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EA 031 816

Fullan, Michael

Leading in a Culture of Change.

ISBN-0-7879-5395-4

2001-00-00 172p.

Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 ($25). Tel: 415-433-1740; Fax: 415-433-0499; Web site: http://www.josseybass.com. Books (010) Guides Non-Classroom (055) EDRS Price MF01/PC07 Plus Postage.

Elementary Secondary Education; *Leadership; Leadership Qualities; *Leadership Styles; *Leadership Training

The more complex society gets, the more sophisticated leadership must become. This book is about how leaders can focus on certain key change themes that will allow them to lead effectively under messy conditions. Chapter 1 identifies theoretical reasons why change occurs as it does. They include moral purpose, understanding change, developing relationships, knowledge building, and coherence making; they have developed independently but are deeply compatible. Chapters 2 through 6 take each theme in turn and examine in more detail its inner workings. Through these five chapters, a comprehensive theory of leadership is developed. The matter of becoming a leader and how systems can foster leadership development are taken up in chapter 7. In recent times, the knowledge base for what makes for success under conditions of complexity is getting better--deeper and more insightful. Case examples of large-scale transformation in both business and education provide an ever-increasing body of experiences from which to gain insight. This book draws from these new ideas and finds remarkable convergences in what is being discovered about how to lead in a culture of complex change. (Contains 71 references and an index.) (RT)

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IN A CULTURE OF

NGE BUSINESS, NONPROFIT, AND PUBLIC

sector leaders are facing new and

daunting challengesrapid-paced developments in technology, sudden shifts in

the marketplace, and crisis and contention in

the public arenaif they are to survive in this

chaotic environment, leaders must develop the

skills they need to lead effectively no matter

how fast the world around them is changing.

Leading in a Culture of Change offers new

and seasoned leaders' insights into the

dynamics of change and presents a unique and

imaginative approach for navigating the

intricacies of the change process. Author

Michael Fullanan internationally acclaimed

expert in organizational changeshows how

leaders in all types of organizations can accomplish their goals and become exceptional

leaders. He draws on the most current ideas

and theories on the topic of effective

leadership, incorporates case examples of

large scale transformation, and reveals a

remarkable convergence of powerful themes

or, as he calls them, the five core

competencies. By integrating the five core competencies

attending to a broader moral purpose, keeping

on top of the change process, cultivating

relationships, sharing knowledge, and setting a

vision and context for creating coherence in

organizationsleaders will be empowered to

deal with complex change. They will be

transformed into exceptional leaders who

consistently mobilize their compatriots to do

important and difficult work under conditions

of constant change. 3

More Praise for Leading in a Culture of Change

"The sign of outstanding and inspired leadership is the ability to

lead rather than be led by the forces of change. How do leaders

in private, public, and not-for-profit sectors meet the challenges

of today's complex world? This book shows the way."

Veronica Lacey, president and CEO, The Learning Partnership

"Michael Fullan debunks the notion that there is a 'one-size-fits-

all' blueprint for managing change. Leading in a Culture of

Change is an excellent book for all educators and business lead-

ers. Readers will gain powerful new insights into developing the

core capabilities required for effective leadership under condi-

tions of complex change." Kenneth Lalonde, executive vice president,

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

"A great book for leaders everywhere who are truly interested in

learning and cultivating the leadership potential in others."

Marilyn Knox, president, Nutrition, Nestle Canada Inc.

"Michael Fullan has no truck with simplistic solutions or super-

heroes. Instead he helps leaders understand the paradoxes of

complex cultural changeleaders from all sectors will learn from

his insights." Heather Duquesnay, director and chief executive,

National College for School Leadership, England

"Leading in a Culture of Change describes vividly the kind of

leadership necessary to bring about successful change in modern

times. At its heart is building capacitya powerful message."

Michael Barber, head, Standards and Effectiveness Unit,

Department for Education and Employment, London, England

LEADING IN A CULTURE OF

CHANGE

LEADING IN A CULTURE OF

CHANGE

MICHAEL FULLAN

IA JOSSEY-BASS NEED A Wiley Company MIK San Francisco

Published by

r JOSSEY-BASSli si A Wiley Company 989 Market Streetimm....""

1. San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fullan, Michael.

Leading in a culture of change : being effective in complex times / Michael Fullan.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-7879-5395-4 (alk. paper) 1. Educational leadership. 2. School management and organization.

3. Educational change. I. Title. LB2806 .F794 2001 371.2dc21 2001002014

FIRST EDITION

HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Contents

Preface ix

1. A Remarkable Convergence 1

2. Moral Purpose 13

3. Understanding Change 31

4. Relationships, Relationships, Relationships 51

5. Knowledge Building 77

6. Coherence Making 107

7. The Hare and the Tortoise 121

References 139

About the Author 145

Index 146 vii

To WLIW

Preface

THE MORE COMPLEX SOCIETY GETS, THE MORE SOPHIS-

ticated leadership must become. Complexity means change, but specifically it means rapidly occurring, unpre- dictable, nonlinear change. Moreover, the pace of change is ever increasing, as James Gleick, the author of Chaos, point- ed out in a recent book called Faster, which he subtitled The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Gleick, 1999). How do you lead in a culture such as ours, which seems to spe- cialize in pell-mell innovation?

This is the leader's dilemma. On the one hand, failing to act when the environment around you is radically changing leads to extinction. On the other hand, making quick deci- sions under conditions of mind-racing mania can be equally fatal. Robert Steinberg said it best: "The essence of intelli- gence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act

PREFACE

quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly" (cited in Gleick, 1999, p. 114).

This book is about how leaders can focus on certain key change themes that will allow them to lead effectively under messy conditions. The book is also about how leaders foster leadership in others, thereby making themselves dispensable in the long run. And it is about how we can produce more "leaders of leaders."

The good news is that society has not been evolving as recklessly as it seems. As we shall see, there are deep theoret- ical reasons why change occurs as it does. If we can come to understand these powerful themes, we will be able to influ- ence (but not control) them for the better. I identify these themes in Chapter One, which I call "A Remarkable Convergence" because certain powerful factors have emerged that have developed independently but that are deeply com- patibleindeed, synergistic. There are five themes in particu- lar: moral purpose, understanding change, developing rela- tionships, knowledge building, and coherence making. Chapters Two through Six take each theme in turn and exam- ine in more detail its inner workings. Through these five chap- ters I develop a comprehensive theory of leadership. In Chapter Seven, I take up the matter of becoming a leader and how systems can foster leadership development, which turns out to be more of a tortoise than a hare proposition. Leadership must be cultivated deliberately over time at all lev- els of the organization.

Two things have happened in recent times that aid our pursuit of effective leadership. One is that the knowledge base for what makes for success under conditions of complexity is

getting betterdeeper, more insightful. The other is that there

PREFACE xi

are many more case examples of large-scale transformation in both business and education. There is literally more to learn today than ever before. Since the early 1990s we have begun to study and learn from more and more examples of pur- poseful reform. We are uncovering fantastic new insights from these experiences. This book draws from these new ideas in both business and education, and in so doing finds remarkable convergences in what we are discovering about how to lead in a culture of complex change.

Leadership in business and in education increasingly have more in common. As we shall see, businesses are realiz- ing more and more that having moral purpose is critical for sustainable success. In this respect they have much to learn from schools. Schools are beginning to discover that new ideas, knowledge creation, and sharing are essential to solving learning problems in a rapidly changing society. Schools can learn from how the best companies innovate and get results. At the most basic level, businesses and schools are similar in that in the knowledge society, they both must become learn- ing organizations or they will fail to survive. Thus, leaders in business and education face similar challengeshow to culti- vate and sustain learning under conditions of complex, rapid change.

Fortunately, there are many more examples of organiza- tions that are engaged in successful change. I have benefited from working with a growing number of colleagues in Toronto and around the world helping bring about (and study) large-scale reform. The most interesting initiative is our

critical friend evaluation of the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy in England, in which dramatic improve- ments in student performance are being attempted in all the

xli PREFACE

primary schools in the country (twenty thousand) over a five- year period (1997 to 2002); actually, more schools will be involved, because the results must extend beyond the primary schools into secondary schools and into the infrastructure. I thank my colleagues Lorna Earl, Ken Leithwood, Ben Levin,

Nancy Watson, Doris Jantzi, Blair Mascall, and Nancy Torrance for their work on the England evaluation.

We are also working on several other fronts: school dis- trict reform, such as the literacy project involving ninety-three

schools in the Toronto District School Board; the study of lit- eracy reform in the York Region District School Board; the development of "assessment literacy" in all eighty-four schools (and thus in the system) in the Edmonton Catholic School District; the Manitoba School Improvement Program; and the evaluation of school improvement in the Guilford County School District in Greensboro, North Carolina. We are also trying our hand at the redesign of teacher education, both in Toronto in our own program and in Louisiana, where comprehensive reform of teacher education and school improvement is being attempted. At the same time, we have monitored large-scale change projects conducted by others around the world. Andy Hargreaves and Carol Rolheiser have been particularly helpful in working through many of the ideas as we drew lessons from educational reform initia- tives.

Clearly these are exciting timesthere is a lot going on. Not the least of these developments is the new realization that leadership is key to large-scale improvement yet must be rad- ically different than it has been. Further, effective leadership is in very short supply. We can therefore expect to see leadership development initiatives dominating the scene over the next decade.

PREFACE

Leadership required in a culture ofchange, however, is not straightforward. We are living in chaotic conditions. Thus leaders must be able to operate under complex, uncertain cir- cumstances. For this reason, I dedicate this book to a chaos theory concept, "wildness lies in wait." Bernstein (1996, p. 331) quotes G. K. Chesterton: "The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, or even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illog- icality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait."

Not a bad mantra for leaders in complex times: seek out and honor hidden inexactitudes.

April 2001 Michael Fullan

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Chapter One

A Remarkable Convergence

C RANGE IS A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD. ITS RELENTLESS pace these days runs us off our feet. Yet when things are

unsettled, we can find new ways to move ahead and to create breakthroughs not possible in stagnant societies. If you ask people to brainstorm words to describe change, they come up with a mixture of negative and positive terms. On the one side, fear, anxiety, loss, danger, panic; on the other, exhilara- tion, risk-taking, excitement, improvements, energizing. For better or for worse, change arouses emotions, and when emo- tions intensify, leadership is key.

This is not a book about superleaders. Charismatic leaders inadvertently often do more harm than good because, at best, they provide episodic improvement followed by frustrated or despondent dependency. Superhuman leaders also do us another

disservice: they are role models who can never be emulated

2 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

by large numbers. Deep and sustained reform depends on many of us, not just on the very few who are destined to be extraordi- nary.

This book, then, is about how all of us can improve our leadership by focusing on a small number of key dimensions. Each and every leader, whether the CEO of a multinational corporation or a school principal, can become more effec- tivemuch more effectiveby focusing on a small number of core aspects of leadership and by developing a new mind-set about the leader's responsibility to himself or herself and to those with whom he or she works.

I have never been fond of distinguishing between leader- ship and management: they overlap and you need both quali- ties. But here is one difference that it makes sense to highlight: leadership is needed for problems that do not have easy an- swers. The big problems of the day are complex, rife with paradoxes and dilemmas. For these problems there are no once-and-for-all answers. Yet we expect our leaders to pro- vide solutions. We place leaders in untenable positions (or, al- ternatively, our system produces leaders who try to carry the day with populist, one-sided solutions that are as clear as they are oversimplified). Homer-Dixon (2000b, p. 15) makes a similar observation: "We demand that [leaders] solve, or at least manage, a multitude of interconnected problems that can develop into crises without warning; we require them to navigate an increasingly turbulent reality that is, in key as- pects, literally incomprehensible to the human mind; we buf- fet them on every side with bolder, more powerful special interests that challenge every innovative policy idea; we sub- merge them in often unhelpful and distracting information; and we force them to decide and act at an ever faster pace."

A REMARKABLE CONVERGENCE 3

Heifetz (1994) accuses us of looking for the wrong kind of leadership when the going gets tough: "in a crisis . . . we call for someone with answers, decision, strength, and a map of the future, someone who knows where we ought to be goingin short someone who can make hard problems sim- ple. . . . Instead of looking for saviors, we should be calling for

leadership that will challenge us to face problems for which there are no simple, painless solutionsproblems that require us to learn new ways" (p. 21).

An alternative image of leadership, argues Heifetz (1994, p. 15), is one of "mobilizing people to tackle tough prob- lems." Leadership, then, is not mobilizing others to solve problems we already know how to solve, but to help them confront problems that have never yet been successfully ad- dressed.

There is, I will argue, a recent remarkable convergence of theories, knowledge bases, ideas, and strategies that help us confront complex problems that do not have easy answers. This convergence creates a new mind-seta framework for thinking about and leading complex change more powerfully than ever before. Figure 1.1 summarizes the framework.

There are strong reasons to believe that five components of leadership represent independent but mutual reinforcing forces for positive change. Chapters Two through Six are de- voted to building the case for the powerful knowledge base represented by these five components of effective leadership. In the following paragraphs I will discuss Figure 1.1, provid- ing a brief overview of the components.

Briefly, moral purpose means acting with the intention of making a positive difference in the lives of employees, cus- tomers, and society as a whole. This is an obvious value with

4 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Leaders

Members

Results

Commitment (External and Internal)

More good things happen; fewer bad things happen.

Figure 1.1. A Framework for Leadership.

which many of us can identify, but I will argue in Chapter Two that there may be inevitable evolutionary reasons why moral purpose will become more and more prominent and that, in any case, to be effective in complex times, leaders

A REMARKABLE CONVERGENCE 5

must be guided by moral purpose. In Chapter Two we will take up case studies from both business and education that will demonstrate that moral purpose is critical to the long- term success of all organizations.

Second, it is essential for leaders to understand the change process. Moral purpose without an understanding of change will lead to moral martyrdom. Moreover, leaders who com- bine a commitment to moral purpose with a healthy respect for the complexities of the change process not only will be more successful but also will unearth deeper moral purpose. Understanding the change process is exceedingly elusive. Management books contain reams of advice, but the advice is often contradictory, general, and at the end of the day confus- ing and nonactionable. Chapter Three identifies these prob- lems and offers six guidelines that provide leaders with concrete and novel ways of thinking about the process of change: (1) the goal is not to innovate the most; (2) it is not enough to have the best ideas; (3) appreciate early difficulties of trying something newwhat I call the implementation dip; (4) redefine resistance as a potential positive force; (5) recul- turing is the name of the game; (6) never a checklist, always complexity.

Third, we have found that the single factor common to every successful change initiative is that relationships im- prove. If relationships improve, things get better. If they re- main the same or get worse, ground is lost. Thus leaders must be consummate relationship builders with diverse people and groupsespecially with people different than themselves. Effective leaders constantly foster purposeful interaction and problem solving, and are wary of easy consensus.

Fourth, the new work on knowledge creation and sharing

6 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

reflects an amazing congruence with the previous three themes. We live, after all, in the knowledge society, but that term is a cliche. What is deeply revealing is that new theoreti-

cal and empirical studies of successful organizations unpack the operational meaning of the general term "knowledge or- ganization." I will show how leaders commit themselves to constantly generating and increasing knowledge inside and outside the organization. What is astonishing (because it comes from an independent theoretical tradition) is how inti- mately the role of knowledge relates to the previous three themes. What has been discovered is that, first, people will not voluntarily share knowledge unless they feel some moral commitment to do so; second, people will not share unless the dynamics of change favor exchange; and, third, that data without relationships merely cause more information glut. Put another way, turning information into knowledge is a so- cial process, and for that you need good relationships. So Chapter Five focuses on knowledge building, but we will see that we need moral purpose, an understanding of the change process, and good relationships if we are to create and share knowledge.

All this complexity keeps people on the edge of chaos. It is important to be on that edge because that is where creativity resides, but anarchy lurks there too. Therefore, effective lead-

ers tolerate enough ambiguity to keep the creative juices flow-

ing, but along the way (once they and the group know enough), they seek coherence. Coherence making is a peren- nial pursuit. Leadership is difficult in a culture of change be- cause disequilibrium is common (and valuable, provided that patterns of coherence can be fostered).

In summary, moral purpose is concerned with direction

A REMARKABLE CONVERGENCE 7

and results; understanding change, building relationships, and knowledge building honor the complexity and discovery of the journey; and coherence making extracts valuable patterns worth retaining. But, alas, none of this is quite so linear and fixed as it would seem when one reads a simple description of each component.

There is another set of seemingly more personal character- istics that all effective leaders possess, which I have labeled the

energy-enthusiasm-hopefulness constellation. I do not think it is worth debating whether this constellation is a cause or an effect of the five leadership components. No doubt there is a dynamic, reciprocal relationship between the two sets. Energetic-enthusiastic-hopeful leaders "cause" greater moral purpose in themselves, bury themselves in change, naturally build relationships and knowledge, and seek coherence to consolidate moral purpose. Looking at the dynamic from the "other side," we can see that leaders immersed in the five as- pects of leadership can't help feeling and acting more ener- getic, enthusiastic, and hopeful. Whatever the case, effective leaders make people feel that even the most difficult problems can be tackled productively. They are always hopefulcon- veying a sense of optimism and an attitude of never giving up in the pursuit of highly valued goals. Their enthusiasm and confidence (not certainty) are, in a word, infectious, and they are infectiously effective, provided that they incorporate all five leadership capacities in their day-to-day behavior.

Note also how the five capacities together operate in a checks and balances fashion. Leaders with deep moral pur- pose provide guidance, but they can also have blinders if ideas are not challenged through the dynamics of change, the give and take of relationships, and the ideas generated by new

8 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

knowledge. Similarly, coherence is seen as part and parcel of complexity and can never be completely achieved. Leaders in a culture of change value and almost enjoy the tensions inher- ent in addressing hard-to-solve problems, because that is where the greatest accomplishments lie.

Figure 1.1 also shows how leaders who are steeped in the five core capacities by definition evince and generate long- term commitment in those with whom they work. Effective leaders, because they live and breathe the five aspects of lead- ership, find themselves committed to stay the course (in a sense, they are also inspired by others in the organization as they interact around moral purposes, new knowledge, and the achievement of periodic coherence), and, of course, they mo- bilize more and more people to become willing to tackle tough problems. We have to be careful when we talk about commitment. In the past, we have written about blind com- mitment or groupthinkwhen the group goes along uncriti- cally with the leader or the group (Fullan & Hargreaves, 1992). Leaders can be powerful, and so can groups, which means they can be powerfully wrong. This is why the five di- mensions of leadership must work in concert. They provide a check against uninformed commitment.

Even when commitment is evidently generated, there are qualifiers. Argyris (2000, p. 40) has helped us make the cru- cial distinction between external and internal commitment: "These differ in how they are activated and in the source of energy they utilize. External commitment is triggered by man-

agement policies and practices that enable employees to ac- complish their tasks. Internal commitment derives from energies internal to human beings that are activated because getting a job done is intrinsically rewarding." Argyris notes

A REMARKABLE CONVERGENCE 9

that "when someone else defines objectives, goals, and the steps to be taken to reach them, whatever commitment exists will be external" (p. 41).

Moral purpose is usually accompanied by a sense of ur- gency. Leaders in some such cases are in a hurry. If they are in

too much of a hurry, they will completely failyou can't bull- doze change. If leaders are more sophisticated, they may set up a system of pressure and support, which in the short run will obtain noticeable desired results, but these will mainly be derived from external commitment. Remember that external commitment is still commitment; it is the motivation to put one's effort into the task of change. It can include excitement and satisfaction of accomplishment. It is valuable. Later, I will

present case studies of change projects that generated a good deal of external commitment with impressive short-term re- sults. But we will also discuss the ins and outs of developing internal commitment on a large scalean extremely difficult proposition.

At this stage of the discussion, we need only make the point essential to the framework illustrated in Figure 1.1. The litmus test of all leadership is whether it mobilizes people's commitment to putting their energy into actions designed to improve things. It is individual commitment, but it is above all

collective mobilization. We will also see in subsequent chap- ters that collective action by itself can be short-lived if it is not based on or does not lead to a deep sense of internal purpose among organizational members. Generating internal over ex- ternal commitment and external over blind commitment is the mark of effective leadership.

What are the outcomes of all this effective leadership and commitment? In Figure 1.1, I have deliberately referred to

10 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

results very generally as causing "more good things to hap- pen" and "fewer bad things to happen." I will be presenting case studies from both business and education. In the case of business, good things are economic viability, customer sat- isfaction, employee pride, and a sense of being valuable to society. In schools, good things are enhanced student per- formance, increased capacity of teachers, greater involvement of parents and community members, engagement of students, all-around satisfaction and enthusiasm about going further, and greater pride for all in the system. In both cases, the re- duction of bad things means fewer aborted change efforts; less

demoralization of employees; fewer examples of piecemeal, uncoordinated reform; and a lot less wasted effort and re- sources.

This book delves into the complexities of leadership evi- denced in Figure 1.1. It provides insights, strategies, and, ulti- mately, better theories of knowledge and action suited to leadership in complex times. In the final chapter we will ex- amine more directly the question of how new leaders can be developed. How to become more effective as a leader is of growing concern for all those in positions to make a differ- ence; how to foster large numbers of leaders in all areas of so- ciety is a system question more worrisome today than ever before. If leadership does not become more attractive, doable, and exciting, public and private institutions will deteriorate. If the experience of rank-and-file members of the organization

does not improve, there will not be a pool of potential leaders to cultivate. A classic chicken-and-egg problem. Good leaders

foster good leadership at other levels. Leadership at other lev- els produces a steady stream of future leaders for the system as a whole.

A REMARKABLE CONVERGENCE 11

The conclusion, then, is that leaders will increase their ef- fectiveness if they continually work on the five components of

leadershipif they pursue moral purpose, understand the change process, develop relationships, foster knowledge building, and strive for coherencewith energy, enthusiasm, and hopefulness. If leaders do so, the rewards and benefits will be enormous. It is an exciting proposition. The culture of change beckons.

Chapter Two

Moral Purpose

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MOTHER THERESA TO HAVE

moral purpose. Some people are deeply passionate about improving life (sometimes to a fault, if they lack one or more of the other four components of leadership: understand- ing of the change process, strong relationships, knowledge building, and coherence making among multiple priorities). Others have a more cognitive approach, displaying less emo- tion but still being intensely committed to betterment. Whatever one's style, every leader, to be effective, must have and work on improving his or her moral purpose.

Moral purpose is about both ends and means. In educa- tion, an important end is to make a difference in the lives of students. But the means of getting to that end are also crucial. If you don't treat others (for example, teachers) well and fairly, you will be a leader without followers (see Chapter

14 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Four, in which I describe how effective leaders constantly work on developing relationships at all levels of the organiza- tion). Of course, a case can be made that leading with in- tegrity is not just instrumental. To strive to improve the quality of how we live together is a moral purpose of the high-

est order. Sergiovanni (1999, p. 17) draws the same conclu- sion about what he calls the lifeworld of leadership.

Ask the next five people you meet to list three persons they

know, either personally or from history, who they consider

to be authentic leaders. Then have them describe these lead-

ers. Chances are your respondents will mention integrity, re-

liability, moral excellence, a sense of purpose, firmness of

conviction, steadiness, and unique qualities of style and sub-

stance that differentiate the leaders they choose from others.

