Educational Leadership in Changemaking Times
A lecture for Dr Kay Sidebottom and the Educational Leadership module of the MSc Education, Stirling University, 29th February 2024
There must be as much written about leadership as about anything else in the world. Yet there remains a profound disconnect between the leadership research of the past 20+ years and what actually happens in schools, colleges and universities.
A good starting point for thinking differently about educational leadership is ‘The Prepared Leader’, a book based on their own experiences by two senior leaders from the US higher education sector: Erika James (Dean of Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania) and Lynn Perry Wooten (President of Simmons University in Boston, which has a long history of welcoming students from all backgrounds and “all forms of human uniqueness”). As an introduction to the work of these two academic leaders, I recommend their two-episode podcast with Brené Brown on Dare to Lead.
James and Wooten - or, as I like to think of them, Erika and Lynn - take the ‘People, Planet, Profit’ model of organisational sustainability (which is still, inexplicably, radical in large parts of the UK education system) and add in a fourth dimension - preparedness. They use Covid as a springboard to drive home why change is part of our daily lives now and crisis is no longer occasional, but permanent. We cannot continue to lead or govern without taking account of what is happening in the world around us. Yet, as Erika and Lynn write, “we are hardwired to neglect the possibility of a crisis.”
Leaders and governors do not take account of this. They do not have time to take account. Their long-term thinking gets lost in a short-term world. Their good intentions do not lead to sustainable change.
And yet, none of this is new thinking. Ten years ago, Richard Wilson’s book ‘Anti-Hero’ was a wake-up call to organisations everywhere to think differently about leadership. At least it should have been a wake-up call.
The problem is that the systems which direct and constrain us on a daily basis in the service of capitalism are not being challenged. The vast majority of people are doing our best but systems get in the way of any real change. Far more influential than any of the amazing leadership research coming out of business schools across the globe is this 20th century quote attributed to Peter Drucker:
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
It’s not untrue, but it’s only part of the picture. Like the children’s strategy game, rock/paper/scissors, the winner changes every time. Culture pulls back strategy, but good cultures are eroded when workflow bumps up against inadequate systems, time after time. That’s why systems thinking has taken hold in leadership circles over the past decades.
Let’s just unpack that a little.
Rock/paper/scissors is recognised as being a game for global north/west children, yet the earliest evidence of it (in the form frog/slug/snake) was found in 200BCE China. In Japan in the 1700s it became fox/gun/leader and it spread across Indonesia in various forms. I like ant/human/elephant because of its more-than-human feel. It reached Europe in the 1920s.
Systems thinking was invented by a woman, Donella Meadows, in 2009. She was an environmental scientist with a really cool pudding bowl haircut and her book, ‘Thinking in Systems’, asks:
I am here for that kind of academic writing, especially as she goes on to use the metaphor of a zoo to explore systems thinking further. She is also generous in crediting the many thinkers with whom she co-wrote and thought.
Kate Raworth, of Doughnut Economics fame, was once told that ‘undergraduates can’t understand systems thinking’ - well that’s because academics have hidden Dana’s straightforward approach to complexity under a cloud of words and engineering metaphors. Here’s a systems map that Kate’s 11 year old twins produced in April 2020.
And here, at its simplest, is a system: fox and rabbit. Clearly, the fuller picture would look something more like Kate’s twins produced. It would include fox hunting, urban foxes, myxomatosis and intentional culling, rabbit food supply chains, new roads, fox-proof chicken houses etc, But any of us could draw a comprehensive fox and rabbit map with a bit of thought.
What’s the common denominator here? A children’s strategy game which has become westernised. A woman’s work - generously also crediting men - which has got lost under the weight of - well, I’m sorry, but I have to call it ‘man talk’, though it’s not only men. What’s going on?
Educational leadership thinking has been colonised by the global north/west in the service of capitalism and those structures run deep in our thinking and practice. The hierarchical set-ups, the line management (of people, rather than projects), the evidence-able lie that is ‘trickle-down’ economics, the obfuscating bureaucracy - all causing us to forget that the rest of the world has ideas too, simpler and more community-oriented ways of doing things, rather than the individualistic path of the ‘heroic’ leader who is no longer able to lead the way he (or she) sees fit. bell hooks would refer to the conditions which have created this situation as the ‘imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy’. I’m not throwing out any shade here, because we are all caught up in it. It’s Gramsci’s ‘hegemony of the mind’. Our thinking has been shaped intergenerationally to operate in this way.
