Michael Fullan on Leading in a Culture of Change

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and today we’re bringing you an episode on leading in a culture of change with Michael Fulin. Michael has been the world’s most persistent and persuasive advocate for systems leadership

for deep learning experiences. He is encouraged by the global momentum he sees with whole systems adopting deep learning strategies and policies. 20 years after his best-selling book, Leading in a Culture of Change, Josie Bass released the second edition of Certainly Timely Resource.

Let’s listen in as Tom and Michael discuss leading in a culture of change. Michael Fulin, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. So glad to be back with you Tom. It’s good to have you back. Today we’re celebrating the second edition of Leading in a Culture of Change.

The first one was at 20 years ago Michael? Yeah, it was about it in 2000, it came out in 2001. Wow, as I, I think I mentioned the last time we talked that that book was really important to me and to many other education leaders. For a lot of us that was the first time we got a tutorial and systemic change.

So it’s really great to see the book back out again. Yeah, I know you reviewed the first one. It was a great, great kickoff for me and the second one you reviewed. So you know as much as I do almost, but we can talk about it. Michael, this is, did you rewrite enough of it to count as a new book?

Would this be like 47? Yeah, it’s, I don’t know what the percentage is, but there was, we can talk about why I changed it. I used the same framework and I’ll say why, but we had so much more experience with it that deepened the concepts.

So it’s, I would say it’s in words, it’s probably 50% new words. All right, I want to get your view on what’s happening in the world and how it’s going to shift the grand movement towards deeper learning. So we’ll probably touch on that a bit during the book review, but I’d like to end with that topic.

So let’s dive in and talk about leading in a culture of change, which seems super, super relevant to what’s happening worldwide. But in the introduction, Michael, you talk about a culture of change. How do you, what is a culture of change and what does that have to do with education leadership? Well, a culture of change is the content, of course, it differs depending on what the

dynamics are. So the culture of change is how does the system work? How does the, how do things get to relate? What are people trying to change about that in order to get better results? And what are the ins and outs of trying to lead that degree of complexity?

And the big difference between the two books this way in these terms is that when I wrote the first one in 2000, complexity was just complex. And now in, when I went to write the 2021, complexity became complex, complexified. And so I don’t know whether readers are familiar with or listeners are familiar with the difference between making things more complicated by trying to rationally deal with complexity or

making them more amenable to understanding. And that gets into the dynamics, nonlinear change. There’s happened to be much more agile, all of those things. So the complexity has definitely become more complexified 20 years later. Michael, we, I often talk about novelty and complexity.

The young people in particular are seeing more new and complicated situations. And the pandemic’s just the latest, right? But the rise of artificial intelligence, its impact on the innovation economy, climate change, all of these things are ratcheting up the right amount of complexity. So I appreciate that observation.

I think it’s super relevant for education leaders. Right, yeah. And we, we can talk about this, but in one sense, when I wrote the first edition, it was, I had been studying change for 20 years as a professor and doing research and being close to the problem, but I hadn’t led change.

And then in 2003, I was appointed as the advisor, senior policy advisor to the premier of Ontario. And we launched a big change on literacy, numeracy, high school graduation, did 12 years of very successful change, I would say. And the relevance of this point is when I was studying it, that’s okay.

We made some good and leading in a culture of change, gotten some new concepts out that people like you as leaders liked and began to use. But then, then in doing the change, I will say for that period, which is 2003 to 2013, we were able to just use complexity. That’s an odd way of putting it.

But we said, okay, literacy, numeracy, high school graduation, capacity building. And then after now that we finished with that work, now I’m finding in the new edition, that is not just complexity. It’s much more complicated than that. And we have to really think of these concepts, same concepts, but think of them

more dynamically and we can talk about that. I appreciate that. In the introduction, you said the more complex society gets, the more sophisticated leadership needs to be. I appreciate that.

Exactly. Yeah. Feels like a good, a strong rationale for the updated edition. So I do, I want to urge people, if you read the first one, this is not just a retread, it’s an important update.

So, to get a copy of it. I appreciate that. It’s ironic in some ways that the first edition went like wildfire for, you know, 10, 12 years, whatever it more. And this one is slow.