Key in this list of characteristics is the importance of sub-

stance, distinctive qualities, and moral underpinnings. Authentic leaders anchor their practice in ideas, values, and

commitments, exhibit distinctive qualities of style and sub-

stance, and can be trusted to be morally diligent in advanc-

ing the enterprises they lead. Authentic leaders, in other

words, display character, and character is the defining char-

acteristic of authentic leadership.

At the loftiest level, moral purpose is about how humans evolve over time, especially in relation to how they relate to each other. Ridley (1996) and Sober and Wilson (1998) trace the evolution of self-centered and cooperative behavior in an- imals, insects, and humans. What makes humans different, says Ridley, is culture. Ideas, knowledge, practices and beliefs,

and the like enter consciousness and can be passed on "by di-

MORAL PURPO*

rect infection from one person to another" (p. 179). Ridley raises the interesting evolutionary hypothesis that "coopera- tive groups thrive and selfish ones do not, so cooperative so- cieties have survived at the expense of others" (p. 175). Thus leaders in all organizations, whether they know it or not, con- tribute for better or for worse to moral purpose in their own organizations and in society as a whole.

Sober and Wilson (1998) also state that it is futile to argue whether people are driven by egoistic (self-centered) or altru- istic (unselfish) motives. The fact is that all effective leaders are driven by bothwhat Sober and Wilson call "motiva- tional pluralism[, which] is the view that we have both egois- tic and altruistic ultimate desires" (p. 308). This is why everyday leaders shouldn't expect to be like Mother Theresa. (And who knows, maybe she got a lot of pleasure out of help- ing others). Most of us have mixed motives, and that is per- fectly fine.

I will also show that moral purpose doesn't stand alone. We will see that leaders who work on the five qualities in this booknot just the obvious first quality, which is moral pur- pose itself, but all four other componentswill, by definition, find themselves steeped in moral purpose. Whether you are an insurance executive or a school principal, you simply can- not be effective without behaving in a morally purposeful way. And if you follow the lessons in this book, you won't have to plan to be more moral in your pursuit; it will come naturally. Moral purpose is profoundly built into the five components of leadership as they are carried out in practice.

The complexity of pursuing moral purpose in a culture of change can be best illustrated through case examples. I select cases equally from education and from business to show that

16 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

the issues of leadership are increasingly common across both types of organizations. A major education example comes from our current multiyear large-scale evaluation of the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy in England.

The Case of the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy

Let us descend from this elevated abstract level and consider a real case, a very large scale case involving a whole country (twenty thousand schools with seven million students up to age eleven), namely the case of the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy (NLNS) in England. Here is the proposi- tion: a new government comes into power in 1997, and the prime minister declares that his three priorities are "educa- tion, education, education." We have heard that before, but this government goes further. It says that the initial core goal is to raise the literacy and numeracy achievement of children up to age eleven. The government sets specific targets. The baseline they observe is that the percentage of eleven-year- olds scoring 4 or 5 on the test of literacy was 57 percent in 1996 (level 4 being the level at which proficiency standards are met); for numeracy the baseline was 54 percent. The min-

ister announces that the targets for 2002 are 80 percent for literacy (up from 57 percent) and 75 percent for numeracy (up from 54 percent). He makes a commitment that he will resign as secretary of state if those targets are not met.

Further, the leaders of the initiative in the Department for Education and Employment set out to "use the change knowl- edge base" to design a set of pressure-and-support strategies to accomplish this remarkable feat. Finally, they know they

MORAL PURPOSE 17

are going to be watched carefully as this highly political and highly explicit initiative unfolds. A team of us at the Univer- sity of Toronto are monitoring and assessing the entire NLNS strategy as it unfolds during the 1998 to 2002 period.

The main elements of the implementation strategy are summarized by Michael Barber (2000, pp. 8-9), head of the government initiative:

A nationally prepared project plan for both literacy

and numeracy, setting out actions, responsibilities,

and deadlines through to 2002;

A substantial investment sustained over at least six

years and skewed toward those schools that need

most help;

A project infrastructure involving national direction

from the Standards and Effectiveness Unit, 15 re-

gional directors, and over 300 expert consultants at

the local level for each of the two strategies;

An expectation that every class will have a daily

math lesson and daily literacy hour;

A detailed teaching programme covering every

school year for children from ages 5 to 11;

An emphasis on early intervention and catch up for

pupils who fall behind;

A professional development programme designed to

enable every primary school teacher to learn to un-

derstand and use proven best practices in both cur-

riculum areas;

18 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

The appointment of over 2,000 leading math teach-

ers and hundreds of expert literacy teachers who

have the time and skill to model best practice for

their peers;

The provision of "intensive support" to circa half of

all schools where the most progress is required;

A major investment in books for schools (over 23

million new books in the system since May 1997);

The removal of barriers to implementation (espe-

cially a huge reduction in prescribed curriculum

content outside the core subjects);

Regular monitoring and extensive evaluation by our

national inspection agency, OFSTED;

A national curriculum for initial teacher training re-

quiring all providers to prepare new primary school

teachers to teach the daily math lesson and the liter-

acy hour;

A problem-solving philosophy involving early iden-

tification of difficulties as they emerge and the pro-

vision of rapid solutions or intervention where

necessary;

The provision of extra after-school, weekend, and

holiday booster classes for those who need extra

help to reach the standard.

The impact of the strategies on achievement, measured as a percentage of pupils reaching levels 4 or 5, is in many ways astounding (recall that twenty thousand schools are in-

MORAL PURPOSE 19

volved). By the year 2000, the whole country had progres- sively moved from 57 percent proficient achievement in liter- acy in 1996 to 75 percent; and from 54 percent to 72 percent in numeracy. We have no doubt that the targets of 80 percent and 75 percent will be achieved by 2002, although I do not present it as a problem-free case because a preoccupation with

achievement scores can have negative side effects, such as nar- rowing the curriculum that is taught and burning people out as they relentlessly chase targets.

There is a lot more than moral purpose operating in this case, and we will draw on it again in subsequent chapters. I use it here to illustrate the value and dilemmas of moral pur- pose. In terms of moral purpose, there are several points to be made. First, getting thousands of students to be literate and numerate who otherwise would not be so is not a bad day's work. This is bound to make a difference in many lives.

Second, moral purpose cannot just be stated, it must be accompanied by strategies for realizing it, and those strate- gies are the leadership actions that energize people to pursue a desired goal. In a recent interview in the Times Education Supplement, "Charisma and Loud Shouting" (2000, p. 28), Sir Michael Bichard, the permanent secretary at the Department for Education and Employment in England, said it this way: "For me leadership is about creating a sense of purpose and direction. It's about getting alignment and it's about inspiring people to achieve. . . . [There is a] need to en- thuse staff and encourage a belief in the difference their or- ganization is makingwhether it is a school or a government department. We can do a lot by making heroes of the people who deliver. It's important to make people feel part of a suc- cess story. That's what they want to be."

20 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Third, pluralistic motives abound. The government wants to be reelected, and leaders may get a lot of personal gratifi- cation if it is successful, and their careers may be enhanced, and there is an explicit measurable purpose.

Fourth, who knows whether this is a right purpose? Is there collateral damage: do other subjects like the arts suffer? Are schools becoming preoccupied only by the test results? Are teachers getting burnt out? Will short-term success be fol-

lowed by deeper failure? And so on. Fifth, is the strategy really inspiring people (principals and

teachers, for example) to do better? How deep is their com- mitment? I have written about this case elsewhere (Fullan, 2001), and there are numerous legitimate questions about the National Literacy and National Numeracy Strategy case. Our conclusion at this stage is that the strategy has indeed caught the interest and energy of the majority of principals and teach- ers and that they are getting a sense of pride and accomplish- ment from the results so far. Nevertheless, to use Argyris's terms, the leadership strategy has generated only external commitment on the part of school educatorsalbeit real commitment that got real results. In order to go deeper, for example, to get at the creative ideas and energies of teach- ers, additional leadership strategies will be neededstrategies that will foster internal commitment (that is, commitment ac- tivated by intrinsically rewarding accomplishments).

In summary, leadership, if it is to be effective, has to (1) have an explicit "making-a-difference" sense of purpose, (2) use strategies that mobilize many people to tackle tough prob- lems, (3) be held accountable by measured and debatable in- dicators of success, and (4) be ultimately assessed by the extent to which it awakens people's intrinsic commitment,

MORAL PURPOSE 21

which is none other than the mobilizing of everyone's sense of moral purpose.

The Case of Monsanto

Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja (2000) report on the case of Monsanto, a life science company that underwent a remark- able transformation in the years 1993 to 1999 under the di- rection of its new CEO, Robert Shapiro. Shapiro used a series of "town hall meetings" to introduce the new direction and to begin a dialogue. Pascale et al. (pp. 80-81) quote at length from one of Shapiro's presentations in 1995, attended by three hundred of the company's informal leaders:

Here's what bothers me. There are almost six billion people

in the world but the global economy works for only one bil-

lion of them. Even for the favored group (and the two bil-

lion that are about to join it), there are rising expectations

as to the amounts, choice, quality, and health of food. At the

other end of the continuum, at least one and a half billion

of the world's population are in real trouble. Eight hundred

million of these are so malnourished that they cannot par-

ticipate in work or family life and are on the edge of starva-

tion. Finally, over the next thirty years, most of the additional people joining the planet will be born in poorer

places.

The system we have is unsustainable. We burn a lot of

hydrocarbons and waste a lot of stuff. There is not enough

acreage on earth to provide for humanity's food needs using

traditional technology. In developed countries there is the

interesting challenge of aging. The elderly consume a lot of

22 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

health care as technology offers more costly interventions.

Fewer people in the workforce end up supporting the higher

bill for those who are old. This, too, is politically unsustain-

able.

Food is shifting from an issue of fuel and calories to an

issue of choice. With growing nutritional and environmen-

tal consciousness, food must inevitably command a larger

share of mind.

These problems for humanity can also be seen as a trillion-dollar opportunity. These are all unresolved prob-

lems. It isn't just a question of modular extensions of what

we have (via technology and innovations in distribution).

We need to reinvent our approach fundamentally. Biotechnol-ogy is a profoundly different avenue for agricul-

ture and human health. And information technology pro-

vides enough of a difference in degree that it represents a

nanotechnology. Biotechnology is really a subset of infor-

mation technology. It does not deal with the information

that's encoded electronically in silicon but with the informa-

tion that is encoded chemically in cells, not used for E-mail

or spreadsheets but information that tells what proteins to

make, when to make them, and how to make them. The rate

of increase of knowledge in this field puts Moore's Law to

shame, doubling every twelve to eighteen months. We will

map the entire human genome by 2005, and will understand

most of the functionality of the genome in this same period.

I believe our agriculture and health care systems will be

revolutionized by the intersection of biotechnology and infor-

mation technology. There is something of great consequence

in the convergence of these technologies with our market

knowledge, and I want you to help me discover what it is.

MORAL PURPOSE 23

Pascale and his colleagues portray the interplay between Shapiro, as leader, and the employees: "Shapiro points to pieces in the puzzle (life sciences breakthroughs, agriculture, information technology, market knowledge); listeners relate his words to their own experience and fill in the blanks with their detailed knowledge of the business; Shapiro focuses on the unsustainable problems facing humanityimmense chal- lenges that cry out for nontraditional solutions" (p. 81). The authors observe: "many in the room are moved at the prospect of contributing to the elimination of world hunger and chronic suffering" (p. 83). All of this sounds very much like moral purpose. Ideas, energy, and action follow, with some ten thousand of Monsanto's thirty thousand employees becoming involved. Through leadership that mobilized the energies and ideas of employees, Monsanto made a rapid im- pact in the market. The consulting firm McKinsey called it one of the most thoroughgoing transformations in business history (p. 86).

Pascale et al. note: "Within three years following Monsanto's introduction of genetically modified seeds, farms had shifted 50 percent of all cotton and 40 percent of all soy- beans grown in the United States to disease- and herbicide- resistant crops. American cotton growers alone reduced her- bicide consumption by $1 billion" (p. 6). The share price, they report, "rocketed from $16 to $63" (p. 86).

It would be too simple if we concluded that Monsanto was an out and out success. There was growing objection on envi- ronmental grounds to genetically modified seeds; Monsanto initially regarded this objection as political backlash and as a public relations problem. Shapiro and his colleagues still felt that they were making a valuable contribution to the world,

24 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

but by 1999 Shapiro finally acknowledged: "Our confidence in this technology and our enthusiasm for it has, I think, widely been seen, and understandably so, as condescension or indeed arrogance. Because we thought it was our job to persuade, too often we forget to listen" (Pascale et al., 2000, p. 87).

Today, Monsanto has merged with Upjohn to form Pharmacia, with Shapiro as nonexecutive chairman. It is too early to tell how well Pharmacia will pursue the moral issues embedded in its biotechnology goals. It is still a strong finan- cial competitor, but what are the lessons here? First, a sense of moral purpose on the part of employees is important and can make a huge difference in the performance of the organi- zation. Second, and of growing significance in the global economy, moral purpose applies outside as well as inside the company. Pascale et al. put it this way:

[H] ow a system connects with its external world is also a

key source of that system's health. Connectivity is not just

about good relations with those outside the company. It im-

pacts the quality of strategy and design and has direct bear-

ing on a company's success.

Biotechnology presents just one example of issues that

are too complex to address without a design for broadening

the participation of people with diverse concerns and stakes

in the questions. Seeking out the views of scientists and gov-

ernment regulators, people affected in different ways by the

product help everyone imagine and design for unintended

consequences. To talk only to oneself as a company will lead

to strategic vulnerability [Pascale et al., 2000, p. 91].

MORAL PURPOSE 25

Commitment to the environment and to the broader global community as part and parcel of the long-term success of the organization is moral purpose writ large. Pascale and his colleagues conclude, "we can no longer afford to look at our business as atomistic agents alone in a world to which we connect only through competition" (2000, p. 92). If you want more than short-term gains, moral purpose sincerely sought is good for business. Pluralistic motives can coexist: do good, worry about the environment, and derive a profit. But leaders have to be explicitly aware of the interplay of these three forces.

I do not for a minute think that moral purpose automati- cally attracts people to do good things. Acting with moral purpose in a complex world is, as we have just seen, highly problematic. First, there are many, many competing "goods," which cannot all be pursued. This is why coherence making is such an important quality for effective leadership, as we will discuss in Chapter Six. Coherence making, which in- volves prioritizing and focusing, is greatly facilitated when guided by moral purpose.

Second, and more fundamentally, moral purpose is prob- lematic because it must contend with reconciling the diverse interests and goals of different groups. Diversity means dif- ferent races, different interest groups, different power bases, and basically different lots in life. To achieve moral purpose is to forge interactionand even mutual purposeacross groups. Yet the problem is that people are not equal, and the privileged have a vested interest in the status quo as long as it works in their favor.

Still, profit-minded businesses do better when they pay

26 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

attention to moral purpose. De Gues (1997) worked for Royal Dutch/Shell for almost forty years and studied "long- living companies." He found that in many countries, 40 per- cent of newly created companies last less than ten years and that even "the big solid companies" do not hold out for more than an average of forty years (p. 2). By contrast, long-lived companies (those lasting more than fifty years) had a strong sense of purpose and were adaptive to their environments without compromising core ideals.

De Gues (1997) talks about both the negative and the pos- itive case: "Companies die because their managers focus on the economic activity of producing goods and services, and they forget their organizations' true nature is that of a com- munity of humans" (p. 3). In contrast,

A healthy living company will have members, both humans

and other institutions, who subscribe to a set of common

values and who believe that the goals of the company allow

them and help them to achieve their own individual goals.

Both the company and its constituent members have basic

driving forces; they want to survive, and once the conditions

for survival exist, they want to reach and expand their po-

tential. The underlying contract between the company and

its members (both individuals and other institutions) is that

the members will be helped to reach their potential. It is un-

derstood that this, at the same time, is in the company's self-

interest. The self-interest of the company stems from its

understanding that the members' potential helps create the

corporate potential [p. 200].

Whether we are talking about a biotechnical company or

MORAL PURPOSE 27

a school, having moral purposeboth in terms of contribu- tion to society and development of commitment in employ- eesmakes excellent business sense in the middle to long run. Organizations without such purpose die sooner than later. At best, they win the odd early battle and steadily lose the war thereafter.

The message of this chapter is that moral purpose is worthwhile on just about every meaningful criterion; it may not become activated on its own accord, but it is there in nas- cent form to be cultivated and activated. I have argued else- where that moral purpose has a tendency to become stronger as humankind evolves (Fullan, 1999). Thus, in evolutionary terms, moral purpose has a predestined tendency to surface. Effective leaders exploit this tendency and make moral pur- pose a natural ally. Although moral purpose is natural, it will flourish only if leaders cultivate it.

There are signs that moral purpose is on the ascendency in schools and businesses. A good example is Palmer's The Courage to Teach (1998), in which he shows how the best teachers integrate the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual as- pects of teaching to create powerful learning communities. With respect to businesses, Garten (2001) interviewed forty prominent men and women around the world who held CEO, president, and chairperson positions in major companies. Garten describes how some executives have made the direct link between social responsibility and the morale, productiv- ity, and loyalty of employees, such as Jarma 011ila, chairman and CEO of Nokia Corporation, whom Garten quotes:

People want their company to be a good citizen. They want

it to show true concern for the world, for the environment.

28 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

They want it to have a social conscience. There is now a very

clear expectation which is coming from political life as well

as our employees, that companies will have to have a soul, a

state of mind which represents a social conscience. That's

very different from the early 1990s when we were applauded

just for employing more people. There is a very high expec-

tation, something I did not see when I started as CEO in 1992 [p. 184].

Similarly, Bolman and Deal (2000, p. 185) predict that "culture and core values will be increasingly recognized as the vital social glue that infuses an organization with passion and purpose. Workers will increasingly demand more than a pay- check. They'll want to know the higher calling or enabling purpose of their work."

Garten (2001, p. 192) goes on to say, however, that most leaders "are badly understanding the rise of global problems that will affect their firms and the environment in which they operate. They are failing to see the gap between society's ex- pectations of what they should do and what they seem pre- pared to do."

The most fundamental conclusion of this chapter is that moral purpose and sustained performance of organizations are mutually dependent. Leaders in a culture of change real- ize this. Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja (2000, p. 92) found elements of this kind of leadership in the seven companies they studied, and call "sustainability" the challenge of the century: "The theory of sustainability is that it is constituted by a trinity of environmental soundness, social justice, and economic viability. If any of these three are weak or missing,

MORAL PURPOSE 29

the theory of sustainability says that that practice [what the organization is doing] will not prove sustainable over time."

We are now ready to extend our thinking, because in a non- linear world it is easy to lose one's way, even if one is moti- vated by moral purpose. If we live in a culture of changeand we certainly doto understand the change process is a vital quality of all leaders.

Chapter Three

Understanding Change

REMEMBER THAT A CULTURE OF CHANGE CONSISTS OF

great rapidity and nonlinearity on the one hand and equally great potential for creative breakthroughs on the other. The paradox is that transformation would not be pos- sible without accompanying messiness.

Understanding the change process is less about innovation and more about innovativeness. It is less about strategy and more about strategizing. And it is rocket science, not least be-

cause we are inundated with complex, unclear, and often con-

tradictory advice. Micklethwait and Wooldridge (1996) refer to management gurus as witch doctors (although they also acknowledge their value). Argyris (2000) talks about flawed advice. Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel (1998) take us on a Strategy Safari. Drucker is reported to have said that people

32 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

refer to gurus because they don't know how to spell charla- tan!

Would you know what to do if you read Kotter's Leading Change, in which he proposes an eight step process for initi- ating top-down transformation (1996, p. 21)?

1. Establishing a Sense of Urgency

2. Creating a Guiding Coalition

3. Developing a Vision and Strategy

4. Communicating the Change Vision

5. Empowering Broad-Based Action

6. Generating Short-Term Wins

7. Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change

8. Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture

Would you still know what to do if you then turned to Beer, Eisenstat, and Spector's observations (1990) about drawing out bottom-up ideas and energies?

1. Mobilize commitment to change through joint diagno- sis [with people in the organization] of business prob- lems

2. Develop a shared vision of how to organize and man- age for competitiveness

3. Foster concerns for the new vision, competence to enact it, and cohesion to move it along

4. Spread revitalization to all departments without push- ing it from the top

5. Institutionalize revitalization through formal policies, systems, and structure

UNDERSTANDING CHANGE 33

6. Monitor and adjust strategies-in response to problems in the revitalization process [cited in Mintzberg et al.,

1998, p. 338]

What do you think of Hamel's advice (2000) to "lead the revolution" by being your own seer?

Step 1: Build a point of view

Step 2: Write a manifesto

Step 3: Create a coalition

Step 4: Pick your targets and pick your moments

Step 5: Co-opt and neutralize

Step 6: Find a translator

Step 7: Win small, win early, win often

Step 8: Isolate, infiltrate, integrate

And, after all this advice, if you did know what to do, would you be right? Probably not. Some of the advice seems contradictory. (Should we emphasize top-down or bottom-up strategies?) Much of it is general and unclear about what to dowhat Argyris (2000) calls "nonactionable advice." This is why many of us have concluded that change cannot be managed. It can be understood and perhaps led, but it cannot be controlled. After taking us through a safari of ten manage- ment schools of thought, Mintzberg et al. (1998) draw the same conclusion when they reflect that "the best way to 'man- age' change is to allow for it to happen" (p. 324), "to be pulled by the concerns out there rather than being pushed by the concepts in here" (p. 373). It is not that management and leadership books don't contain valuable ideasthey dobut

34 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

rather that there is no "answer" to be found in them. Nevertheless, change can be led, and leadership does make a difference.

So our purpose in this book is to understand change in order to lead it better. The list that follows summarizes this chapter's contribution to understanding the change process. As with all five components in Figure 1.1, the goal is to de- velop a greater feel for leading complex change, to develop a mind-set and action set that are constantly cultivated and re- fined. There are no shortcuts.

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.

Before delving into a discussion of each of the items on this list, let's consider Goleman's findings (2000) about lead- ership that gets results, because they relate to several elements of the list. Goleman analyzed a database from a random sam- ple of 3,871 executives from the consulting firm Hay/McBer. He examined the relationship between leadership style, orga- nizational climate, and financial performance. Climate was measured by combining six factors of the working environ- ment: flexibility, responsibility, standards, rewards, clarity, and commitment. Financial results included return on sales, revenue growth, efficiency, and profitability.

A OR

UNDERSTANDING CHANGE 35

The following are the six leadership styles Goleman iden-

tified (2000, pp. 82-83):

1. Coercivethe leader demands compliance. ("Do what I tell you.")

2. Authoritativethe leader mobilizes people toward a vision. ("Come with me.")

3. Affiliativethe leader creates harmony and builds emotional bonds. ("People come first.")

4. Democraticthe leader forges consensus through par- ticipation. ("What do you think ? ")

5. Pacesettingthe leader sets high standards for per- formance. ("Do as I do, now.")

6. Coachingthe leader develops people for the future. ("Try this.")

Two of the six styles negatively affected climate and, in turn, performance. These were the coercive style (people re- sent and resist) and the pacesetting style (people get over- whelmed and burn out). All four of the other styles had a significant positive impact on climate and performance.

With this basic introduction to leadership styles, let us now turn to the list items.

