Leadership Metatheory: Fostering Transformative Leadership in the Face of Complexity

• In Event: Assessing Leadership for Adaptive Change Through the Lens of Complexity Theory

Abstract

Objectives
Those who seek to understand and support school leaders cannot do so without attaining an adequate interpretive context. This paper aims to serve this end by developing a theoretical framework for leadership that integrates complexity theory (Stacey, 1996), systems thinking (Meadows, 1999), and research on adult development (Smith & Pourshot, 2013). The paper aims to bring key ideas and findings about complexity, systems and adult development together to improve our understanding of what school leadership requires and how we can best think about the challenges and possibilities for school leaders in the 21st century.

Theoretical framework, methods and data sources
In my work with urban principals over the past four years I have joined a growing chorus of scholars who describe and interpret schools as complex systems (Davis & Sumara, 2001; 2006; Morin, 2001; Opfer & Pedder, 2001). The strengths and weaknesses of this scholarship are addressed in this paper by bringing together systems thinking, complexity theory, and developmental frameworks under the meta-theoretical umbrella of Integral Theory (Forman & Ross, 2013; Wilber, 2000; 2006). Integral Theory is uniquely situated to serve as both an interpretive framework and an orienting operating system for leaders (Brown, 2011; 2012; Esbjorn-Hargens, 2010; Fuhs, 2008).

Findings
Integral Theory posits the existence of four irreducible and interdependent domains of reality—the interiors and exteriors of individuals and collectives (the objective, subjective, interobjective, and intersubjective aspects of all experience) (Wilber, 2006). Complex theory and systems thinking are helpful for disclosing the self-organized, emergent, nested, interdependent, ambiguously bounded and yet structure-determined aspects of experience. But complexity theory and systems thinking struggle to acknowledge and explain the subjective and intersubjective aspects of experience that play such an important role in human systems. These perspectives tend to reduce reality to interobjective systems, and this theoretical reduction has real consequences for how leadership is understood and enacted. To correct for and integrate the important but partial truths that complex systems thinking discloses, I follow Forman and Ross (2013), Fuhs (2008), and Wilber (2006) by outlining an integral theory of leadership that integrates human subjectivity and human development into a more comprehensive meta-theoretical framework.

Scholarly Significance
If we are to understand educational leadership and related change we must find a way to explicate the qualities of individual leadership in the context of systems. To understand the demands of leadership in complex systems we need to understand the distinctions between qualitatively different structures of perception and interpretation available to leaders. Without a framework to help us understand what constitutes leadership development and how to foster such development, idealized leadership descriptions will not fulfill their practical aims. The integration of complex systems thinking and developmental research allows us to place partial theories of leadership into a coherent, research-based context. Surfacing the developmental trajectory of leadership capacity also offers the added benefit of pointing us more concretely toward specific practices that can enable such development.

Author

• Brad Kershner, Boston College