Leadership (not leaders') is the key to the new revolution

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Michael FullanLeadership sustainability

• System Thinkers in Action

A compelling strategy for widespread and lasting
improvement
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Leadership sustainability

• Leadership (not leaders) is the key to the new
  revolution. Leadership is to this decade what
  standards were to the 1990s if we want
  large-scale, sustainable reform
• Succesful leaders in learning organizations, and
  operating in comlex times (Leading in a Culture
  of Change)
• Moral purpose
• Understanding change processes
• Relationship building
• Knowledge building
• Coherence making

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Leadership is crucial to success

• A combination of pressure and support
• or
• Accountability and capacity building
• Capacity building involves the collective
  ability
• dispositions, skills, knowledge, motivation and
  resources
• to act together to bring about positive change

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Sustainability

• What is needed in present and future society?
• The ability to learn how to learn and other
  meta-cognitive or thinking skills the ability
  to learn on the job and in teams the ability to
  cope with ambiguous situations and unpredictable
  problems the ability to communicate well
  verbally, not just in writing and the ability to
  be creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial
• David Hargreaves
• Centrally driven reforms can be a necessary first
  start (when performance is seriously
  unacceptable) but can never carry the day of
  sustainability

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Matrix
KNOWLEDGE POOR

KNOWLEDGE RICH
CENTRAL

PROFESSIONAL PRESCRIPTION

JUDGMENT
Barber
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An adaptive challenge Sustainability

• Public service with a moral purpose
• Commitment to changing context at all levels
• Lateral capacity building through networks
• Intelligent accountability and vertical
  relationships
• Deep learning
• Dual commitment to short-term and long-term
  results
• Cyclical energizing
• The long lever of leadership

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1. Public service with a moral purpose

• Raising the bar and
  closing the gap of pupil learning
• Treating people with demanding
  respect
  
  (moral purpose is supportive,
  responsive, and demanding,
  depending on
  the cirumstances
• Altering the social environment
  (e.g., other schools
  and districts)
  for the better

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2. Commitment to changing at all levels

• Changing whole systems means changing the entire
  context within which people work
• If context is everything, me must directly focus
  on how it can be changed for the better
• It will take time and cumulative effort. Once it
  is under way, it has self generating power to go
  further

If you want to change peoples behavior, you need
to create a community around them
Contexts are the structure and culture within one
works
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3. Lateral capacity building

• Complexity theory tells us that if you increase
  the amount of purposeful interaction and infuse
  it with the checks and balances of quality
  knowledge, selforganizing patterns (desirabele
  outcomes) will acrue

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4. Intelligent accountability and vertical
relationships

• Take shared responsability for positive outcomes
• Positive outcomes arise from a combination of
  personal effort and wider social resources
• Learning communities interact around given
  problems, they generate better practices, shared
  commitment, and accountability to peers

Vertical relationships between state,
district between district, school
How good is your school?
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5. Deep learning

• Adaptive work
• Demands learning
• Demands experimentation
• Difficult conversations
• Species evolve whereas cultures learn (Heifetz)
• Whoever makes the most mistakes wins!!
• Fear creates a focus on the individual rather
  than the collective
• Fear causes a focus on the short run (driving)
  out consideration of the longer run

• Drie standaardvragen van Fullan
• Wat zou er moeten gebeuren?
• Wat gebeurt er?
• Wat maakt het verschil?

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6. Dual commitment to short-term and long-term
results

• Governments have to show progress in relation to
  social priorities (in health service, street
  crime, pupil achievement) within one election term

Each level above you helps or hinders (it is
rarely neutral)
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7. Cyclical energizing

• If we want sustainability, we need to keep an eye
  on energy levels (overuse and underuse)
• It is not hard work that tires us out as much as
  it is negative work
• Positive collaborative cultures
• push for greater accomplishments
• avoid the debilitating effects of negative
  cultures
• (Collaborative cultures can become too intense
  and burn us out)
• We need a combination of full engagement with
  colleagues, along with less intensive activities
  that are associated with replenishment)

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8. The long lever of leadership

• Leadership is the lever for sustainanability
  system thinkers in practice
• We need a system laced with leaders who are
  trained to think in bigger terms and to act in
  ways that affect lagger parts of the system as a
  whole the new theoreticians

A certain kind of leadership (amalgams of level
4 and 5) How many do you leave behind who can go
even further?
The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource
when changes of mental attitude are required
Solitude facilitates learning, thinking,
innovation, and maintaining contact with ones
own inner world
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Energy
Regressive archetypes are cognitively and
emotionally simpler and easier to use Progressive
archetyes require much more skill and persistence
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Seven languages of transformation
Kegan Lahey
Its doable you can get better at them through
reflective practice
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10 preconditions of sustainability

• Leading with a compeling, driving
  conceptualiztion
• Collective moral purpose
• The right bus
• Capacity building
• Lateral capacity building
• Ongoing learning
• Productive learning
• A demanding culture
• External partners
• Growing financial investments

Fullan, Bertani Quinn
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10 guidelines for system leaders committed to
sustainability

• The reality test (face the facts)
• Moral purpose
• Get the basics right
• Communicate the big picture
• Provide opportunities for people to interact with
  the big picture
• Intelligent accountability (evidence based)
• Incentivize collaboration and lateral capacity
  building
• The long lever of leadership
• Design every policy, whatever the purpose, to
  build capacity, too
• Grow the financial investment in education

Barber Fullan
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The main message
Make system thinking and sustainability the
agenda