Earlier this week I heard a friend of mine speaking to a group of people about his experience of change and a lesson he’d learned from attending a game of rugby the week before. My friend is a former rugby player who played at the top level. Like me, he spent years at Lancaster Park – that beloved, slightly battered ground that had been a cornerstone of Canterbury sporting and community life for 130 years, having opened officially in October 1881. Unlike me, he’d even played some of his top level rugby at that venue!
If you’ve ever stood in that crowd, packed among thousands of other Cantabrians, watching local heroes and international giants play out under open skies, you’ll know the feeling. There was something almost tribal about it – the cold, the noise, the shared belonging.
The earthquakes took it from us, of course. Not all at once, but eventually and irreversibly.
My friend described his recent experience at the new stadium, Te Kaha – arriving and immediately noticing how different it felt. The layout wasn’t quite right. The atmosphere seemed off. The seating struck him as strange. He caught himself comparing everything – unfavourably – to the old ground. Despite the fact that the new stadium is fully covered (so you’re no longer sitting in the freezing cold Christchurch Easterly, or being drenched during a Christchurch Southerly!), despite the better sight lines, despite the very real improvements, he found himself mourning Lancaster Park. Wanting it back. Feeling vaguely dissatisfied.
It wasn’t until somewhere around half time, a passage of play lit him up. He was on his feet, yelling. Completely absorbed in the game. And he paused, looked around, and realised: he was having a great time. His sense of disorientation lifted. His comment to me was simple but profound: “The new stadium is different. But the game is still being played. The crowds are still coming. And the old one is gone. I needed to accept that.”
Why This Matters for Schools
I’ve thought about this story a lot in the context of what’s happening in New Zealand education right now. School leaders – particularly principals – are experiencing a cascade of change. Curriculum reforms, assessment directions, structural shifts, and policy announcements that often arrive without adequate explanation, without meaningful consultation, and without time to prepare. A little like an earthquake, you might say: not always predictable, rarely welcome, and leaving people disoriented in the aftermath.
And when people are disoriented, something predictable happens. We reach for the familiar.
Psychologists call this status quo bias – our tendency to prefer the current state of affairs, or to idealise a past one, particularly when we feel we had no say in what changed. The research on this is robust: when change is imposed rather than chosen, people experience it not just as inconvenient but as a kind of loss. Daniel Kahneman’s work on loss aversion tells us that losses loom roughly twice as large as equivalent gains in our psychological experience. We don’t just prefer the old way – we feel the loss of it far more acutely than we feel any benefit from the new.
Added to this is what researchers call nostalgic recollection – our tendency to remember the past through a warmly distorted lens. The old stadium, in my friend’s memory, wasn’t just familiar. It was perfect. The atmosphere was better. Never mind the rain. Never mind the restricted views from certain stands. Never mind the ageing infrastructure. Memory is not a recording; it’s a reconstruction, and we reconstruct the past in ways that serve how we feel in the present. When we’re anxious and off-balance, the past feels safer than it ever actually was.
My friend was experiencing exactly this. He wasn’t really comparing two stadiums. He was comparing a lived present with an idealised memory – and the memory was always going to win that contest.
Looking in the Rear Vision Mirror
The thing that concerns me here is how many school leaders are currently navigating change in Aotearoa New Zealand. Too much energy is being spent looking in the rear vision mirror.
That’s not a criticism – it’s a completely understandable human response to loss and disruption. But when our focus is almost entirely fixed on what we’ve lost, what we used to do, what we believed was working, we lose our capacity to look forward. We lose our ability to read what’s actually in front of us and prepare our communities for it.
The risks of this are real. Schools that are institutionally exhausted by the grief of change find it harder to build the shared understanding their communities need. Leaders who are emotionally occupied by resentment or nostalgia are less available to ask the forward-facing questions: What will our students need in this environment? What opportunities exist here that didn’t before? How do we build the conditions for our people to make sense of this?
There’s a concept in psychological research called cognitive appraisal – the idea that our emotional response to a change is shaped not so much by the change itself as by how we interpret it. The same event, appraised as a threat, produces anxiety and resistance. Appraised as a challenge (or opportunity, even), it produces engagement and problem-solving. We don’t always get to choose what changes. But we have far more agency over how we appraise it than we typically exercise.
My friend’s half-time realisation was, in effect, a reappraisal. Not a denial of what was lost, but a re-engagement with what was actually present and real in front of him.