I don’t know why this is because it’s, I’ve got so many books out there or because it’s a second edition and people have other images. But it’s definitely, it’s definitely different. And it’s, I could talk about some of the key aspects that makes it different and why it’s different.

I, another thing I appreciated about the introduction is that you talked about. The book helped you understand what to focus on in messy conditions. We, I think we can all appreciate that phrase more than, than you probably even knew when you wrote it down and how leaders foster leadership in others. Yeah.

And it’s really the combination of those two of dealing with the messiness and the way in which you distribute leadership and evoke leadership in others that that combination makes you, as you describe, indispensable forever. So I appreciate that. Good.

Yeah. And I think the, just to tease out a couple of the key differences. Um, when we say it’s messy, one of the things that makes it messy is it’s non-linear. Uh, in other words, the environment is changing a lot more rapidly now than it

was 20 years ago. And when the environment changes, the leaders better change in organizations. And so it’s by definition, it’s messy because it’s, and COVID is just compounded with that in, in many levels. Uh, but related to that is, uh, just take one leadership insight that I, you know,

I want to say all these are my own insights. It’s what I pull out of our practice, working with leaders and reading about it as well. But if you take one of the key findings about leadership now is that leaderships, leaders have to be, uh, contextually literate, deep contextual literacy.

That’s a bit of a mouthful and I don’t use that much jargon, but contextual literacy is understanding deeply the culture that you’re in. And another corollary of that is when any time you change your job to be, take a leadership position in the same organization or elsewhere, uh, you automatically become de-skilled to a certain point that the de-skillness is

because you can’t positively know that culture yet. And therefore it has implications for leadership, which means you have to be, yes, you’re an expert, you’ve got good ideas or they wouldn’t have hired you, but you also have to be a learner or an apprentice, as we call it, because you’ve got to learn about that context.

You might be learning from parents or students or whatever, but you’ve got to be a learner and then you have to foster that, those characteristics and those that you want to build as part of your leadership. And I appreciate that you, uh, and you talk about being the lead learner and how to being the lead learners to engage deeply in your context.

Yes. I mean, I mean, just take that, uh, it was Roger Martin, the business, uh, Dean of business school that wrote a book that I, this concept was in, but when he was examining successful leaders in countries where big change had happened, he said that one of their characteristics is they combined being an

expert and being an apprentice. And so he, uh, he, in other words, he said, you better don’t hold back on what you know, but also learn a lot. You’ve got to be a learner. If you’re not a learner, you’re not going to be effective.

And I think probably, probably you agree with me that the majority of leaders that we know are not effective. I mean, the majority of just, if you had a way of measuring that. And one of the reasons not effective is they haven’t been humble enough to combine their expertise and what they have to know in a new situation.

And they certainly haven’t been able to, uh, help their, uh, the leaders that the team that they’re building to be like that. This is such an important point, Michael. Um, I think this important point for, for teachers and, uh, teacher leaders, the, the ability to say, I don’t know is critical to unlocking deep learning,

both through yourself and for the children in, in your trust. Um, I don’t think you can get to deep learning without acknowledging that I don’t know and being willing to, to acknowledge that in front of a, a group of third graders or in front of your, your faculty, uh, seems so, um, it seems foreign to many people, but it seems really critical to un, um, unblocking learning.

Well, you know, there’s a lot of ironies in here. And one of them is that, uh, that confidence is not a characteristic that’s related to effectiveness and leadership. In other words, the, the, the more confident you are, it doesn’t mean you’re more effective, which is an Iran.

You have to be more confident, not more confident. And so those who pride themselves in being confident, uh, don’t say, I don’t know very often. So because they’re so confident, that’s their persona. And therefore they never learn much more than they start with and they fail.

And it’s really blatant. And every, everybody knows that sometimes they call it the imposter syndrome. I’m supposed to know something of that. I don’t know what I pretend. I know it, but everybody knows if you’re an imposter on a given item of knowledge,

everybody knows it. The young, you know, 10 year olds know it. It doesn’t have, you’re not fooling anybody but yourself. Right. All right, Michael, let’s, let’s dive into the five components of change leadership.

