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. 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.

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?

When I was working in a system that demanded standardised academic outcomes, while also holding me accountable for developing human capabilities, I often found myself holding two lists in my head.

One one list: everything I believed mattered for students and the world they were walking into. On the other? What the system was asking of me. The more those lists diverged, the more my sense of meaning eroded.