The first edition of this book was a game changer for many education leaders, especially for me. The second edition is even more insightful, in that it merges the moral imperative with courage, research, and pragmatism. This book will help transition leaders from being effective to exceptional. A must read!
—Ron Canuel, Former CEO of Canadian Education Association
Everything about this astonishing Change Culture revisited is timely, insightful, and compelling. Michael Fullan cuts deeply by having us discover present change leadership challenges while weaving far-reaching answers from education and business practitioners as well as his own personal wisdom. Through Leading in a Culture of Change, Second Edition, Fullan takes another leap forward by helping us navigate this current omnipresent complexity of change. A must read!
—Dr. Bill Hogarth, consultant and former director of education, York Region District School Board
With accelerating complexity, Leading in a Culture of Change is the new normal. In this updated edition, Michael Fullan notes that the more complex the change, the more people must be part of the solution. Like the first edition, moral purpose is job one, but this edition makes it clear that relationships are a close second. This new edition contains many fresh insights as it describes leading from the middle, listening, co-learning, and sense making—all part of the new leadership. The update is as valuable as the first edition was almost two decades ago.
—Tom Vander Ark, CEO, Getting Smart
The education sector is so full of change today, it can seem overwhelming to students, parents, teachers and administrators alike. Yet it often feels like we aren't moving anywhere fast – many students and teachers are disengaged with the way they are learning and the leadership they are being provided. In this revised edition of Leading in a Culture of Change, Fullan shows us that to make real impact in this context, we must learn to ‘go slow to go fast’. This means taking the time to deeply engage with context so that we can become lead learners within our organizations. As Fullan shows, the insights and ideas apply equally to leaders in business and education. Whether you are a leader in a large system, an advisor, or practitioner on the ground, I highly recommend this thought-provoking and practical book to help you in taking the next step forward.
—William Gort, professional economist and education sector consultant, Deloitte Access Economics
Fullan delivers a brilliant and compelling strategy for increasing leadership effectiveness. The continual efforts to pursue moral purpose, understand the change process, develop grounded collaboration, foster deep learning knowledge, strive for coherence, and do so with energy, courage, and relentlessness are imperative as educators endeavor to prove that demographics do not determine destiny. Leading in a Culture of Change, Second Edition, is the gold standard for addressing the tools necessary to build a solid foundation for effective improvement efforts on behalf of students across all boundaries.
—Sandy Thorstenson, former superintendent, Whittier Union High School District
One of the many mistakes I made during my career as a school superintendent was not to place enough emphasis on ‘culture’ in the ‘early’ years. I started leading school districts in 1983, and it was Fullan's 2001 book, Leading in a Culture of Change, that helped me understand the link between culture and high, continuous, improvement. It was my ‘cultural’ savior! The second edition is even better. Unlike most business books, Fullan shows how to create, nurture, and benefit from a great culture. Today's young group of leaders do not know what they do not know. If you want to thrive and survive, read Leading in a Culture of Change.
—Dr. Terry Grier, retired superintendent, Houston Independent School District
Second Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fullan, Michael, author.
Title: Leading in a culture of change / Michael Fullan.
Description: Second edition. | San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019040633 (print) | LCCN 2019040634 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119595847 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119595786 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119595823 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Educational leadership. | School management and organization. | Educational change.
Classification: LCC LB2806 .F794 2020 (print) | LCC LB2806 (ebook) | DDC 371.2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040633
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040634
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © Eoneren/iStock.com
To WLIW
WHAT IS A CULTURE OF CHANGE ANYWAY? I USE the phrase in two ways. One is the fact that changes are always rolling into and over all our organizations these days. One form of leadership in this latter case is protecting the organization from constant, superficial change. The second and more fundamental use is how to change the existing culture so that it has the capacity to manage and incorporate change on a continuous basis that serves the goals of the organization, including deliberately incorporating new goals and their implementation.
The more complex society gets, the more sophisticated leadership must become. Complexity means change, but specifically it means rapidly occurring, unpredictable, nonlinear change. Moreover, the pace of change is ever increasing, as James Gleick, the author of Chaos, pointed out in a book called Faster, which he subtitled The Acceleration of Just about Everything (Gleick, 1999). That was two decades ago, much before the advent of the iPhone, introduced in 2007 and artificial intelligence! How do you lead in a culture such as ours, which seems to specialize 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 decisions under conditions of mind-racing mania can be equally fatal. Robert Steinberg said it best: “The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act 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.”
Now 19 years after the first edition of “Leading in a Culture of Change” the five themes still hold true, but we have much more specificity about their role in change. And we need to relabel some of the concepts to make them more precise, relative to current knowledge. Moral purpose remains the rock, but we now focus on its actual impact and how to get it if you don't have it. Second, understanding change is laced with a new insight: nuance. In complex societies, effective change and nuance pretty much go hand in hand. Third, relationship building is still key but we have sorted out what effective and not-so-effective relationships are, which I examine under the banner of effective collaboration. Fourth, knowledge building and sharing is ever critical, but now we see it in relation to “deep learning” that encompasses technology and innovation. Fifth, coherence making has turned out to be a powerful concept; we have pinpointed the role of leadership as coherence makers in complex times.
The other major development over the past 20 years is that the world has become much more complex, but more than that—the world is becoming ever more troubled. Worsening climate change, unknown job markets, greater superficial closeness via technology but less closeness, more stress and anxiety, and less trust decade by decade, and corresponding erosion of trust. All of this puts moral purpose to greater tests as it makes it more crucial. Leaders don't need to become better at a bad game; they need to change the game! The framework and examples I provide in this book will put leaders in a position to lead change under ever increasing challenges to help people and organizations thrive. Complexity always brings new opportunities but only when society has strong leadership dispersed across the system.
Schools and businesses increasingly have more in common because both are trying to find their way in ever challenging circumstances. In our own work over the past decade we have pretty much concluded that schools as we know them are past their due date. They no longer serve the purpose they were originally assigned some 200 years ago—to produce reliable workers for an industrial society. We are in the midst of trying to change that in our work on “deep learning” that we will take up in various parts of the book.
Clearly these are difficult, even threatening times—there 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 radically different than it has been. Further, effective leadership is in very short supply. In the course of this book, I will map out the new leadership that will be required to take us forward from 2020 onward.
In complex, what I have called chaotic times, leaders must be able to operate under conditions that are not always clear—worse, not as clear as they appear to be. G.K. Chesterton identified the challenge best: “Life is not an illogicality, yet it is as trap for logicians…. Its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude hidden. Its wildness lies in wait” (quoted in Bernstein, 1996, p. 331). Coping with wildness lying in wait may not be a bad job description for leading in a culture of change.
One last point: Over the years, we have found that about 80% of our best ideas come from “leading practitioners.” You will find that the ideas in this book are well grounded, and cutting edge. Thus, in the course of this book you will discover what it means to be leader in a culture of change. In many ways, the ideas and insights come from the horse's mouths, although I have been able to articulate it in precise and, I think, insightful language. Commit yourself to leading in a culture of change, and find out how in the following chapters.
Although there are overtones of saving the world in this book, the core message is: Make your organization the best it can be. To do this effectively, you have to take into account the bigger picture. This is a practical matter for me. You have “to go outside to become better inside,” as we say. If many leaders do this, they will end up improving both the inside and the outside. All good solutions are system solutions.