Sense giving | Clarity, not certainty

Clarity and certainty are easily confused.  We seek certainty because it’s comforting. It feels safe to believe that good leadership means knowing what comes next whether we believe it of ourselves or others. But certainty belongs to mechanical systems, places where inputs and outputs are predictable. Schools are not mechanical systems; they’re eco systems. In...

The story of who we are and what we value

A lot of schools have a mission, a vision and a set of values. They sit neatly on websites and corridor walls, signalling identity and purpose. But if you covered the logos and read them side by side, would you know which school was which? Here’s a tongue in cheek version of this argument: https://youtu.be/c4HKRXmrCvg?si=9hZgezaVfuMHKKKE...

Reflexivity | What school leaders can learn from researchers

Our capacity to understand the reality of school life shapes the sense we make and the actions that we take. Every decision that people make in our schools rests on interpretation. Interpretation of evidence, context and intent. We like to think we lead from facts, but even facts need sense to make them meaningful. We...

In rejection of authentic leadership

For more than a century, leadership theory has promised control and certainty over something that is inherently complex. The Great Man theory of the 1840s told us that leaders are born, not made. The trait theories of the 1930s insisted we could acquire the necessary trait for leadership. By the 1940s and 50s, behavioural and situational theories made leadership more accessible, advocating for...

Closing our leadership rings

No individual leader can possibly know the full reality of school life. And the more senior that leader is, the less likely it is that they can know the reality because truth doesn't rise to the top. Yet we must make decisions that affect the experience of the team, of children and of parents. It...

AI supported case writing | A signature pedagogy for school leadership development?

Where does leadership development happen? The Center for Creative Leadership argue the above and an extension of this thinking is that we need good structures around making sense of the day to day, challenging experiences to maximise leadership development in our schools. The concept of a signature pedagogy suggests that each profession has characteristic ways...

Can schools shift from hierarchical to relational leadership models?

This is the third and final post in a three part series exploring how school leadership might evolve in response to complexity. In the first post, I challenged traditional models of leadership built for an industrial era of stability, control and predictability. These models assume that leadership is something individuals do to others from a position of...

Enabling the emergence of leadership

This post is the second in a three part series exploring how school leadership might evolve in response to complexity. In the first post of this series, I argued that many of the leadership models we’ve inherited, arose out of a different understanding of the world. They assume that schools are complicated and ultimately controllable...

The trouble with leader theory | Why industrial era models no longer serve complex schools

This post is the first in a three part series exploring how school leadership might evolve in response to complexity. In this opening piece, I question the leadership models many of us have inherited and used. The second post looks at some key complexity informed theories for this knowledge era. The final post addresses the...

Leadership handbook 6.0

For the 6th year now, I have been collecting educational and leadership research and insights, compiling them into a leadership handbook. 6.0 is freely available to download at the end of this post in the hope that you find it as useful to browse as I have to compile. If you've you've seen the previous...