The Goal Is Not to Innovate the Most

The organization or leader who takes on the sheer most num- ber of innovations is not the winner. In education, we call these organizations the "Christmas tree schools" (Bryk, Sebring, Kerbow, Rol low, .& Easton, 1998). These schools

36 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

glitter from a distanceso many innovations, so little time but they end up superficially adorned with many decorations, lacking depth and coherence.

Relentlessly taking on innovation after innovation is Goleman's pacesetter leader (2000, p. 86):

The leader sets extremely high performance standards and

exemplifies them himself. He is obsessive about doing things

better and faster, and he asks the same of everyone around him. He quickly pinpoints poor performers and demands

more from them. If they don't rise to the occasion, he re-

places them with people who can. You would think such an

approach would improve results, but it doesn't. In fact, the

pacesetting style destroys climate. Many employees feel

overwhelmed by the pacesetter's demands for excellence,

and their morale dropsguidelines for working may be clear in the leader's head, but she does not state them clearly;

she expects people to know what to do.

The pacesetter often ends up being a "lone ranger," as Superintendent Negroni puts it when he reflects on his expe- rience (and on his eventual change to lead learner). During the first three years of Negroni's superintendency in Springfield, Massachusetts, his overall goal was "to change this inbred system": "Intent on the ends, I operated as Lone Ranger. I didn't try to build relationships with the teachers' union or with the board. Instead, I worked around them. Most of the time, I felt that I was way out in front of them. I would change things on my own" (quoted in Senge et al., 2000, p. 426). For all the changes he pushed through, Negroni says, "these were three brutal years for all of us. . . .

UNDERSTANDING CHANGE 37

I was running so fast and making so many changes that I was getting tired. People around me were even more sick and tired" (pp. 426-427).

Eventually, through reflective practice and feedback, Negroni moved to transforming the district into a learning in- stitution. He explains:

Our most critical role at the central office is to support learn-

ing about learning, especially among principalswho will

then do the same among teachers in their schools. At the be-

ginning of the year, three or four central office administra-

tors and I conducted forty-six school visits in forty-six days,

with the principals of each school alongside us. Then the ad-

ministrators and all forty-six principals met together to sum-

marize what we had seen. This is one of a series of walk-throughs that principals do during the course of a school yearwith me, with other central office administra-

tors, and with each other. The sequence includes a monthly

"grand round," when every principal in the district goes

with me and the eight academic directors to spend the day

in one school. We break up into subgroups for hour-and-a-

half visits, then come back and (still in subgroups) discuss

what we saw. Then a representative from each subgroup

makes a presentation to all of the principals [quoted in Senge

et al., 2000, p. 431].

These principals are still deeply engaged in innovation, but it is less frenetic, more organically built into the culture. Thus pacesetters must learn the difference between competing in a change marathon and developing the capacity and commit- ment to solve complex problems.

38 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

It Is Not Enough to Have the Best Ideas

It is possible to be "dead right." This is the leader who has some of the best ideas around but can't get anyone to buy into them. In fact, the opposite occursshe experiences over- whelming opposition. The extreme version of this kind of leader is Goleman's coercive leader (2000, p. 82): "The com- puter company was in crisis modeits sales and profits were falling, its stock was losing value precipitously, and its share- holders were in an uproar. The board brought in a CEO with a reputation as a turnaround artist. He set to work chopping jobs, selling off divisions and making the tough decisions that should have been executed years before. The company was saved, at least in the short-term." Before long, however, morale plummeted, and the short-term success was followed by another, less recoverable downturn.

Even the more sophisticated versions of "having good ideas" are problematic. Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja (2000) call these leaders social engineers:

Corporations around the world now write checks for more

than $50 billion a year in fees for "change consulting." And

that tab represents only a third of the overall change cost if

severance costs, write-offs, and information technology pur-

chases are included. Yet, consultants, academic surveys, and

reports from "changed" companies themselves indicate that

a full 70 percent of those efforts fail. The reason? We call it

social engineering, a contemporary variant of the machine

model's cause-and-effect thinking. Social is coupled with en-

gineering to denote that most managers today, in contrast to

their nineteenth-century counterparts, recognize that people

need to be brought on board. But they still go about it in a

UNDERSTANDING CHANGE 39

preordained fashion. Trouble arises because the "soft" stuff

is really the hard stuff, and no one can really "engineer" it

[p. 12, emphasis in original].

But surely having good ideas is not a bad thing. And yes, it is an element of effective leadership, as in Goleman's au- thoritative style. Goleman (2000) talks about Tom, a vice president of marketing at a floundering national restaurant chain that specialized in pizza: "[Tom] made an impassioned plea for his colleagues to think from the customer's perspec- tive. . . . The company was not in the restaurant business, it was in the business of distributing high-quality, convenient- to-get pizza. That notionand nothing elseshould drive what the company did. . . . With his vibrant enthusiasm and clear visionthe hallmarks of the authoritative styleTom filled a leadership vacuum at the company" (p. 83).

Goleman's data show that the authoritative leader had a positive impact on climate and performance. So do we need leaders with a clear vision who can excite and mobilize peo- ple to committing to it, or don't we? Well, the answer is a bit complicated. For some situations, when there is an urgent problem and people are at sea, visionary leaders can be cru- cial. And at all times, it helps when leaders have good ideas. But it is easy for authoritative leadership to slip into social engineering when initial excitement cannot be sustained be- cause it cannot be converted to internal commitment.

Put another way, the answer is that authoritative leaders need to recognize the weaknesses as well as the strengths in their approach. They need, as Goleman concludes, to use all four of the successful leadership styles: "Leaders who have mastered four or moreespecially the authoritative,

40 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

democratic, affiliative, and coaching styleshave the best cli- mate and business performance" (p. 87).

Appreciate the Implementation Dip

One of our most consistent findings and understandings about the change process in education is that all successful schools experience "implementation dips" as they move for- ward (Fullan, 2001). The implementation dip is literally a dip in performance and confidence as one encounters an innova- tion that requires new skills and new understandings. All in- novations worth their salt call upon people to question and in some respects to change their behavior and their beliefs even in cases where innovations are pursued voluntarily. What happens when you find yourself needing new skills and not being proficient when you are used to knowing what you are doing (in your own eyes, as well as in those of others)? How do you feel when you are called upon to do something new and are not clear about what to do and do not under- stand the knowledge and value base of new belief systems?

This kind of experience is classic change material. People feel anxious, fearful, confused, overwhelmed, deskilled, cau- tious, andif they have moral purposedeeply disturbed. Because we are talking about a culture of pell-mell change, there is no shortage of implementation dips or, shall we say, chasms.

Pacesetters and coercers have no empathy whatsoever for people undergoing implementation dips. They wouldn't know an implementation dip if they fell into it. Effective leaders have the right kinds of sensitivity to implementation. They know that change is a process, not an event. They don't panic

UNDERSTANDING CHANGE 41

when things don't go smoothly during the first year of under- taking a major innovation or new direction. They are em- pathic to the lot of people immersed in the unnerving and anxiety-ridden work of trying to bring about a new order. They are even, as we shall discuss, appreciative of resistance.

Leaders who understand the implementation dip know that people are experiencing two kinds of problems when they are in the dipthe social-psychological fear of change, and the lack of technical know-how or skills to make the change work. It should be obvious that leaders need affilia- tive and coaching styles in these situations. The affiliative leader pays attention to people, focuses on building emotional bonds, builds relationships, and heals rifts. The leader as coach helps people develop and invests in their capacity build-

ing (Goleman, 2000). Further, elements of authoritative leadership help. Enthu-

siasm, self-confidence, optimism, and clarity of vision can all inspire people to keep going. The problems start when you are only authoritative or only affiliative or only a coach. Thus leaders who are sensitive to the implementation dip combine styles: they still have an urgent sense of moral pur- pose, they still measure success in terms of results, but they do things that are more likely to get the organization going and keep it going.

Redefine Resistance

We are more likely to learn something from people who dis- agree with us than we are from people who agree. But we tend to hang around with and overlisten to people who agree with us and we prefer to avoid and underlisten to those who don't.

42 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Not a bad strategy for getting through the day, but a lousy one for getting through the implementation dip.

Pacesetters and coercers are terrible listeners. Authorita- tive leaders are not that good at listening either. Affiliative and

democratic leaders listen too much. This is why leadership is complicated. It requires combining elements that do not eas- ily and comfortably go together. Leaders should have good ideas and present them well (the authoritative element) while at the same time seeking and listening to doubters (aspects of democratic leadership). They must try to build good relation- ships (be affiliative) even with those who may not trust them.

We will spend more time in Chapter Four taking up the complexities of resistance and its hitherto unappreciated pos- itive side. Suffice it to say here that we need to respect resisters

for two reasons. First, they sometimes have ideas that we might have missed, especially in situations of diversity or complexity or in the tackling of problems for which the an- swer is unknown. As Maurer (1996, p. 49) says, "Often those who resist have something important to tell us. We can be in- fluenced by them. People resist for what they view as good reasons. They may see alternatives we never dreamed of. They

may understand problems about the minutiae of implementa- tion that we never see from our lofty perch atop Mount Olympus."

Second, resisters are crucial when it comes to the politics of implementation. In democratic organizations, such as uni- versities, being alert to differences of opinion is absolutely vital. Many a strong dean who otherwise did not respect re- sistance has been unceremoniously run out of town. In all or- ganizations, respecting resistance is essential, because if you ignore it, it is only a matter of time before it takes its toll, per- haps during implementation if not earlier. In even the most

UNDERSTANDING CHANGE 43

tightly controlled and authority-bound organization, it is so easy to sabotage new directions during implementation. Even

when things appear to be working, the supposed success may be a function of merely superficial compliance.

For all these reasons, successful organizations don't go with only like-minded innovators; they deliberately build in differences. They don't mind so much when othersnot just themselvesdisturb the equilibrium. They also trust the learning process they set upthe focus on moral purpose, the attention to the change process, the building of relationships, the sharing and critical scrutiny of knowledge, and traversing the edge of chaos while seeking coherence. Successful organi- zations and their leaders come to know and trust that these dynamics contain just about all the checks and balances needed to deal with those few hard-core resisters who make a career out of being against everythingwho act, in other words, without moral purpose.

Reculturing Is the Name of the Game

It used to be that governments were the only group constantly reorganizing. Now, with reengineering and mergers and ac- quisitions, everybody is doing it. And they are getting nowhere. Gaius Petronious nailed this problem almost two thousand years ago: "We trained hard . . . but it seemed every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reor- ganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization" (cited in Gaynor,

1977, p. 28). Structure does make a difference, but it is not the main

44 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

point in achieving success. Transforming the culturechang- ing the way we do things around hereis the main point. I call this reculturing. Effective leaders know that the hard work of reculturing is the sine qua non of progress. Further- more, it is a particular kind of reculturing for which we strive:

one that activates and deepens moral purpose through collab- orative work cultures that respect differences and constantly build and test knowledge against measurable resultsa cul- ture within which one realizes that sometimes being off bal- ance is a learning moment.

Leading in a culture of change means creating a culture (not just a structure) of change. It does not mean adopting in- novations, one after another; it does mean producing the ca- pacity to seek, critically assess, and selectively incorporate new ideas and practicesall the time, inside the organization as well as outside it.

Reculturing is a contact sport that involves hard, labor- intensive work. It takes time and indeed never ends. This is why successful leaders need energy, enthusiasm, and hope, and why they need moral purpose along with the other four leadership capacities described in this book. Later on we will see case examples of reculturing, because it is very much a matter of developing relationships (Chapter Four), building knowledge (Chapter Five), and striving for coherence in a nonlinear world (Chapter Six).

Never a Checklist, Always Complexity

It is no doubt clear by now why there can never be a recipe or cookbook for change, nor a step-by-step process. Even seemingly sophisticated plans like Kotter's (1996) eight steps,

UNDERSTANDING CHANGE 45

or Hamel's (2000) eight, discussed earlier in this chapter, are suspect if used as the basis for planning. They may be useful to stir one's thinking, but I have argued that it will be more productive to develop one's own mind-set through the five core components of leadership because one is more likely to internalize what makes for effective leadership in complex times. This makes it difficult for leaders because they will be pushed to provide solutions. In times of urgent problems and confusing circumstances, people demand leaders who can show the way. (Just try leading by explaining to your board of directors that you have based your strategic plan on the properties of nonlinear feedback networks and complex adaptive systems.) In other words, leaders and members of the organization, because they live in a culture of frenetic change, are vulnerable to seeking the comforting clarity of off-the-shelf solutions. Why not take a change pill, and if that doesn't work, there will be another one next year.

Alas, there is no getting around the conclusion that effec- tive leaders must cultivate their knowledge, understanding, and skills of what has to come to be known as complexity sci- ence. (For the latest, best discussion of this subject, see Pascale

et al., 2000; and Stacey, 2000; see also my Change Forces tril- ogy, 1993, 1999, forthcoming). Complexity science is one of those remarkable convergences of independent streams of in- quiry that I referred to in Chapter One. This science, as Pascale et al. claim, grapples with the mysteries of life and liv- ing; it is producing exciting new insights into life itself and into how we might think about organizations, leadership, and social change: "Living systems [like businesses] cannot be di- rected along a linear path. Unforeseen consequences are in- evitable. The challenge is to disturb them in a manner that

46 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

approximates the desired outcomes" (Pascale et al., 2000, p. 6, emphasis in original).

The Complexities of Leadership

Leading in a culture of change is about unlocking the myster- ies of living organizations. That is why this book places a pre- mium on understanding and insight rather than on mere action steps. Complexities can be unlocked and even under- stood but rarely controlled.

There are, as can be seen, dilemmas in leading change. Goleman's analysis helps us because it informs us that ele- ments of different leadership styles must be learned and used in different situations. But knowing what to do in given cir- cumstances is still not for sure. If you are facing an urgent, crisis-ridden situation, a more coercive stance may be neces- sary at the beginning. Those dealing with failing schools have drawn this very conclusion: the need for external interven- tion is inversely proportionate to how well the school is pro- gressing. In a case of persistent failure, dramatic, assertive leadership and external intervention appear to be necessary. In the long run, however, effectiveness depends on develop- ing internal commitment in which the ideas and intrinsic mo- tivation of the vast majority of organizational members become activated. Along the way, authoritative ideas, demo- cratic empowerment, affiliative bonds, and coaching will all be needed.

In the preceding paragraph I deliberately said that more coercive actions may be needed "at the beginning" of a crisis. This is where leadership gets complicated. When organiza- tions are in a crisis they have to be rescued from chaos. But a

UNDERSTANDING CHANGE 47

crisis usually means that the organization is out of synch with its environment. In this case, more radical change is required, and this means the organization needs leadership that wel- comes differences, communicates the urgency of the chal- lenge, talks about broad possibilities in an inviting way, and creates mechanisms that "motivate people to reach beyond themselves" (Pascale et al., 2000, p. 74; see also Heifetz, 1994).

Recall from Chapter Two the case study of the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy in England. Most people would agree that the public school system is in a state of cri- sis. It needs authoritative leadership before it disintegrates, but the system is still out of line with its environment, which calls for accelerated change and learning. There can be a fine line between coercive and authoritative leadership. Certainly the strategy in England has elements of coercive as well as pacesetting leadership. Is this degree of pressure required to get large-scale change under way? We don't really know, but I would venture to say that the strategy that moved the English school system from near-chaos to a modicum of suc- cess is not the same strategy that is going to create the trans- formation needed for the system to thrive in the future. For that you need plenty of internal commitment and ingenuity. School systems all over the world, take heed.

The need to have different strategies for different circum- stances explains why we cannot generalize from case studies of success. In 1982, Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence galvanized the management world to inspiration and action. As it turns out, however, of the forty-three excel- lent companies (and they were excellent at the time), "half were in trouble" within five years of the book's appearance;

48 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

"at present all but five have fallen from grace" (Pascale et al., 2000, p. 23).

To recommend employing different leadership strategies that simultaneously and sequentially combine different ele- ments seems like complicated advice, but developing this deeper feel for the change process by accumulating insights and wisdom across situations and time may turn out to be the most practical thing we can domore practical than the best step-by-step models. For if such models don't really work, or if they work only in some situations, or if they are successful only for short periods of time, they are hardly practical.

We can also see the complexities of leadership in J. B. Martin's comparison of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy:

Jack Kennedy was more the politician, saying things pub-

licly that he privately scoffed at. Robert Kennedy was more

himself. Jack gave the impression of decisive leadership, the

man with all the answers. Robert seemed more hesitant, less

sure he was right, more tentative, more questioning, and

completely honest about it. Leadership he showed; but it has

a different quality, an off-trail unorthodox quality, to some

extent a quality of searching for hard answers to hard ques-

tions in company with his bewildered audience, trying to

work things out with their help [cited in Thomas, 2000, p. 390].

Robert Kennedy had his ruthless and conspiratorial mo- ments, but it is likely that his style of leadershipcommitted to certain values, but uncertain of the pathwaysis more

UNDERSTANDING CHANGE 49

suited to leading in a culture of change. Being sure of yourself when you shouldn't be can be a liability. Decisive leaders can attract many followers, but it is usually more a case of de- pendency than enlightenment. The relationship between lead- ers and members of the organization is complicated indeed, as we will also see in subsequent chapters.

It is time now to continue our practical journey. The next stop is relearning in a different way what we thought we al- ready knew: that relationships are crucial. Of course they are, but what does that really mean in a culture of change?

Chapter Four

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

IF MORAL PURPOSE IS JOB ONE, RELATIONSHIPS ARE JOB

two, as you can't get anywhere without them. In the past, if you asked someone in a successful enterprise what caused the success, the answer was "It's the people." But that's only partially true: it is actually the relationships that make the dif- ference.

In pursuing the importance of relationships in this chap- ter, I will also relate them to the role of moral purpose in business and education. In so doing, I will do something dif- ferent: let's talk about businesses as if they had souls and hearts, and about schools as if they had minds. We will see that moral purpose, relationships, and organizational success are closely interrelated. We will also find that businesses and schools have much in common. Businesses, as I concluded in the previous chapters, are well-advised to boost their moral

52 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

purposefor their own good as well as for the good of soci- ety. Schools, particularly because we live in the knowledge society, need to strengthen their intellectual quality as they deepen their moral purpose.

Businesses as If They Had Souls

In "Relationships: The New Bottom Line in Business," the first chapter of their book The Soul at Work, Lewin and Regine (2000) talk about complexity science: "This new sci- ence, we found in our work, leads to a new theory of business that places people and relationshipshow people interact with each other, the kinds of relationships they forminto dramatic relief. In a linear world, things may exist independ- ently of each other, and when they interact, they do so in sim- ple, predictable ways. In a nonlinear, dynamic world, everything exists only in relationship to everything else, and the interactions among agents in the system lead to complex, unpredictable outcomes. In this world, interactions, or rela- tionships, among its agents are the organizing principle" (pp. 18-19).

For Lewin and Regine, relationships are not just a prod- uct of networking but "genuine relationships based on au- thenticity and care." The "soul at work" is both individual and collective: "Actually, most people want to be part of their organization; they want to know the organization's purpose; they want to make a difference. When the individual soul is connected to the organization, people become connected to something deeperthe desire to contribute to a larger pur- pose, to feel they are part of a greater whole, a web of con- nection" (p. 27).

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS 53

It is time, say Lewin and Regine, to alter our perspective: "to

pay as much attention to how we treat peopleco-workers, subordinates, customersas we now typically pay attention to structures, strategies, and statistics" (p. 27). Lewin and Regine make the case that there is a new style of leadership in successful companiesone that focuses on people and rela- tionships as essential to getting sustained results.

It's a new style in that it says, place more emphasis than you

have previously on the micro level of things in your com-

pany, because this is a creative conduit for influencing many

aspects of the macro level concerns, such as strategy and the

economic bottom line. It's a new style in that it encourages

the emergence of a culture that is more open and caring. It's

a new style in that it does not readily lend itself to being

turned into "fix it" packages that are the stuff of much man-

agement consultancy, because it requires genuine connection

with co-workers; you can't fake it and expect to get results

[P. 571.

It is time, in other words, to bury the cynic who said "leadership is about sincerity, and once you learn to fake that, you've got it made."

Lewin and Regine then present a series of chapters de- scribing successful businesses that combine a tough commit- ment to results underpinned by a deep regard for people inside and outside the organization. Examples range from Verifone, the electronic company that increased its revenues from $31.2 million to $600 million in eleven years, to Monsanto, the biotechnology company I discussed in Chapter Two. Lewin and Regine cite Monsanto's main goal, which

54 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

was to help people around the world "lead longer, healthier lives, at costs that they and their nation can afford, and with- out continued environmental degradation" (quoted in Lewin & Regine, 2000, p. 208). We saw in Chapter Two that Monsanto, using relationship and caring principles (as well as strategies for activating them), transformed itself from 1993 to 1999, quadrupling share prices.

I also warned in the last chapter: don't generalize prema- turely from successful cases. Lewin and Regine leave us with a happy ending with the CEO, Shapiro, talking about Monsanto's awareness of human impact on the environment: "Around that [awareness of impact on the environment] coa- lesced a commitment to sustainable development, which you might describe as finding ways to continue economic growth while not negatively impacting the environmenteven im- proving the environment, because that is going to be neces- sary" (cited in Lewin & Regine, 2000, p. 223, emphasis in original).

We saw from Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja (2000) that Monsanto later faltered because, although it was strongly connected inside, it failed to engage deeply enough with those on the outside. It is still a good company (now merged), but it certainly lost ground. The lesson: never be complacent; re- ality-test your own rhetoric with outside (and inside) skeptics and dissenters. It is like, say Pascale et al., "walking on a trampoline" (p. 77).

Related to the soul, there is a powerful message from Kouzes and Posner (1998), who discuss "encouraging the heart." At the outset Kouzes and Posner observe that "lead- ers create relationships" (p. xv). The authors identify seven essentials to developing relationships (p. 18): (1) setting clear

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS 55

standards, (2) expecting the best, (3) paying attention, (4) per- sonalizing recognition, (5) telling the story, (6) celebrating to- gether, and (7) setting the example.

What separates effective from ineffective leaders, conclude

Kouzes and Posner, is how much they "really care about the people [they] lead" (p. 149). (You may want to take their twenty-one-item Encouragement Index, pp. 36-37, as one check.)

Other business authors echo the newfounded emphasis on relationships: Bishop (2000) argues that leadership in the twenty-first century must move from a product-first formula to a relationship-first formula; Goffee and Jones (2000) ask, "Why should anyone be led by you?" Their answer is that we should be led by those who inspire us by (1) selectively show- ing their weaknesses (revealing humanity and vulnerability), (2) relying on intuition (interpreting emergent data), (3) man- aging with tough empathy (caring intensely about employees and about the work they do), and (4) revealing their differ- ences (showing what is unique about themselves).

Let us now consider some school examples, which focus on developing relationships as essential for getting results. Schools, especially elementary schools, are known for their culture of caring, but can they get tough about bottom-line results? Are they really all that caring if they cannot show that students are learning?