The first one remains, uh, moral purpose. Uh, it does remain that. And it’s, uh, now it’s more, uh, dynamic interactive. When I first wrote about it, it was more like, make sure as a leader, you have your moral compass, make sure that that’s what guides your work, all of those.

That remains to an extent. But now we say you’ve actually got to build your moral purpose in the situation in which you’re in. It’s not a static thing. And this is, you know, we’ve said these things like, uh, being right is not

a strategy of change. Uh, and just because you’re deeply committed to some big goal, doesn’t mean you know how to get there. So we have made moral purpose to be like more dynamically interactive with the doing of change.

I like that. You, you said that now it’s more important to focus on impact. Why is that? I think it’s because, um, it’s, it’s a mixture of things, uh, which should say, but one reason is that it forces you to be clearer about whether you’re

getting anywhere. But then we get into the ins and outs of, uh, how do you think about the impact? And if you, if you think about impact in the wrong way, which is, uh, we’re going to increase literacy scores, come hell or high water, and I’m going to pound the system until they do it.

You’re preoccupied with impact. You might have moral purpose, but, but you’re just blowing it because you’re not here, you’re not cultivating people to come along with you. I totally appreciate that. And Michael, the, um, older I get, the more I think about unintended consequences.

I don’t know if you, all right, if, if you’ve attempted systems change, you have created some unintended consequences. And I guess the, uh, the more of those consequences that are in my wake, the more often I think about that. So I appreciate this.

Dynamical view of, um, moral purpose and, uh, and, and impact. Yeah. In the change leader, because they’re poised into context, uh, the unintended consequences are recognized right away because they’re there. Uh, whereas for the other leaders out of where, but later on it catches up to

them, but then it’s too late. So, uh, the notion of unintended consequences is, is likely to happen. And if you’re immersed in the, in the leadership and the, and the environment, the con, uh, the culture that you’re in, you will be part of knowing that cause you’ll, you’ll be there.

So seeing problems, uh, as they adapt, it’s adaptive leadership, but it’s because you’re on top of it, that it happens. All right. Second component is understanding change. And, um, you, you say the new insight here is, uh, is nuance.

What, what do you mean by that? Well, I wrote a separate book on called nuance and, um, and it came out just almost parallel to this book on the second edition. And it is, uh, uh, nuance. First of all, it’s hard to explain because if I could explain it,

it would be no longer nuance, right? It is, uh, picking up the subtlety, but, uh, to give you, uh, an idea is that, uh, and I’ve got in the book and the other book, and I use some of these examples in this book, I’ve taken leaders that I’ve known or seen or worked with who have been particularly effective.

It could be a school, it could be a district. In one case, it’s the province or state. And, uh, I said, what makes these people effective? Cause they look like they’re doing a lot of the same things that others claim to be doing, but they’re not effective.

The others. So I found out that they were effective because they really, uh, got below the surface. This is a gain, the contextual, they really immersed in it. They didn’t pretend they knew a lot.

Uh, they, you know, a typical, uh, uh, quote from these leaders is the first three months I was there, I ask a lot more questions that I had answers for. And then I start, I learned, and then, and then after that, and, and cause part of this initial part is building trust, as you know, and, uh, you know, trust is something, uh, we call it, uh, go slow to go fast is that you need to

attend to the trust related relationships in the nature of the problem. Not for a year or two, maybe it’s only three months, but you’ve been learning, learning, learning. And then you start to ramp up your, you know, you’re telling questions, your focus, the tightening up the team, getting more serious.