Sitting with the Discomfort – but Not Stopping There
I want to be careful here, because I’m not suggesting that school leaders should simply accept everything that’s coming down from above, or pretend that the current reform environment in New Zealand is beyond critique (it certainly isn’t!). Some of what is happening is genuinely poorly designed (and I’m trying to be polite here.) The pace is sometimes irresponsible (again, being polite). The consultation has in places been thin (or non-existent!). These are fair and important observations.
But there’s a distinction between holding a view – a considered, evidence-informed, professionally grounded view about what good looks like – and being so captured by what we’ve lost that we can’t function effectively in the present.
The educators I most admire are those who can do both things at once. They can grieve what was good about what existed before. They can advocate, clearly and calmly, for what the evidence supports. And they can still turn up fully for their staff, their students, and their families – not waiting for perfect conditions, but doing the important work in the conditions they actually have. Because the game, as my friend discovered, is still being played.
The children in our schools didn’t get a say in any of this either. They’re sitting in classrooms right now, and they need present, future-focused leaders who are scanning the horizon – not leaders who are lost in grief for a world that isn’t coming back.
A Different Kind of Preparation
My challenge to current school leaders is this: rather than waiting to respond to change as it arrives, what would it look like to prepare – actively, deliberately, collectively – for the change that’s coming?
This means staying close to the evidence about what works for learners, regardless of what’s being mandated from above. It means building the kind of shared professional culture in your school where people can hold uncertainty without it becoming paralysis. It means helping your community understand the broader drivers of change – not so they stop questioning, but so they can make sense of what’s happening and maintain trust in your leadership through it.
It also means scanning the broader environment to be aware of the forces at play that are driving the changes being experienced. This was for me, the motivation for pulling together the 2026 Education Environment Scan – not that we should all seek to become experts in national and international trends and politics. Rather, that by at least having an awareness of what is happening in the world around us, we might be better placed to anticipate and identify some of these shifts and changes before they suddenly impact us. (It also means that we may be better positioned to take pro-active action where appropriate, and to become active in voicing concerns before things become an issue to resolve.)
Put together, this is what I’d describe as a kind of principled adaptability: a clear sense of your values and your evidence base, held firmly, alongside a genuine willingness to engage with what the new landscape actually looks like – rather than endlessly mapping it against the old one.
The new stadium in Christchurch doesn’t carry the weight of 130 years of memory yet. It doesn’t have the worn edges and the shared history. But it has a roof. And it has a game being played inside it. And it has crowds who love rugby (or league, or concerts…) – who, once they let themselves be present, are just as alive and engaged and connected as they ever were at Lancaster Park.
The old stadium mattered. So does what’s here now.
The question is where we choose to put our attention.
Something to ponder…
If this resonates with you, I want to leave you with a few questions – not to answer all at once, but to carry with you into your week, your staff meetings, your quiet moments of reflection.
On your own response to change:
- When you think honestly about the changes being asked of you right now, how much of your energy is being spent grieving what was – and how much is genuinely directed toward what could be?
- Is there an “old stadium” in your professional life that you keep comparing the present to – and is that comparison helping you lead, or holding you back?
- What would it take for you to have your own “half-time moment” – a point where you look around and realise you’re more engaged with the present than you thought?
On your school and community:
- Do the people around you – your staff, your board, your whānau – have enough shared understanding of why things are changing to make sense of what they’re experiencing? Or are they navigating disruption without a map?
- What’s one conversation you’ve been avoiding that, if you had it, might shift your school culture from reactive to responsive?
On looking forward:
- What signals in your environment are you already picking up that suggest further change is coming – and what would it look like to get ahead of those, rather than be caught by them?
- What does “principled adaptability” look like in your school, specifically? What are the non-negotiables you’d hold firm, and where is there genuine room to adapt?
- If your students could see how you’re responding to the current environment, what would you want them to learn from watching you?
Further reading
- 2026 Education Environment Scan – provides a shared map from which leaders at every level of the system can develop coherent, coordinated responses to a genuinely complex future.
- From change-fighters to future makers – What if we spent less time fighting change, and more time building what’s right for learners?
- Theories of change – Too many change efforts focus on implementation without explaining WHY they’ll work
- System persistence – Despite promises of reform and declarations of intent to create an inclusive, learner-centred system, we remain tethered to outdated paradigms that fail our tamariki and rangatahi.
- Before we change the approach we need to examine our beliefs – Systemic change in education starts not with new models – but with old assumptions.
One reply on “A tale of two stadiums”
This is a accurate reflection of what is happening in many parts of our lives but also a huge challenge to have the time and energy to ‘reset’. We need to support each other.