System Leadership Development

Leader of Learning

Professional Learning

Thursday 21 April

Capacity Building: 

Dr. Mick Bezzina, Dr Jayne-Louise Collins, Greg Thornton

"Beyond bureaucracy: learning in a complex system"

• "Creating an ecology for system learning"
• organisation or system is constituted of people and their relationships and ideas.
• Bring a lens of "complex adaptive systems" to Sydney Catholic Schools.
• Focused on inquiring into the moral purpose
• whole system capacity building
• leaders from multiple teams across the system
• Who were involved? Learning and Teaching AND RE!! (reps from each of these teams.)
• the project members were people who were leaders of learning and able to influence positive change within their team/ school. (both official and unofficial leaders)
• Louise Stoll (1990)" actions that are focused on deep and sustained learning for all people across all dimension of education system for the purpose of enhancing student learning."
• New Horizons- offers a look towards the future of hope, promise and optimism, yet equally with the challenge of change.
• seeking a new future/alternative perspective may mean getting "uncomfortable" 

Complex adaptive systems - What does this lens offer our understanding of organisations?

1. offers a living system perspective
2. open, dynamic and connected whole
3. all within the system participate in the relationships within the system (we need to accompany our colleagues in their goals and aims)
4. human capacities are integral to understanding complex human social systems (celebrate the diversity of people, understanding of complexities- shifts from corporate efficiency, budgets rigidity,)

What does the current lens offer?

• A given production system must combine inputs and process in order to produce output.
•  Harris (2010) open up to possibilities for other ways of thinking, working and being within education systems.
•  Jappinen, (2014) new territory requires shift in worldview, shift in paradigm - complex, emergent, relational
• Wheatley (2006) when we view from this perspective we enter into a new landscape - cannot be reduced to simple cause and effect.

Enactment of Leadership within the project:

• leaders created a strong narrative thread about moral purpose that was centred on the person of the learner.
• the focus was on Religious Leadership - it mattered to everybody - genuine question of Inquiry - it was a constant across the system capacity building- 
• purpose of the work was to enabling students to live lives of promise, service, flourishing - how do enable this? how do we understand what it is that teachers need?
• understanding your own identity - led to questions that mattered - what does this mean to me and my students?
• there will be a diversity of view- challenge didn't disconnect us- what connected us was our openness to learn from each other.
• collective identify was important - leaders created this strong narrative thread - expression were formed

1. renewed expression of leader identity
2. renewed and emergent knowledge of moral purpose and how it might be enacted
3. ways of being in the system that are dynamic and relational centred on enabling human capacity and potential

Leaders as active participants

1.  leader as learner - position ourselves as a "learner" and participation is essential - Being an observer does not connect you- being in it and among the work and the learning - they shared expertise and experience, tested theories, asked questions - movements were made sometimes UNCERTAINNESS AND POSSIBILITIES.we came back to where they started - but we learnt along the way 
2. fragmentations occurred - as the frameworks did not support some regions to participate at ground level - unless you are in the space with your colleagues - you don't experience the context.

• understanding of Leadership - Not as a management role - this caused some conflict as it challenged traditional forms of leadership. 
• presence and attentiveness to relationships built leadership capacity - "seed through people" reform of interactions /rather then the idea.... thats where changed occured.
• "seeding" attention to what happens IN people and in relationship with each other - the "way of being" was the reform.

Leaders created spaces for capacity building were open to possibility 

and centred on relationships of trust

• the learning enables capacity - we needed to break down barriers - free to work with people, directorates - to create opportunities to branch out where the questions lead me - Who do I need to work with to enhance my learning and build my and others capacity.

Coherence and Disruption:Leaders disrupted the usual stable 

and predictable ways of working and leading

• leaders a participants 
• leaders grounding the work in the vision/ shared understanding/purpose
• leaders struggle, are disrupted, uncomfortable, tensions.
• It was the disruption that caused the leaders to create a new way - new order... initiating and designing that were responsive to their own context. they looked in - whats happening for us - what do we need how might we lead for this?
• It was retrospectively that leadership members were able to value the experience of the "disruption" the lack of guidelines or directions from the outside- they stepped up and strive to design their own learning according to their own contextual need. 
• there were multiple localised levels of capacity building.  - sharing their insights- local learning - collectively became system learning. (REC cluster meetings - shared understanding - what inquiries do they have within their own schools and how can they learn from each other?Could Regional Meeting allow this work to unfold? JANE??)
• Some teams found the "diversity" a limitation - too many questions and challenges appeared - Focus was on efficient delivery , the discussions and differing world views - they couldn't work with the diversity - Space and Time to work this out - 
• Listen, seek to understand, reflected their thinking - therefore Leader as sense makers, Ask questions about what was blocking their learning. 

Conclusion:

• A system capacity for learning-  deliberate to drop the "building" not bigger - better.. change, flexible, responsive in complex and dynamic environments connected in relationship.
• there were personal and professional transformation.
• connectedness and skills gained to apply to diverse learning projects.