FULLAN’S
MODEL FOR CHANGE
 Fullan believes that to begin the
change process you must first have a
moral purpose.
o Moral Purpose means acting with the
intention of making a positive difference
in the lives of the people it affects.

Leaders must understand the change
process. They must understand the
complexity involved in change.

The single common factor to every
successful change initiative is that
relationships improve.

There must be the creation and sharing of
new knowledge.
o
Fullan believes that people won’t share information
unless they are committed to the project and that also
includes that they believe there is a moral purpose.
 Coherence Making is the
final step of understanding
the change.
o Change creates disequilibrium,
which can be uncomfortable.
People have to make sense of the
process for themselves.
EXAMINATION OF FULLAN’S 5 POINTS
LEADERSHIP AND MORAL PURPOSE
 Every leader, to be effective, must have a moral
purpose.
 Moral purpose should be involved in both the process
and the end product.
 Moral purpose cannot just be stated. It must have
strategies to make it happen.
 Moral purpose is difficult because you have to contend
with the different ideas and cultures that people in an
organization bring to the community.
 Culture and core values are often the glue that holds an
organization together
 Moral purpose should have a purpose and a
passion.
 Authentic leaders have a distinctive style and
have ideals, values and purposes. They
“display character.”
 They are morally diligent in advancing the
project.
 They know that cooperative groups thrive and
selfish ones do not.
 They know that most people have both “egotistic
and altruistic desires” and realized that that’s
O.K.
 Effective leadership has:
o Strategies that mobilize many people to tackle
tough problems
o Accountability that can be measured
o An explicit “making a difference sense of
purpose”
o Assessment that can be measured by the
extent it awakens the intrinsic commitment of
others—it mobilizes everyone’s sense of
moral purpose
LEADERSHIP MUST UNDERSTAND
THE CHANGE PROCESS
 Goal of leadership is not to innovate the most!
 It is not enough to have the best ideas.
 Leadership must appreciate the early difficulties of trying
something new.
 Leadership must look at resistance as a positive force in
the change process.
 Leadership must re-culture the organization during the
change process.
 Never perceive change as a check-list, but always as a
complex system.
LEADERS MUST UNDERSTAND THAT
RELATIONSHIPS ARE ESSENTIAL
 “If moral purpose is job one, relationships are job two as
you can’t get anything done without them.”
 According to some experts on organizational leadership,
the differences between effective and ineffective leaders
are how much they really care about the people they
lead.
 According to Fullan, “It is the interactions and
relationships among people, not the people themselves,
that makes the difference in an organizational success.
 Relationships within an organization are essential to
consider during the change process.
 Effective leaders constantly foster purposeful
interaction and problem solving.
 Effective leaders are often wary of consensus.
 If relationships were good prior to the changes,
they become better during the process.
 Leaders must create learning communities that
enhance the skills and knowledge of the people
in the organization.
 Learning communities can be channeled to
promote organizational innovations while
maintaining coherence.
 People in a learning community must have a
common culture of expectations and must be
held accountable.
 Learning communities must have access to appropriate
materials and resources.
 Strong learning communities can make matters worse if
the leadership doesn’t carefully monitor relationships
and behaviors.
 Effective learning communities share knowledge and
collaborate, often making a breakthrough decision.
 The role of the leader is to ensure that the learning
community develops relationships that produce desired
results.
 In several studies, the leadership, or lack of it accounted
for the difference in whether a strong professional
learning community developed that affected student
learning in a positive way.
 Knowledge of the teachers is very important but you
must move them into professional learning communities
to channel changes into a coherent program.
KNOWLEDGE BUILDING
 When you are going through the change
process leaders must focus the group on the
new information.
 Change doesn’t happen when you place
changed individuals into the environment. You
have to create a new environment and new
settings.
 People have to be able to share information and
that requires that people listen to each other.
Listening depends on good relationships within
the organization.
 The culture of the organization has to include
sharing of information. In turn, sharing of
information creates a collaborative culture,
which cycles back to more sharing.
 Leaders in a culture of change must access tacit
knowledge from members of the group.
 Tacit knowledge is what people know, but don’t
necessarily verbalize—how the organization
works below the level of discussion or
consciousness.
Organizations that create and share
knowledge are characterized by the ability to;




Share tacit and explicit information
Share the same set of beliefs
Create professional development opportunities
Communicate both up and down in the hierarchy
 Michael Fullan uses a term called “slow
knowing” to describe a leadership quality.
 He states that the more patient modes of
leadership are very well suited to making sense
of intricate situation, complex and ill-defined
problems.
 Slow knowing means absorbing the
disturbances and drawing out new patterns.
 People need to internalize the process of
change—the change itself and the unexpected
effects of the change, including relationships.
COHERENCE MAKING
 Good leadership requires the process of making meaning out of the
changes.
 Leadership is difficult in a climate of change because of the
disequilibrium and people must understand what is happening.
 Once people start to make meaning of the change and it has
coherence, new patterns may emerge.
 When the changes are perceived positively it creates energy,
enthusiasm and generates other positive changes.
 Good effective leaders make people feel that even in the most
difficult times, problems can be discussed productively.
 Effective leaders have confidence, not always certainty.
 Effective leaders have enthusiasm, which can be contagious.
There are 2 types of commitment—
external and internal:
 External is triggered by management policies—
we have to do this task. This starts the wheels
turning and puts the change into motion. This
can be a motivation to get involved.
 Internal is triggered by a sense of
accomplishment. We are getting the job done
and that gives us a good feeling. This generates
a “collective mobilization” that can energize the
project
 Michael Fullan stated “In many organizations, the
problem is not the absence of innovations, but the
presence of too many disconnected, episodic, piecemeal
projects with superficial implementation.”
 When an organization is in the process of change people
have to let go of previous ideas, yet keep the new ideas
under control.
 Change creates “messiness” and messiness is seen as
disequilibrium.
 An organization is a living system.
 Living systems must change and grow or they will die.
 Living systems never change on a pure linear path.
 Leadership must be able to adapt to the unexpected and
tweak the “status quo” if needed.
 Change should create a disturbance in a way that
matches some of the desired outcomes.
 Productive “disturbance” occurs when there is a moral
purpose to the change.
 People will work towards a higher goal if they see the
purpose of the change and if it makes sense to them!
 To make things coherent policies and strategies have to
be aligned with assessment and professional
development.
 The actual solutions to the problem may come from the
people closest to the situation.
 Michael Fullan uses a term called “slow knowing” to
describe a leadership quality.
 He states that the more patient modes of leadership are
very well suited to making sense of intricate situation,
complex and ill-defined problems.
 Slow knowing means absorbing the disturbances and
drawing out new patterns.
 People need to internalize the process of change—the
change itself and the unexpected effects of the change,
including relationships.
 Effective leaders always see the bigger picture.
 Leadership must be developed at all levels of the
organization, and new leaders cultivated for the future.
 People must have a shared commitment to the project
and there must be lateral and hierarchal accountability.