Michael Fullan's Six Secrets to Change

THE SIX SECRETS OF CHANGE 

by Michael Fullan

Secret One: Love Your Employees

Child-first stances in education are misleading and incomplete.  The principal should value teachers as much as children. (in a way that everyone benefits)
Loving and investing in your employees in relation to a high-quality purpose is the bedrock of success.

Secret Two: Connect Peers with Purpose

The solution to the too tight-too loose dilemma in management of a system is purposeful peer interaction.
Just collaborating is not enough to ensure learning and growth in the workplace because of the possibility of groupthink.  Three factors must be present to ensure collaboration is purposeful:

-         Organizational and individual values must align

-         Information and knowledge about effective practices must be openly shared

-         Monitoring mechanisms must be in place

In education, the Ontario Focused Intervention Partnership is a good example of successful lateral capacity building.
When peers interact with purpose, they provide their own built-in accountability.

Secret Three: Capacity Building Prevails
Advice for a new leader: Don’t roll your eyes on day one when you see practice that is less than effective by your standards.  Instead, invest in capacity building while suspending short-term judgment.

Secret Four: Learning Is The Work

Organizations face a consistency-innovation dilemma: How to stay consistently focused on core goals while at the same time learning continuously how to get better.

Consistency and innovation can both be achieved through organized learning in context. (that is, reflective practice – learning while working)  Consistency is achieved by precisely identifying (and adhering to) the key practices that are crucial to success.

Professional development programs and courses, even when they are good, often fail to bring about positive change because they are removed from the setting in which teachers work.

Secret Five: Transparency Rules  

Transparency involves being open about results and practices and is an exercise in pursuing and nailing down problems that recur and identifying evidence-informed responses to them.

Effective data comparisons for schools:

-         Compare a school with itself – the progress it is making when compared to previous years

-         Compare a school with its statistical neighbours

-         Examine school results to an external or absolute standard

Secret Six: Systems Learn
A key reason why organizations do not sustain learning is that they focus on individual leaders.  As individual leaders come and go, the company engages in episodic ups and downs.

In schools, rotating principals creates a perpetual carousel where schools move up and down with depressing regularity.

Systems learn by:

1. Developing many leaders working in concert
2. Having leaders approach complexity with a combination of humility and confidence

Humility results from a healthy respect for uncertainty and awareness that no matter how smart you are, no matter how much you crunch the data, you can never be certain of a positive outcome.

Four guidelines for leaders:

-         Act and talk as if you were in control and project confidence

-         Take credit and some blame

-         Talk about the future

-         Be specific about the few things that matter and keep repeating them

Use integrative thinking: face constructively the opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new (and better) idea.