Schools as If They Had Minds

Nothing presents a clearer example of school district recul- turing than School District 2 in New York City. Elmore and Burney (1999, pp. 264-265) provide the context:

56 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

District 2 is one of thirty-two community school districts in New York City that have primary responsibility for elemen-

tary and middle schools. District 2 has twenty-four ele- mentary schools, seven junior high or intermediate schools,

and seventeen so-called Option Schools, which are alterna- tive schools organized around themes with a variety of dif-

ferent grade configurations. District 2 has one of the most diverse student populations of any community district in the city. It includes some of the highest-priced residential and

commercial real estate in the world, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and some of the most densely populated poorer communities in the city, in Chinatown in Lower Manhattan and in Hell's Kitchen on the West Side. The stu- dent population of the district is twenty-two thousand, of whom about 29 percent are white, 14 percent black, about

22 percent Hispanic, 34 percent Asian, and less than 1 per- cent Native American.

Anthony Alvarado became superintendent of District 2 in 1987. At that time, the district ranked tenth in reading and fourth in mathematics out of thirty-two subdistricts. Eight years later, by 1996, it ranked second in both reading and mathematics. Elmore and Burney describe Alvarado's ap- proach: "Over the eight years of Alvarado's tenure in District 2, the district has evolved a strategy for the use of professional development to improve teaching and learning in schools. This strategy consists of a set of organizing principles about the process of systemic change and the role of professional development in that process; and a set of specific activities, or models of staff development, that focus on system wide im-

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS; RELATIONSHIPS 57

provement of instruction" (1999, p. 266). The seven organiz- ing principles of the reform strategy are as follows: (1) it's about instruction and only instruction; (2) instructional im- provement is a long, multistage process involving awareness, planning, implementation, and reflection; (3) shared expertise is the driver of instructional change; (4) the focus is on sys- temwide improvement; (5) good ideas come from talented people working together; (6) set clear expectations, then de- centralize; (7) collegiality, caring, and respect are paramount. Elmore and Burney (1999, p. 272) explain:

In District 2, professional development is a management

strategy rather than a specialized administrative function.

Professional development is what administrative leaders do

when they are doing their jobs, not a specialized function

that some people in the organization do and others do not.

Instructional improvement is the main purpose of district

administration, and professional development is the chief

means of achieving that purpose. Anyone with line adminis-

trative responsibility in the organization has responsibility

for professional development as a central part of his or her

job description. Anyone with staff responsibility has the re-

sponsibility to support those who are engaged in staff devel-

opment. It is impossible to disentangle professional development from general management in District 2 because

the two are synonymous for all practical purposes.

In 1998, Anthony Alvarado joined Alan Bersin, Superintendent of Public Education San Diego, as Chancellor of Instruction (Chief Academic Officer). A diverse, multicul- tural, urban district, San Diego City Schools District consists

58 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

of 187 schools and 143,000 students. A larger and more com- plex system than District 2, San Diego had numerous major innovative initiatives under way during the 1990s, but they were not integrated or focused. In this respect, San Diego was typical of many large urban districts that I wrote about in The New Meaning of Educational Change (Fullan, 2001)lots of innovative projects that produced pockets of success, along with an overall situation of overload and fragmentation.

One of the first things that Bersin and Alvarado did was to restructure the district so that it focused on instruction, built-in to the line of authority of the system. Prior to their arrival, the district was organized into five clusters, each su- pervised by an area superintendent, again typical of large dis- tricts. Bersin and Alvarado reorganized the district into first seven, and then eight families of schools. The area superin- tendent position was replaced with a new role called "instruc- tional leader." Each instructional leader was responsible for twenty to twenty-five schools. The expectation was that the instructional leader would concentrate solely on instructional leadership (coaching and evaluating principals) and student performance.

The overall plan is called "Blueprint for Student Success in a Standards-Based System: Supporting Student Achieve- ment in an Integrated Learning Environment." The emphasis initially is on literacy and now mathematics, including a num- ber of prevention and intervention strategies designed to iden- tify and correct learning problems early in a child's schooling. Major investments and procedures have been established that provide literacy and mathematics materials, and professional development for all school leaders, staff developers, and peer coaches. Student achievement is monitored carefully at the in-

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS 59

dividual, classroom, school, and district levels. A monthly re- port is issued by the district that discusses and updates strate- gies being used and progress of the system.

Relationships are carefully coordinated. The most direct manifestation of this are the monthly conferences. The devel- opment and support of district and school leaders are carried out in partnership with the University of San Diego in what is called "The Educational Leadership Development Academy." The executive director of the Academy is Elaine Fink, former superintendent and deputy superintendent in New York District 2, who played a major role in the development of District 2 school-based leadership. The eight instructional leaders conduct monthly conferences where their role and performance are continually reviewed. In between meetings the district administration and instructional leaders interact regularly concerning the implementation of instructional practices and student performance. Similarly, each of the eight instructional leaders conduct monthly conferences with their twenty to twenty-five school principals, along with weekly visits and other forms of interaction. The principals in turn have monthly staff conferences with teachers in their schools. All of these monthly conferences are monitored. For exam- ple, principal-led staff conferences are videotaped and re- viewed by the group of twenty to twenty-five principals. A great deal of individual coaching and daily interactive prob- lem-solving sessions are carried out at all levels.

Like all the case studies of large-scale transformation dis- cussed in this book, interpretation of results is not straight- forward. First, I take up the impact on student performance and on the commitment of principals and teachers. District- wide reading results reveal the post-1997 trend. In tests that

60 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Table 4.1. Results.a

Year

San Diego City School Districtwide Reading

White Hispanic African-American

1993 63.0 35.5 27.0

1994 62.4 35.4 27.0

1995 63.5 36.0 26.4

1996 63.6 35.6 27.4

1997 63.8 34.9 26.1

1998 66.2 39.5 27.9

1999 71.0 42.9 32.7

2000 73.4 45.8 36.7

aPercent at or above 50th Percentile Source: "Districtwide NRT Language Results: 1993-2000." San Diego City Schools, Institute for Learning, Standards, Assessment, and Accountability Program Studies Office.

compare San Diego students with national norms, the per- centage of white, Hispanic, and African-American students achieving at or above the 50th percentile is flat-lined in the 1993-1997 period (pre Bersin-Alvarado), and increased in- crementally in the 1998-2000 years, as shown in Table 4.1.

What about principal and teacher commitment? It is much like the English National Literacy and Numeracy case dis- cussed in Chapter Two: many teachers and principals ob- jected to the top-down imposition in the first year, but as the strategy began to provide positive teaching experiences and some student results, more and more teachers and principals began to value the initiative. Before hearing from Anthony Alvarado himself, I will consider two external commentaries. The Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy at Stanford University is conducting an ongoing study of the reform. In one survey, principals gave the district high marks for setting

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS 61

expectations, commitment to standards, and focus on teach- ing and learning. The principal rating of overall district sup- port was 83 percent for elementary school principals, 67 percent for middle schools, and 78 percent for high schools (Stanford University, 2000a).

In a series of interviews with principals and teachers con- ducted in the 1999-2000 school year, the Stanford researchers made several observations about the status of the reform in its second year, including (1) both principals and teachers overwhelmingly value the new role of principals as instruc- tional leaders; (2) principal leadership and collegial supports have been strengthened across the district; (3) there is more coherence and focus to the district's reform compared with the past; (4) some principals and many teachers object to the top-down way in which the reforms have been introduced; and (5) the vast majority of principals value the content of the reform, and the majority of teachers value it. About a third of the teachers disagreed with the reform, or felt it eliminated other valuable programs (Stanford University, 2000b).

The second external commentary is my own, based on a site-visit in January 2001. In a session with principals, I asked them to respond anonymously to two questions: What were their aspirations or expectations with respect to the reform ini- tiative? What worries or concerns did they have about the initiative? I coded the responses as to whether they were positive, neutral, or negative. Positive meant a strong identity with the goals and content of the initiative, with implementa- tion worries. Neutral or negative indicated a vague notion of the initiative or disagreement with it, or worries that did not relate to the reform itself. I received 166 responses (nearly the full total). Of these, I categorized 135 (81 percent) as positive,

62 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

20 (12 percent) as neutral, and 11 (7 percent) as negative. This is just a snapshot, but it is generally consistent with the obser- vation of othersa strong majority of principals endorse the initiative and their new roles.

I also interviewed Anthony Alvarado, who talked about his own sense of progress and intentions:

We are in our third year. I see and feel that there has been a

definite shift to implement the reform. We started with a

strong district plan. We wanted to get principals to under-

stand that we have created district parameters. But this ini-

tiative is not about simply implementing a district plan. It is

about drawing out what principals stand for. Granted, it is

not about doing your own thing, but I also don't want prin-

cipals to follow a procedural plan. I want them to ask "How

do I develop a culture in my school that gets people to un-

derstand what they can do together to help students?" I am

interested in the hearts and minds of principals. The feeling

is that something is being done to them, but that is not our

intent. We are creating a system for them to take responsi-

bility, for them to understand internally how they can com-

mit deeply to student learning. I actually think that instructional leadership, when it is done well, is transforma-

tional leadership. The sense of who I am as a principal or

teacher, what I believe in, is ultimately what we are trying to

work on. We are trying to create a system to deepen instruc-

tional work with a value base that you can stay with because

it reflects what you are. I want people to be able to say "What I did was substantial." That "it counted." This deep-

ening of belief is a learning process, and is held together by

shared values and beliefs. It requires moral and intellectual

attention [Interview, January 29, 2001].

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS 63

What is happening in San Diego City Schools District is a moving target. It is too early to tell whether the effort will be sustained over many years, and whether its impact will be ef- fective in the long run. On a related matter, in an era of high- stakes testing in schools and with a sense of urgency to show short-term results, leaders in a culture of change require a quality that all long-term effective leaders havethe capacity to resist a focus on short-term gains at the expense of deeper reform where gains are steady but not necessarily dramatic. Unlike businesses that go for immediate profit, schools should

resist going for an immediate boost in test scores. As Alvarado recalls:

When you set a target and ask for big leaps in achievement

scores, you start squeezing capacity in a way that gets into a

preoccupation with tests, perhaps bordering on cheating.

You cut corners in a way that ends up diminishing learning.

That is the antithesis of our effort. Whenever we get good

data, I want people to prove to me that there is a causal re-

lationship to what we are doing. If I got a 2.5 percent in-

crease every year for ten years, I would be happy. I want

steady, steady, ever-deepening improvement [Interview,

January 29, 2001].

Bersin and Alvarado demonstrate tough empathy. They clearly focus on learning ("it's about instruction and only in- struction"), but they know that principals and teachers will only be mobilized by caring and respect, by talented people working together, and by developing shared expertise. Their leadership is not all that different from the leadership evi- denced in the transformed companies such as Monsanto ana- lyzed by Pascale et al. (2000).

64 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Another education example at the level of the school is de-

scribed in a study by Newmann, King, and Youngs of what makes some schools especially effective. Their latest case stud-

ies are most revealing. Newmann et al. (2000) conclude that what they call school capacity is the key to success. This ca- pacity consists of five components: (1) teachers' knowledge, skills, and dispositions; (2) professional community; (3) pro- gram coherence; (4) technical resources; and (5) principal leadership. The role of these five components in combination is revealing.

The knowledge, skills, and dispositions of teachers as in- dividuals is obviously important and can make a difference in individual classrooms. Newmann and his colleagues, how- ever, make the point that this is not sufficient, because the or- ganization must change along with individuals. Thus, professional development or training of individuals or even of small teams will not be sufficient. For this reason schools must also focus on creating schoolwide professional learning communities.

Individual development combined with professional com- munities is still not sufficient unless it is channeled in a way that combats the fragmentation of multiple innovations; that is, there must be program coherence, which Newmann et al. (2000, p. 5) define as "the extent to which the school's pro- grams for student and staff learning are coordinated, focused on clear learning goals, and sustained over a period of time." Program coherence is organizational integration.

Another component of school capacity concerns the ex- tent to which schools garner technical resources. Instructional improvement requires additional resources in the form of ma- terials, equipment, space, time, and access to new ideas and

75-

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS

to expertise. Successful schools are much better at addressing their resource needs.

School capacity is seriously undermined if it does not have

the fifth component: quality leadership. Put differently, the role of the principal is to "cause" the previous four factors to get better and better. Elmore (2000, p. 15) agrees: "[T]he job of administrative leaders is primarily about enhancing the skills and knowledge of people in the organization, creating a common culture of expectations around the use of those skills and knowledge, holding the various pieces of the organiza- tion together in a productive relationship with each other, and holding individuals accountable for their contributions to the collective result."

Look what is being said here. Development of individuals is not sufficient. New relationships (as found in a professional learning community) are crucial, but only if they work at the hard task of establishing greater program coherence and the addition of resources. The role of leadership (in this case, the principal) is to "cause" greater capacity in the organization in order to get better results (learning). Again, there is not much difference from what we have seen in successful busi- ness organizations.

As I tout the importance of relationships, this is a good time to enter a word of caution, because relationships are not ends in themselves. Relationships are powerful, which means they can also be powerfully wrong. McLaughlin and Talbert's study of high schools illustrates the nature of good and bad relationships as they affect student learning. McLaughlin and Talbert (2001) conducted detailed case studies of professional learning communities in sixteen high schools. They found that only three of sixteen schools had strong professional learning

66 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

communities (more aboUt this in a moment) and that some departments within schools had strong communities while others had decidedly weak ones. In one school, for example, "Oak Valley's English department has the strongest technical culture of any department in our sample while the same school's social studies department ranks among the weakest" (McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001, p. 47).

A veteran English teacher at Oak Valley comments: "It's everyday practice that teachers are handing [out] sample les- sons they've done, or an assignment that they've tried, and [discussing] when it worked [or] how they would do it differ- ently. Or a new teacher joins the staff and instantly they are paired up with a couple of buddies . . . and file drawers and computer disks and everything are just made readily avail- able" (p. 50). In contrast, teachers in the social studies depart- ment speak of "my materials" but never mention their colleagues as resources.

Most revealing is that different teachers as they talk about students reflect radically different assumptions about learn- ing. English teachers' comments are uniformly positive: "We have excellent students, cooperative, and there's good rapport with the teachers." In contrast, a social studies teacher says, "The kidsthere's no quest for knowledge. Not all, but that's in general. . . . it's not important to them. They just don't want to learn." Mind you, these are the same students being talked about!

McLaughlin and Talbert sum up the situation in Oak Valley's two departments: "In the social studies department, autonomy means isolation and reinforces the norms of indi- vidualism and conservatism. In the English department, pro- fessional autonomy and strong community are mutually

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS 67

reinforcing, rather than oppositional. Here collegial support and interaction enable individual teachers to reconsider and revise their classroom practice confidently because depart- ment norms are mutually negotiated and understood" (2001, p. 55).

McLaughlin and Talbert show the dramatically different effect these experiences have on the motivation and career commitments of teachers: "When teachers from the Oak Valley English and social studies departments told us how they feel about their job, it was hard to believe that they teach in the same school. Oak Valley English teachers of all peda- gogical persuasions express pride in their department and pleasure in their workplace: Not a day goes by that someone doesn't say how wonderful it is to work here,' said one. In contrast, social studies teachers, weary of grappling alone with classroom tensions, verbalize bitterness and professional disinvestment. Several plan to leave the school or the profes- sion" (2001, pp. 83-84).

In a wonderfully insightful observation, McLaughlin and Talbert make the point that strong teacher communities can be effective or not depending on whether the teachers collab- orate to make breakthroughs in learning or whether they re- inforce methods that, as it turns out, do not achieve results. In other words, weak collaboration is always ineffective, but strong communities can make matters worse if, in their col- laboration, teachers (however unwittingly) reinforce each other's bad or ineffective practice. This is why close relation- ships are not ends in themselves. Collaborative cultures, which by definition have close relationships, are indeed pow- erful, but unless they are focusing on the right things they may end up being powerfully wrong. Moral purpose, good ideas,

68 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

focusing on results, and obtaining the views of dissenters are essential, because they mean that the organization is focusing on the right things. Leadership, once again, comes to the fore.

The role of the leader is to ensure that the organization devel- ops relationships that help produce desirable results.

In the schools McLaughlin and Talbert studied, leadership

(or lack of it) at the department or school level (or both) ac- counted for a large part of the difference in whether strong professional learning communities developed in a way that positively affected student learning. Looking again at Oak Valley's English and social studies departments:

These very different worlds reveal how much department

leadership and expectations shape teacher community. The

English department chair actively maintained open depart-

ment boundaries so that teachers would bring back knowl-

edge resources from district and out of district-professional

activities to the community. English faculty attended state

and national meetings, published regularly in professional

journals, and used professional development days to visit

classrooms in other schools. The chair gave priority for time

to share each other's writing, discuss new projects, and just

talk. . . . English department leadership extended and rein-

forced expectations and opportunities for teacher learning

provided by the district and by the school, developing a rich

repertoire of resources for the community to learn.

None of this applied down the hall in the social studies

department, where leadership enforced the norms of pri-

vatism and conservatism that Dan Lortie [in his classic study

of teachers (Lortie, 1975)] found central to school teaching.

For example, the social studies chair saw department meet-

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS 69

ings as an irritating ritual rather than an opportunity: "I don't hold meetings once a week; I don't even necessarily

have them once a month." Supports or incentives for learn-

ing were few in the social studies department. . . . This de-

partment chair marginalized the weakest teachers in the department, rather than enabling or encouraging their pro-

fessional growth [McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001, pp. 107-108].

Recall that only three of sixteen high schools demon- strated schoolwide professional communities. In comparing effective professional learning communities with ineffective ones, McLaughlin and Talbert talk about the pivotal role of principal leadership:

The utter absence of principal leadership within Valley High

School . . . is a strong frame for the weak teacher commu-

nity we found across departments in the school; conversely,

strong leadership in Greenfield, Prospect and Ibsen has been

central to engendering and sustaining these school-wide

teacher learning communities. . . .

Principals with low scores [on leadership as perceived by

teachers] generally are seen as managers who provide little

support or direction for teaching and learning in the school.

Principals receiving high ratings are actively involved in the

sorts of activities that nurture and sustain strong teacher

community [McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001, p. 110].

That only a minority of schools and school districts oper- ate in the manner espoused by Alvarado, Newmann et al., Elmore and Burney, and McLaughlin and Talbert is a

70 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

statement of how very far we have to go in transforming the public school system. Further, that the examples we have looked at are not really examples of transformation but rather preliminary baby steps reveals how deep the necessary cul- tural change really is.

The point of this section is that schools and school dis- tricts can get tough about student learning, can use their minds to identify new and better ideas, and can establish strategies and mechanisms of development. But successful strategies always involve relationships, relationships, relation- ships.

I have, of course, deliberately reversed stereotypes that portray businesses as needing more soul and schools as need- ing more intelligence. You could say that businesses should take on the mantle of greater caring and schools should focus on ideas and results, and you would have a point, but this is not the main point.

Where the world is heading (or, more accurately, where it needs to head) makes businesses and schools less different than they have been in the past. Both need to be, and are, in- creasingly concerned with moral purpose and good ideas if they are to be successful and sustainable organizations. In other words, the laws of nature and the new laws of sustain- able human organizations (corporations and public schools alike) are on the same evolutionary path. To be successful be- yond the very short run, all organizations must incorporate moral purpose; understand complexity science; and respect, build, and draw on new human relationships with hitherto uninvolved constituencies inside and outside the organization. Doing these things is for their own good, and the good of us all.

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS 71

It would be the understatement of the year to say that leadership that combines all of the elements just mentioned is demanding. What would be more important in leading in a culture of changewhich really means helping people work together when anxiety and related emotions run highthan "emotional intelligence"?

Emotional Intelligence and Resistance

People have always needed emotional intelligence, but in complex times people need it in spades. The culture of change

I have been describing is, by definition, rife with anxiety, stress, and ambiguity (and correspondingly with the exhilara- tion of creative breakthroughs). It should come as no surprise then that the most effective leaders are not the smartest in an IQ sense but are those who combine intellectual brilliance with emotional intelligence.

Goleman (1995, 1998, 2000) has done the foundation work on the topic of emotional intelligence. He cites count- less examples and studies, such as the following: "Claudio FerandezAraoz, in charge of executive searches throughout Latin America from Egon Zehnder International's Buenos Aires office, compared 227 highly successful executives with 23 who failed in their job. He found that the managers who failed were all high in expertise and IQ. In every case their fatal weakness was in emotional intelligencearrogance, overreliance on brainpower, inability to adapt to the occa- sionally disorienting shifts in that region and disdain for col- laboration or teamwork" (1998, p. 41). He cites Kevin Murray, director of communications of British Airways: "or- ganizations going through the greatest change are those who

72 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

need emotional intelligence the most" (1998, p. 42). We are talking, in other words, about all organizations that are effec- tive in today's culture.

Goleman (1998) has identified five main emotional com- petency sets (with several subdivisions), which he divides into

the domains of personal and social competence (adapted from table 1, pp. 26-27):

Personal competence

Self-awareness (knowing one's internal state, pref- erences, resources, and intuitions)

Self-regulation (managing one's internal states, im-

pulses, and resources)

Social competence

Motivation (emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals)

Empathy (awareness of others' feelings, needs, and concerns)

Social skills (adeptness at inducing desirable re- sponses from others)

We have already discussed the four leadership styles that Goleman (2000) found most effective in influencing culture and performance. Underpinning the authoritative, affiliative, democratic, and coaching styles is high emotional intelligence. Low emotional intelligence is the hallmark of coercive and pacesetting leaders.

Stein and Book (2000) have taken these ideas further into conceptualization and measurement in developing the Emotional Quotient (EQ) inventory, which has been adminis-

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS 73

tered to more than forty-two thousand people. They say at the outset:

[E]veryone knows people who could send an IQ test sky-

high, but can't quite make good in either their personal or

working lives. They rub others the wrong way; success just

doesn't seem to pan out. Much of the time they can't figure

out why. The reason why is that they're sorely lacking in

emotional intelligence. . . .

In everyday language emotional intelligence is what we

commonly refer to as "street smarts," or that uncommon

ability we label "common sense." It has to do with the abil-

ity to read the political and social environment, and land-

scape them; to intuitively grasp what others want and need,

what their strengths and weaknesses are; to remain unruf-

fled by stress; and to be engaging, the kind of person that

others want to be around [p. 14].

In a manner similar to Goleman, Stein and Book (2000) name five realms of EQ:

1. Intrapersonal (self-awareness, actualization, independ- ence, and self-regard)

2. Interpersonal (empathy, social responsibility)

3. Adaptability (problem solving, flexibility)

4. Stress management (stress tolerance, impulse control)

5. General mood (happiness, optimism)

Stein and Book warn against the superficial use of EQ and recommend close examination of the strengths needed in cer- tain jobs. Teachers, for example, need to be especially strong

74 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

on optimism and stress management; in addition, Stein and Book found that teachers who are rigid and lacking in im- pulse control are ineffective. In their work with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Stein and Book found that independence (one of the subdimensions of EQ) had a reverse effect on sporting successthat is, talented hockey players who went their own way tended to underachieve. In an assessment of the Young President's Organization (comprising CEOs thirty-nine years old or younger), they found high levels of flexibility and inde- pendence (which involves listening), which is likely not the precise profile needed to lead larger, more complex organiza- tions.

Need I say much more? If relationships are (almost) every- thing, a high EQ is a must. And the good news is that emo- tional intelligence can be learned; in other words, you can improve your EQ by working on it (Stein & Book, 2000; see also Chapter Seven). Effective leaders work on their own and others' emotional development. There is no greater skill needed for sustainable improvement.

