Change Forces - The Sequel

Michael G. Fullan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135711146
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Fullan's first book on this subject was an instant and best-selling success. Now in Change Forces - The Sequel he extends and expands the use of chaos theory as a lens through which to view and comprehend change, and the forces which govern it. Educators have already widely embraced this approach, and taken on board the idea that change is not so straightforward as we might hope. As Fullan worked on his ideas relating them to school systems, higher education and research, the field of change forces was also developing significantly. This volume covers new aspects of this 'science of complexity' and helps educators obtain insights for delving deeper into moral purpose, and expanding into fresh dimensions of changing forces in the environment.
The first volume appealed to a wide market from classroom teachers, through school administrators, to student teachers and academics. This volume will appeal to a similar cross-section.

Chapter 1
Moral Purpose and Complexity

The ability to assume complexity is a great strength. You could call it the ability to deal with reality.

(Saul, 1997, p. 222)

Once upon a time the moral purpose of educational reform seemed relatively straightforward. While we knew that innovation was often motivated by politics and careerism, most people when pushed would agree that the ultimate purpose of reform is to benefit all students. If the problem were that straightforward, that simple, we would have solved it long ago. After all, we have been innovating for student improvement for most of this century. The direct approach of naming the goal and mobilizing to achieve it does not, and cannot, work in something as complex as moral change agentry—a continuous preoccupation with making virtuous improvements in a world in which the particular pathways to success are literally unknowable in advance of doing something.

At the micro level, moral purpose in education means making a difference in the life-chances of all students—more of a difference for the disadvantaged because they have further to go. At the macro level, moral purpose is education's contribution to societal development and democracy. A strong public school system, as I shall argue, is the key to social, political and economic renewal in society. In postmodern society, more than ever before, a strong commitment to the role of moral purpose in educational reform is crucial. But because of worldwide diversity, and because of chaotic complexity, figuring out moral purpose, getting or staying committed to it and making progress in achieving it are enormously difficult. At the very time we need more of a moral commitment to the public good, the forces of change are creating confusion, frustration and discouragement. This book is about pursuing moral purpose in complex times.

There are two primary reasons why achieving moral purpose is complex. One concerns the dynamics of diversity, equity and power; the other involves the concept and reality of complexity itself.

Diversity, Equity and Power

Diversity means different races, different interest groups, different power bases and basically different lots in life. To achieve moral purpose is to forge interaction and even mutual interest across groups. Yet the problem is that there are great tendencies to keep people different than ourselves at a distance. In psychological experiments people are more likely to exhibit helpful behavior to those similar to themselves. As Sober and Wilson (1998, pp. 326–7) observe:

If empathy elicits altruistic motives with respect to those whom we take to be similar, its absence means that we are less inclined to be altruistically motivated toward those whom we take to be different.

You cannot achieve moral purpose unless you develop mutual empathy and relationships across diverse groups, and this is no easy task. As we will see later, there are ways of conceptualizing, valuing and working through the discomfort of each other's diversity, but these require very different strategies than we are accustomed to. Having empathy for those who are different from ourselves is a tall but essential order.

We also have to recognize that many reforms—equity-minded reforms in particular—are not in the short-term interests (more about long-term interests later) of those in privileged positions. Oakes et al (1998, p. 953) provide theoretical and empirical evidence to back up their claim: ‘We find that when reforms seek to achieve parity in opportunity and achievement across diverse groups of students, reformers faced enormous challenges.’ They argue that the change literature falls short because it takes a neutral stance towards equity and power. In their study of detracking in ten racially and socio-economically mixed secondary schools, Oakes et al found that teacher and principal change agents got blindsided by fellow teachers and powerful parents opposing detracking (moving from homogeneous to mixed-ability classes). The change leaders in these cases failed to realize (and the change literature provided little help) that intense opposition to detracking was based on perceived loss of advantage to higher income, white students if they were mixed with lower income, predominantly non-white students.

Similarly, Slee, Weiner and Tomlinson (1998) and others launch a fundamental critique of school effectiveness and school improvement, not so much for what these movements study, but rather what they leave out or underemphasize. They argue that social class is relegated to a control .variable and not treated as problematic in its own right, that there is a failure to focus on power, and that school effectiveness research tends to concentrate on management issues and broad generalizations rather than on the complexity of the issues faced by teachers operating in disadvantaged circumstances.

Slee, Weiner et al themselves are short on solutions, but along with Oakes and her colleagues they are essentially right in calling for a more critical preoccupation on the part of researchers, policymakers and teachers with issues of power and equity in the improvement process. These problems, based as they are on power and privilege, may seem insurmountable. And critical theorists, as correct in their analysis as they may be, have offered little by way of strategy beyond brute sanity (to be sure, this is an enormously difficult issue to address strategically). There may, however, be other resources and ideas available for accomplishing more comprehensive and equitable reform, which brings us to complexity theory and evolutionary theory.

Complexity and Evolution

The paradox of complexity is that it makes things exceedingly difficult, while the answer lies within its natural dynamics—dynamics which can be designed and stimulated in the right direction, but can never be controlled.