So it’s really as a process during implementation, especially the first six months that’s different than we thought of before, which we thought before, well, it’s mainly capacity building, get teachers to be more effective. It’s not that it’s about, it’s about the content of change capacity building, but it’s also about the process of interacting with people to really get at

the insights below it. So, uh, so this is really, I think an important part of it. I appreciate this. Um, it seems like about 20 years ago, Michael, um, all the education consultants started building these theories of change and they were useful in that they,

they created this if then thinking that helped us understand, um, a bit more fully complex systems, but I’m afraid that they were a bit reductionist and in tricking us into thinking that change was relatively simple and relatively linear. I think what I’ve come to appreciate in part because of some conversations with

a Chicago historian named Ada Palmer, that history is very complicated. Uh, and that change in dynamical systems is very complicated. And it’s often a series of very small perturbations that result in a different set of outcomes than we had intended. So my takeaway is, um, that change is complicated and that it does require us

to study, um, the nuances of change and to be prepared for things to occur, uh, differently than we had anticipated. Is that fair? Uh, yeah, I want to just take it, uh, unpack it a little bit because in the two mistakes you can make at the front end is, uh, pretend it’s not complicated and

then it gets you. Right. The other is though, is that you say, well, it’s really complicated. I’m going to, I’m going to have the models going to take into account all these things and then it gets bogged down.

You and your team are the only one that understands it or whatever. So what you have to do with the complexity is be a leader who learns complexity through the doing. So for example, at the front end now, one of the big, and this is a redefinition of, uh, of, uh, a moral, a moral purpose.

I don’t know whether you remember or know, uh, from, remember from reading, but one of the, uh, chief management people in the 1920s was Mary Parker Follett and she focused on unity of purpose and she said the, the, the goal of the leader is to work with those in their organization to continually develop, especially at the front phase, uh, the unity of purpose that you jointly hold.

In other words, I’m going to, I’m going to learn, I’m going to refine my unity of purpose as you refine yours. We’re doing interactively and out of that interaction will become, uh, this better focus. And then the punchline she said, and I, I think she might have meant it slightly

tongue-in-cheek, but I don’t think so really. She said, and once you achieve unity of purpose and then she paused and said, don’t expect it to last for more than 15 seconds. So I mean, she was acknowledging that this is a dynamic phenomenon and the way to lead, uh, to deal with dynamism is not to anticipate it, but be in the middle of

it and learn while we’ll have some things you already bring to the table, but I’ll learn more when dynamic dynamism starts going its course. I, wow. I love that. That’s super insightful, uh, from 1920.

Yeah. I’ve come to think about the work, uh, that we do as, as hosting conversations and building temporary agreements. And it, in this dynamic setting, it is this achieving unity and then, um, executing against it, but then very quickly, um, building a new agreement around it.

So I, I appreciate that dynamic view of alignment. That seems much more important today than it was 20 years ago. Exactly. Yep. Number three, um, building relationships.

It’s always been more important, but how are you thinking about it today? Well, it’s, um, it is about trust and, uh, we’re trying to get people to think about, uh, uh, trust is something that you, uh, build a little bit slowly, but then once you have it, a lot of things can happen faster. You know, the so-called speed of trust.

So we want people to attend at the front end, don’t move too slowly and don’t move too fast because either one too slowly, uh, bogs things down too fast, people rebel. So I think it is about trust and then the relationships and now we’re getting better at this. And I just want to make a distinction here.

There’s been a lot of work, as you know, and I’ve been part of its formation since, uh, 1980, uh, on cl- collaborative cultures. And it turns out that collaborative cultures are not necessarily any more effective, uh, that, that they can be equally superficial or wrong-headed or whatever. And so the new concept we have, and I have it in the book, is called connected autonomy,

which recognizes the value of the individual and then says the individual, you need to be your own person, but you, but you, you also have to interact in order to become a better person because there are other things going on that you need to know and you need to contribute to that. So what we have now, I think is, uh, is a different view of relationship. I’ll just give you one more aspect that’s a big insight and I look for insights, uh,

uh, what I call sticky, uh, sticky observations, but here’s one. Leaders need to strive for precision, but avoid prescription. So that’s a really big, nuanced insight. In other words, you have to strive for precision, which is how does this work and what’s the teaching that’s going to produce this impact, but don’t try to get at that precision.

And when you get it, impose it then as a prescriptive rule for everybody else. And that’s hard not to do when you think it’s work. So it’s really, all of this stuff is dynamic, but allow you to capture things that work. But, uh, another word for precision is specificity. Figure out the specific inner workings of something that pre-results in an impact.