As so often, when I’m preparing a talk, Professor Damien Page (with whom Kay used to work) posts something that seems to better articulate what I’m trying to say.
This resonates with my current work, designing and facilitating a leadership programme in further education called Green Changemakers. Our work is shaped around the research-based AimHi Earth ‘15 Green Skills, Clearly Explained’ (I appreciate that ‘clearly explained). Green Skill 7 as you can see here is about learning from diverse global cultures, languages and histories.
A pertinent example from education - which you may have covered with Kay - is Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. We all learn that early on as teachers, right? Maslow is one of the most influential and enduring thought leaders in education. Yet his framework, sensible and pragmatic on the face of it, is drawn from indigenous wisdom, specifically the Siksika people of the Blackfoot Nations, whom he visited in Northern Alberta for six weeks in the 1930s. He came away inspired and with deep respect for the Blackfoot way of life. Not respectful enough to cite them in any of his writings, of course, or to faithfully represent their belief system, which was rooted in both community and in ancestry - seventh generation thinking of being a good ancestor, and of acknowledging all that had been learned from previous generations. (7th Generation Thinking is also an AimHigh Earth Green Skill). Again, I’m throwing no shade Maslow’s way, he just did what was commonly done by academics and anthropologists in his day. What I’m trying to convey is that this is down to systems and structures. Check out Cindy Blackstock, Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavy Head’s work to read more about Maslow’s stay with the Siksika people.
But you are an educator working within these systems and structures and so is Kay and so am I. What can we do, to be prepared leaders, with a quadruple bottom line that also includes people, profit (I prefer ‘prosperity’) and planet?
The answer, as it so often is, is community. No single leader can bring about the changes we need, on their own. Nancy Kline, founder of the Thinking Environment, writes that the further people go up the leadership ladder, the more obedient they have to be. Leaders can set the tone, but they need people across the organisation to drive change.
In my work, we call these people changemakers.
The philosopher Baruch Spinoza, writing in Latin at the very time in history when the structures and systems we labour under were being laid down, had two words for power at his disposal:
Potestas - power as usual, status, rank, hierarchy, clout. It’s power-over, the power of the individual, supported by the system.
Potentia - a different kind of power. A joyful activist energy, connection, community and hope. Power-with.
If I asked you now to think of someone with potentia, I bet a face would spring to mind. It’s that person you come away from, buzzing with hope and new ideas. It’s the person you’re glad to see in work. And potentia isn’t always sparked and shared between humans. It’s that feeling you get when you’re out in nature and come back inspired.
Spinoza’s world view did not prevail, 400 years ago. In fact, his writings - smuggled out of his home in The Hague after his death - were banned by the Dutch authorities and the Roman Catholic Church. His belief in the potentia of humans, the shared life-force of humans and non-humans and the importance of developing a personal ethics, rather than mindless obedience, made him as unpopular then as he would be now. It’s my sad belief that the last thing potestas wants in today’s world is people thinking for themselves. Potestas rose and potentia was forgotten, locked away in a language that fewer and fewer people understood.
And yet, the concept of potentia stuck around, re-examined and kicked into the weeds by potestas, as new political movements came and went. It’s very persistent, because it speaks to inconvenient truths - that humans are essentially creative, essentially communitarian, essentially connected with the natural world around them. We may forget this, working mindlessly in the service of capitalism. We may be too tired to notice our own potentia and how it reaches out to connect. But it is there.
Accepting that the time of the old, individualistic, potestas-wielding, heroic leader is gone, opens us up to thinking differently about what leadership can be. Twenty years ago, the idea of ‘distributed’ leadership - distributed across the organisation, that is - was influential. Today we are more likely to think in terms of a changemaking community; a sharing of potentia which transcends the usual hierarchy of job roles. Think of changemakers as golden unicorns:
One of the finest changemakers I have ever met was Claire Mutchell, catering manager of a college in the west of England. Claire started her job in lockdown; her first day was literally Monday 23rd March 2020. Fircroft College had been the first college in England to declare a climate emergency and Claire was charged with some ambitious targets: increase the amount of produce produced in the gardens, provide 80% vegan or vegetarian menu and reduce food waste to zero. Two years later, she won a Green Gown award for the College but her real victory is taking Fircroft over the tipping point from good intentions to sustainable change. Climate justice work now has a real momentum there. But Claire couldn’t have done it alone. She had golden unicorns around her - people who were equally committed to a greener future. And she knew she had to win over others, sleeping unicorns who maybe lacked hope in Covid times about what could be achieved. I love the metaphor of sleeping unicorns. It makes me think of my favourite book as a child - The Weirdstone of Brasingamen - in which sleeping knights lay under the earth with their mounts, waiting to awake in the hour of need.