In a culture of change, emotions frequently run high. And when they do, they often represent differences of opinion. People express doubts or reservations and sometimes outright opposition to new directions. What about these kinds of re- sistance? Well, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that leaders in a culture of change welcome it! They certainly re- frame it as having possible merit, and they almost always deal with it more effectively than anyone else. Defining effective leadership as appreciating resistance is another one of those remarkable discoveries: dissent is seen as a potential source of new ideas and breakthroughs. The absence of conflict can be a sign of decay. Sometimes, observe Pascale et al. (2000),

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS

prolonged "equilibrium is death" (p. 19). They use many ex- amples which illustrate that allowing (even fostering) nega- tive feedback is a step (not the only one) to needed improvement. One example is Jack Welch's "workout" at GE, in which "senior corporate officers were subjected to straight feedback from the troops in a series of public events. . . . Welch unleashed a process through which lower-level employ-

ees could shine the spotlight of public scrutiny on the most aggravating bureaucratic policies and redundant work prac- tices" (p. 28). (Warning: don't do this in your own organiza- tion unless you have all your EQ faculties intact and understand the entire process of acting on the results.)

All successful organizations in a culture of change have been found to a certain extent to seek diversity of employees, ideas, and experiences while simultaneously establishing mechanisms for sorting out, reconciling, and acting on new patterns (see Lewin & Regine, 2000, and Pascale et al., 2000).

This is why I and others have said that investing only in like-minded innovators is not necessarily a good thing. They become more like-minded and more unlike the rest of the or- ganization while missing valuable new clues about the future. By supporting the like-minded, leaders trade off early smooth-

ness for later grief. If you include and value naysayers, noise

in the early stages will yield later, greater implementation. This is why I endorse Heifetz's seemingly counterintui-

tive advice (1994), "respect those you wish to silence," and Maurer's touchstones for "getting beyond the wall of resist- ance" (1996, p. 54), which include maintaining a clear focus while you take the concerns of resisters seriously.

I have established in this chapter that the development of relationships among diverse elements in the organization, in-

76 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

cluding those who raise objections, is essential. The next stop on our journey concerns the role of knowledge, another con- vergenceknowledge sharing fuels relationships. We have al- ready established that relationships are paramount, but did you know that this is largely because they are kissing cousins to the knowledge society?

Chapter Five

Knowledge Building

THE COVER STORY IN THE BUSINESS SECTION OF THE

October 30 Toronto Globe and Mail was titled "Knowledge Officer Aims to Spread the Word" (2000). In its profile of Rod McKay, international chief knowledge officer at KPMG, the article said, "McKay's challenge is to get KPMG's 107,000 employees at all levels worldwide to share information" (p. M1). "Knowledge sharing," says McKay, "is a core value within KPMG. Every individual is assessed on their willingness to share their experience with others in the firm" (p. M1).

Knowledge building, knowledge sharing, knowledge cre- ation, knowledge management. Is this just another fad? New buzzwords for the new millennium? They could easily be- come so unless we understand the role of knowledge in organizational performance and set up the corresponding

78 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

mechanisms and practices that make knowledge sharing a cultural value.

Information is machines. Knowledge is people. Informa- tion becomes knowledge only when it takes on a "social life" (Brown & Duguid, 2000). By emphasizing the sheer quantity of information, the technocrats have it exactly wrong: if only we can provide greater access to more and more information for more and more individuals, we have it made. Instead what you get is information glut.

Brown and Duguid (2000) establish the foundation for viewing knowledge as a social phenomenon:

"Knowledge lies less in its databases than in its people" (p. 121).

"For all information's independence and extent, it is peo- ple, in their communities, organizations and institutions, who ultimately decide what it all means and why it mat- ters" (p. 18).

"A viable system must embrace not just the technological system, but the social systemthe people, organizations, and institutions involved" (p. 60).

"Knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold. It entails the knower's understanding and some de- gree of commitment" (p. 120).

If you remember one thing about information, it is that it only becomes valuable in a social context.

"Attending too closely to information overlooks the so- cial context that helps people understand what that in- formation might mean and why it matters" (p. 5).

"[E]nvisioned change will not happen or will not be

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 79

fruitful until people look beyond the simplicities of infor- mation and individuals to the complexities of learning, knowledge, judgement, communities, organizations, and

institutions" (p. 213).

Incidentally, focusing on information rather than use is why sending individuals and even teams to external training by itself does not work. Leading in a culture of change does not mean placing changed individuals into unchanged envi-

ronments. Rather, change leaders work on changing the con-

text, helping create new settings conducive to learning and sharing that learning.

Most organizations have invested heavily in technology and possibly training, but hardly at all in knowledge sharing and creation. And when they do attempt to share and use new knowledge, they find it enormously difficult. Take the seem- ingly obvious notion of sharing best practices within an or- ganization. Identifying the practices usually goes reasonably well, but when it comes to transferring and using the knowl- edge, the organization often flounders. Hewlett-Packard at- tempted "to raise quality levels around the globe by identifying and circulating the best practices within the firm" (Brown & Duguid, 2000, p. 123). The effort became so frus- trating that it prompted Lew Platt, chairman of HP, to wryly observe, "if only we knew what we know at HP" (cited in Brown & Duguid, p. 123).

In this chapter, we will see several examples of knowledge-creation and sharing from business and educa- tion. These organizations and schools are still in the minor- ity, but they are the wave of the future. (And what we can learn from them dovetails perfectly with the discussion in previous chapters.)

80 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Examples from Business

In their study of successful Japanese companies, Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) explain that these companies were success- ful not because of their use of technology but rather because of their skills and expertise at organizational knowledge cre- ation, which the authors define as "the capability of a com- pany as a whole to create new knowledge, disseminate it throughout the organization, and embody it in products, serv- ices and systems" (p. 3).

Building on earlier work by Polyani (1983), Nonaka and Takeuchi make the crucial distinction between explicit knowl-

edge (words and numbers that can be communicated in the form of data and information) and tacit knowledge (skills, be- liefs, and understanding that are below the level of aware- ness): "[Japanese companies] recognize that the knowledge expressed in words and numbers represents only the tip of the iceberg. They view knowledge as being primarily `tacie something not easily visible and expressible. Tacit knowledge is highly personal and hard to formalize, making it difficult to communicate or share with others. Subjective insights, intu- itions, and hunches fall into this category of knowledge. Furthermore, tacit knowledge is deeply rooted in an individ- ual's action and experience, as well as in the ideals, values, or emotions that he or she embraces" (p. 8). Successful organi- zations access tacit knowledge. Their success is found in the intricate interaction inside and outside the organizationin- teraction that converts tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge on an ongoing basis.

The process of knowledge creation is no easy task. First, tacit knowledge is by definition hard to get at. Second, the

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 81

process must sort out and yield quality ideas; not all tacit knowledge is useful. Third, quality ideas must be retained, shared, and used throughout the organization.

As Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) say, "The sharing of tacit knowledge among multiple individuals with different back- grounds, perspectives, and motivations becomes the critical step for organizational knowledge creation to take place. The

individuals' emotions, feelings, and mental models have to be

shared to build mutual trust" (p. 85). In further, more comprehensive work, Von Krogh, Ichijo,

and Nonaka (2000) subtitle their book "how to unlock the mystery of tacit knowledge and release the power of innova-

tion." Lamenting the overuse of information technology per se, Von Krogh et al. take us on a journey that is none other than an explanation of how effective companies combine care or moral purpose with an understanding of the change process and an emphasis on developing relationships (corre- sponding, of course, to Chapters Two through Four in this book): "Knowledge enabling includes facilitating relation- ships and conversations as well as sharing local knowledge across an organization or beyond geographic and cultural borders. At a deeper level, however, it relies on a new sense of

emotional knowledge and care in the organization, one that highlights how people treat each other and encourages cre- ativity" (Von Krogh et al., 2000, p. 4).

Knowledge, as distinct from information, "is closely at- tached to human emotions, aspirations, hopes, and intention" (Von Krogh et al., 2000, p. 30). In other words, there is an the explicit and intimate link between knowledge building and internal commitment on the way to making good things happen (see Figure 1.1 in Chapter One).

82 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

I will soon take up the not-so-straightforward chicken- and-egg question of the causal relationship between collabo- rative work cultures and knowledge sharing, but let's stay for a moment with the conditions under which people share knowledge. Von Krogh et al. elaborate: "Knowledge creation puts particular demands on organizational relationships. In order to share personal knowledge, individuals must rely on others to listen and react to their ideas. Constructive and help- ful relations enable people to share their insights and freely discuss their concerns. They also enable microcommunities, the origin of knowledge creation in companies, to form and self-organize. Good relationships purge a knowledge-creation process of distrust, fear, and dissatisfaction, and allow orga- nizational members to feel safe enough to explore the un- known territories of new markets, new customers, new products, and new manufacturing technologies" (p. 45).

Von Krogh et al. (2000) emphasize that a culture of care (certainly not a business term!) is vital for successful perform- ance, which they define in five dimensions: mutual trust, ac- tive empathy, access to help, lenience in judgment, and courage. Does this sound like soft stuff better suited to kinder- garten? (The courage part is for the teacher.) Not when you see the U.S. Army, KPMG, Gemini Consulting, Monsanto, British Petroleum, Sears, and a host of other companies in "tough" businesses espousing quality relationships as vital to their success.

Many of us have experienced firsthand the consequences of not attending to these matters. Von Krogh et al. (2000, pp. 56-57) summarize Darrah's study (1993) of a computer com- ponents supplier.

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 83

The company faced severe productivity and quality prob-

lems. Management's response was to punish ignorance and

lack of expertise among factory-floor workers; at the same

time, whenever they ran into manufacturing problems, it ex-

plicitly discouraged them from seeking help from the engi-

neers who designed the components and organized the production line. These workers gained individual knowledge

through seizing: They worked on sequentially defined man-

ufacturing tasks and tried to come to terms with the task at

hand, without thinking through the consequences for the

performance of other tasks at other stages of the manufac-

turing process. When a new worker was employed, he re-

ceived little training. Yet for productivity and cost reasons,

the novice would be put to work as soon as possible. Knowledge transactions between workers and engineers

were very rare, and most of the knowledge on the factory

floor remained tacit and individual. The tacit quality of in-

dividual knowledge was pushed even farther because the

foremen would not allow personal notes or drawings to help

solve tasks.

Concerned with the severe productivity and quality problems, a new production director suggested a training

program for factory workers that would help to remedy the

situation. The program was designed in a traditional teach-

ing manner: The product and manufacturing engineers were

supposed to explain the product design and give an overall

view of the manufacturing process and requirements for each step. At the end of the training session, the engineers

would ask the workers for their opinions and constructive

inputa knowledge transaction intended to improve qual-

84 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

ity and communication. The workers, however, knew the

consequences of expressing ignorance and incompetence,

and they did not discuss the problems they experienced, even

if they knew those problems resulted from flaws in product

design. Nor did they have a legitimate language in which to

express their concerns and argue "on the same level" as the

engineers. The workers mostly remained silent, the training

program did not have the desired effects, and the director left the company shortly thereafter.

What about the causal relationship between good rela- tionships and knowledge sharing? Most people automatically assume that you build relationships first and information will flow. Von Krogh et al. (2000) seem to accept this causal di- rection: "We believe a broad acceptance of the emotional lives of others is crucial for establishing good working relation- shipsand good relations, in turn, lead to effective knowl- edge creation" (p. 51).

I tend, however, to agree with Dixon (2000). One myth, observes Dixon, is that

[T]he exchange of knowledge happens only in organizations

that have a noncompetitive or a collaborative culture. It fol-

lows that the first thing you have to do is to fix the culture

and then get people to share. But I have found that it's the

other way around. If people begin sharing ideas about issues

they see as really important, the sharing itself creates a learn-

ing culture. I have, of course, inserted an important caveat

in that sentence: "about issues they see as really important."

Ford supplies an illustration of this point. Every Ford

plant is responsible for making a S percent productivity in-

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 85

crease every year. People in the plant refer to it as the "task."

This is serious business; as one plant manager said, "If you

don't make your task, your successor will." Year after year

it is a real chore to keep making the 5 percent task, as pro-

duction engineers are stretched to find some new process or

technique to reduce the cost of labor, materials, or energy.

Now, the Best Practice Replication process sends the pro-

duction engineer in each Vehicle Operations plant five to

eight best practices items a week, each of which describes

how a sister plant reduced costs. Each item spells out exactly

how much was saved, specified in hours, materials, or en-

ergy. The production engineers have come to rely on this sys-

tem as a way to make their task. In fact, on average, 40 percent of task comes from best practices pulled off the sys-

temand in some plants 100 percent of task is taken from

the system. It is significant that this system is so well used in

an industry that is known for being highly competitive. People use it because the system offers help with a very criti-

cal business need. But what has also happened at Ford as a

result of this ongoing exchange is a change in the company's

culture. A learning culture is developing based on this expe-

riential understanding of why knowledge sharing is impor-

tant.

It is a kind of chicken-or-egg issue: Which comes first,

the learning culture or the exchange of knowledge? Given

many organizations' rather abysmal success rate at chang-

ing their culture, I would put my money on having the ex-

change impact the culture rather than waiting for the culture

to change [pp. 5-6].

In other words, establishing knowledge sharing practices

86 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

is as much a route to creating collaborative cultures as it is a product of the latter. This means that the organization must frame the giving and receiving of knowledge as a responsibil- ity and must reinforce such sharing through incentives and opportunities to engage in it. Recall the words of Rod McKay of KPMG with which I started this chapter. "Every individual is assessed on their willingness to share their experiences with

others in the firm" ("Knowledge Officer Aims to Spread the Word," 2000, p. M1).

Von Krogh et al. (2000) draw the same conclusion when they talk about two interrelated responsibilities: "From our standpoint, a 'caring expert' is an organizational member who reaches her level of personal mastery in tacit and explicit knowledge and understands that she is responsible for shar- ing the process" (p. 52, emphasis in original).

Figure 5.1 illustrates the elements of knowledge exchange. Knowledge is constantly received and given, as organizations provide opportunity to do so and value and reward individu- als as they engage in the receiving and sharing of knowledge.

The logic of what we are talking about should be clear: (1) complex, turbulent environments constantly generate messiness and reams of ideas; (2) interacting individuals are

Responsibility

Opportunity

Figure 5.1. Knowledge-Sharing Paradigm.

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 87

the key to accessing and sorting out these ideas; (3) individu- als will not engage in sharing unless they find it motivating to do so (whether because they feel valued and are valued, be- cause they are getting something in return, or because they want to contribute to a bigger vision).

Leaders in a culture of change realize that accessing tacit knowledge is crucial and that such access cannot be man- dated. Effective leaders understand the value and role of knowledge creation, they make it a priority and set about establishing and reinforcing habits of knowledge exchange among organizational members. To do this they must cre- ate many mechanisms for people to engage in this new be- havior and to learn to value it. Control freaks need not apply: people need elbow room to uncover and sort out best ideas. Leaders must learn to trust the processes they set up, looking for promising patterns and looking to con- tinually refine and identify procedures for maximizing valu- able sharing. Knowledge activation, as Von Krogh et al. (2000) call it, "is about enabling, not controlling . any- one who wants to be a knowledge activist must give up, at the outset, the idea of controlling knowledge creation" (p. 158). They elaborate: "From an enabling perspective, knowledge that is transferred from other parts of the com- pany should be thought of as a source of inspiration and insights for a local business operation, not a direct order that must be followed. Control of knowledge is local, tied to local re-creation. . . . The local unit uses the received knowledge as input to spark its own continuing knowledge- creation process" (p. 213).

It is important to note that companies must name knowl- edge sharing as a core value and then establish mechanisms

88 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

and procedures that embody the value in action. Dixon (2000) provides several illustrations:

One of the best examples . . . is British Petroleum's Peer

Assist Program. Peer Assist enables a team that is working

on a project to call upon another team (or a group of indi-

viduals) that has had experience in the same type of task.

The teams meet face-to-face for one to three days in order

to work through an issue the first team is facing. For exam-

ple, a team that is drilling in deep water off the coast of Norway can ask for an "assist" from a team that has had experience in deep-water drilling in the gulf of Mexico. As

the label implies, "assists" are held between peers, not with

supervisors or corporate "helpers." The idea of Peer Assists

was put forward by a corporate task force in late 1994, and

BP wisely chose to offer it as a simple idea without specify-

ing rules or lengthy "how-to" steps. It is left up to the team

asking for the assistance to specify who it would like to work with, what it wants help on, and at what stage in the

project it could use the help [p. 9].

Probably the best-known example of leveraging knowledge

within a team is the U.S. Army's use of After Action Reviews. The AARs are held at the end of any team or unit

action with the intent of reusing what has been learned im-

mediately in the next battle or project. These brief meetings

are attended by everyone who was engaged in the effort, re-

gardless of rank. The Army's simple guidelines for conduct-

ing AARs are (1) no sugar coating, (2) discover ground

truth, (3) no thin skins, (4) take notes, and (5) call it like you

see it. The meetings are facilitated by someone in the unit,

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 89

sometimes the ranking officer but just as often another mem-

ber of the team. The learning from these meetings is cap-

tured both by the members, who all write and keep personal

notes about what they need to do differently, and by the fa-

cilitator, who captures on a flip chart or chalkboard what

the unit as a whole determines that it needs to do differently

in the next engagement. Army After Action Reviews have

standardized three key questions: What was supposed to happen? What happened? And what accounts for the differ-

ence? An AAR may last fifteen minutes or an hour depend-

ing on the action that is being discussed, but in any case, it

is not a lengthy meeting. . . .

Bechtel's Steam Generator Replacement Group also uses

this practice, although it calls the meetings "lessons learned"

instead of AARs. Bechtel is a multibillion-dollar interna-

tional engineering, procurement, and construction company

engaged in large-scale projects, such as power plants, petro-

chemical facilities, airports, mining facilities, and major in-

frastructure projects. Unlike other parts of Bechtel in which

individuals work in ever-changing project teams, the Steam

Generator Replacement Group is a small specialized unit

that works on a lot of jobs together. Anything learned on

one job can be immediately used by the team on the next

job. The nature of its work leaves little room for error. The

average window of time to replace a steam generator is sev-

enty days or less, unlike the typical Bechtel project, which

may last two years or more. This unforgiving schedule man-

dates that the Steam Generator Replacement Group learn

from its own lessons, because even a small mistake can re-

sult in a significant delay to a project. The lessons are cap-

tured in two ways: first, in weekly meetings to which

90 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

supervisors are required to bring lessons learned; then, at

the end of each project, the project manager brings all play-

ers together for a full day to focus on the lessons learned

[pp. 37-40].

The design criteria underlying these examples are crucial: (1) they focus on the intended user(s); (2) they are parsimo- nious (no lengthy written statements or meetings); (3) they try to get at tacit knowledge (this is why personal interaction or exchange is key and why dissemination of "products" or ex- plicit knowledge by itself is rarely sufficient); (4) learning takes place "in context" with other members of the organiza- tion; and (5) they do not aim for faithful replication or con- trol.

We could do well enough if we harnessed intracompany knowledge ("if only we knew what we know at HP"). Accessing and creating new knowledge from the outside gets more complicated (see the examples in Pascale, Millemann, & Gioja, 2000). Whether one is promoting intracompany ex- changes or accessing external knowledge, the principles are the same: make knowledge building a core value and create specific opportunities to engage in the process. If Shell can do it with 105,000 employees dispersed among 130 "operating companies," we all can do it. In all these cases, there is a need to establish specific procedures and opportunities, such as the "fishbowl" at Shell, described here by Steven Miller, the man- aging director of the new Oil Products Business Committee (quoted in Pascale et al., pp. 188-189):

One of the most important innovations in changing all of us

was the fishbowl. The name describes what it is: I and a

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 91

number of my management team sit in the middle of a room

with one of the country teams in the center with us. The

other team members listen from the outer circle. Everyone is

watching as the group in the hot seat talks about what they're going to do, and what they need from me and my

colleagues to be able to do it. That may not sound revolu-

tionarybut in our culture it was very unusual for anyone lower in the organization to talk this directly to a managing

director and his reports.

In the fishbowl, the pressure is on to measure up. . . . If

a team brings in a plan that's really a bunch of crap, we've

got to be able to call it a bunch of crap. If we cover for peo-

ple or praise everyone, what do we say when someone brings

in an excellent plan? That kind of straight talk is another

big culture change for Shell.

The whole process creates complete transparency be-

tween the people at the coal face and me and my top man-

agement team. At the end, these folks go back home and say,

"I just cut a deal with the managing director and his team

to do these things." It creates a personal connectionand it

changes how we talk with each other and how we work with

each other. The country leaders go along because it provides

support for what needed to be done anyway. After that, I

can call up those folks anywhere in the world and talk in a

very direct way because of this personal connectedness. It

has completely changed the dynamics of our operations.

The fishbowls, note Pascale et al. (2000, p. 224), are staged for dramatic effect to accomplish work and generate commitment: "The proceedings are videotaped so that when teams return to their operating companies, stakeholders from

92 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

middle and upper management who were not present at the workshop can watch and learn from the visual record. (These inexpensive videos had a huge multiplier effect on the trans- formation of Shell's Downstream business.)"

In the same vein, Garvin (2000), after examining several case examples of knowledge-building organizations, summa- rizes the role of leaders: "First, leaders and managers must create opportunities for learning by designing settings and events that prompt the necessary activities. Second, they must cultivate the proper tone, fostering desirable norms, behav- iors and rules of engagement. Third, they must personally lead the process of discussion, framing debate, posing ques- tions, listening attentively, and providing feedback and clo- sure" (pp. 190-191).

Examples from Education

It may seem from the previous pages that business organiza- tions are paragons of knowledge creation and sharing, but it is likely that only a small minority are this good (and they don't necessarily sustain this level of goodness). Many of the same companies appear in different books, so the list seems longer than it actually is. Still, I would say that although the average company is about as bad as the average school sys- tem, when it comes to knowledge sharing, the best companies are better than the best school systems. There are proportion- ately more of them, and they are working more diligently on the task.

It is one of life's great ironies: schools are in the business of teaching and learning, yet they are terrible at learning from each other. If they ever discover how to do this, their future is

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 93

assured. (Mind you, they are not helped by an oppressive hi- erarchy that bombards them with multiple colliding de- mands.)

In Chapter Four I referred to the remarkable improvement of a whole school system in the case of District 2 in New York

City under the direction of Superintendent Anthony Alvarado and his staff. We might as well be talking about Shell or Ford as we listen to Elmore and Burney (1999) describe two of the knowledge-sharing strategies employed by the district: inter- visitation and peer networks, and instructional consulting services.

Intervisitation and Peer Networks

District 2 [has] a heavy reliance on peer networks and visits

to other sites, inside and outside the district, designed to bring teachers and principals into contact with exemplary

practices. Intervisitation, as it is called in the district, and

peer consultations are routine parts of the district's daily life.

Teachers often visit other classrooms in conjunction with

consultants' visits, either to observe one of their peers teach-

ing a lesson or a consultant teaching a demonstration les-

son. And groups of teachers often visit another school, inside or outside the district, in preparation for the develop-

ment of a new set of instructional practices. Usually princi-

pals initiate these outside visits and travel with teachers.

In addition, principals engage in intervisitations with

peers in other schools. New principals are paired with "bud-

dies" who are usually more senior administrators, and they

often spend a day or two each month in their first two years

in their buddy's school. Groups of teachers and principals

working in district initiatives travel to other districts inside

and outside the city to observe specific instructional practices.

