Leading Change in Our Districts
Last month, we discussed our role in overseeing student achievement using a Theory of Action. The last post in the series pointed out another responsibility which is Leading Change in our district. The book Leading in a Culture of Change by Michael Fullan is a book I highly recommend. Below is a high level summary of the book.
Certainly, the 150 pages of content is a lot of material to digest. Fundamentally, the book focuses on a framework for “leading change”. There are five components of leadership that represent independent but mutual reinforcing forces for positive change:
Moral purpose – acting with the intention of making a positive difference
Understanding change – is essential to survive without becoming a martyr
Relationship Building – fostering purposeful interaction and problem solving on the toughest questions
Knowledge Creation and Sharing – building the capacity of the organization to constantly generate and increase knowledge
Coherence Making – tolerating enough ambiguity while striving to identify meaningful patterns worth retaining
Acting on five components there are three more personal characteristics that all effective leaders possess: energy-enthusiasm-hope. Taken in all encompassing reinforcing system, you have an organization that moves forward as the forces of change swirl around. Here is a pictorial representation.
Creating Moral Purpose
Moral purpose is about both ends and means. In education, an important end is to make a difference in the lives of students. But the means of getting to that end are also crucial.
At its loftiest level, moral purpose is about how humans evolve over time, especially in relations to how they relate to each other. Examining the evolution of self-centered and cooperative behavior of individuals is translated into the “culture” of an organization. To be an effective leader should be driven by egoistic desires (self-centered) and altruistic (unselfish) motives.
Recognize that moral purpose does not stand alone. However, you can not be an effective leader without behaving in a morally purposeful way.
The Change Process
Understanding the change process is less about innovation and more about innovativeness. It is less about strategy and more about strategizing. It is about avoiding the common mistakes when change starts. And it is rocket science, not least because we are inundated complex, and often contradictory advice. For example:
Kotter’s Leading Change proposes eight steps :
Establishing a Sense of Urgency
Creating a Guiding Coalition
Developing a Vision and Strategy
Communicating the Change Vision
Empowering Broad-Based Action
Generating Short-Term Wins
Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change
Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture
Or Hamel’s advice to “lead the revolution “:
Build a point of view
Write a manifesto
Create a coalition
Pick your targets and pick your moments
Co-opt and neutralize
Find a translator
Win small, win early and win often
Isolate, infiltrate, integrate
Despite the contradictory advice and the valuable ideas contained in leadership books, change can be led and leadership does make a difference. The book then details its approach to understanding change in order to better lead it.
Understanding the Change Process
The goal is not to innovate the most.
It is not enough to have the best ideas.
Appreciate the implementation dip.
Redefine resistance.
Reculturing is the name of the game.
Never a checklist, always complexity.
Building Relationships
If moral purpose is job one, relationships are job two, as you can’t get anywhere without them. Moral purpose, relationships and organizational success are closely interrelated. In the case of schools, because we live in the knowledge society, need to strengthen their intellectual quality as they deepen their moral purpose.
After presenting educational examples, the author does acknowledge a word of caution. Relationships are are ends in themselves. Relationships are powerful, which means they can also be powerfully wrong. Strong teacher communities can be effective or not depending on whether the teachers collaborate to make breakthroughs in learning or whether they reinforce methods that, as it turns out, do not achieve results. The role of the leader is to ensure that the organization develop relationships that help produce desirable results.
Schools and school districts can get tough about student learning, can use their minds to identify new and better ideas, can establish strategies and mechanisms of development. But successful strategies always involve relationships, relationships, relationships.
Knowledge Creating and Sharing
Knowledge building, knowledge sharing, knowledge creation, knowledge management. Is this just another fad? They could easily become so unless we understand the role of knowledge in organizational performance and set up corresponding mechanisms and practices that make knowledge sharing a cultural value.
Information is machines. Knowledge is people. Information becomes knowledge only when it takes on a “social life”. Brown and Duguid establish a foundation for viewing knowledge as a social phenomenon:
“Knowledge lies less in its databases than its people.”
“For all information independence and extent, it is people, in their communities, organizations, and institutions, who ultimately decide what it all means and why it matters.”
“A viable system must embrace not just the technological system, but the social system – the people, organizations and institutions involved.”
“Knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold. It entails the knower’s understanding and degree of commitment.”
If you remember one thing about information, it is that it only becomes valuable in a social context.
Focusing on information rather than use is why sending individuals or teams to external training by itself does not work. Placing changed individuals in an unchanged environment does not work. Change leaders work on changing the context, helping create new settings conducive to learning and sharing that knowledge. If individuals begin sharing ideas about issues they they see as important, the sharing itself creates a learning culture. Ideally, each individual makes an internal commitment to reach a level of mastery in tacit and explicit knowledge and understands they are responsible for sharing.
Coherence Making
Change is a leader’s friend, but it has a split personality: its nonlinear messiness gets us into trouble. But the experience of messiness is necessary in order to discover the hidden benefits – creative ideas and novel solutions often generated when the status quo is disrupted. While the world is complex, the key is to “disturb the status quo in a manner that approximates the desired outcome.
In schools, the main problem is not lack of innovations but the presence of too many disconnected, piecemeal, superficially adorned projects. Besides facing a turbulent, uncertain environment, schools face the additional burden of having a torrent of unwanted, uncoordinated policies and innovation raining down on them from hierarchical bureaucracies.
While “disturbing the status quo” appears to contradict coherence making, unsettling processes provided the best route to greater all-round coherence. The most powerful coherence is a function of having worked through the ambiguities and complexities of hard-to-solve problems because the only coherence that counts is not what is on paper nor what top management can articulate but what is in the minds and hearts of members of the organization. The leader’s coherence-making capacity is a matter of timing. There is a time to disturb and to time to cohere. Good leaders attack incoherence when it is a function of random innovativeness or prolonged confusion.
The book places a premium on understanding and insight rather than on mere action steps. In the long run, leadership effectiveness depends on developing internal commitment in which the ideas and intrinsic motivation of the vast majority of organizational members, become activated. Along the way, authorative ideas, democratic empowerment, affiliative bonds, and coaching will be needed.
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