Leadership and complexity thinking

Leadership and complexity thinking

From a different angle, others have applied the insights of complexity theory to the analysis of school leadership and educational improvement. Mason (Mason 2008) and Morrison (Morrison 2008) demonstrate, at least at the descriptive / analytical level, that educational processes contribute to a complex whole, with the relationships between activities and agencies creating new often unpredictable outcomes. Such insights call into question an overly simplistic prescriptive relationship between leadership agency and school improvement.

Harris, in the introduction to her edited book on distributed leadership (Harris 2009), is also keen to establish these links with complexity theory:

Interest in collaborative systems, reflected in both the management literature and the academic social sciences literature, is best exemplified by the explosion of interest in complexity science and network theory. From a complexity perspective those in formal leadership positions “emphasize the management of independencies” and are primarily concerned with rich networks of relationships…. Network theory is similarly concerned with interdependencies and the distribution of power across complex systems. As Wheatley notes (1998: 164) nothing exists independent of its relationships, whether looking at subatomic particles or human affairs. This position implies that maximizing interconnections and interactions among organizational members is more likely to result in positive growth and development. Organisational learning theory and theories of distributed cognition assume that existing capacities of individual members can be enhanced through social interaction and connecting sources. (p4)

For Hoban (Hoban 2002), complexity theory requires a broader based theoretical understanding of the different influences on educational change. He argues that teacher learning plays a powerful, and poorly recognised part, in the research and literature on change and improvement in education. A growing literature on ‘teacher leadership’ suggests that the role of teachers within ‘educational leadership’ is also now receiving more attention. In the USA, Murphy (Murphy 2005)sees clear connections between teacher development and teacher leadership; he is less sure that there are discernible connections between teacher leadership and improved student outcomes. This fits with Dinham’s report of a major study in New South Wales into developing teacher professionalism through action learning, where the benefits to teachers were clearly established, but the benefits to students could not be as convincingly demonstrated (Dinham 2009).

While the evaluation team was not directly focused on distributed leadership as either a precondition or product of the action learning projects, it was apparent how important distributed leadership was to action learning and project success. Leadership cannot easily develop in a vacuum, and the action learning projects provided the vehicle to build on and further develop leadership capacity in the schools concerned.

Holden and Durrant (Durrant, Holden 2006) argue for a model of ‘distributed’ leadership in learning organisations based around the empowerment of teachers who develop their practice through relations of trust and professional enquiry. This concept of ‘distributed leadership’ has gained considerable ground in the past decade or so, perhaps, as Gronn suggests, as a flag around which opposition to the seeming dominance of the ‘heroic’ individual model, promoted through policy and research in the 80s and 90s. (Gronn 2009).

Drath and Palus (Drath, Palus 1994) also want to move away from the hierarchical ‘leader-follower’ conception of leadership. Leaders, for them, are better conceived of as members of a ‘community of practice’, in which people share values and ways of doing things. Leadership is a process happening among and between a group of people. There may be a ‘leader’, but all will share in leadership in some way or other. These useful insights into contemporary educational leadership deserve a more detailed treatment, which follows in the section on‘distributed leadership’.