94 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

And monthly districtwide principals' meetings are held on

site in schools, and often principals observe individual teach-

ers in their peers' schools as part of a structured agenda for

discussing some aspect of instructional improvement. Principals are encouraged to use visits and peer advising as

management strategies for teachers within their buildings. A

principal who is having trouble getting a particular teacher

engaged in improvement might be advised by the district staff

to pair that teacher with another teacher in the building or

another building in the district. And principals themselves

might be encouraged to consult with other principals on spe-

cific areas where they are having difficulties.

Intervisitations and peer advising as professional devel-

opment activities tend to blend into the day-to-day manage-

ment of the district. The district budgets resources to support about three hundred days of professional time to be

allocated to intervisitation activities. Many such activities

are not captured by these budgeted resources, since they

occur informally among individuals on an ad hoc basis.

A specific example serves to illustrate how professional

development and management blend together around peer

advising and intervisitation. An elementary principal who is

in the last year of her probationary period and is considered

to be an exemplar by district personnel described off- handedly that throughout her probationary period, she had

visited regularly with two other principals in the district. She

is currently involved in a principals' support group that meets regularly with three other principals, and she provides

support to her former assistant principal, who was recruited

to take over another school as an interim acting principal.

In addition this principal has led several groups of teachers

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 95

from her school to observe teaching of reading and writing

in university settings and in other schools in the city. She has

attended summer staff development institutes in literacy and

math with teachers from her school, and in the ensuing school year, she taught a series of demonstration lessons in

the classrooms of teachers in her school to work out the complexities of implementing new instructional strategies.

She speaks of these activities as part of her routine adminis-

trative responsibility as a principal rather than as specific

professional development activities.

Another example of how peer advising and intervisita-

tion models come together in the routine business of the dis-

trict is the monthly principals' conferences. Most districts

have regularly scheduled meetings of principals, typically or-

ganized by elementary and secondary levels. These routine

meetings usually deal primarily with administrative business

and rarely with specific instructional issues. In District 2, in

contrast, regular principals' meetingsfrequently called principals' conferencesare primarily organized around in-

structional issues and only incidentally around routine ad-

ministrative business, and they often take place in the schools. At one recent principals' conference which took

place in a school, the meeting principals were asked to visit

classrooms, observe demonstration lessons, and use a proto-

col to observe and analyze classroom practice. Another re-

cent principals' conference convened at New York's Museum

of Modern Art. The theme was the development and imple-

mentation of standards for evaluating students' acadeniic

work. The conference consisted of a brief introductory dis-

cussion of District 2's activities around standards by Alvarado; an overview of standards work by the standards

96 LEADING IN 'A CULTURE OF CHANGE

coordinator, Denis Levine, and a principal, Frank DeStefano,

who has taken a leadership role in developing standards in

his school; a series of small group discussions of an article

about standards by Lauren Resnick; an analysis by small

groups of participants of a collection of vignettes of student

work around standards; and an observation of the museum's

education programs. Discussion of routine administrative

business occupied less than thirty minutes at the end of the

seven-hour meeting [Elmore & Burney, 1999, p. 278].

Instructional Consulting Services

District 2 invests heavily in professional development con-

sultants who work directly with teachers individually and in

groups at the school site. Over time the district has devel-

oped two main types of consulting arrangements. The first

type relies on outside consultants, experts in a given instruc-

tional area who are employed under contractual arrange-

ments, sometimes with universities and sometimes as independent consultants. The second type relies on district

consultants, typically recruited from the ranks of dis- trict personnel, paid directly on the district budget, and given an assignment to work in a given instructional area.

Principals and school heads play a key role in assessing the

needs of the school and brokering consulting services.

The district's first instructional improvement initiative,

which began soon after Alvarado's arrival in the district

eight years ago, relied exclusively on outside consultants and

was focused on literacy, reading, and writing. . . .

Overall the District 2 professional development consult-

ing model stresses direct work by external consultants and

district staff developers with individual teachers on concrete

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KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 97

problems related to instruction in a given content area; work

with grade-level teams of teachers on common problems

across their classrooms; consultation with individual teaches

who are developing new approaches to teaching in their

classrooms that other teachers might use; and work with

larger groups of teachers to familiarize them with the basic

ideas behind instructional improvement in a given content

area. Change in instructional practice involves working

through problems of practice with peers and experts, obser-

vation of practice, and steady accumulation over time of

new practices anchored in one's own classroom setting.

The consulting model is labor intensive, in that it relies

on extensive involvement by a consultant with individuals

and small groups of teachers, repeatedly over time, around

a limited set of instructional problems. Connecting profes-

sional development with teaching practice in this direct way

required making a choice at the district level to invest re-

sources intensively rather than using them to provide low-

impact activities spread across a larger number of teachers.

The approach also implies a long-term commitment to in-

structional improvement in a given content area. In order to

reach large numbers of teachers with the District 2 consult-

ing model, district- and school-level priorities for profes-

sional development have to stay focused on a particular content areain this case literacy and mathover several years, so that consultants have the time to engage teachers

repeatedly across a number of schools in a year and then ex-

pand their efforts to other schools in successive years [Elmore & Burney, 1999, pp. 274-276].

The forms of systematic knowledge exchange in District 2

98 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

are being carried on and further developed in the post- Alvarado-Fink period. The reform in San Diego that I dis- cussed in the previous chapter also uses deliberate and focused methods to ensure the development, sharing, and use of knowledge. In addition to "intervisitation and peer net- works" and "instructional consulting services," San Diego, as does District 2, makes heavy use of monthly conferences. Recall from Chapter Four that the eight instructional leaders meet once a month with their supervisor, as do the instruc- tional leaders with their twenty to twenty-five principals, as do the principals with their school staff. In all these meetings, the focus is on instruction and associated ideas for develop- ing leadership that will have an impact on teaching practices and student learning.

During my site visit in January 2001, I observed a two- hour session that an instructional leader was conducting with twenty-two school principals. Videotapes of leadership are being used by San Diego more and more to analyze and improve the performance of leaders. In this session, two hours were spent examining a video of one of the principals in the group as she conducted one of the monthly staff con- ferences with teachers. The principal on tape viewed seg- ments of the video and discussed them with the instructional leader and other principals: Were the purposes and goals of the session clear? Did staff seem engaged? Was there an ac- tion-based closure? Was it likely that staff would follow up and do something? And so on. The principal in question was appalled at what she saw: "My goals were not clear," "I can't believe I said what I said," "When I looked at my video there was nothing I could see that was likely to motivate teachers."

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 99

As someone observed, "When you look at your own work this way, it is frightening. You are not this charismatic leader. It shakes your foundation." What makes it acceptable is that everyone in the group is videotaped and discussed, including the work of the instructional leader. There must be strong norms of trust and a developmental, risk-taking set of values for these methods to work. When done well, and with in- tegrity, the knowledge sharing in these kinds of settings is phe- nomenal.

We will see in Chapter Seven how District 2 and San Diego

go about recruiting and developing leaders (for example, prin-

cipals) who can play these more demanding (and more satis- fying) leadership roles (see Fink & Resnick, 1999).

Let us take another example. You would think that schools in total know a lot about teaching reading, writing and mathematicsand you would be right. You would also think that accessing this information would be a top prior- ityand you would be wrong. What is going on here? Well, over the years schools have built up all kinds of structural and cultural barriers to sharing, and they are having a devil of a time overcoming this inertia. (If they weren't so well pro- tected by having nearly a monopoly, and if they weren't so essential to the future of democracy, they would be long gone.) Yet we are finding that teachers and principals, once they experience knowledge sharing, are thirsting for more. They literally can't get enough of it. Let's look at three ex- amples. Carol Rolheiser and I, from the University of Toronto, are working in three school districts: the Edmonton Catholic School District in Alberta, the Toronto District School Board, and the York Region District School Board just north of Toronto.

100 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Assessment for Learning The Edmonton Catholic School District has eighty-four schools. Working with an internal district steering group, Carol and I are training teams (comprising the principal and several teachers) from all eighty-four schools in four cohorts of twenty-one over a three-year period. This project is called the Assessment for Learning initiative. School teams come to-

gether with us for six to eight days per year, during which time they participate in learning about moral purpose, the change process, developing relationships and collaborative work cultures, linking parents and the community, and other topics. As the name of the initiative indicates, the teams focus particularly on what we call assessment for learning, which involves the development of school-based plans to improve student learning. School teams examine how well students are doing, what targets they should set to improve learning, and what strategies might get them where they want to go. They collect data on their own classroom practices and student per- formance and share these results with other school teams. At each session the groups receive new input and share what they

are doing. At the end of a period of development (about a year), we hold a Learning Fair. Its instructions are simple enough to fit on one page: see page 101.

The most recent Learning Fair was held in Edmonton on November 3, 2000. The work produced, the energy in the room, the marvel at what was going on were awesome. Ask anyone who was there. At this event there was a great deal of evidence that ideas discussed in previous group sessions had been put into practice, that new ideas were being generated, and that the culture of the district was becoming more open to examining and sharing its teaching practice. The video that

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 101

Learning Fair ... an opportunity to showcase, reflect, and celebrate!

The focus of the Learning Fair is to reflect on the successes and challenges

of our journey in the Assessment for Learning initiative and to share our

learning with each other. The Learning Fair will take place on [date].

Each school is invited to prepare a "storefront" that showcases its leader-

ship work. A storefront is a visual representation of the learning that has

emerged from this initiative. You will have the opportunity to discuss your

work as other schools explore the storefronts.

The storefront can reflect:

Concrete actions your leadership team has taken in your school

based on the focus of our "Assessment for Learning" initiative

Artifacts that illustrate the assessment changes in your school

Successes and outcomes of your work

Challenges and solutions

Lessons learned

Tips for preparing the storefront:

Make sure you have a clearly defined purpose and include the

points mentioned above.

Be creative: think about presentation, color, user-friendly materi-

als. Use a variety of visuals.

Consider ... a mind map, a storyboard, artifacts, photographs of work in progress, graphs, charts, products, other

Include references to any data you generated related to this initia-

tive.

Prepare an oral description to share ... no longer than five min- utes.

Provide a one-page summary to accompany your storefront pres-

entation ... be sure to include the names of your school and lead- ership team members. This summary should describe key activities

and outcomes of your work in Assessment for Learning.

Setup time will be one hour prior to the fair.

Note: All schools will have the opportunity to present and attend!

102 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

was produced from that event could have a tremendous mul- tiplier effect back in the schools and in other districts (pro- vided the principles of knowledge sharing are followed).

Early Years Literacy Project We are just in the initial stages of the Early Years Literacy Project (EYLP) in the Toronto District, a large district with over six hundred schools. We are working with a sizeable chunk: nine half-days of training over a one-year period with teams of two from each of the ninety-three schools involved in the project. Each team consists of the principal and the lit- eracy coordinator (a teacher leader who has a half-time ap- pointment to work with the principal and other teachers on the improvement of reading and writing in the school). After just two half-days of training, we asked the 186 participants to fill out a one-page questionnaire, which included two open-

ended questions: (1) What was the strongest part of the two days? and (2) What would you like to learn about in future sessions?

For both questions, the top theme in the responses by prin- cipals and literacy coordinators pertained to knowledge shar- ing. For example, typical responses to the question about the strongest part of the two days were

Being able to dialogue with our literacy coordinator without the bump and grind of a regular school day (principal)

Discussion with other schools about how they are solving some of the issues we are facing at our school (literacy coordinator)

Focusing on what is going on in our school already

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KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 103

(realized there is more going on than I know) (literacy

coordinator)

When participants were asked what they wanted in future sessions, their top request involved more dialogue and access

to specific ideas:

Need more knowledge about practice and strategies

to make things happen/change in school (principal)

Would like to hear what others are doing with respect to the [project] what does it look like, how are they interpreting data to make changes (principal)

Reflective processes where teachers would reflect on their own personal practices and then relate to the broader picture of what others in the district were doing (literacy coordinator)

We have barely scratched the surface in the Toronto District, but future sessions, including a Learning Fair of ac- complishments to date, are designed to go down the path of accessing tacit knowledge and making it available to others in the district.

Performance Plus and Mentor Teacher Project The third example is the York Region School District just north of Toronto. Here our role is that of external researchers and consultants. The district has commissioned us to docu- ment the lessons learned from two initiatives and to make rec-

ommendations for future developments. The fifteen most disadvantaged schools in the district are in an initiative called

104 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Performance Plus (focusing on early literacy). Another group, including some of the first fifteen, participate in the Mentor Teacher Project, which provides additional support for teacher development and the improvement of student liter- acy. Leaders of the projects claim that many schools are expe-

riencing success and that lessons are being learned at the individual level, but nobody else knows. The tacit and explicit knowledge being squandered is enormous. Our role is to work with the York region to help it access, understand, and act further on what is already being learned.

In addition to principals and teachers exchanging ideas, we are also working in these projects to involve students in sharing and creating knowledge. They do this within the classroom as they learn to use more powerful interactive learning methods. Students are also taught to present portfo- lios of their work and accomplishments to their parents. In these ways students are learning why and how to share knowledgesomething they will need as future workers and citizens. The more that educators model knowledge sharing themselves in their daily work, the more that students will learn to do so.

As I said earlier, it is ironic that school systems are late to the game of knowledge building both for their students and for their teachers. Most schools are not good at knowledge shar- ing within their own walls, let alone across schools in the same district. The more general infrastructure for accessing "information" (I use the term advisedly) in national networks and databases is more developed than it is for local networks. Yes, access as much information as you can, but it is the local networks that count, because it is when we are learning in

KNOWLEDGE BUILDING 105

context that knowledge becomes specific and useable. There are a few high-quality regional knowledge-building networks,

but even in those situations, intradistrict and intraschool shar- ing is not strong. Schools systems, in any case, would be well advised to name knowledge sharing as a core valueto label it explicitly, which they do not now doand to begin to work on the barriers and procedures to dramatically increase its use.

Once again, I conclude that corporations and school sys- tems have much more in common than we thought. They are

not identical, but they both would be better off (and hence so

would society) if they strengthened their capacity to access and leverage hidden knowledge. And if they do, they will be much better at coherence making in a disordered, nonlinear world.

Chapter Six

Coherence Making

C RANGE IS A LEADER'S FRIEND, BUT IT HAS A SPLIT personality: its nonlinear messiness gets us into trouble.

But the experience of this messiness is necessary in order to discover the hidden benefitscreative ideas and novel solu- tions are often generated when the status quo is disrupted. If you are working on mastering the four leadership capacities we have already discussedmoral purpose, understanding change, developing relationships, building knowledgeyou can afford such a friend. You don't have to become Dr. Change love to realize that living on the edge means simulta- neously letting go and reining in.

The ultimate goal in chaotic societies is to achieve greater reining in. It is just that the route to get there is not as linear as most of us would like. The central tendency of dynamic, complex systemsand today's world is certainly an example

107

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108 LEADING INA CULTURE OF CHANGE

of such a systemis to constantly generate overload and cause fragmentation. Leaders need to accept this condition as a given, recognize its potential value, and go about coherence making while also retaining the awareness that persistent co- herence is a dangerous thing. Fortunately, our mastering the previous four capacities means not only that we can afford to let go but also that we can trust that the dynamics of change, when guided by such leadership, will be conducive to coher- ence making. Let's see how this dynamic works.

The basis of the new mind-set for leading in a culture of change is the realization that "the world is not chaotic; it is complex" (Pascale, Millemann, & Gioj a, 2000, p. 6). The theory (we will get to the practice in a moment) is best sum- marized in terms of four principles of a "living system," which businesses and schools certainly are (Pascale et al., p. 6; emphasis in the original):

1. Equilibrium is a precursor to death. When a living system is in a state of equilibrium, it is less responsive

to changes occurring around it. This places it at maxi- mum risk.

2. In the face of threat, or when galvanized by a com- pelling opportunity, living things move toward the edge of chaos. This condition evokes higher levels of

mutation and experimentation, and fresh new solu- tions are more likely to be found.

3. When this excitation takes place, the components of living systems self-organize and new forms and reper- toires emerge from the turmoil.

4. Living systems cannot be directed along a linear path. Unforeseen consequences are inevitable. The challenge

COHERENCE MAKING 109

is to disturb them in a manner that approximates the desired outcome.

The Disturbance Part

The key phrase is "disturb them in a manner that approxi- mates the desired outcome." Right away we know that tak- ing on all the innovations that come along or trying to reengineer people is not the kind of disturbance that is going to approximate any desired outcome.

In schools, for example, the main problem is not the ab- sence of innovations but the presence of too many discon- nected, episodic, piecemeal, superficially adorned projects. The situation is worse for schools than for businesses. Both are facing turbulent, uncertain environments, but schools are suffering the additional burden of having a torrent of un- wanted, uncoordinated policies and innovations raining down on them from hierarchical bureaucracies. Many super- intendents (of the pacesetter style) compound the problem with relentless "projectitis." Thomas Hatch (2000, pp. 1-2) shows what happens "when multiple innovations collide": "The list of reforms suggested or attempted since 1983 en- compasses almost everything from higher standards and new tests for student performance to merit pay and school-based management. . . . And it is not uncommon now to find school districts in which vastly different approaches to educational reform are being attempted at the same time. . . . In fact, in a study of 57 different districts from 1992-1995, Hess (1999) reports that the typical urban district pursued more than eleven 'significant initiatives' in basic areas such as reschedul- ing, curriculum, assessment, professional development and

110 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

school management." Hatch further states, "As a result, rather than contributing to substantial improvements, adopt- ing improvement programs may also add to the endless cycle of initiatives that seem to sap the strength and spirit of schools and their communities" (p. 4).

In a survey of schools in districts in California and Texas, Hatch (2000) reports that 66 percent of the schools were en- gaged with three or more improvement programs, 22 percent with six or more; and in one district, 19 percent of the schools "were working with nine or more different improvement pro- grams simultaneously" (p. 9).

The result, according to one associate superintendent, is that "frustration and anger at the school level have never been higher. When attempting to garner new funds or develop new programs, over and over again, he [the associate superintend- ent] hears from principals and teachers 'we don't want any- thing else. We're over our heads" (Hatch, 2000, p. 10). One external provider reported, "We work in schools that have seven, eight, nine, affiliations with outside organizations all purporting to have something to do with reform" (p. 25).

The situation Hatch describes is not what I mean, by dis- turbance. Productive disturbance is likely to happen when it is guided by moral purpose and when the process creates and channels new tensions while working on a complex problem. Because the most interesting problems are complex and be- cause there can be no advance blueprint for such cases, Heifetz (1994) says we need adaptive leadership, or, as the title of his book suggests, leadership without easy answers.

When the situation is complex, effective leaders sometimes

tweak the status quo even when clear solutions are not evi- dent. Earlier in this book we saw how Shapiro at Monsanto

COHERENCE MAKING 111

"disturbed" the system through "town hall meetings" that unleashed a process of dialogue among rank-and-file mem- bers (Chapter Two); how Alvarado, in School District 2 and in San Diego, created anxiety by focusing intensely on instruc- tion and student performance data that had to be acted on (Chapter Four); and how Welch at GE invited employee scrutiny of existing practices in so-called workout sessions (Chapter Four).

I have to say that top-down, blueprinted strategies or reengineering or relentless innovativeness all turn out to be more reckless than the disturbances we are talking about in the examples in this book. Recall the "fishbowl" technique used by Steve Miller of Shell (as described in Chapter Five), through which people in the organization have an opportu- nity to observe and critique plans being proposed. Pascale et al. (2000) report on Miller's reflection about the set of new processes used at Shell:

Top-down strategies don't win too many ball games today.

Experimentation, rapid learning, seizing the momentum of

success works better. We needed a different definition of

strategy and a different way to generate it. In the past, strat-

egy was the exclusive domain of the CMD [Shell's chairman

and his team]. But in the multi-front war Shell was engaged

in, the top can't possibly have all the answers. The leaders

provide the vision and are the context setters. But the actual

solutions about how best to meet the challenges of the mo-

mentthose thousands of strategic challenges encountered

every dayhave to be made by the people closest to the ac-

tionthe people at the coal face. Everyone and everything

is affected.

112 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Change your approach to strategy and you change the

way a company runs. The leader becomes a context setter,

the designer of a learning experiencenot an authority fig-

ure with solutions. Once the folks at the grassroots realize

they own the problem, they also discover that they can help

create and own the answerand they get after it very quickly, very aggressively, and very creatively, with a lot

more ideas than the old-style strategic direction could ever

have prescribed from headquarters. It worked because the

people at the coal face usually know what's going on. They

see the competitive threats and our inadequate response every day. Once you give them the context, they can do a

better job of spotting opportunities and stepping up to deci-

sions. In less than two years, we've seen astonishing progress

in our retail business in some twenty-five countries. This rep-

resents around 85 percent of our retail sales volume and we

have now begun to use this approach in our service organi-

zations and lubricant business.

A program like this is a high-risk proposition, because it

goes counter to the way most senior executives spend their

time. When I began spending 50 to 60 percent of my time at

this (with no direct guarantee that what I was doing would

make something happen down the line), I raised a lot of eye-

brows. People want to evaluate this against the old way which gives you the illusion of "making things happen." I

encountered lots of thinly veiled skepticisms: "Did your net

income change from last quarter because of this change

process?" These challenges create anxiety. The temptation,

of course, is to reimpose your directives and controls even

though we had an abundance of proof that this would not

work. The grassroots approach to strategy development and

COHERENCE MAKING 113

implementation doesn't happen overnight. But it does hap-

pen. People always want results yesterday. But the process

and behavior that drive authentic strategic change aren't like

that. It's like becoming the helmsman of a big ship when

you've grown up behind the steering wheel of a car. This ap-

proach isn't about me. It's about rigorous, well-taught mar-

keting concepts, combined with a strong design, that enable

frontline employees to think like businesspeople. Top execu-

tives and frontline employees learn to work together in part-

nership.

There's another kind of risk to the leaders of a strategic

inquiry of this kindand that's the risk of exposure. You're

working very closely and intensely with all levels of staff,

and they get to assess and evaluate you directly. Before, you

were remote from them; now, you're very accessible. If that

evaluation comes up negative, you've got a big-time prob-

lem.

Finally, the scariest part is letting go. You don't have the

same kind of control that traditional leadership is used to.

What you don't realize until you do it is that you may, in

fact, have more controlbut in a different fashion. You get

more feedback than before, you learn more than before, you

know more through your own people about what's going on

in the marketplace and with customers than before. You still

have to let go of the old sense of control [quoted in Pascale

et al., 2000, pp. 191-1921.

Remember from Figure 1.1 in Chapter One that the route to making more good things happen and preventing more bad

things from occurring is a process that generates widespread

114 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

internal commitment from members of the organization. You can't get there from here without amplifying and working through the discomfort of disturbances. When change occurs, there will be disturbances, and this means that there will be differences of opinion that must be reconciled. Effective lead- ership means guiding people through the differences and, in- deed, enabling differences to surface.

If the notion of enabling disturbances disturbs you, you don't have to be this radical. Working on coherence making directly is not a bad idea in a world that is loaded with uncer- tainty and confusion. But you do need to go about coherence making by honoring the change guidelines in previous chap- ters, which in effect require differences about the nature and direction of change to be identified and confronted. This is so 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. Rest as- sured also that the processes embedded in pursuing moral purpose, the change process, new relationships, and knowl- edge sharing, do actually produce greater and deeper coher- ence as they unfold.

