I grew up professionally with the concept of ‘implementation.’ When I was beginning my academic career around 1970, the field had just gone through the ‘adoption era’ when many promising curriculum innovations were apparently taken on but on closer inspection were not being put into practice. In 1968 for example, John Goodlad and his colleagues reported on their observational study, Behind the classroom door in which they examined some eight thematic innovations of the day. Not only did they find that many classrooms that claimed to be using given innovations were not in fact using them, but they also discovered that many classrooms that made no such claim were indeed putting some of the ideas in to practice. Around the same time Seymour Sarason, Neal Gross and others were showing that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” One pair of evaluators, Charters and Jones, warned us “on the risk of appraising non-events”—when an innovation was said to be adopted, but actually wasn’t and then was evaluated as to its impact (without assessing the degree of implementation).
 
The research continued for the next four decades during which some of us turned the problem on its head and asked, “How can we get better implementation?” Before turning to some of these ideas, I think it is fair to say that people still do not focus on implementation. There seems to be far more attraction for visions, big plans, silver bullets, ad hoc successes and so forth.
 
I claim that quality implementation is 90% of the problem, and furthermore we need to increase our aspirations to go for ‘whole system reform’ (Fullan, 2010). In other words, we need to focus on the improvement of 100% of schools, districts, regions, states/provinces/countries. This is in fact the work we have been doing since 1997 when we assessed Tony Blair’s and Michael Barber’s literacy and numeracy strategy in England, and then had the opportunity to put the ideas systematically into practice in Ontario from 2003 until the present (with very encouraging results; in Ontario, literacy and numeracy has increased by 14% across the 4,000 elementary schools, and high school graduation has risen from 68% to 81% across the 900 high schools).
 
Interest in the quality of whole system implementation and results has rocketed over the past year. In Toronto in September 2010 we held a ‘Building blocks for whole system reform’ (BB4E) in which we examined both successes and those striving for more across several states/countries: Finland, Singapore, Ontario, Australia, and the United States, as well as a cross-country analysis by Andreas Schleicher of PISA/OECD. The McKinsey group reported on ‘how the best systems keep getting better’ in which they had analyzed 20 entities—all of which had demonstrated major improvement in student achievement on a large scale. And of course PISA itself released its latest results on December 7, 2010.
 
Despite all of this attention people still don’t treat ‘the implementation problem’ very seriously. I think there are two related main reasons. First, front-end fanfare and related vision-based rallying cries are simply sexier than day-to-day follow through. Second, implementation is hard work requiring persistence, ability to manage and overcome obstacles and setbacks. Success takes time, but encouragingly is not as open ended as one might expect. Major success on a large scale can be realized in three to six years-- if the right combination of ingredients is employed. A big if, but not out of reach for those who understand that implementation is just about everything.
 
Implementation then is the sine qua non of progress: it requires both a commitment, and set of strategic factors that are essential. This is not the place to review those factors, but they are evident in the Ontario success (Fullan, 2010), and in the work on ‘Deliverology 101’ (Barber et al, 2011).
 
The evidence that the problem—the failure to take implementation seriously—is still prevalent has been described in an article I recently published called ‘Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform’ (Fullan,2011). The four wrong drivers are: external accountability, focus on individuals, technology, and piecemeal reform efforts; the corresponding right drivers are: capacity building, team-work and other forms of collaboration, pedagogy, and systemic strategies. It is no accident that the wrong drivers tend to be in the ‘adoption’ camp, while the right drivers focus on implementation.
 
In short, implementation concerns the hard work of changing cultures (skills, norms, shared values), while adoption is more about structure and other surface changes. This is why we claim that success is 10% right direction, and 90% implementation.
 
More information can be found at www.michaelfullan.ca
 
Barber, M. et al (2011) Deliverolgy, 101. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Corwin Press.
Fullan, M. (2010) All systems go. Thousand Oakes, CA: Corwin Press
Fullan, M. (2011). Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform. Melbourne, Australia: The Centre for Strategic Education.