Is our thinking about school complexity complex enough?
Much of school leadership discourse rests on a quiet assumption that leadership is something leaders do to organisations.
Even when we adopt the language of complexity (emergence, systems, uncertainty) we often retain a more comfortable belief underneath: that with enough skill, clarity or authority (and maybe even a hint of herosim), leaders can still steer the school toward intended outcomes. The assumption of linearity and control underpins most change management models and much of implementation science. Problems are diagnosed, solutions are designed, fidelity is monitored and variation is treated as noise to be reduced. These approaches are not unintelligent or ill intentioned. They are internally coherent. The problem is that they are built on a fundamentally different ontology to schools understood as complex adaptive systems.
Change management and implementation science tend to assume that:
desired practices can be specified in advance
variation is a problem to be minimised
fidelity is a proxy for effectiveness
leadership influence is directional and stabilising
Complexity theory assumes something quite different, that:
practice emerges, it is not installed
variation is inevitable and the spark of innovation
outcomes emerge from interaction, not compliance
leadership influence is relational, provisional and recursive
Trying to apply the first set of assumptions to systems governed by the second does not fail because leaders are insufficiently skilled. It fails because the underlying theory of how organisations work is mismatched to reality.
This creates an uncomfortable tension for school leaders. We are given titles, paid for leadership, are looked to by a colleagues for direction and held accountable for organisational success yet complexith theory suggests that leadership does not work the way our job descriptions imply.
Dennis Tourish questioned whether our thinking about complexity is complex enough, suggesting five propositions for a more congruent relationship between a complexity ontology and life as a leader. Below are these propositions and what they mean for leadership in schools. Before the propositions, one distinction matters.
Leadership is a process: emergent, relational, communicative.
Leaders are individuals formally positioned, resourced and held accountable.
Complexity theory does not remove responsibility from leaders. It reframes what leaders can reasonably be responsible for.
Holding that distinction matters, because confusion between the two creates unrealistic expectations of ourselves and of others.
Proposition 1
Leaders deal with contingencies and possibilities, not linear sequences
Indeterminacy, uncertainty and unpredictability are ever present in complex systems. They cannot be eliminated. Leaders and followers co-construct their understanding of what is happening and what matters.
What this means for school leadership
Improvement in schools does not unfold as a sequence of steps. Plans interact with workload, values, history, capability and local interpretation.
The same initiative will be enacted differently across departments, year groups and individuals because meaning is made locally.
Planning still matters but it does not remove uncertainty, it frames how people respond to it. This places limits on implementation models that assume clarity up front can eliminate variation downstream.
The leadership task is not to eliminate ambiguity but to help people act coherently within it.
What this disrupts
The belief that better planning guarantees predictable outcomes
The assumption that deviation equals failure
The idea that clarity means certainty
Proposition 2
Leaders are part of the complexity they are trying to manage
Leaders cannot stand outside the system and influence it objectively. They are shaped by the same dynamics they seek to shape.
What this means for school leadership
Leaders’ presence changes the room whether we intend it or not. Leaders’ reactions become signals. Leaders’ stress and their opinions travel faster than their strategy. In implementation terms, leaders are never neutral drivers of change; they are among the most powerful variables shaping how change is interpreted.
Leaders cannot simply observe patterns because the way they speak, decide, respond to pressure and handle uncertainty becomes part of the system’s behaviour.
Leadership therefore becomes a reflexive activity, in this case requiring an understanding of positionality usually reserved for academics.
What this disrupts
The idea of the leader as an omnipotent seer of truth
The fantasy of objectivity
The belief that self awareness is optional
Proposition 3
Leadership emerges through communication, not position
Leadership is claimed, enacted, modified and accepted through communicative processes. Titles grant access, not influence. This helps explain why formally well designed initiatives can stall, while unofficial practices spread rapidly. Communication, not design quality, is the primary vehicle of influence.
What this means for school leadership
Authority does not guarantee leadership. Leadership is negotiated through:
whose interpretations stick
who is listened to
what becomes taken for granted
which narratives gain traction
In schools, leadership is often accepted in some spaces and resisted in others. Influence is local, contextual and provisional.
What this disrupts
The belief that announcements produce alignment
The assumption that authority equals impact
The idea that leadership is something you have
Proposition 4
Leader and follower identities are unstable and evolving
Leader and follower roles are communicatively co-constructed and there are no followers in a complex system.
What this means for school leadership
People move between leading and following constantly. A teacher may lead learning while following organisational constraints. A middle leader may have authority in one context and none in another. Senior leaders may follow expertise they do not possess.
Leadership is not vertically distributed so much as situationally enacted. This sits uneasily with models that allocate responsibility for change solely by role rather than by where influence is actually exercised.
What this disrupts
Fixed role descriptions as predictors of behaviour
Simplistic models of distributed leadership
Binary thinking about leaders and followers
Proposition 5
Conflict is often rational, not a misunderstanding
Conflict frequently reflects differentiated interests, not confusion. It may be resolved, suppressed or institutionalised through communication. In implementation terms, unresolved tensions are often mislabelled as resistance, when they are signals of competing but legitimate priorities.
What this means for school leadership
Disagreement in schools often reflects real tensions:
workload versus aspiration
accountability versus autonomy
pace versus depth
Advocated practices versus underlying beliefs
Suppressing conflict reduces adaptive capacity. Harmony can become performative. Silence can be strategic.
The task is not to eliminate conflict but to work with it as information.
What this disrupts
The assumption that consensus equals alignment
The framing of dissent as negativity
The desire to smooth complexity away
Holding the contradiction
Taken together, these propositions describe a form of leadership that is:
less about control and more about attention
less about certainty and more about sense making
less about direction setting and more about pattern shaping
And yet leaders remain accountable. Decisions still have to be made. Consequences still exist. The work of school leadership is not to resolve this contradiction, but to inhabit it more skilfully: not pretending we can control complex systems, not retreating into passivity and not mistaking managerial certainty for leadership effectiveness. This requires leaders to unlearn some of what change management has taught them, while retaining responsibility for direction, coherence and moral purpose.
I sometimes feel leadership in schools requires a perpetual inhabiting of paradox. You dissect that thoroughly here.