Be more strategic
It’s probably one of the most common pieces of advice given to school leaders. For some, being strategic means planning further ahead. For others, it means thinking bigger, being less reactive or focusing less on day to day detail.
In schools, the ambiguity matters. When being strategic is poorly defined, roles blur and workload quietly escalates. Senior leaders feel pulled into operational detail. Middle leaders feel stretched between delivery and direction. Teachers experience shifting priorities without clarity about who is deciding what, and why.
This post aims to define being strategic within a complex system.
Schools are complex systems
We operate under constant moral pressure, public scrutiny, regulatory constraint and human unpredictability. It easy easy to see why leadership work collapses:
urgent operational issues crowd out longer term thinking
coordination masquerades as strategy
Over time, this not only exhausts people but distorts the organisation because different kinds of leadership work are confused, collapsed or misallocated.
Levels of work
The core idea in this series comes from the work of Elliott Jaques on levels of work, made visible by Stefan in his essays on organisational phsyics. Jaques was not writing about schools but about organisations more generally. His central insight was that work differs in the complexity of judgement it requires and the time horizon over which decisions carry real consequences. In very simple terms:
some work focuses on immediate execution
some work coordinates and stabilises activity over time
some work shapes direction in relation to a changing environment
Schools struggle when we treat them as interchangeable; when we ask people to do strategic work without creating the conditions for it to be possible or sustainable.
Being strategic ≠ planning ahead
One common misunderstanding is to equate strategic leadership with long term planning. Planning matters, of course but in Jaques’ terms, planning is not what distinguishes strategic work. Strategic work is defined by what you are accountable for holding in view at the same time. Schools require leadership strategy in terms of:
maintaining a coherent relationship between the organisation and its environment
holding uncertainty and reconciling ambiguities
deciding which problems matter, not just how to solve the ones already named
shaping the conditions within which others can plan, decide and act well
This is qualitatively different from planning ahead, operational excellence or organisational coordination, even though all are essential.
Why school leaders struggle with being strategic
Schools are particularly vulnerable to role confusion for three reasons:
Moral purpose
The work feels urgent because it matters. Leaders step in just this once to help, fix, or protect and the exception becomes the norm. Teachers are busy and it feels like an act of service to help in the moment, in every moment.High visibility of operational problems
Timetables break, staff are absent, parents complain, lessons happen every hour. Strategic work is quieter and easier to crowd out. We’ll do it when the students have gone home or at the weekend.Weak shared language
We often lack a common way to describe different kinds of leadership work without sounding hierarchical or evaluative.
The result is a familiar pattern: senior leaders pulled downwards into day to day issues and middle leaders stretched thin because they often teach a signficant load and have the conceptiont that they need to be more strategic. As Stefan argues, these are organisational design issues, not necessarily a reflection on the individuals entangled within it.
What this series will explore
This post is about framing the problem. The posts that follow will get more concrete.
Across the series, I’ll think aloud to explore:
how levels of work apply to schools
how Stefan’s complexity categories show up in schools and how we might approach the conservation principle; seeking to influence where complexity lives in school
Stefan’s confusion tax applied to schools and how we might avoid it
Leadership, Rewritten’s Run / Serve Change in schools
how rituals and routines shape leadership
and what this all means for school leadership development
If we want schools that are adaptive rather than reactive, coherent rather than fragmented, and humane rather than exhausted, we need to be more precise about the work we are asking leaders to do and how we protect it. The next question, then, is not simply whether leaders understand what being strategic means but how we design our schools to enable strategic work to actually happen.
I look forward to reading the rest of the series. Great start.
The distinction between strategic and operational is something I've seen leaders struggle with constantly. The "moral purpose" trap is real, when stepping in to help becomes the default and suddenly there's no bandwidth left for actually shaping direction. I worked with a school where senior leadership spent 60% of their time on timetable fixes and abscence cover becuz "it's urgent," which meant actual strategic decisions got made reactively or not at all.