System Leadership Development - Capacity Building
"Actions that lead to an increase in the collective power of a group to improve students achievement."
Dr Michael Bezzina
Mr Greg Thornton
Linda Burney - Inaugural speech in 2003 - A place of many stories
- Challenge the 'rhetoric'
- What does "collaboration" really mean? Is there a sheared understanding of certain terms?
- Deep Learning, sustaining learning
- System leadership is challenging- there will be tension- we have the opportunities to work within this tension and gain coherence in our work.
LoLs are in a unique experienece to engage and bring coherence within and across schools. How do we share knowledge across schools and cross "pollinate"
- From expert to sense-maker
One might ask what it is that we offer people as system leaders if we do not bring certainty. Once we cease being the “imported expert” we need to offer instead a sophisticated set of skills in stimulating discussion, challenging thinking and synthesising group perspectives -and perhaps a sense of being a leader as learner, someone open and curious - as together groups work to make sense of their purpose and the way they pursue it.
REFLECTION POINT: What skills can I offer as a facilitator of sense making? How can I be “leader” in sense making?
- From builder to pollinator
In an emergence paradigm, we need to come to understand our work with individual schools and teams not as a series of “one-off” encounters in which we follow pre-determined blueprints to produce pre-determined outcomes, but as opportunities in which schools and teams are assisted to nurture their own capacity, and to give expression to our wider moral purpose in context. Moreover, each of us, as a system leader, is called to share the emerging wisdom from these encounters as we move across the system, “noticing and amplifying” - taking the pollen of good ideas and innovative and effective practice from school to school, team to team, school to team in order to nurture growth and capacity wherever we go, while recognising that we too grow through the experience. We are the only people in the system with the capacity to do this intentionally and regularly.
REFLECTION POINT: What are my strategies for “noticing” and “amplifying”?
- From map to compass
In traditional bureaucracies we rely on detailed plans, usually issued from on high, to maintain direction - road maps if you like, with each waypoint plotted. Our roles in these systems tend to be to receive the map and to steer schools and teams along the predetermined roadways. In creative, adaptive systems much more attention is devoted to the compass-bearing (the moral purpose). Our roles become focussed on assisting people to appreciate and give expression to that moral purpose and to determine which are the best roads to take in any given context - recognising that the multitude of schools and teams, while headed in the same direction, will likely be journeying on different roads to get there.
REFLECTION POINT: How can I enrich my understanding of our system moral purpose to be able to assist schools in its pursuit?
- From giving directions to making spaces.
Recognising that we are working for consistency of purpose rather than uniformity of practice, we need to find ways of making the space in which people can engage with the big questions, what they mean in each context, and how they are to engage with them in their particular community. Telling people what to do - and how - is a simple (and relatively quick) response. We know, though, that this does not engender capacity in the system, nor does it build ownership. The challenge for us is to find or create “spaces” - not just the right rooms but more importantly (and in increasing order of challenge!) the right sharing technologies, sufficient time, and a climate of openness, ownership and engagement.
REFLECTION POINT: What is one part of my work which might particularly benefit from my making “space”?
- From outsider to participant
Whatever our role, we cannot hope to make space, to help colleagues in making sense, to act as a moral compass, to gather the pollen of good thinking and practice, if we are dispassionate and detached outsiders to the work of schools and teams. Leaders in an emergence paradigm need to be prepared to roll up their sleeves and be a part of the learning journey, sharing the questions and the uncertainties, whether it is with a grade team in a primary school, a whole secondary staff, a cluster of schools, a regional principals’ group, colleagues across the system in literacy work, the senior staff of SCS or indeed the SCS Leadership team.
REFLECTION POINT: Compare the outcomes of projects in which you have been more directly engaged with those in which you have been an outsider. To what extent does this experience bear out this shift?
- From cog to community member
In the traditional bureaucratic paradigm, each member is seen as a cog, with a circumscribed motion and a limited number of other cogs with which to interact. Cogs do what they are designed for - no more, no less. No cog can influence the nature of the machine of which it is part. If we consider ourselves as community members instead, we come to appreciate that we are part of a social ecology which is growing towards a shared moral purpose - interacting with many other members, both formally and informally and giving expression to our individual gifts singly and in concert with others. In this way, each of us has a capacity for influence, and groups of us even more so. In sharing in the capacity for influence, we share in the responsibility - whether we be a Director, a LOL, an EO, a Consultant or a Head. When frustrated we can’t blame “them”. There is only “us”!
REFLECTION POINT: Do you believe you have a capacity for influence within the system? How can/do you exercise this?
