Coherence in an era of uncertainty.
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash.
Schools get told a lot that they need to change. My own feed is filled with urgent calls for schools to transform, mostly framed around survival in the context of AI driven disruption.
But the question I would wonder to myself as I scrolled through news stories and posts was: How?
How are we supposed to change? Should we pull everything apart and start again?
Do we keep adding programs and initiatives so we can market ourselves as ‘future ready’?
How does change actually happen inside a system that is overflowing with conflicting priorities?
“Coherence is not another initiative. It’s a lived orientation to the work of schooling that makes change possible without overload or churn. ”
I started Coherence Co-Lab to answer these questions. And for me, the shift was in understanding coherence. The idea of coherence is not new in education, but its implications for system design are often under explored. Coherence in the context of Coherence Co-Lab isn’t another initiative or an addition to the improvement agenda. It’s a foundation; a lived orientation to the work of schooling that makes change possible without overload or churn.
And while I am hesitant to be yet another voice in your feed talking about AI, I am not approaching change in schools as an AI expert. My lens is systems and organisational design, thus my perspective offers a zoom out: AI is a stress test on legacy systems, and the assumptions that sit underneath. If anything, AI induced uncertainty is amplifying a problem that has been here for some time: schools trying to hold multiple priorities that we never designed to fit together.
“AI is a stress test on legacy systems and the assumptions that sit underneath.”
Yes, I think survival in this era of schooling will include a technical response to AI, but there remains a broader adaptive element to be considered. What makes us relevant right now might be an AI strategy and a plan to execute, but what will make us resilient over time will come from a deep seated clarity around why schools exist, what the structures reflect and what they are optimised to produce.
There will be more disruptions, more unprecedented change. Treating each disruption as another initiative to retrofit into existing structures, without changing the central reference point, simply perpetuates inherited design. The way we do school improvement is so deeply embedded in our culture, that when we deem something as needing to be fixed, we turn to the same tools we’ve always known: more administration, more standardisation, more top-down mandates (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). I think this is true of a lot of innovations in modern schooling; we keep trying to use the factory’s own manual to turn the factory into something else. And when this is happening inside a policy landscape that lags behind emerging needs, the question becomes practical: what do we do? I’ve written about this previously in the context of career education. What do schools do while waiting for policy to catch up with what they already know is important?
We lead anyway.
“We keep trying to use the factory’s own manual to turn the factory into something else. ”
But the question remains: How? In education culture, we rely heavily on the science of things; best practice, quality methodology. These things have value, but best practice is always shaped by context. What works in one setting does not necessarily produce the same outcomes in another. The idea of best practice presents another risk: when we become wedded to ‘the one best way of doing things’, those routines become frozen in time (Grant, 2021).
In a VUCA context, leaders face a choice. We can pursuing improvement through new best practices and efficiencies like the administrative progressives who came before us, or we can approach change as a design problem shaped by system conditions. This is design-orientated leadership. Change led by humans who understand systems, foresight, and can tolerate the discomfort of disciplined experimentation.
So if you’re like me, scrolling through your feed and asking how change happens inside complex systems, this is the problem space Coherence Co-Lab works within. I will be the first one to say there are no clear answers or certainties, because truthfully, I’m not sure that system resilience will come from technical solutions or isolated reforms. What will propel us forward is a willingness to rethink, to face an unknown future while interrogating our mental models about education, and a shared, human-centric understanding of why schooling exists. This is where coherence starts.
References
Grant, A. (2021). Think again: The power of knowing what you don’t know. Viking.
Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Harvard University Press.