicists use "inertia" for an object at rest, but also for a moving object's tendency to keep moving in the same direction. Organizations under pressure do the second kind. They accelerate the things that made them successful, and in trying to climb out of the hole, they dig it deeper.
Schools are especially susceptible to this, and not because school leaders are slow. It's because schools are good at the things that make an organization hard to redirect: long-tested ways of working, deep relationships, and values people genuinely hold. Those are strengths. They are also exactly what hardens.
Four ways a winning formula hardens
Sull argues that every successful organization runs on a formula with four parts: how it sees its world, how it gets work done, whom it is bound to, and what it believes. When conditions change, each part can turn from an asset into a constraint.
1. Strategic frames become blinders
Frames are the mental models that answer the basic questions: What business are we in? Who are our competitors? Which families matter most? They let a leadership team sort a flood of information quickly. They also decide what the team can't see.
The school version is familiar: we compete with the other independent schools within driving distance. Meanwhile, families are weighing a strong public district, a microschool, an ESA-funded option, or a move to a different town.
Angus Fletcher's work on story thinking offers a useful way to see this. A strategic frame is, at bottom, a story a school tells about itself: who we are, whom we serve, who we're up against, why families choose us. Stories are how people make sense of what's happening, which is why frames are so powerful. The trouble starts when a team has only one story. Every new fact gets cast in that plot, and the facts that don't fit get written out.
Ask: What information have we explained away lately?
2. Processes become routines
Once an organization finds a way of working that succeeds, it locks in. That's efficient, until the process becomes the point. People follow it because it's familiar, not because it works.
Schools have no shortage of these, and some of the most durable live in classrooms. In some lower schools, struggling readers are still taught to guess unfamiliar words from pictures and context, even though the evidence strongly favors systematic phonics. In the upper grades, units are taught, tested, and left behind, although research on spaced and retrieval practice shows that returning to material over time is what makes learning last. Both persist because they feel like they work, and because they are how many of us were taught to teach.
The same pattern runs through operations. The parent and faculty satisfaction surveys someone built in-house years ago still go out every spring. The questions lead the witness, and the responses aren't anonymous, so the people with the most candid feedback have every reason to soften it. The results come back reassuring, and the reassurance gets treated as evidence. The budget is built by rolling last year's lines forward, and no one asks whether what we've been spending money on, and at that level, still makes sense. The admissions funnel describes the school's view of enrollment so well that the family's actual journey never comes into focus.
Ask: Which of our processes would we design this way if we were starting today?
3. Relationships become shackles
No school succeeds without deep relationships with families, faculty, donors, and alumni. Sull's point is that the same bonds that built an institution can keep it from changing course.
Consider a longtime donor who has generously underwritten school operations for years, on one understanding: the school stays committed to the program the donor cares about most. That program no longer draws families. Students and faculty have little interest in it. It loses money every year and pulls faculty time away from work that matters more. But no one wants to put the relationship at risk, so the program stays. The gift that once strengthened the school has become a pair of golden handcuffs.
Relationships between heads and boards can harden too. At another school, a long-serving head had been the trusted narrator of the school's story for years. The board relied on that account, and the gap between the school's claimed identity and its lived one stayed invisible until a group of newer board members asked to see more evidence that the head's story was true. An attrition study, stakeholder interviews, and a third-party evaluation of faculty and parents exposed significant gaps in the story. That isn't a failure of trust. It's what any trusted relationship does when nothing outside it checks it.
Ask: Which relationships are making our decisions for us?
4. Values become dogmas
Values are what hold a school together and make people want to work there. Over time, Sull warns, they can harden into rules that carry authority simply because they always have.
In schools, the tell is when a value is cited to end a conversation rather than shape one. "We are a school where every child is known" is a real and worthy commitment. It becomes a dogma when it's the reason no one can discuss section sizes, program consolidation, or a modest enrollment increase, even when those choices might protect the very experience the value describes.
Ask: Is this value guiding a decision or preventing one?
Change the question
Sull's most useful advice is a change of question. Under pressure, leaders rush to ask, What should we do? He suggests pausing to ask, What hinders us?
Most schools aren't starting from zero here. They have some notion of what hinders them: the program no one will touch, the survey everyone suspects is too rosy, the relationship that quietly shapes too many decisions. What's usually missing is a precise, shared name for it, said out loud in the room where decisions get made. Without that, the existing formula bends every new initiative back toward the old one. Naming the frame, the routine, the relationship, or the dogma in the way is the work that makes action count.
Sull is just as wary of the opposite reflex: tearing everything down at once. Change everything simultaneously and you risk destroying the competencies and relationships that took years to build, and disorienting the people you need most. He calls the better path renewal rather than revolution: respect the institution's heritage while recasting the frames, routines, relationships, and values that no longer serve it. Schools see the revolution version when a new head arrives determined to sweep everything out and, in the process, breaks what took decades to build.
This is where Fletcher's thinking comes back in. Active inertia is a school acting out its one story, louder and faster. Strong narrative thinking doesn't settle on a single plot. It stays connected to where it came from while holding competing stories about what might happen next, and keeps generating new ones as conditions change. Renewal is that move. The character, a school's history, values, and commitments, carries forward. The plot is allowed to change.
Before the next initiative
Active inertia is hard to spot precisely because it looks like leadership. The calendar is full, the initiatives are launched, the board is engaged. The antidote isn't less activity. It's examining the formula before accelerating it.
The next time your leadership team or board is about to launch a response to pressure, spend forty-five minutes first on these questions:
- If we keep doing what we're doing, only harder, where does that take us in three years?
- Which of the four (our frames, our routines, our relationships, our values) is most likely to bend this initiative back toward business as usual?
- What have we been treating as noise that might be a signal?
- What competing story about our school's next chapter are we not yet telling?
- What would we keep, deliberately, as we change course?
Those questions won't tell you what to do. They'll help you name what's standing in the way, clearly enough that the team can act on it.
Source: Donald N. Sull, "Why Good Companies Go Bad," Harvard Business Review, July–August 1999.