The Coherence-Making Part

There are two concepts in complexity science that relate to the coherence-making role, namely, self-organizing and strange attractors. Self-organizing concerns new patterns of relationship and action that emerge when you set up the con- ditions and processes described in Chapters Two through Five. When you do this the dynamics are such that the organ- ization shifts to a new state as a result of the new interactions

COHERENCE MAKING 115

and ideas. Such new states represent breakthroughs in which greater coherence is achieved. This, I hope it is clear, is ab- solutely not a leaderless proposition. Leaders in a culture of change deliberately establish innovative conditions and processes (again, as in Chapters Two through Five) in the first

place, and they guide them after that. Leaders are actually more influential on the ground in this scenario than they are with traditional, more (seemingly) control-based strategies. Pascale et al. (2000, p. 175) advise these new leaders to "de- sign more than engineer, discover more than dictate, and de- cipher more than presuppose."

Strange attractors involve experiences or forces that at- tract the energies and commitment of employees. They are strange because they are not predictable in a specific sense, but as outcomes are likely (if not inevitable) in the processes we are describing. Think of a strange attractor as a series of experiences that will galvanize (attract) the deep energies and commitment of organization members to make desirable things happen. Visions, for example, can act as attractors, but only when they are shared at all levels of the organization, and only when they emerge through experience, thereby gen- erating commitment. By contrast, lofty visions crafted in the boardroom or on a retreat meet the "strange" criterion in the eyes of employees, but not the "attractor" one. (I like the su- perintendent in Susan Moore Johnson's study [1996] who said, "Ten years ago if I'd had a vision they would have locked me up and now I can't get a job without one.") Charismatic leaders can also be strange attractors, but, as I mentioned in Chapter One, they generate short-term external commitment at best, and at worst, dangerous dependency. In his study of gurus, psychiatrist Anthony Storr (1997) warns

116 LEADING IWA CULTURE OF CHANGE

us that charismatic leaders often function as a seductive trap to solve the chaos we feel in complex times. What disciples get out of the relationship, he says, is the comfort of having someone else take responsibility for their decisions; "the charisma of certainty is a snare, which entraps the child who is latent in us all" (p. 233). Effective strange attractors, on the other hand, possess the magnetic luring power of exploring moral purpose through a series of change experiences, sup- ported by collaborative relationships, that generate and sort out new knowledge.

We can see this process at work in the District 2 and San Diego case studies. Alvarado and his team raise the moral stakes by stressing "we are about instruction and only in- struction" in the service of student learning. Had he declared only this, like so many other superintendents, the experience would have been one more ho-hum, "this too shall pass" phe- nomenon for the principals and teachers. But he also pro- ceeded to design (not dictate) means of pursuing this goal through intervisitation and peer networks, instructional con- sulting services, and the like, which were bound to produce "attractors" (new solutions) that could be pulled out, rein- forced, and built upon.

When I say disturbance is a good thing, I am not against coherence, but in fact just the opposite: unsettling processes provide the best route to greater all-round coherence. In other words, the most powerful coherence is a function of having worked through the ambiguities and complexities of hard-to- solve problems. The leader's coherence-making capacity, in this sense, is a matter of timing. There is a time to disturb and a time to cohere. Good leaders attack incoherence when it is a function of random innovativeness or prolonged confusion.

COHERENCE MAKING 117

Perhaps it is time to reassure those who are uneasy with the proposition that allowing, even fostering, disturbances is a responsible thing to do in perilous times. (I hope you have been persuaded to abandon the have-a-great-vision-and- implement-it strategy.) This is a time to emphasize that there is a great deal of coherence making in Figure 1.1 from start to finish. Moral purpose sets the context; it calls for people to

aspire to greater accomplishments. The standards in relation to outcomes can be very high indeed, as they are in the cases

cited in this book. These standards are also a reverse-driver for achieving coherence. For example, in education, in our work on school improvement my colleagues and I have devel-

oped the idea that greater "assessment literacy" is crucial. We define assessment literacy as consisting of

The capacity of teachers and principals to examine student performance data and make critical sense of them (to know good work when they see it, to under- stand achievement scores [for example, concerning literacy], to disaggregate data to identify subgroups that may be disadvantaged or underperforming)

The capacity to develop action plans based on the un- derstanding gained from the aforementioned data analysis in order to increase achievement

The corresponding capacity to contribute to the polit- ical debate about the uses and misuses of achievement data in an era of high-stakes accountability

In sum, through focusing on outcomes (what students are learning), assessment literacy is a powerful coherence-maker. Focusing on outcomes clarifies for teachers and principals

118 .LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

what they are trying to accomplish and drives backward through the process toward moral purpose. It helps schools produce more coherent action plans.

This moral purposeoutcome combination won't work if we don't respect the messiness of the process required to iden- tify best solutions and generate internal commitment from the majority of organization members. Within the apparent dis- order of the process there are hidden coherence-making fea- tures. The first of these features is what can be called lateral accountability. In hierarchical systems, it is easy to get away with superficial compliance or even subtle sabotage. In the in- teractive system I have been describing, it is impossible to get away with not being noticed (similarly, good work is more easily recognized and celebrated). There is, in fact, .a great deal of peer pressure along with peer support in collaborative organizations. If people are not contributing to solutions, their inaction is more likely to stand out. The critical ap- praisal in such systems, whether it be in relation to the per- formance of a peer or the quality of an idea, is powerful.

A second coherence-making feature concerns the sorting process embedded in the knowledge-creation and knowledge- sharing activities described in Chapter Five. The criteria for retaining an idea are (1) Does it work? and (2) Does it feed into our overall purpose? Knowledge sharing, in effect, com- prises a continuous, coherence-making sorting device for the organization.

The third feature involves the shared commitment to se- lected ideas and paths of action. People stimulate, inspire, and motivate each other to contribute and implement best ideas, and best ideas mean greater overall coherence.

In short, highly interactive systems with moral purpose

COHERENCE MAKING 119

have great cohesive powers built in; with such powers in place, what we have left to worry about are complacency, blind spots, and groupthink, so we thus seek new diversity and new disturbances. And so the cycle goes.

We have come on a pretty complicated journey. I have said that leadership in a culture of change requires a new mind-set that serves as a guide to day-to-day organization development and performance. We obtained, I hope, a good sense of what the mind-set consists of and a good sense of how it plays it- self out in actual cases from businesses and school systems. But how do leaders get this good? The answer is, "by learn- ing in organizations like the ones I described." Tautologies aside, developing leaders for a culture of change involves slow

learning over time. Rapid change, slow learninga paradox that brings us to the hare and the tortoise.

Chapter Seven

The Hare and the Tortoise

IN FONTAINE'S FABLE, THE HARE IS QUICK, CLEVER, HIGH

on hubris, and a loser. The tortoise is slow and purposeful; he adapts to the terrain and is a winner. I admit that the tor- toise's way is not perfectly analogous to leading in a culture of change, because if the tortoise had known about complex- ity science, it might have engaged in a creative diversion or two. Still, the tortoise won, and people, like tortoises, have to stick their necks out to get somewhere.

The lessons for developing leaders in a culture of change are more tortoise-like than hare-like because they involve slow learning in context over time. What are these lessons? In this book, we have learned three powerful lessons about lead- ership that have implications for developing more of it. Fortunately, they are intricately interrelated: the vital and par- adoxical need for slow knowing, the importance of learning

121

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122 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

in context, and the need for leaders at all levels of the organi- zation, in order to achieve widespread internal commitment.

Slow Knowing

When talking about leading on the edge of chaos, it may seem odd to say that what Claxton (1997) calls slow knowing be- comes more important rather than less. Claxton provides the reason: "Recent scientific evidence shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined" (p. 3).

In other words, under conditions of complex, nonlinear evolution, we need more slow knowing. "Hare brained" is about chasing relentless innovation; "tortoise mind" is about absorbing disturbances and drawing out new patterns. Entirely consistent with our previous chapter, Claxton (1997, p. 214) observes:

Those who try to manage nations and corporationsminis-

ters and executives of all persuasionsmay be panicked by

the escalating complexity of the situations they are attempt-

ing to control into assuming that time is the one thing they

have not got. Their fallacy is to suppose that the faster things

are changing, the faster and more earnestly one has to think.

Under this kind of pressure [they] may be driven to adopt

one shallow nostrum, one fashionable idea after another,

each turning out to have promised more than it was capable

of delivering. Businesses are re-engineered, hierarchies are

flattened, organisations try to turn themselves into learning

organisations, companies become "virtual." Meetings pro-

THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE 123

liferate; the working day expands; time gets shorter. So much time is spent processing information, solving problems

and meeting deadlines that there is none left in which to

think. Even "intuitive thinking" itself can easily become yet

another fad that failsbecause the underlying mindset hasn't changed [p. 214].

In referring to "hard cases" (situations of complexity), Claxton says, "One needs to be able to soak up experience of complex domainssuch as human relationshipsthrough one's pores, and to extract subtle, contingent patterns that are latent within it. And to do that one needs to be able to attend to a whole range of situations patiently without comprehen- sion; to resist the temptation to foreclose on what that expe- rience may have to teach" (1997, p. 192).

Claxton talks about the poet John Keats's reference to "negative capability," which is the capacity to "cultivate the ability to waitto remain attentive in the face of incompre- hension" (1997, p. 174). In my lexicon, remaining attentive is to have moral purpose; incomprehension is to respect the complexities of situations that do not have easy answers. Claxton continues, "To wait in this kind of way requires a kind of inner security; the confidence that one may lose clar- ity and control without losing one's self. Keats's description of negative capability came in a letter to one of his brothers, following an evening spent in discussion with his friend Charles Di lkea man who, as Keats put it, could not 'feel he had a personal identity unless he had made up his mind about everything" (p. 174).

Beware of leaders who are always sure of themselves. Effective leaders listen attentivelyyou can almost hear them

124 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

listening. Ineffective leaders make up their minds prematurely

and, by definition, listen less thereafter. I recall a high-ranking civil servant who said about his boss, "His problem is that he is so bright that he stops listening as soon as he has under- stood the point." Not a very good way to build relationships or to pick up ideas that you might have missed.

Paradoxically, slow knowing doesn't have to take a long time. It is more of a disposition that can be "acquired and practised" (Claxton, 1997, p. 214). Again, effective leaders seem to understand this. They see the bigger picture; they don't panic when things go wrong in the early stages of a major change initiative. It is not so much that they take their time, but rather that they know it takes time for things to gel. If they are attentive to the five leadership capacities in this book, they know things are happening all the time, even when there is not closure. In a sense, they take as much time as the situation will allow, and do not rush to conclusions in order to appear decisive.

To get this good itself requires time. Conger and Benjamin (1999, p. 262) suggest a ten-year rule of thumb "as the threshold time for individuals . . . to attain the status of ex- pert." But we all know the difference between ten years of ex- perience and one year of experience ten times over. Therefore, the experience must be intensive and must constantly culti- vate the capacity to hone one's moral purpose and knowledge of nonlinear change processes, to build relationships with di- verse groups, to build knowledge, and to strive for coherence. Most organizations do not function in a manner that provides these kinds of learning experiencesjust the opposite in some ways: they teach people to get better at a bad game (Block, 1987). And, as tempting as it is to try, we have also learned

r*1

1.1

THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE

that it is not sufficient to package this knowledge and try to teach it. For many reasons, it must be learned in context.

Learning in Context

A second lesson is that learning in context over time is essen- tial. Let us be precise here because aspects of this lesson are counterintuitive. Attempting to recruit and reward good peo- ple is helpful to organizational performance, but it is not the main point. Providing a good deal of training is useful, but that too is a limited strategy. Elmore (2000) tells us why fo- cusing only on talented individuals will not work:

What's missing in this view [focusing on talented individuals]

is any recognition that improvement is more of a function of

learning to do the right thing in the setting where you work

than it is of what you know when you start to do the work.

Improvement at scale is largely a property of organizations,

not of the pre-existing traits of the individuals who work in

them. Organizations that improve do so because they create

and nurture agreement on what is worth achieving, and they

set in motion the internal processes by which people progres-

sively learn how to do what they need to do in order to achieve what is worthwhile. Importantly, such organizations

select, reward and retain people based on their willingness to

engage the purposes of the organization and to acquire the

learning that is required to achieve those purposes. Improvement occurs through organized social learning. . . .

Experimentation and discovery can be harnessed to so- cial learning by connecting people with new ideas to each other in an environment in which ideas are subject to

BEST COPY AVAILABLE 134

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126 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

scrutiny, measured against the collective purposes of the or-

ganization, and tested by the history of what has already

been learned and is known [p. 25, emphasis in original ex-

cept for "in the setting where you work"].

This is a fantastic insight: learning in the setting where you work, or learning in context, is the learning with the greatest payoff because it is more specific (customized to the situation)

and because it is social (involves the group). Learning in con- text is developing leadership and improving the organization as you go. Such learning changes the individual and the con- text simultaneously.

We can return to District 2 in New York City and to the San Diego district to see what learning in context means. The leadership in these districts considers the development of school principals as the key to school success (think of the principal as a branch plant manager). The single most impor- tant factor ensuring that all students meet performance goals at the site level is the leadership of the principalleadership being defined as "the guidance and direction of instructional improvement." Focusing on selecting principals who are in- structionally focused is a necessary first step, followed by cre-

ating an intense, comprehensive system of professional development to promote their continued growth. Compre- hensive training for principals would include on-site coaching of the strategies and behaviors that principals need to utilize with their teachers in their classrooms to improve the learn- ing of their students.

Opportunities to learn through study groups, action re- search, and the sharing of experiences in support groups cre- ate real supports for principals so that the complicated and

THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE 127

difficult problems of instructional leadership can be ad- dressed. High performing districts utilize a monthly princi- pals' conference as a leadership development tool. This conference is jointly planned and evaluated, and creates a forum for common learning, critique, collegial sharing, and the development of a powerful culture of mutual support. "Buddy" principals (regular cross-team visitations)oppor- tunities for mentoring where principals are released full-time to serve as mentors or remain in their assignment ("sitting" principals) while mentoringoffer practicing principals the opportunity to work deeply on the skills and behaviors that require continuous coaching. Successful districts annually in- crease their investment in principal training in order to broaden and deepen the array of leadership strategies that their site leaders possess (Fullan, Alvarado, Bridges, & Green, 2000, pp. 9-10).

The number of organizational practices in District 2 that involve principals' "learning in context" is impressive. These practices include:

Intervisitation Regularly scheduled visits of princi- pals to schools throughout the district to view imple- mentation of initiatives

Monthly Principal Support Groups Monthly confer- ences with district instructional leaders and other principals to discuss strategies, progress toward goals, and the like

Principal Peer Coaching Full-time mentor principals and selected sitting principals coach individual princi- pals on a regular basis

128 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Supervisory Walkthrough On-site visits by supervisors to address individual needs of schools and to provide guidance to principals

District Institutes Institutes on topics such as liter- acy, mathematics, standards, and assessment

Principals' Study Groups Groups investigating prese- lected content areas or a problem of practice which is investigated

Individualized Coaching One-to-one coaching for in- dividual principals, including all newly appointed principals, led by district superintendent or principal mentors

The rationale underlying these practices and additional examples are described in Fink and Resnick (1999). The goal is to develop leaders at all levels who focus intensely on in- struction and learning. Fink and Resnick (p. 5) emphasize that "the principal in a District 2 school is responsible for estab- lishing a culture of learning in the school, one in which ques- tions of teaching and learning provide the social life and interpersonal relations of those working in the school" (em- phasis in original).

These learning-to-lead practices continue to be refined in the work of the Leadership Academy in San Diego. The Academy has been established in partnership with the University of San Diego. The purpose of the academy is "to comprehensively address the recruitment and development of high-quality educational leadership at all levels of the sys- tem" (The Leadership Academy at University of San Diego, 2000). The Leadership Academy goals are specifically de- fined as:

THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE 129

1. Identify practitioners who have demonstrated knowledge

and skill in teaching and learning, and create a newly de- ;

signed certification program of theory and practice that will

truly prepare graduates for the challenges of site-based

leadership. University professors and outstanding leaders

from San Diego City Schools, together, will develop a rigor-

ous curriculum that incorporates the best leadership re-

search with a full time internship under the guidance of an

outstanding principal.

2. Design and implement a program for the development of

district leadership with the eight instructional leaders of San

Diego City Schools. This work will include training in the

development of powerful principal work plans, the design

and execution of highly effective principal conferences, and

the improvement of coaching skills utilized during school

visits.

3. Provide training and support in the improvement of princi-

pal professional development. This work addresses the

quality of the principal mentoring initiative, study groups,

focused school leadership, interschool and interdistrict visi-

tation, principals' professional development, and content

learning and summer seminars and courses for further

study [The Leadership Academy, 2000].

With the practices just described, if you are a principal in District 2 or in San Diego, you can't help but learn to become a better leader and to foster leadership in others. In another publication, Elmore (2000) makes explicit the reasoning un- derlying these practices while lamenting the absence of such conditions in most school systems (and, we could easily add, in most organizations).

130 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Unfortunately the existing system doesn't value continuous

learning as a collective good and does not make this learn-

ing the individual and social responsibility of every member

of the system. Leadership must create conditions that value

learning as both an individual and collective good. Leaders

must create environments in which individuals expect to

have their personal ideas and practices subjected to the scrutiny of their colleagues, and in which groups expect to

have their shared conceptions of practice subjected to the

scrutiny of individuals. Privacy of practice produces isola-

tion; isolation is the enemy of improvement.

Learning requires modeling: Leaders must lead by mod-

eling the values and behavior that represent collective goods.

Role-based theories of leadership wrongly envision leaders

who are empowered to ask or require others to do things

they may not be willing or able to do. But if learning, indi-

vidual and collective, is the central responsibility of leaders,

then they must be able to model the learning they expect of

others. Leaders should be doing, and should be seen to be

doing, that which they expect or require others to do. Likewise, leaders should expect to have their own practice

subjected to the same scrutiny as they exercise toward oth-

ers [pp. 20-21].

All through this book the message has been that organiza- tions transform when they can establish mechanisms for learning in the dailiness of organizational life. As Elmore (2000) puts it, "People make . . . fundamental transitions by having many opportunities to be exposed to ideas, to argue them to their own normative belief systems, to practice the

THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE 131

behaviors that go with those values, to observe others prac- ticing those behaviors, and, most importantly, to be success- ful at practicing in the presence of others (that is, to be seen to be successful). In the panoply of rewards and sanctions that attach to accountability systems, the most powerful incentives reside in the face-to-face relationships among people in the organization, not in external systems" (p. 31).

Leaders in a culture of change create these conditions for daily learning, and they learn to lead by experiencing such learning at the hands of other leaders. Leaders are not born; they are nurtured.

We can now see why the knowledge-sharing practices de- scribed in Chapter Five are learning in context. Peer Assist, After Action Learning, the fishbowl, best practices, lessons learned, the Learning Fair, intervisitationall have the qual- ity of learning on the spot, or at least very soon after the spot. They involve learning here and now so that the next time will be better. The techniques are important, but they work only when leaders understand the deep cultural values that under- pin them. Incidentally, learning in context itself is an exercise in getting at tacit knowledge. It doesn't do much good and may in fact be harmful to start using the techniques as prod- uctsthat is, as ends in themselvesbecause they mask lay- ers of hidden knowledge that would be necessary for the technique to be effectively used. Techniques per se, in other words, are examples of explicit knowledge and are only the tip of the iceberg. It is much harder, and more essential, to get at the first principles: the feel and understanding that comes with tacit knowledge. It is those first principles that constitute the value of the technique, not the mere use of the technique for its own sake.

132 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Learning in context also makes it clear why (and how) modeling and mentoring are crucial. Mentors who evidence moral purpose, display emotional intelligence, and foster car- ing relationships and norms of reciprocity for knowledge sharing, show the way. When leaders model and promote all of these values and practices in the organization, they improve the performance of the organization while simultaneously de- veloping new leadership all the time. In this sense, organiza- tional performance and leadership development are one and the same.

If you want to develop leadership, you should focus on reciprocity, the mutual obligation and value of sharing knowl- edge among organizational members. The key to developing leadership is to develop knowledge and share it; if it is not mutually shared, it won't be adequately developed in the first place and will not be available to the organization in any case. For the individual, the explicit value to be internalized is the responsibility for sharing what you know. For the organiza- tion (or for leadership, if you like), the obligation is to remove barriers to sharing, create mechanisms for sharing, and re- ward those who do share. Leadership creates the conditions for individual and organizational development to merge.

Learning in context is based on the premise that "what is gained as a group must be shared as a group" (Pascale, Millemann, & Gioja, 2000, p. 264). Von Krogh, Ichijo, and Nonaka (2000) make a similar point:

Allocate substantial time to think carefully through the types

of knowledge you have in your business and where it resides.

Is this critical knowledge for doing business kept in instruc-

tions, procedures, documents, and databases? Or is it tightly

410

THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE 133

connected to the skills of individual professionals, deeply

rooted in their years of experience? If the answer is yes to

the second question, do these professionals operate accord-

ing to care-based values, allowing younger team members

to acquire their skills through mentoring processes? If yes to

this question, do you recognize the role of these people in

the organization, and have you given them incentives to

keep contributing to the company's overall knowledge [p. 263]?

Leaders, then, look for many opportunities to "cause" and reward leadership at all levels of the organization. When there is widespread learning in context, leadership for the future is a natural by-product.

Leadership for Many

There are two levels at which this book is about leadership for many: one obvious and one more fundamental. At the ob- vious level, the ideas in every chapter invite all of us to prac- tice becoming better leaders, whether we are a rank-and-file employee, head of a committee, department head, manager, principal, or a high-ranking executive.

The other, more fundamental conclusion is that internal commitment ("energies internal to human beings that are ac- tivated because getting the job done is intrinsically reward- ing" [Argyris, 2000, p. 40]) cannot be activated from the top. It must be nurtured up close in the dailiness of organizational behavior, and for that to happen there must be many leaders around us. Large organizations can never achieve perfect in- ternal commitment, but with good leadership at all levels they

134 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

can generate a great deal of it, and this will feed on itself. When Henry Mintzberg was asked in a recent interview

what organizations have to do to ensure success over the next ten years, he responded: "They've got to build a strong core of people who really care about the place and who have ideas. Those ideas have to flow freely and easily through the organi- zation. It's not a question of riding in with a great new chief executive on a great white horse. Because as soon as that per- son rides out, the whole thing collapses unless somebody can do it again. So it's a question of building strong institutions, not creating heroic leaders. Heroic leaders get in the way of strong institutions" (quoted in Bernhut, 2000, p. 23).

Strong institutions have many leaders at all levels. Those in a position to be leaders of leaders, such as the CEO, know that they do not run the place. They know that they are culti- vating leadership in others; they realize that they are doing more than planning for their own successionthat if they "lead right," the organization will outgrow them. Thus, the ultimate leadership contribution is to develop leaders in the organization who can move the organization even further after you have left (see Lewin & Regine, 2000, p. 220).