And as a result of that, you can be a lot better than you use it more, but you’re also always, uh, wary of settling down a precision into therefore everybody has to do it because we know it works. That’s when you get killed. I love, love that idea. I guess I think about the, this is as creating generative relationships.

If you’re managing a big network, how you do it without being oppressive, you want it to be generative, right? In the sense that people have the notion that they can contribute back to the system. And so I appreciate the, the interest in precision being specific might even be better, but um, that’s a, uh, a nice way to put it.

That does see, it does, I think, capture the tension of distributed leadership, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, only you, I mainly use precision because it’s a literate of prescription. It is specificity.

But yeah, the, I think this is really where it gets interesting for a lot of things because, the, uh, this is the dilemma of connected autonomy. If you go too far over into autonomy, you don’t get the learning and you don’t get the impact. If you go too far into the collectivity, uh, you start to get the imposition and not the creativity.

So the sophistication of nuanced leadership, uh, because what connected autonomy means is that everybody to a degree is a system player. I’m an individual, but I’m also contributing to the system because I’m connected. And when I’m connected, I contribute to the connection and I learned from the connection. And this is why it’s really a sophisticated concept.

Yeah. So I said recently that I think we just ended a 150 year stretch of teacher as independent contractor and that now given this pandemic and the crazy way that we’re going to have to go back to school, um, with these different schedules of some kids being remote and some kids being on site. Um, it’s going to be hyper dynamical.

Uh, and it strikes me that we’ve advised schools that now they, they, they need to have a learning platform that helps manage their work and that, uh, everyone is now part of a team, uh, part of a blended learning, uh, team. And that, it strikes me that, um, many people will impose those sorts of regimes in ways that feel quite, uh, repressive, uh, to people rather than inviting people to, um,

to co-construct these new team based platform, uh, based, um, learning systems. So this point seems super relevant to the next 60 days as people are preparing to go back to school in a way that might be more routinized than it has been in the past. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we, uh, uh, we did this paper with Microsoft called reimagining education that came out about a month ago. And, uh, I mean, we did the paper, Microsoft co-sponsored it,

but we, we have that, uh, the transition phase disruption, et cetera, eventually getting to reimagining. And I think it won’t be the next 60 days. It’ll be the next 200 days probably because this is not going to settle. It’s never, never will settle, but it won’t settle the way that people think it was. And, but I think that’s exactly right. It has to be a dynamic version where there is, it’s, uh, something is being learned in that. And it’s, uh, and it’s, you’ve

got to be, you’ve got to be poised as a learner, but the system has to interact in a, in a way that it serves up learning to be learned. That is how, but how to do this. Uh, so this is why I think it’s, it’s going to push towards, uh, interaction and, uh, and it’s going to therefore, uh, I think be on balance better than what we had before. And what we had before, which is another story in some ways was that, you know, this, that the public school system was, uh, you know,

almost 80% of students were not plugged in in high school and, and, uh, and the inequality was massive. So the external factors, uh, pre-COVID were not very good for the, for the attraction of learning to students or teachers. And therefore we better use the crisis, the pandemic as an opportunity to, to practice, correct, self-correct some of that. Uh, number four is, is, uh, creating and sharing knowledge. What’s new about that? Uh, the newness is deep learning. Uh, you know,

knowledge was a bit static before for us. And yeah, we had the innovator that, you know, you could pick out the innovative companies that with that did pay more attention to innovation and knowledge. Uh, in Toyota was the big star when, when we talked about that, they had some really good, uh, insights about change, transparency being one of them, uh, specificity of precision was another was all in there in Toyota. But you, you, you then can’t

take that model, which was operating under a certain set of circumstances and now say, uh, well, it’s just a matter of being innovative in terms of knowledge. Uh, the big change is, uh, and I, this is very, is new. So, uh, I don’t think I’ve finalized the formulation of it, but the way I would put it is that, um, the dramatic way to put it is that we have, um, significantly overestimated the potential of artificial artificial intelligence. And we have

significantly underplayed the human intelligence of individuals and groups, especially students, uh, and teachers for that matter. So you’ve got this, you know, around the knowledge and we’ve, we’ve, we’re operationalizing and deep learning. We’ve said knowledge is something that has to do with deep learning. Deep learning is about, uh, and our conclusion about this is, uh, it’s very clear. We didn’t expect this to be this clear, but it’s about engaging the world and changing the

