SPARC is Transformational —
Our Model of Change

This series was written for the people who hold human development as a professional calling — CHROs, Chief People Officers, Vice Provosts for Faculty Affairs, Foundation Program Officers — and for the Presidents, Provosts, and executive leaders who partner with them.

This series is for anyone who has invested in leadership development, seen leaders genuinely changed by the experience, and then watched the institution absorb those leaders back into the same patterns that preceded the work — or seen leaders leave the institution.

The series is an extended description of a different approach, grounded in research and practice, that we believe yields more substantial and sustainable change. It describes the SPARC Transformational Partnership Model (TPM) — its theoretical foundations, its architecture, and what it actually produces — across eleven pieces that move in sequence from problem, to design, to practice, to evidence, to vision. The pieces are based on the diagram below, which emerged from SPARC's ongoing reflective practice.

A note on perspective: these pieces are written in the voice we use in our partnerships — sometimes analytical, sometimes direct, sometimes speaking in the first person "we" that is not rhetorical but literal. We are a small firm. The experiences described here are the products of real relationships, with real people, in real institutions. We think that voice — authoritative where the research warrants it, personal where the work requires it — is appropriate for what this series is trying to do.

The title — Our Model of Change — refers to the conviction that runs through all eleven pieces: that what produces lasting change in institutions is not the program on the surface but the developmental work that happens beneath it. That work is invisible on most dashboards. It is the subject of this series.