A Time to Disturb

As we are "careening into the future" (Homer-Dixon, 2000b) is the very time we need leadership the most. Yet leadership in all institutions is in short supply and worsening. "Policy Focus Converges on Leadership" (2000), the cover article of the January 12 issue of Education Week, begins, "After years of work on structural changesstandards and testing and ways of holding students and schools accountablethe edu-

4113

THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE 135

cation policy world has turned its attention to the people charged with making the system work. Nowhere is the focus on the human element more prevalent than in the recent recognition of the importance of strong and effective leader- ship" (p. 1).

The subtitle of the article states, "Principals Wanted: Apply Just About Anywhere." The same could be said about the superintendency and about leaders in all institutions. Leadership appropriate for the times is a scarce commodity.

Leadership and knowledge society are the twin buzzwords in the new millennium. In the corporate world, leadership de- velopment as a field has become a billion-dollar business in a few short years (Conger & Benjamin, 1999, p. xi). In educa- tion, leadership academies abound, the most prominent ex- ample being the new National College for School Leadership in England, with a new state-of-the-art building at the University of Nottingham, which is also the site of the Uni- versity's Computer Science Department, Business School, and School of Education. Many philanthropic organizations, in- cluding the Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have made school leadership a top priority.

With all the attention focused on strong leaders, visions, standards, and the like, it would be easy to get this wrong. We can't solve the problem of producing better leaders for a culture of change by attempting to produce greater numbers of individual leaders with the desired traits. Elmore (2000, p. 25) rightly observes that by using such a strategy, the pro- portion of leaders "seldom grows larger than but one quarter to one third of the total population of classrooms, schools, or system."

136 LEADING IN A CULTURE OF CHANGE

Glenn and Gordon state, "Today many believe it is possi- ble to shape the future, rather than simply prepare for a fu- ture which is a linear extrapolation of the present or a product of chance or fate. [Yet the] complexity, number, and frequency of choices seem to grow beyond the ability to know and decide. Skills development in concept formulation and communications seems to be decreasing relative to the re- quirements of an increasingly complicated world" (1997, p. 29).

Homer-Dixon (2000a, p. 211) further reports, "Yaneer Bar- Yam, the American complexity theorist, . . . argues that the level of complexity of modern human society has recently over- taken the complexity of any one person belonging to it. . . . [S]o as modern human society becomes more complex than we are individually, it begins to exceed our adaptive ability. In effect, we have too short a repertoire of responses to adjust effec- tively to our changing circumstances."

When responding to changing circumstances becomes this difficult, we need leaders who can combine the five core ca- pacities discussed in this book. In a culture of complexity, the chief role of leadership is to mobilize the collective capacity to challenge difficult circumstances. Our only hope is that many individuals working in concert can become as complex as the society they live in.

One of the main conclusions I have drawn is that the re- quirements of knowledge societies bring education and busi- ness leadership closer than they have ever been before. Corporations need souls and schools need minds (and vice versa) if the knowledge society is to survivesustainability demands it. New mutual respect and partnerships between the corporate and education worlds are needed, especially

THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE 137

concerning leadership developmentprovided those partner- ships are guided by the forces discussed in Chapters Two through Six.

These five themes, I have argued, contain the right dynam-

ics and the checks and balances for simultaneously letting go and reining in. When leaders act in the ways recommended, they will disturb the future "in a manner that approximates the desired outcomes," to use Pascale et al.'s felicitous phrase (2000). Such leaders will also create leadership at all levels of the organization in a way that cannot quite be controlled but that will have built-in safeguards because of the very dynam-

ics involved. What is needed for sustainable performance, then, is lead-

ership at many levels of the organization. Pervasive leader- ship has a greater likelihood of occurring if leaders work on mastering the five core capacities: moral purpose, understand-

ing of the change process, building relationships, knowledge building, and coherence making. Achieving such mastery is less a matter of taking leadership training and more a case of slow knowing and learning in context with others at all levels

of the organization. Ultimately, your leadership in a culture of change will be

judged as effective or ineffective not by who you are as a leader but by what leadership you produce in others. Tortoises, start your engines!

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About the Author

Michael Fullan is the dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. He is recognized

as an international authority on educational reform. Fullan is engaged in training, consulting, and evaluation of change projects around the world. His ideas for managing change are used in many countries, and his books have been published in

many languages. His What's Worth Fighting For trilogy (with

Andy Hargreaves), Change Forces trilogy, and The New Meaning of Educational Change are widely acclaimed.

145

153

Index

A Academic achievement outcome:

assessment literacy for, 117-118; as criterion for effec- tive leadership, 10; in educa- tional case examples, 18-19, 58-60; short-term versus long- term gains in, 63

Access to help, 82 Accountability: lateral, 118; pres-

sures for, 134-135 Acquisitions, 43 Adaptability, as emotional intelli-

gence, 73 Adaptive leadership, 110, 136 Affiliative leadership style: defined,

35; emotional intelligence in, 72; impact of, on organiza- tional climate and financial performance, 40; for imple- mentation dips, 41; listening and, 42

146

After Action Reviews (AARs), 88-89, 131

Ahlstrand, B., 31 Altruism, 14-15 Alvarado, A., 56-60, 62-63, 69,

95, 96, 98, 111, 116, 126, 127 Ambiguity, 6, 71, 116 Anarchy, 6 Anxiety, 71, 111, 112 Argyris, C., 8-9, 20, 31, 33, 133 Arrogance, 71 Assessment for Learning, 100-102 Assessment literacy, 117-118 Attentiveness, 123-124 Authoritarian organizations, resist-

ance in, 43 Authoritative leadership style:

defined, 35; emotional intelli- gence in, 72; good ideas and, 39-40; for implementa- tion dips, 41; uses of, 39-40, 47

INDEX 147

Autonomy, in school example, 66-67,68-69

B Bad practices, reinforcement of,

65-70 Bad things, fewer, as definition of

effective leadership, 10, 113-114

Bar-Yam, Y., 136 Barber, M., 17-18 Bechtel, Steam Generator

Replacement Group, 89-90 Beer, M., 32-33 Benjamin, B., 124,135 Bernhut, S., 134 Bersin, A., 57-58,60 Best Practice Replication, 85 Best practices sharing, 79,85-86,

90,131. See also Knowledge creation and sharing

Bichard, M., 19 Bill and Melinda Gates

Foundation, 135 Biotechnology, 21-25. See also

Monsanto Bishop, B., 55 Blind commitment, 8-9. See also

Commitment; External com- mitment

Block, P., 124 Bolman, L., 28 Book, H., 72-74 Bottom-up change, framework for,

32-33 Bridges, R., 127 British Airways, 71-72 British Petroleum (BP), Peer Assist

Program, 82,88 Brown, J. S., 78-79 Bryk, A., 35 Buddies, 93,127

Burney, D., 55-57,69,93-97 Business: knowledge creation and

sharing in, 80-92; link be- tween global problems and, 28; moral purpose in, case ex- ample of, 21-25; moral pur- pose in, importance of, 25-27, 51-52; moral purpose in, trend toward, 27-28; partner- ships of education and, 136-137; problem of having the best ideas in, 37-40; rela- tionships in, 52-55; with soul, 52-55,136

C California, school district improve-

ment programs in, 110 Capability, negative, 123 Caring about people: in business

organizations, 52-55; knowl- edge creation and sharing and, 82-87; in schools, 55-71

Caring expert, 86 Case studies of success, generaliz-

ing from, 47-48 Center for the Study of Teacher

and Policy, 60-61 Certification program, for instruc-

tional leaders, 129 Change, 31-49; complexity and,

2-3,5,31-35,44-49, 107-109; emotional reactions to, 1, 40-41, 71; internal ver- sus external commitment for, 8 -9, 115 -116; leadership framework for, 3-11; popular management strategies for, 31-35,44-45. See also Complex problems; Culture of change

Change consulting, 38-39

148 INDEX

Change Forces (Fullan), 45 Change management, inadequacy

of, 31-35 Change process, 5,7,31-49; ap-

preciation of resistance and, 41-43; "best ideas" problem and, 38-40; complexities of leadership and, 46-49; guide- lines for, listed, 5, 34; imple- mentation dip and, 40-41; innovation overload and, 35-37; leadership styles and, 34-49; moral purpose and, 5; understanding, as component of leadership, 5,31-49

Chaos: anarchy and, 6; charismatic leaders and, 116; coherence making and, 6, 107 -108; com- plexity versus, 108-109; cre- ativity and, 6; edge of, 108, 122-123

"Charisma and Loud Shouting," 19

Charismatic leaders, 1-2,115-116 Checklists, 44-46,48 Christmas tree schools, 35-36 Claxton, G., 122-123,124 Coaching, for principals, 126,127 Coaching leadership style: defined,

35; emotional intelligence in, 72; impact of, on organiza- tional climate and financial performance, 40; for imple- mentation dips, 41

Coercive leadership style: defined, 35; emotional intelligence in, 72; uses of, 38,46,47

Coherence making, 8, 107 -119; assessment literacy for, 117-118; complexity and, 107-119; as component of leadership, 6, 107 -119; distur-

bance and, 109-114,116-119, 137; hidden features of, 118-119; moral purpose and, 110, 114, 116, 117 -119; reculturing and, 44; self-organ- izing and, 108, 114 -115; strange attractors and, 114, 115-116; strategy and, 111-113; timing of, 116-117

Collaborative cultures: knowledge sharing and, 82, 84 -92; nega- tive potential of, 65-70; peer pressure in, 118

Collective capacity, 136 Collective mobilization, 9 Commitment, engendered by lead-

ers: in educational case exam- ple of moral purpose, 20-21; external versus internal, 8-9, 115-116; internal, defined, 8-9; knowledge creation and sharing and, 81; moral pur- pose and, 20; nature of, 8-9; shared, in coherence making, 118; strange attractors and, 115-116. See also External commitment; Internal commit- ment; Moral purpose

Common sense, 73 Complex problems and times:

change process and, 31-35, 44-49; coherence making and, 6, 8, 107 -119; disturbance and, 109-114,137; emotional intelligence for, 71-75; grass- roots approach to strategy in, 111-113; knowledge creation and sharing for, 86; leadership as key to, 2-3,34,46-49, 134-137; leadership frame- work for, 3-11; management advice inadequacy for, 31-35,

INDEX 149

44-46, 48, 110 -113; moral purpose and, 24, 25, 28 -29; overload and fragmentation in, 108; resistance in, 42-43; slow knowing in, 122-125. See also Change; Culture of change

Complexities of leadership, 46-49 Complexity science and theory,

136; as approach to change, 44-46; coherence making and, 108 -109, 114 -116; defined, 45-46; principles of, 108-109, 114-116; relationships and, 52-53,70

Compliance, 118 Computer components supplier,

82-84 Conferences, of schools principals

and teachers, 59,95-96, 98-99,127

Conflict, value of, 74-75. See also Resistance

Conger, M. A., 124,135 Connection, web of, 53. See also

Relationships Connectivity, of company with ex-

ternal world, 24 Conservatism, in school example,

66-67,68-69 Consulting services, instructional,

96-97,98 Context: information in, 78-79;

learning in, 121-122,125-133 Control: knowledge enabling ver-

sus, 87, 90; letting go of, 113; self-organizing and, 115

Convergence, of theories, knowl- edge bases, ideas, and strate- gies, 3,45

Cooperative behavior: evolution of culture and, 14 -15, 27 -28; moral purpose and, 14-15,

27-28 Courage, 82 Courage to Teach, The (Palmer),

27 Creativity, in chaos, 6,31,107 Crisis, leadership styles for, 38,39,

46-47 Critical appraisal, 118 Cultural change, 43-44 Culture, human, moral purpose

and, 14-15 Culture of care, for knowledge cre-

ation and sharing, 82-87. See also Caring

Culture of change, 11; coherence making in, 107-119; complex- ities of leadership in, 46-49; emotional intelligence for lead- ing in, 71-75; importance of, versus structure, 43-44; knowledge in, 77-79; leader- ship development for, 121-137; moral purpose in, 15-25,28-29; reculturing for, 43-44; resistance in, 74-75; understanding change process and, 31-49. See also Change; Change process; Complex problems; Reculturing

D Darrah, C., 82-84 De Gues, A., 26 Deal, T., 28 Death, 108 Decisiveness and indecisiveness,

48-49,123-124 Democratic leadership style: de- fined, 35; emotional intelligence in, 72; impact of, on organizational climate and financial performance, 40; listening and, 42

157

150 INDEX

Democratic organizations, respect- ing resistance in, 42

Department for Education and Employment, England, 16,19

Dependency, 49,115-116 Desired outcomes, disturbance for,

109-114,137 De Stefano, E, 96 Development of leaders, 10-11,

119, 121 -137; at all levels, 122, 133 -134, 137; learning in context and, 121-122, 125-133; modeling and, 130, 132; slow learning and, 121-125; traits and, 135-136; trends and future of, 134-137. See also Professional develop- ment

Dialogue, in schools, 102,103. See also Knowledge creation and sharing

Dilke, C., 123 Discomfort, 112-114 Discovery, for learning, 125-126 District institutes, 128 Disturbance, 109-114,137; coher-

ence making and, 116-119; moral purpose and, 110,114, 116, 117 -119; timing of, 116-117

Diversity: appreciation of resist- ance and, 42, 74 -75; distur- bance and, 114; moral purpose and, 25; relationship building and, 5

Dixon, N., 84-85,88-90 Drucker, P., 31-32 Duguid, P., 78-79 Dying companies, 26

E Early Years Literacy Project

(EYLP), 102-103 Easton, J., 35 Edge of chaos, 108,122 Edmonton Catholic School

District, Alberta, Canada, 99; Assessment for Learning initia- tive of, 100-102

Education and educational reform: business organizations and, 136-137; moral purpose in, 13-14; moral purpose in case example of, 16-21. See also Schools

Education Week, 134-135 Egoism, 14-15 Egon Zehnder International, 71 Eisenstat, R., 32-33 Elementary schools, relationships

and reculturing of, 55-57 Elmore, R. E, 55-57,65,69,

93-97,125-126,129-131, 135-136

Emergence, 108 Emotion: disturbance and, 110,

111; knowledge and, 81, 84; moral purpose and, 13; rela- tionships and, 84

Emotional competency sets, 72 Emotional intelligence, 71-75;

competencies for, 72, 73; lead- ership styles and, 72; measure- ment of, 72-73

Emotional Quotient (EQ) inven- tory, 72-73

Emotional reactions to change, 1; and disturbance, 110, 111; im- plementation dip and, 40-41

Empathy, 55, 63; knowledge cre- ation and sharing and, 82;

INDEX 151

for people in implementation dips, 40-41; as subdimension of emotional intelligence, 72

Employee morale, link between moral purpose and, 27-28

Enabling, knowledge, 81, 87 Encouragement Index, 55 Energy-enthusiasm-hopefulness

constellation, 7 England, educational reform in,

16-21. See also National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy

Enthusiasm, 7 Environmental synchronization,

failure of, 47 Equilibrium, 75, 108 Evolution: culture and, 14-15;

moral purpose and, 14-15, 27-28

Excellent companies, 47-48 Experience and knowing, 124-125 Experimentation, for learning,

125-126 Expertise, time frame for develop-

ing, 124 Explicit knowledge, 80, 104, 131.

See also Knowledge headings External commitment: charismatic

leaders and, 115-116; defined, 8-9; in educational case exam- ple of moral purpose, 20-21; internal commitment versus, 8-9, 115-116. See also Commitment; Internal com- mitment

External consultants, for instruc- tional improvement, 96-97

External intervention, 46

F Failure: in case studies of success-

ful companies, 47-48; persist- ent, leadership for, 46

Fear of change, 1, 40, 41, 112-113. See also Resistance

Ferandez-Araoz, C., 71 Financial performance: authorita-

tive leadership and, 39; meas- ures of, 34; relationship between leadership style, orga- nizational climate, and, 34-35. See also Organizational success

Fink, E., 99, 128 Fishbowl, 90-92, 111, 131 Flexibility, as emotional intelli-

gence, 74 Followers, dependent, 49 Fontaine, 121 Food engineering, 21-25. See also

Monsanto Ford plants, 84-85 Fragmentation, 35-37, 108 Fullan, M., 8, 20, 27, 40, 58,

99-104, 127

G Garten, J., 27-28 Garvin, D., 92 Gates Foundation, 135 Gaynor, A., 43 Gemini Consulting, 82 GE, 75, 111 Genetically modified seeds, 23-24.

See also Monsanto Gioja, L., 21-25, 28-29, 38-39,

45-46, 47-48, 54, 63, 74-75, 90-92, 108-109, 111-113, 115, 132, 137

Glenn, J., 136 Global economy and problems, 24;

link between business and, 28

152 INDEX

Goffee, R., 55 Goleman, D., 34-35,36,38,

39-40,41,46,71-72,73 Good things, causing, as definition

of effective leadership, 10, 113-114

Gordon, T., 136 Government reorganization, 43 Grassroots approach to strategy,

111-113 Green, N., 127 Groupthink, 8 Gurus, 115-116; management,

31-33

H Hamel, G., 33,45 Hare and tortoise, 121,122 Hare brained, 122 Hargreaves, A., 8 Hatch, T., 109-110 Hay/McBer, 34-35 Healthy companies, 26-27 Heart, encouraging the, 54-55 Heifetz, R., 3,47,75,110 Heroic leaders, 134 Hess, E M., 109-110 Hewlett-Packard (HP), 79 High schools, study of professional

learning communities in, 65-70

Homer-Dixon, T., 2,134,136 Hopefulness, 7

Ichijo, K., 81-84,86,87 Ideas: authoritative leadership and,

39-40; coercive leadership and, 38; flow of, at all levels, 134; problem of having the best, 38-40; public school sys- tem reform and, 69-70; shared

commitment to, 118; sorting of, 118

Implementation dip, 40-41; as- pects of, 41; leaders' sensitivity to, 40-41; leadership styles for, 41

Impulse control, 74 In Search of Excellence (Peters and

Waterman), 47-48 Incentives: for knowledge creation

and sharing, 86,87,130-131, 132; for learning, 130-131, 132

Independence, in EQ, 74 Information: knowledge versus,

78 -79, 81; social context and value of, 78-79

Information technology: biotech- nology and, 22; investment in, versus knowledge creation and sharing, 79; overuse of, 81

Innovation, 31; implementation dip and, 40-41; innovativeness versus, 31; overload and frag- mentation of, 35-37,58, 109-110; tacit knowledge and, 81

Institutes, 128 Instructional consulting services,

96-97,98 Instructional leaders, 58,59,98,

128-129 IQ, emotional intelligence and, 71,

73 Interactions, in complexity, 52-53,

114-115. See also Relationships

Internal commitment: coherence making and, 113-114, 115-116; defined, 8 -9, 133; external commitment versus, 8 -9, 115 -116; knowledge

INDEX 153

creation and sharing and, 81; leaders at all levels for, 122, 133 -134, 137; leadership styles and, 46-49; moral pur- pose and, 24; strange attrac- tors and, 115-116; working through disturbances and, 113-114. See also Commitment; External com- mitment

Interpersonal competencies, 73 Intervisitation, in school district,

93-96,98,127,131 Intrapersonal competencies, 73 Intrinsic rewards. See Internal

commitment Intuition, 55,80,123

J Japanese companies, organiza-

tional knowledge creation of, 80

Johnson, S. M., 115 Jones, G., 55

K Keats, J., 123 Kennedy, J. F., 48 Kennedy, R. E, 48 Kerbow, D., 35 King, B., 64 Knowledge: explicit versus tacit,

80; information versus, 78-79, 81; slow, 121-125; tacit, 80-81,83,87,90,104, 131-132

Knowledge creation and sharing, 5 -6, 76, 77 -105; in business, 80-92; challenges of, 80-81; change process and, 6; as com- ponent of leadership, 5-6, 77-105; conditions for, 82;

culture of care for, 82-85; ex- 'tent of, in schools versus busi- ness, 92 -93, 104; external, 90; importance of, 77-79; intra- company, 90; learning in con- text and, 131-133; local versus national networks for, 104-105; mechanisms for, in business, 87-92; mechanisms for, in schools, 93-105; nam- ing, as core value, 87-88,90, 105; paradigm for, 86-87; reculturing and, 44, 82 -91; re- lationships and, 6,82-87; role of leaders in, 92; in schools, 92-105; social value of, 78-79; sorting process for, 118; teachers' and principals' enthusiasm for, 99-104

Knowledge enabling, 81,87 "Knowledge Officer Aims to

Spread the Word," 77 Knowledge organization, 6 Knowledge-sharing paradigm,

86-87 Knowledge society, 6, 76, 77 -78;

leadership and, 135,136-137 Kotter, J., 32,44-45 Kouzes, J. M., 53-54 KPMG, 77,86

L Lampel, J., 31 Lateral accountability, 118 Leaders: adaptive, 110; at all lev-

els, 122, 133 -134, 137; charis- matic, 1 -2, 115 -116; commitment engendered by, 8-9; as context-setters, 112; development of, 10-11,119, 121-137; emotional intelli- gence in, 71-75; heroic, 134;

154 INDEX

Leaders: (continued) motivational pluralism of, 15; personal characteristics of, 7; scarcity of, 134-135; self-or- ganizing and, 115; strange at- tractors and, 115-116. See also Development of leaders

Leadership: complexities of, 46-49; as component of school capacity, 65; emotions and, 1, 71; five components of effective, 3-11; management versus, 2; necessity of, for complexity and change, 2-3, 34, 134-137; outcomes of ef- fective, defined, 9-10; role- based theories of, 130

Leadership Academy, 59, 128-129 Leadership framework: change-

process-understanding compo- nent of, 5, 7, 31-49; checks and balances in, 7-8; coher- ence-making component of, 6, 8, 107-119; five components of, 3-11; graphical summary of, 4; knowledge-creation-and- sharing component of, 5-6, 77-105; moral purpose com- ponent of, 3-5, 6-7, 13-29; overview of, 3-11; relationship component of, 5, 7, 51-76

Leadership styles, 34-35; affilia- tive, 35, 41, 42, 72; authorita- tive, 35, 39-40, 41, 42, 47, 72; coaching, 35, 41, 72; coercive, 35, 38, 46, 47, 72; democratic, 35, 42, 72; emotional intelli- gence and, 72; listed and de- fined, 35; need for multiple, 39-40, 41, 46-49; pacesetting, 35, 36-37, 42, 47, 72, 109-110; relationship of, to

organizational climate and fi- nancial performance, 34-35

Leadership succession, 134 Leading Change (Kotter), 32 Learning: at all levels, 122,

133-134, 137; in context, 121-122, 125-133; from dis- agreement and resistance, 41-43; knowledge creation and sharing and, 131-133; modeling and, 130, 132; slow, 121-125; techniques of, 131-132; valuing of, as collec- tive good, 130, 132-133. See also Development of leaders; Knowledge creation and shar- ing; Professional development in schools

Learning communities, 27, 64; in high schools, 65-70; negative potential of, 65-70; in schools, 64, 65-70

Learning culture, 84-85, 128 Learning experiences, 124-125 Learning Fair, 100-102, 103, 131 Learning organizations, 122-123 Lenience in judgment, 82 "Lessons learned meetings,"

89-90, 131 Letting go, 113; and reining in,

107-108, 137 Levine, D., 96 Lewin, R., 52-54, 75, 134 Lifeworld of leadership, 14 Like-minded innovators, 75 Listening, 41-42; attentiveness

and, 123-124; emotional intel- ligence and, 74; leadership styles for, 42

Literacy coordinators, 102-103 Living systems, 45-46, 108-109.