School Leadership and Complexity Theory

Citation

Clarke, S. (2003), "School Leadership and Complexity Theory", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 41 No. 4, pp. 445-448. https://doi.org/10.1108/jea.2003.41.4.445.1

The field of organisational theory and its implications for the practice of leadership have never been quite the same since Greenfield suggested that human organisations are, in effect, existential realities characterised by complexity, uncertainty and wistfulness. In setting out a new agenda for future enquiry into organisations, Greenfield argued that an increased emphasis should be placed on understanding power relations, conflicts, values and moral dilemmas in educational leadership.

In similar vein the micropolitical perspective of organisations has stipulated that as the political dimension of institutions, including that of schools, is both inevitable and desirable, the political process needs to be revealed and accepted as a vehicle for change and educational improvement. Hence, leaders in schools who are sensitive to the micro‐political landscape of their own institutions command an insight that helps them to secure support for change in general. More recently, the distributed perspective on leadership is also claimed to be predicated on an understanding of organisations which highlights their increasing complexity as well as their proclivity to rapid change.

Enter “complexity theory” and Keith Morrison's book. Complexity theory has apparently become well‐established in the business and scientific communities over recent years and Morrison's book is a convincing attempt to apply complexity theory to the educational context as well as discussing the theory's implications for school leadership.

The first chapter of the book sets out to define complexity theory and examines its key components. According to the author complexity theory is concerned fundamentally with survival, evolution, development and adaptation. The theory is the offspring of chaos theory but is claimed to move beyond it. Chaos theory, it is argued, cannot apply readily to human interaction because human behaviour is not deterministic. Complexity theory, on the other hand, is actually predicated on unpredictability and atypical behaviour in order to account for change, development and novelty through self‐organisation.

Put simply, an organisation is conceptualised within the frame of complexity theory as the processes of people relating to and interacting with each other over time. These processes give rise to emergent new forms within the organisation whose nature and structure it might not have been possible to predict. Indeed, change is viewed by complexity theory as being essential to survival, a corollary of which is the primary importance of learning within an ever‐changing environment. Consequently, a school needs to become a learning organisation if it is to build capacity for adaptation rather than withering away.

This line of argument as Morrison is prepared to concede, is self‐evident. He is keen therefore, to examine the nature, the components of and the processes involved in organisational learning according to complexity theory. First, is the notion of feedback that needs to occur between interacting elements of a system and should ideally be both positive and rich. As the author comments (p. 18), “we have to recall that the root of feedback is food nourishment rather than simply information”, although what this implies in the school context is not entirely clear.

Another key feature of the learning organisation as defined by complexity theory is connectedness which is conceptualised in terms of relationships between teams, between subsystems and between the institution and its environment. These relationships are perceived to be mutual rather than one way and operate on an interpersonal level defined by trust between equal partners. The centrality of relationships to connectedness, it is suggested, highlights the importance of leaders acknowledging and understanding the micropolitics of the organisation in order to effect change.

Communication is a further fundamental process of the learning organisation according to complexity theory requiring that open ended and lateral communication should replace vertical communication by means of networked structures characterised by multiple forms, multiple channels and openness.

Having outlined the main features of complexity theory, the remainder of the book explores the implications of the theory for school leadership. As Morrison is at pains to point out, the implications of adopting complexity theory are not part of the theory itself, but are the consequences of the theory. This portrayal of school organisation viewed through the lens of complexity theory is embellished with examples of events taken from the empirical world of schools. The liberal use of metaphor strengthens the explanatory power of the book further. For example, the so‐called “Red Queen” effect inspired by Lewis Carroll has a particular poignancy given the intensification of schools’ day‐to‐day operations.

The challenges then for those “higher emergent forms of school leadership” that are considered amenable to complexity theory are to foster, nurture and enable the processes involved in organisational learning for promoting the emergence of self‐organisation within a turbulent and unpredictable world.

Leadership in schools from the point of view of the author is at “bifurcation point”. This is one example of many rather esoteric terms employed in the book, and is another way of saying that in the midst of endemic change in education, a different kind of leadership seems to be required from that which applied to schools operating in less complicated and relatively stable circumstances.

In a contemporary environment, the “command and control mentality” of bureaucratic organisations is deemed to be anachronistic. Instead, leadership that promotes self‐organisation and emergence needs to be based on democratic, person centred and relational styles of leadership. To this end, transformational leadership is considered to be insufficient because it remains potentially controlling and is not conducive to notions of emergence and self‐organisation that are fundamental to complexity theory. Rather, transcendental, distributive, servant and quantum leadership are seen as representing more appropriate approaches to the contemporary school environment because of their emphasis on open‐endedness, unpredictability and interpersonal relationships. It is these kinds of leadership, it is argued, that are best suited for harnessing organisational learning through the development of organisational intelligence and an ability to learn from internal and external environments.

So what is the value of complexity theory for understanding schools as organisations and guiding appropriate leadership practices? As the author concedes (p. 191), several of the ideas in the book stand up by themselves without needing the crutch of complexity theory. Indeed, most literature written in the last ten years on educational leadership or school improvement is likely to chart similar territory. For example, concepts such as organisational learning, emotional intelligence, communication, teamwork, knowledge management have almost become touchstones for various theories about how schools might operate It is these considerations that lead to the author's provocative question at the end of the book – is complexity theory redundant? Does it represent just another branch of educational theory artificially grafted onto an already bloated corpus of alternative leadership models?

Morrison thinks not. The value of complexity theory for him lies in its capacity to inform the development of practice in leadership coherently and richly and to suggest new paths to follow in an ever‐changing world. Furthermore, leaning heavily on Evers and Lakomski's work on theory preference, he argues that the validity and utility of complexity theory will stand the test in terms of the virtues of coherence, consistency, comprehensiveness, simplicity, generalizable potential and fecundity.

Hence, Morrison is sanguine about the prospects of complexity theory for school leadership gaining acceptance. Indeed in the final sentence of the book he claims that the time for complexity theory has come, almost as though the arrival of the theory is tantamount to a paradigm shift. This is a brave claim to make. First, it is by no means clear from the book, if complexity theory really presents a different theoretical position informing the practice of leadership or whether it is simply a new “bumper sticker” for existing constructs. In other words, the question is raised as to whether complexity theory genuinely possess the functional efficiency to bind together pre‐existing theories of schools as organisations, such as those of Greenfield, Ball and Sergiovanni, in order to generate a more robust and coherent theory of school leadership?

Ultimately, of course, regardless of how convincing the book may be in validating complexity theory as theory, its legitimacy will be determined by the extent to which the theory contributes in practice to the perceived crisis in school leadership and by its capacity to generate school improvement. The future of complexity theory in education remains speculative, but if it fails to make a positive impact on teaching and learning outcomes in schools, Morrison's own question about whether the theory is redundant or not will be answered unequivocally.

In sum, complexity theory represents an interesting development in the understanding of organisations that helps to challenge current orthodoxies and has the potential to provide some explanatory unity in the field of leadership studies. Keith Morrison's book is a valuable introduction to the theory and is especially commendable in its attempt to apply complexity theory to the educational context.

As such, the book is likely to have appeal for academics who are interested in examining the changing discourse of education management and its implications for the practice of school leadership. At a time when new processes of principals’ professional development are evolving, the book may also provide an additional reference point for guiding content of programmes as well as clarifying the values and assumptions of the next generation of educators who will be leading reformed institutions into the future.