The jury surely must be in by now that rationally constructed reform strategies do not work. The reason is that such strategies can never work in the face of rapidly changing environments. Further, rapid change is endemic and inevitable in postmodern society—a system which self-generates complex dynamics over and over and over again. As Stacey (1996a) puts it:

Most textbooks focus heavily on techniques and procedures for longterm planning, on the need for visions and missions, on the importance and the means of securing strongly shared cultures, on the equation of success with consensus, consistency, uniformity and order. [However, in complex environments] the real management task is that of coping with and even using unpredictability, clashing counter-cultures, disensus, contention, conflict, and inconsistency. In short, the task that justifies the existence of all managers has to do with instability, irregularity, difference and disorder. (pp. xix-xx)

The old way of managing change, appropriate in more stable times, does not work anymore. Two theories in particular help us think differently about where we are at the end of the twentieth century, and how we must approach the new millennium,—complexity theory and evolutionary theory.

Complexity Theory

Complexity and chaos theory are the same thing, but I prefer the former label because it is more accurately descriptive. This new science of complexity essentially claims that the link between cause and effect is difficult to trace, that change (planned and otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways, that paradoxes and contradictions abound and that creative solutions arise out of interaction under conditions of uncertainty, diversity and instability.

Stacey (1996a) captures the essence of complexity theory in these words:

A complexity theory of organization is built on the following propositions:

• All organizations are webs of nonlinear feedback loops connected to other people and organizations (its environments) by webs of nonlinear feedback loops.
• Such nonlinear feedback systems are capable of operating in states of stable and unstable equilibrium, or in the borders between these states, that is far-from-equilibrium, in bounded instability at the edge of chaos.
• All organizations are paradoxes. They are powerfully pulled towards stability by the forces of integration, maintenance controls, human desires for security and certainty, and adaptation to the environment on the one hand. They are also powerfully pulled to the opposite extreme of unstable equilibrium by the forces of division and decentralization, human desires for excitement and innovation, and isolation from the environment.
• If the organization gives in to the pull to stability it fails because it becomes ossified and cannot change easily. If it gives in to the pull to instability it disintegrates. Success lies in sustaining an organization in the borders between stability and instability. This is a state of chaos, a difficult-to-maintain dissipative structure.
• The dynamics of the successful organization are therefore those of irregular cycles and discontinuous trends, falling within qualitative patterns, fuzzy but recognizable categories taking the form of archetypes and templates.
• Because of its own internal dynamic, a successful organization faces completely unknowable specific futures.
• Agents within the system cannot be in control of its long-term future, nor can they install specific frameworks to make it successful, nor can they apply step-by-step analytical reasoning or planning or ideological controls to long-term development. Agents within the system can only do these things in relation to the short term.
• Long-term development is a spontaneously self-organizing process from which new strategic directions may emerge. Spontaneous self-organization is political interaction and learning in groups. Managers have to use reasoning by analogy.
• In this way managers create and discover their environments and In this way managers create and discover their environments and the long-term futures of the organizations. (p. 349)

In another book, Stacey (1996b) elaborates on complex adaptive systems:

The science of complexity studies the fundamental properties of nonlinear-feedback networks and particularly of complex adaptive networks. Complex adaptive systems consist of a number of components, or agents, that interact with each other according to sets of rules that require them to examine and respond to each other's behavior in order to improve their behavior and thus the behavior of the system they comprise. In other words, such systems operate in a manner that constitutes learning. Because those learning systems operate in environments that consist mainly of other learning systems, it follows that together they form a co-evolving suprasystem that in a sense creates and learns its way into the future. (p. 10)

Pretty theoretical you say! And yes, this is rocket science, but I will show in subsequent chapters how this theory operates empirically, and how we can use it to more clearly and deeply understand and cope with change.

Brown and Eisenhardt (1998) in their study of twelve global businesses employed complexity theory to help sort out successful from unsuccessful cases. As they put it:

Complexity theory began with an interest in how order springs from chaos. According to complexity theory, adaptation is most effective in systems that are only partially connected. The argument is that too much structure creates gridlock, while too little structure creates chaos. A good example would be the traffic lights in a city. If there are no lights, traffic is chaotic. If there are too many lights, traffic stops. A moderate number of lights creates structure, but still allows drivers to adapt their routes in surprising ways in response to changing traffic conditions. Consequently, the key to effective change is to stay poised on this edge of chaos. Complexity theory focuses managerial thinking on the interrelationships among different parts of an organization and on the trade-off of less control for greater adaptation. (p. 14)

Evolutionary Theory

While complexity theory is about learning and adapting under unstable and uncertain conditions, evolutionary theory of relationships raises the questions of how humans evolve over time, especially in relation to interaction and cooperative behavior. Both Ridley (1996) and Sober and Wilson (1998) trace the evolution of self-centered and cooperative behavior in animals and insects, and in humans. What makes humans different, says Ridley, is culture. Ideas, knowledge, practices, beliefs and the like enter consciousness and can be passed on ‘by direct infection from one person to another’ (Ridley, 1996, p. 179). And:

The roots of social order are in our heads, where we possess the instinctive capacities for creating not a perfectly harmonious and virtuous society, but a better one than we have at present. (p. 264)

Ridley raises the interesting evolutionary hypothesis that ‘cooperative groups thrive and selfish ones do not, so cooperative societies have survived at the expense of others’ (p. 175).