world as part, I mean, it’s John Dewey and some in modern form, but this is what we found when we started to pull this out and have people work on the six C’s and have students participating more in shaping role knowledge guided by teachers who were, were activators. And so I think it’s exciting because the old knowledge, which I had in 2000 about, about the role of knowledge was more like, oh, how do you find the best knowledge and use it? It’s pretty static notion of it. Now we have

knowledge is the heartbeat of the organization and it’s dynamic knowledge and it’s, it’s, it’s, when you learn, uh, and you, you have a learning apparatus and I think it’s very much, uh, I don’t know whether you have read anything about the grammar of schooling, but, uh, Tyach and Cuban, you and I go back quite a ways when they did wrote this on 1972 or whatever it was or 75. They said schooling hasn’t changed its grammar of how it works for 100. They said a century,

100 years. This is now 25 years later, still hasn’t changed. And what you see in their political grammar is the old way of, you know, school classrooms being what they are, standardization, not much, not much, uh, the role of students as on the receiving end of knowledge rather than proactive. And I just actually very, uh, just almost a month ago finished, uh, their, uh, special issue of the, uh, the American Journal of Education, AGE, uh, was put together by Jell Metta and Sarah Fine,

who did the very good book in search of deep learning, but they could, they put a call out for research based articles on, uh, changing the grammar of schooling and they decided to publish five of these and they got five and they asked Larry Cuban and me separately to comment on them and, uh, we did. And so this issue will come out in about a month from now. But what we found was, uh, uh, four of those five, they started with the new grammar and then it fell back to the old

culture like a flash. The fifth one did some good things, but it was one school, an isolated school, so it didn’t have any leverage. So I think it calls to mind is, and this is where we coincide with the lea, the knowledge of leading in a culture of change and the post-COVID opportunity is about changing the face of knowledge and having humans much more in control of what they’re doing and start being, uh, stop being wowed by artificial intelligence because it’s, uh, and I mean, I,

I still want to use artificial intelligence as a, uh, you know, a sophisticated teacher assessment or, or as a, you know, or as a, even an independent player to do basic things like feedback on literacy and math and stuff. But I really want the bigger things like how do we improve society, be at the heart of the moral purpose of education. And these are the things that artificial intelligence is in there, but human intelligence and most people are finding that, uh, people are a lot smarter,

especially young ones that we thought they were or could be made to be. Uh, I love that. I just finished the book called Difference Making at the Heart of Learning, which argues that that should be the moral purpose of school is this idea of difference making of contribution. So I, uh, I love that formulation. Yeah, I saw that title and it’s, it’s right in line with this conclusion. Um, the last, uh, last point, number five is around

creating coherence, which seems like a fitting end to what could for some leaders be a disturbing and confusing, um, list of change elements. So how do leaders help create coherence for their communities? We have Joanne Quinn, who’s my co developer on deep learning. We did a book, a three years ago called coherence. And I wish we had called it coherence making, but we call it coherence. And we made the point that systems that seem to do better have a shared

sense of purpose about the nature of the work. So my point about that is you have to, uh, the leader’s job is to, it goes back to our unity of purpose and Mary Parker Follett is to forge coherence. And, uh, and, uh, therefore you have to interact. You have to know what you do. You have to, you need all the other things that are needing in a culture of change to be doing that. And when you forge coherence, I think, uh, uh, you get a set, uh, especially let’s say the first couple of

years when you really work on it and then get a good, uh, handle on it, you then have to recognize, well, coherence making is, has to be part of everything because, uh, people come and go. So you quit it’s coherence making. Every time there’s change of personnel, uh, the environment changes COVID big factor, new coherence all over the place or new policies are made. So we’ve made this coherence making more dynamic and said it’s not static. You don’t just get to know one thing and

therefore it all falls into place. You have to be in the game and this is why it’s always interactive. It’s connected autonomy. If you take all the pieces of the book, they all are moving in the direction of creating dynamic continuous coherence making. Uh, Michael, it, um, it strikes me that it’s, it’s easier to create coherence in a new school than an old school. You know, if you, you do have the opportunity to create a new school, you can really begin with a learner experience

