Most school challenges are adaptive. Most of our solutions are technical.
Last month, I read a piece in HBR by John Winsor called “Has AI ended Thought Leadership?” which naturally made me think about schools.
Here’s the high-level summary: Winsor writes that thought leadership is categorically dying, and it’s not because ideas don’t matter (they do), but the number of people who are out there talking about the future far outweigh the people who are going about building it. With the help of LLMs, it’s never been easier to produce polished, but ultimately hollow content. Here’s what Winsor says is emerging in the place of thought leadership: thought doership.
“Thought doership happens in the mess. It happens when you’re running an experiment that might not work, with real money and real people, and you have to make decisions with incomplete information.”
Winsor names the differences between thought leadership and thought doership, and while I won’t recount them here, I do think the distinction poses some interesting questions for us in schools about why we engage with professional learning, and what we expect of the deliverables that are left behind.
It’s probably unsurprising that while reading Winsor’s piece, I was thinking about how it is that we address complex challenges in schools, and the practices of school improvement and change.
Over a decade ago, in their book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky (2009) posed that the most common cause of failure in leadership is produced by treating adaptive challenges like they were technical challenges. What’s the difference? While technical problems may be very complex and critically important (like replacing a faulty heart valve during cardiac surgery), they have known solutions that can be implemented by current know how. Adaptive challenges require going beyond expertise and the organisation’s current structures, procedures and ways of doing things.
“[Technical challenges]can be resolved through the application of authoritative expertise and through the organisation’s current structures, procedures and ways of doing things. Adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits and loyalties. Making progress requires going beyond any authoritative expertise to mobilise discovery, shedding certain entrenched ways, tolerating losses and generating the new capacity to thrive anew.”
Heifetz and colleagues make an important point: No challenge ever comes neatly packaged as either technical or adaptive. Most problems present to us as mixed, with technical and adaptive elements intertwined.
Take for instance, the challenge of AI use in schools. Tools and use are evolving at a rapid pace, and while it makes sense to nail the IT infrastructure and governance, there is a broader adaptive element to be considered about what this means for a school’s priorities: how we think about authenticity, how we teach, learn, how we define our purpose as an educational institution. Or, the challenge of ‘reimagining’ how we do learning in a particular phase or year level. We’ll jump straight to operational and curriculum design, what a timetable might look like, seek out programs or resources and ideate assessment types, but the broader adaptive element of reimagination remains untouched. In reimagining, is our purpose shared? Are we identifying outdated practices? Are we designing for the lived experience of students or assumptions we hold about them? Which of our beliefs must change? What does this say about our priorities?
The same pattern shows up in how we address declining attendance, how we intervene for less than ideal NAPLAN or academic data. How we target engagement. How we design for relevance and real world learning.
When our solutions to complex adaptive challenges only address the technical aspects, it’s likely they’ll run for a while and eventually hit structural design and unchanged mental models and assumptions that sit underneath. And to be transparent, I’ve lived every side of this. I’ve been the classroom teacher delivering the targeted literacy program. I’ve been the leader seeing the engagement and relevance challenge and seeking out pre-packaged program to fix it. I’ve been the person at the system level who is designing and co-ordinating it. I’m not an exception to the pattern. I’ve helped build it, and I’ve watched it stall and miss, which is why I’m building something different now through Coherence Co-Lab.
While Winsor and Heifetz and colleagues are writing from experience in two different fields, I think their ideas about how we lead, how we work through change and address complex challenges exist in a parallel. The work that makes a difference and produces change is messy, experimental, iterative. It’s led by people (internal or external) who have lived it and carry the scar tissue. It’s not informed by high altitude predictions of the future, but by what gets surfaced in the room, with the people who live it and will carry it. And the end deliverable isn’t just insight; it’s built capability to see what’s producing the problem. To experiment and carry risk. To design something and learn from it when what’s sketched out on the whiteboard works differently in real life (because it always does).
So, some questions to leave you with: when you’re strategising and designing solutions address your complex school challenge, when you’re partnering with providers in the work of school improvement, which aspects of the problem are being addressed? The technical parts? The adaptive parts? Or both? And what are your expectations of what is being left behind when the process is finished?