FULLAN’S MODEL FOR CHANGE

1. FULLAN’S MODEL FOR CHANGE Fullan believes that to begin the change process you must first have a moral purpose. Moral Purpose means acting with the intention of making a positive difference in the lives of the people it affects.

2. Leaders must understand the change process. They must understand the complexity involved in change. • The single common factor to every successful change initiative is that relationships improve. • There must be the creation and sharing of new knowledge. • Fullan believes that people won’t share information unless they are committed to the project and that also includes that they believe there is a moral purpose.

3. Coherence Making is the final step of understanding the change. • Change creates disequilibrium, which can be uncomfortable. People have to make sense of the process for themselves.

4. EXAMINATION OF FULLAN’S 5 POINTSLEADERSHIP AND MORAL PURPOSE • Every leader, to be effective, must have a moral purpose. • Moral purpose should be involved in both the process and the end product. • Moral purpose cannot just be stated. It must have strategies to make it happen. • Moral purpose is difficult because you have to contend with the different ideas and cultures that people in an organization bring to the community. • Culture and core values are often the glue that holds an organization together

5. Moral purpose should have a purpose and a passion. • Authentic leaders have a distinctive style and have ideals, values and purposes. They “display character.” • They are morally diligent in advancing the project. • They know that cooperative groups thrive and selfish ones do not. • They know that most people have both “egotistic and altruistic desires” and realized that that’s O.K.

6. Effective leadership has: • Strategies that mobilize many people to tackle tough problems • Accountability that can be measured • An explicit “making a difference sense of purpose” • Assessment that can be measured by the extent it awakens the intrinsic commitment of others—it mobilizes everyone’s sense of moral purpose

7. LEADERSHIP MUST UNDERSTAND THE CHANGE PROCESS • Goal of leadership is not to innovate the most! • It is not enough to have the best ideas. • Leadership must appreciate the early difficulties of trying something new. • Leadership must look at resistance as a positive force in the change process. • Leadership must re-culture the organization during the change process. • Never perceive change as a check-list, but always as a complex system.

8. LEADERS MUST UNDERSTAND THAT RELATIONSHIPS ARE ESSENTIAL • “If moral purpose is job one, relationships are job two as you can’t get anything done without them.” • According to some experts on organizational leadership, the differences between effective and ineffective leaders are how much they really care about the people they lead. • According to Fullan, “It is the interactions and relationships among people, not the people themselves, that makes the difference in an organizational success. • Relationships within an organization are essential to consider during the change process.

9. Effective leaders constantly foster purposeful interaction and problem solving. • Effective leaders are often wary of consensus. • If relationships were good prior to the changes, they become better during the process. • Leaders must create learning communities that enhance the skills and knowledge of the people in the organization. • Learning communities can be channeled to promote organizational innovations while maintaining coherence. • People in a learning community must have a common culture of expectations and must be held accountable.

10. Learning communities must have access to appropriate materials and resources. • Strong learning communities can make matters worse if the leadership doesn’t carefully monitor relationships and behaviors. • Effective learning communities share knowledge and collaborate, often making a breakthrough decision. • The role of the leader is to ensure that the learning community develops relationships that produce desired results. • In several studies, the leadership, or lack of it accounted for the difference in whether a strong professional learning community developed that affected student learning in a positive way. • Knowledge of the teachers is very important but you must move them into professional learning communities to channel changes into a coherent program.

11. KNOWLEDGE BUILDING • When you are going through the change process leaders must focus the group on the new information. • Change doesn’t happen when you place changed individuals into the environment. You have to create a new environment and new settings. • People have to be able to share information and that requires that people listen to each other. Listening depends on good relationships within the organization.

12. The culture of the organization has to include sharing of information. In turn, sharing of information creates a collaborative culture, which cycles back to more sharing. • Leaders in a culture of change must access tacit knowledge from members of the group. • Tacit knowledge is what people know, but don’t necessarily verbalize—how the organization works below the level of discussion or consciousness.

13. Organizations that create and share knowledge are characterized by the ability to; • Share tacit and explicit information • Share the same set of beliefs • Create professional development opportunities • Communicate both up and down in the hierarchy

14. Michael Fullan uses a term called “slow knowing” to describe a leadership quality. • He states that the more patient modes of leadership are very well suited to making sense of intricate situation, complex and ill-defined problems. • Slow knowing means absorbing the disturbances and drawing out new patterns. • People need to internalize the process of change—the change itself and the unexpected effects of the change, including relationships.

15. COHERENCEMAKING • Good leadership requires the process of making meaning out of the changes. • Leadership is difficult in a climate of change because of the disequilibrium and people must understand what is happening. • Once people start to make meaning of the change and it has coherence, new patterns may emerge. • When the changes are perceived positively it creates energy, enthusiasm and generates other positive changes. • Good effective leaders make people feel that even in the most difficult times, problems can be discussed productively. • Effective leaders have confidence, not always certainty. • Effective leaders have enthusiasm, which can be contagious.

16. There are 2 types of commitment—external and internal: • External is triggered by management policies—we have to do this task. This starts the wheels turning and puts the change into motion. This can be a motivation to get involved. • Internal is triggered by a sense of accomplishment. We are getting the job done and that gives us a good feeling. This generates a “collective mobilization” that can energize the project

17. Michael Fullan stated “In many organizations, the problem is not the absence of innovations, but the presence of too many disconnected, episodic, piecemeal projects with superficial implementation.” • When an organization is in the process of change people have to let go of previous ideas, yet keep the new ideas under control. • Change creates “messiness” and messiness is seen as disequilibrium. • An organization is a living system. • Living systems must change and grow or they will die. • Living systems never change on a pure linear path.

18. Leadership must be able to adapt to the unexpected and tweak the “status quo” if needed. • Change should create a disturbance in a way that matches some of the desired outcomes. • Productive “disturbance” occurs when there is a moral purpose to the change. • People will work towards a higher goal if they see the purpose of the change and if it makes sense to them! • To make things coherent policies and strategies have to be aligned with assessment and professional development. • The actual solutions to the problem may come from the people closest to the situation.

19. Michael Fullan uses a term called “slow knowing” to describe a leadership quality. • He states that the more patient modes of leadership are very well suited to making sense of intricate situation, complex and ill-defined problems. • Slow knowing means absorbing the disturbances and drawing out new patterns. • People need to internalize the process of change—the change itself and the unexpected effects of the change, including relationships. • Effective leaders always see the bigger picture. • Leadership must be developed at all levels of the organization, and new leaders cultivated for the future. • People must have a shared commitment to the project and there must be lateral and hierarchal accountability.