Is Your Roll-out a Roll-over?

It was a Thursday afternoon in a school district I won’t name, but you’d recognize the signs. Long rows of beige cinderblock. A freshly painted mission statement on the wall. And somewhere, someone had recently discovered Canva.

I was there to learn about the school and determine how I might help the school’s next steps. It was my first visit to the school and I had joined a meeting where leaders were rolling out a new instructional strategy—one of those initiatives designed to “drive student achievement” and “elevate rigor.”

We gathered in the media center—admin, department heads, a few teachers, and me. A few laptops glowed. The smell of reheated coffee lingered. The principal pulled up the slide deck.

You know the one.

Big font. Bright colors. “OUR WHY” in bold. “We’re excited to roll out our new approach,” she began. “We know this is going to raise the bar.”

The room was silent.

I watched a teacher lean back in his chair and fold his arms. Another glanced at her watch. One made notes, dutifully. A few more blinked slowly in the glow of the projector. And in that moment, I realized something I now carry into every organization I work with:

If you roll something out, you’re probably rolling over people.

That phrase came to me like a whisper—and it hasn’t left since.

I get it. I really do. I’ve been part of leadership teams. You spend months designing a strategy, analyzing data, refining language. You care about the outcome. You want to get it right. So when it’s finally time to share, you want people to see the brilliance.

But that’s the trap.

What we forget is that no one in the room took the journey with you. No one saw the drafts, the dead ends, the breakthroughs. You might be 80 steps in—but to them, this is step one. And they didn’t choose it. They weren’t invited into it. They’re just expected to adopt it.

And that’s where the resistance lives.

Back in that media center, they finished the presentation. The plan was solid. The vision was clear. And the teachers nodded—but I’ve seen that nod before. It’s not agreement. It’s survival.

Later, I sat with a few of them in the corner of the library. One teacher leaned in, dropped her voice a little, and said, “It’s not that I don’t care. I do. I just don’t feel like any of this was built with us in mind.”

And there it was: the truth behind every failed rollout. It’s not about the change itself. It’s about how people were—or weren’t—brought into the process and how they were - or weren’t - part of the solution.

What if we changed our approach? We stop talking about rollouts and designing things in isolation. And we begin thinking like a conductor rather than a composer (a guide, not the hero?). Our job as leaders isn’t to hand people a finished score; It was to build the music together.

That means:

• Asking more questions than offering answers.

• Starting with what's already working.

• Slowing down so we could go further, faster.

People don’t sabotage what they help build. They protect it. They evolve it. They make it better than you could have imagined on your own. It’s slower, sure. But it lasts longer. And it feels better—for everyone.

Because the difference between a plan that lives and a plan that dies is almost always this:

One was announced. The other was built.