A good example of advantage, if not survival, comes from the story of the titmouse and the robin as reported in Brown and Eisenhardt (1998):

Coadaptation is most effective when poised between too much and too little structure. The comparison of the structure of social interaction between the titmouse and red robin illustrates this central idea of coadaptation.

In the early 1900s, milk was delivered to homes in the United Kingdom in bottles without caps. Two bird species, the titmouse and the red robin, learned to drink the cream that floated to the tops of the bottles. Eventually, dairy distributors began putting aluminum seals on the bottles to solve this problem. In about twenty years, the population of titmice (about 1 million birds) learned how to pierce the seals. In contrast, the red robins did not. Occasionally, one robin would discover how to pierce the seal, but that knowledge never spread. What is the explanation?

Titmice are social. They travel in flocks of about eight to ten birds for two or three months per year. They communicate some of the time, but not always, and their flocks vary in membership. In contrast, the red robins are territorial. A male robin will exclude others from his territory. They rarely communicate, and when they do, it is usually antagonistic.

Generally, related agents adapt most effectively when they partially interact with one another. If related agents are always together, then they adapt quickly. However, they have too little diversity to cope with sudden change. If they are never together, the population of agents adapts very slowly to change and may ultimately evolve into a different species that cannot communicate. (p. 75)

De Gues (1997) also takes up the titmouse story as he traces it to the zoologist/biochemist Allan Wilson. In De Gues's (1997) words:

The titmouse went through an extraordinarily successful institutional learning process. The red robins failed, even though individual robins had been as innovative as individual titmice. Moreover, the difference could not be attributed to their ability to communicate. As songbirds, both the titmice and the red robins had the same wide range of means of communication: color, behavior, movements, and song. The explanation, said Professor Wilson, could be found only in the social propagation process: the way titmice spread their skill from one individual to members of the species as a whole.

In spring, the titmice live in couples until they have reared their young. By early summer, when the young titmice are flying and feeding on their own, we see the birds moving from garden to garden in flocks of eight to ten individuals. These flocks seem to remain intact, moving together around the countryside, and the period of mobility lasts for two to three months.

Red robins, by contrast, are territorial birds. A male robin will not allow another male to enter its territory. When threatened, the robin sends a warning, as if to say, ‘Keep the hell out of here.’ In general, red robins tend to communicate with each

other in an antagonistic manner, with fixed boundaries that they do not cross. Birds that flock, said Allan Wilson, seem to learn faster. They increase their chances to survive and evolve more quickly. (pp. 134–5, italics in original)

Of course there are countless examples of selfish behavior among individuals and groups. The evolutionary question is whether cooperative relationships serve a higher moral value while at the same time provide individuals or groups with advantages. Culture allows us to recognize, value and build in such advantages over time. We will see in detail later why isolated cultures are less effective than collaborative cultures. We will see that people need each other's knowledge to solve problems. The motivation to share and the opportunity to access information requires ongoing interaction. Interaction is also required for the development and internalization of higher order purposes (moral purposes if you like). Doing and receiving good (or reciprocity) ‘only works if people recognize each other’ (Ridley, 1996, p. 70). We must, concludes Ridley, ‘encourage social and material exchange between equals for that is the raw material of trust, and trust is the foundation of virtue' (p. 265).

But, alas, we don't have enough ‘equalsߣ in society for virtue to flourish. Wilkinson (1996) provides a compelling analysis of the ‘afflictions of inequality' in his book Unhealthy Societies. He reports data as others have found, that it is not the richest societies that have best health, but those that have the smallest income differences between the rich and the poor. In a section on ‘How Society Kills', Wilkinson presents a massive amount of worldwide evidence that poor people's lives are terribly affected on a daily basis, and they die at an earlier age on the average. But not just for the obvious reasons of absence of food and exposure to danger. Rather, it is the ‘psychosocial pathways' that do the harm. In his words:

To feel depressed, cheated, bitter, desperate, vulnerable, frightened, angry, worried about debts or job and housing insecurity; to feel devalued, useless, helpless, uncared for, hopeless, isolated, anxious and a failure; these feelings can dominate people's whole experience of life, coloring their experience of everything else. It is the chronic stress arising from feelings like these, which does the damage. It is the social feelings which matter, not exposure to a supposedly toxic material environment. The material environment is merely the indelible mark and constant reminder of the oppressive fact of one's failure, of the atrophy of any sense of having a p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Educational Change and Development Series
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Moral Purpose and Complexity
• Chapter 2: Complexity and the Change Process
• Chapter 3: The Deep Meaning of Inside Collaboration
• Chapter 4: The Deep Meaning of Outside Collaboration
• Chapter 5: The Complexities of Transferability
• Chapter 6: Intellectual, Political and Spiritual Fusion
• References