Abstract
This chapter answers calls for a transformational, distributed, action-centered approach to leadership to engage with, problematize, and take action to address complexities and challenges facing education. Complexity leadership theory is informed by complexity theory, grounded in complex adaptive systems, and characterized by multi-level, dynamic interactions, and emergence. The authors describe ways that their formal and informal leadership roles as consultant, administrator, academic, and teacher-leader, illustrate and illuminate the potential of complexity leadership for the education system. They explore this potential as embedded in the context of an action research project enacted across all levels of the education system. These leadership practices may motivate and encourage formal and informal leaders to consider purposeful, planned ways to enable transformative change within complex adaptive systems.
TopIntroduction
The authors are two educators situated in both formal and informal leadership roles, grappling with the many unprecedented, complex, and evolving challenges facing today’s public education system. Within the education system, they have supported government, academia, in-service and pre-service teachers, and Kindergarten -- Grade 12 students, as they explore and address pressing issues affecting education. The authors find inspiration in the work of many colleagues who are also striving to empower learners to confront global, local, and educational complexities, and have witnessed abundant examples of transformational formal and informal leadership within the context of their provincial education system.
However, these leadership practices are not networked and often occur within localized, islanded communities. The potential for networked transformation, innovation, and adaptability within the education system is untapped. The authors see the need for leadership in education to be reconceptualized to address urgent issues affecting education systems, including human rights issues, social and economic inequities, global pandemics, democratic erosion, political instability and turmoil, climate change and sustainability, artificial intelligence, and growing technological demands as shown in Figure 1. They join the call for a transformational, distributed, action-centered approach to leadership (Harris, 2020) to engage with, problematize, and take action to address the complexities and challenges facing education. They propose that Complexity Leadership (Uhl-Bien, 2021a; Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2018; Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2007), informed by complexity theory, grounded in complex adaptive systems, and characterized by multi-level formal and informal interactions, flexibility, and adaptability, can equip educators with actionable strategies for responding to contemporary challenges in education.
The authors begin by placing themselves within the context of their provincial education system and by defining their roles as formal and informal education leaders. They then probe past and current definitions of leadership, as well as understandings of networked and distributed leadership models, that lead to their current understandings of Complexity Leadership in education. They describe the theoretical basis and qualities of Complexity Leadership, and through their lived experiences and leadership roles, they illustrate the potential for Complexity Leadership in the education system.
Figure 1. Urgent issues affecting education systems
The authors use the lens of a collaborative, participatory action research study and draw on their experiences and the development of the resources underpinning the study, to illustrate how creativity, innovation, adaptability, and emergence of ideas can be prompted and enabled through Complexity Leadership at all connected levels of the education system. They conclude the chapter with a discussion of the challenges for implementing a Complexity Leadership approach, suggestions and strategies for implementing Complexity Leadership in education, and implications for a Complexity Leadership approach to education and other complex adaptive systems.
TopLeadership Overview
Theories and concepts about formal leadership are wide ranging, divergent, contentious, and have significantly shifted and evolved over the last 100 years. Fennell (2021) traces the evolution of leadership theories and approaches in the health and human-service workforce, beginning with the “Great Man Theory” of the 1840s and leading to distributed leadership approaches and complexity theory applications in the 2000s. Recent approaches to leadership have included adaptive, authentic, ethical, spiritual, inclusive, servant leadership, transactional, transformational, distributive leadership, and complexity leadership, as well as many other diverse paradigms (Lundqvist et al., 2023; Northouse, 2022).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Agents: Agents in a complex adaptive system may be individuals, teams, schools, departments, or parts of the system.
Complexity Theory: Complexity theory is defined in many different ways. It has been defined as a theory of change and learning and can be used to describe ways that agents interacting in dynamic ways can change, adapt, learn, and create new properties and behaviours.
Emergence: When agents in a complex adaptive system interact with one another to produce new structures, behaviours, and qualities that are not found in the individual parts alone, this phenomenon is known as emergence.
Formal and Informal Leaders: Formal leaders have official status as a leaders and assigned leadership roles and responsibilities. Informal leaders have no official status as leader but they have influence within the system to enable dynamic interactions and emergence.
Complexity Leadership Theory: A leadership theory ( Uhl-Bien et al., 2007 ) grounded in complexity theory and about ways to enable interactive dynamics and emergence (learning, creativity, and adaptation) through informal and formal leadership functions and processes in complex adaptive systems.
System: A whole structure, organization, or organism consisting of many nested parts interacting together to meet the common goals.
Complex Adaptive Systems: Open, non-linear, unpredictable, distributed systems whose dynamic interactions and properties allow them to adapt to change, be self-organizing, emergent, adaptive, and connected.