Leadership | Fix-its and complexities

As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

This is a blog that promises only not to give solutions. That line must just be enough for you to stop here.

It seems as though much of what we pursue is driven by the need to be definitive on solutions, and that is a difficult idea to hold with assertion. . To do so puts us in danger of being immediate in thinking our role is merely seeking solutions: certainly, it is easier work to exist in a fix-it culture than it is to acknowledge the nuances of culture and maintain a standard around such nuances. Yet fix-it culture threatens the foundations on which schools are built. It disempowers and disengages those who drive it. And the navigation of complexity demands that we look beyond just looking for answers to our problems.

A fix-it culture not only positions one or two as highly skilled workmen, with a disregard for the collective work undertaken for school improvement to endure over time, but it fails to acknowledge that to be effective in improving education for children and creating a culture where teachers thrive, this needs school leaders that see beyond fix-its and instead, be able to handle the contexts and journeys of individual settings with a sensitivity and dignity that complexity requires to be handled well. Further to this, if others are involved in being brought in to understand such complexity, as opposed to just exposure of the solution, these colleagues will then reach school leadership without a developed mental models of the types of tensions they may face in future.

If we look only at the problems we face to be nothing more than the absence of a solution, we do the problem a disservice of not understanding the it a little better. Challenges that schools face are complex, but they map across a multitude of domains and cause to influence a range of people as a result. If we make a change to feedback policy, this carries ramifications to teacher workload, curriculum design, assessment, professional development, teaching and learning and depending upon the point of design and delivery, behaviour and culture of lessons. It becomes somewhat of a spread-cause and a spread-effect. Instigating an intention to change the process means to recognise that any change will subsequently create an avalanche of involuntary micro-changes that established leaders will anticipate, mitigate against such tensions to consider the opportunity cost. If we see whole class feedback as a panacea without understanding the nature of its design, it might result in a mental sprint to the envisaged solution. To consider a problem rather than a solution move us beyond fit-it mindset, because we begin to think about who it will impact and where expertise or support mechanisms might be needed to ensure the change made attends to that problem in as many domains as possible, in a way that moves us all forward. What is less effective within the way we provide feedback? Who says so and how do we know? To what degree is this having an impact in other areas of school operation? If we intend to make an amendment to the way we currently work, where will tensions be most likely to arise? If these questions are not posed ahead of change, then the very best solution is worthless, because it doesn’t serve those that it should.

This isn’t to propose that we stop dead in our tracks and revert to ultimate stasis because no decision is a good decision. The way education moves forward inevitably propels us along with it. Matthew Evans asserts that, ‘setting out to learn about the nature of something, rather than with the sole intent of judging the standard of something, changes the relationship with the phenomenon in question,’ and to do so can feel uncomfortable, because it reveals that so much of the standard of any change we make is unknown. How do you know what’s better? How can you determine what has been learned? How can we definitively understand that what we do here is good? We have to make choices, because children and communities require us to do so. Yet to do this with a hat tip to the entanglement of one problem against the next and the next again will never be possible if we do not realise the relationship that each of these choices have with one another, and the less obvious aspects of their form.

Consider the next time that you identify a problem and think about the nature of the problem itself. Look closely at the ‘human’ aspect of the problem’ a opposed to the operational aspect of the problem and who is getting a rough deal as a result. Hold a microscope to it and interrogate to what degree it deserves your (or a team’s) attention. Follow the roots of where it has grown; how it has permeated itself into other areas outside of the immediate domain and whether anyone else has made such observations. Deliberate with others as to whether it has been fully understood, and by whom, and what evidence is available from outside of their peripheral vision to say it has been understood sufficiently.

Schools exist as organisms as opposed to organisations: the plates beneath our feet shift with increased ferocity if we leap from one problem to the next, sticking plasters with haste as we go along. They demand for us all to understand them better if we are to work on a steadier, gradual trajectory of improvement, to reach the realisation that solutions are often just distractions in disguise, lying in the way of us getting to know problems better.

References

Eco, U. (2001). Foucault’s pendulum. Random House.

Evans, M., (2021), Getting the measure of a school, [online] https://educontrarianblog.com/2021/12/04/getting-the-measure-of-a-school/ [accessed 15th May 2021].