Emergent Leadership: A New MetaParadigm of Education Reform

High-performing, high-poverty schools (HP2S) highlight the need for a new paradigm based on the science of complexity. Organizations have been described as complex, living systems of interacting human agents coadapting and coevolving in multidimensional fashion across time and space to create, evaluate, and store organizational knowledge and learning (Stacey, 1996). Born of the great minds surrounding the development of the atomic bomb, the revolution of computer science, and divergent economic theories, the science of complexity has found a home in the hard sciences such as biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics while the softer science of education has only in the last decade begun to notice complexity as a potential source for attempting to understand the nature of the human systems that make up a school community (Berliner, 2002; Waldrop, 1992).

The basic premise that a complex, adaptive system cannot make predictions about outcomes longer than very short term flies in the face of the current educational practice of long-term strategic plans, comprehensive school improvement plans, and goal setting with detailed action steps (DuFour & Eaker, 1998; Wheatley, 2006). If complex systems are truly only knowable in the very short term, how can leadership take advantage of the lessons the science of complexity has to offer? Understanding the nature of complex systems and how those systems hold the ability to continually renew themselves offers building level leadership the exciting possibility of imagining ways to push those complex systems to the razor’s edge of order and chaos.

Exotic evolutionary notions of order, chaos, phase transition, order parameters, self-organization, fitness, creativity, and emergence define a complex system’s constraints for learning and renewal giving school communities the capacity for agency and social justice within and across boundaries defined by their sociocultural capital (Heylighen, 2002; Nasir & Hand, 2006). In other words, we may be able to conceptualize a new, encompassing cognitive archetype, or metaparadigm, of emergent leadership where capacity building in the complex school environment is driven by a principal’s ability to focus the collective school community network’s continual efforts for self-improvement on the sociocultural capital at hand in any given educational setting (Lambert, 2006).