and then create structures and systems around it, uh, so that everything works together for teachers and kids. Any, any tips for people walking into an existing system? How do you engineer coherence in what is a, uh, an incoherent system that has layers of, of, of, uh, inherited policy and structure and systems? Yeah, that’s a big question, a complex question. And one of my mentors was Seymour Sarasen. Who was the, the culture of the school and the problem of change was the first, uh, book that I,

you know, in 1972 that I, uh, I fell in love with and really got me onto this career. But what, um, he wrote another book that’s not very well known. It’s called the creation, the creation of settings in future societies. So for what he did in that book was dispel the notion that just because it’s new, it’s going to be better. He had case after case where it started new and it fell back in the same old thing. So there’s nothing big promising, but your question wasn’t that is what do you do

with the others? And this is where, and this is probably a good way to end is we now see, uh, system change as essential and which, I mean, I don’t mean theoretically, I mean, actually, so this means you have to mobilize three levels. We’ve been working on this and the heart rates as well at the local level, which is the local school in the community, the middle level, which is the district or region. And then the policy level, which is, let’s say the state.

And our very latest book is called the devil is the details. And it’s about thinking through those dynamics. And my, my, uh, perhaps the last thing I will say, I must have another question after this is one of the encouraging things as I look at evolution and the biologists. I love Edward Wilson, who after studying this for 50 years said, why the reason I’m optimistic is that evolution has relentlessly bottom up. And so I think we have to go about leadership where we

stimulate and respond to the bottom up, but we have an outlet for that bottom up, which is how the middle and the policy respond to it. So this is going to demand new things. And one prediction I want to make is that leaders are, are, are going to be different in, you know, in the next five years than they have in the last 20 years, different and better. And I don’t say that because I’m just a romantic. I said, because I think the dynamics of evolution are pointing to the need for more

leadership and people are going to respond to it first in a kind of awkward way in a crude way, but we’re going to settle out of that with better leadership that links the policy level with the practice level, with the practice level having as much influence upward as the policy level does downward. So you’re still optimistic about more deep learning globally? Yes, I am now. And in fact, I would say that there’s more interest in our deep learning since COVID than there was in the,

let’s say the 12 months prior to it. I think it really has shaken people up. They know that the previous system wasn’t working. Regardless of COVID, it wasn’t working. So now they say, well, yeah, and then even COVID exposes it even more lays it open. So they’re open to the better. And I, if I take, you know, Thomas Kuhn is another famous writer, he wrote the structure of scientific revolutions in 1962. And he said two things need for transformation or revolution and thinking

or models. One is that the current system isn’t working. And it’s cleared everyone he called a cat, it’s not working cataclysmically. And so what you can say about that. And he did say, that’s a necessary, but it won’t actually cause system change unless there’s also an alternative model in the wings are being developed. So I’m optimistic to the extent that we’re pretty sure now we’ve got the cataclysmic problem addressed or existing, and that we have to work on the deep learning

type solutions that provide the attractive alternative to system change, not to ad hoc change. Do you have a copy of leading in a culture of change handy there? Show us. There it is. A new covered second edition just came out. Fully updated for this new complexified period that we’re living in. Get a copy of it now. Michael Fulin, thanks for your life’s work. Thanks for updating this book. You’ve helped us all understand

a bit better the crazy times that we’re living in. Well, thank you, John. I really appreciate always talking to you and your proactive interviewing that you’re always so good at. Thank you. Thanks, Michael. Talk to you soon. Yeah, take care. A big thank you to Michael Fulin for joining us on this week’s episode. And congratulations again on the second edition of his book, Leading in a Culture of Change. We’ve got it linked in the

show notes and on the blog in case you want to grab yourself a copy. And thank you listeners for tuning in to this week’s episode. But before you go, make sure you leave us a rating and review and hit subscribe so you don’t miss out on any future episodes. That’s it for today. Thanks for tuning in for the Getting Smart podcast. This is Jessica signing off.