Educational leadership in changemaking times, in permacrisis times, has to become less controlling and more empowering, less individualistic and more collective: an approach currently called ‘adaptive leadership’ (these terms change over time, just roll with it, territorialising and deterritorialising language is yet another feature of capitalism). Adaptive leadership is defined in the Harvard Business Review by a reasonably diverse group of academics as an approach framed by:
Again, none of this is new and the changing jargon is irritating. But rebranding a community, changemaker approach to leadership is about trying to use capitalism’s tools of marketing to get a foothold in the actual work of organisations.
That final ‘A’ - Accountability - is worth our focus. Amongst those who understand that leadership is as much about listening as it is about speaking, there has been much talk of ‘safe spaces’ - impossible to know what another person (or even yourself) will find safe, difficult to keep oneself safe in the midst of power relations. For a long time, Brené Brown and others talked about ‘brave spaces’, but as Elise Ahenkorah, diversity and inclusion speaker and strategist writes, this places a burden on the shoulders of minoritised people who already have to be brave in daily life. In turn, Brené Brown has adopted her term ‘accountable spaces’. It is the work of educational leadership to create accountable spaces in the organisation. The Thinking Environment is a powerful set of tools, to facilitate this
But the real message is that change happens when you have changemakers across the organisation and when leaders - who are wrapped up in the grind of compliance - enable that to happen. When you wake up those golden unicorns who are full of ideas and potentia, but who are used to not being heard. Developing a Thinking Environment culture is the most effective way I know of allowing the quiet spaces - even the silences - where thinking happens and potentia is released. Our challenge in leadership is to keep hold of the threads of long-term thinking in the face of short-term culture and we need long-term thinking to imagine new futures, to find hope and to tackle the wicked problems of our times: climate justice, social and economic justice, prejudice and the mental health crisis. Long-term momentum takes us from good intentions - everyone has those - to sustainable change and it needs the pauses just as much as the waves of potentia. Listen to the words of The Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey, whose book ‘Rest is Resistance’ has had a profound impact on my own practice:
In my work with changemakers over the past decade, in collaboration with my social enterprise partner Joss Kang and others, we have come to identify four seasons of changemaking Like the false spring we had a couple of weeks ago - here in England, certainly - they are not completely linear, but you have to work through one stage to get to the next. Each stage has a series of activities which invite both potentia and pause; the interplay that momentum needs and which is so difficult to sustain in short-term cultures.
Getting Unstuck
Defining your changemaking purpose; removing untrue limiting assumptions that are lived as true; asking possibility and values-line questions; community philosophy.
Releasing Potentia
Identifying changemakers; awakening golden unicorns; developing relationships and ways of working; getting a fluid team together.
Gaining Clarity
Radical candour; non-violent communication; baking values into changemaking practices; articulating and amplifying the work; recognising stuck systems; strategic alignment and momentum. Waves and pauses. Radical Rest.
Co-Creating Unimagined Futures
Endurance; creating momentum with possibility questions; writing your own histories; amplification of impact and process; co-evaluation; ideas incubation, piloting and risk mitigation.
All the activities contained above are easily accessible - many of them (values-line and possibility questions) arising from Thinking Environment work, others such as Radical Candour exist as books, podcasts, articles. Each of them provokes us to think differently about what’s in front of us and around us.
An intentional focus on changemaking is right for our times. It is being prepared (as is scanning the horizon and learning to accurately interpret information). The greatest frustration of my work has always been that people want change, but they don’t want to change: immunity to change as Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan define it.
We can build those defences, even within the constraints of our structures, systems, processes and hierarchies of our organisations, if we take a community/changemaking approach to leadership, in a strategically aligned culture where everyone knows their role. That’s the leader’s job, to make that happen. We have no idea of the potentia locked up in our golden unicorns.