Week Three - Jeff

Develop and articulate ideas for describing leading change in an organisation of your choice

The five elements of model of change by Fullan (2001) consist of Moral Purpose, Understanding Change, Relationship Building, Knowledge Building, and Coherence Making.

I will make use of the works I submitted to the Blog over the past few weeks to supplement analysis for this week.

For Understanding Change and Relationship Building, this can be referred to what I have written in Week two that writes "The management, however, are the Opinion Leaders who first accepted my innovative ideas in making changes to the Division ... and becomes the Early Adopter who adopts to the changes I made. My immediate supervisor, on the other hand, serves as the Change Agent who mediated between my teammates and I to provide positive influence over my concept. "(Mediation between different parties involves relationship building and development). I therefore would not go into details of both elements.

For Moral Purpose, it depends greatly on how the management nurture moral purpose in an organization with their staff. The ultimate goal is possibly to narrow down the difference in belief between management and staff in regards to change. As I mentioned in Week One that the organization has made a clear shared vision that to sustain its future development, its role in sub-degree education institution should be further enhanced to survive, the management has the responsibility in raising staff morale/knowledge in believing in the success of proposed change. This unfortunately still has a long way to go in my organization.

For Knowledge Building, this is what I strongly recommend the management to do as written in previous weeks. Information sharing is week and inter-department contact is inadequate that make knowledge building difficult at this moment. Knowledge Building, whether through formal channels like meeting or informal channels like tea time chat, is the results of good culture of an organization developed long time ago. Organization culture obviously is not an easy changeable issue for any organizations in the world that appreciates the structure of hierarchy. Fortunately, my organization has taken its active role in nurturing a better culture for knowlede building by supporting my idea of information management.

For Coherence Making, the successful management will create a harmonious work environment and discourage fragmentation or overload arisen from change. In Week One - Systems thinking, I pointed out the problems of independent works and formation of small group in my organization. It is found that the hierachical organization structure provides an ideal environment for independence than cooperation. Unless ''an interactive system where leaders give up traditional command and control is restructured'', as suggested by Chris in his work this week, right now I still cannot find out any piece of evidence of coherence making in my organization.

References:
Peter M. Senge. (2006) The fifth discipline : the art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Currency Doubleday.