Perspectives
Writing on culture, leadership and governance
Essays on why capable people in schools repeat patterns that do not serve them, and what changes when the conditions underneath are made visible.
Why Strategic Plans Lose Contact With Everyday Decisions
Most strategic plans aren't abandoned. They're approved, and then quietly overtaken by a year of sensible decisions that nobody connected back to them.
Read this →What School Culture Looks Like Under Pressure
Culture is usually described in calm conditions. It becomes legible in a bad week, when nobody has time to do things the way the handbook says.
Read this →Why Capable Leadership Teams Keep Having the Same Conversation
Somebody says we've talked about this before, and they're right. The conversation keeps coming back because what's being solved each time is the instance, not the pattern.
Read this →Why Improvement Fragments On Its Way Through a School
A decision made in one room arrives in another as something slightly different. Nobody misheard it. Each layer translated it reasonably, and the versions accumulated.
Read this →The Hidden Ecology
People are remarkably adaptive. The deepest work of learning, leadership and governance is cultivating conditions where attention can be invested in meaningful work rather than unnecessary self-protection.
Read this →Designing What Matters
Attention is the resource that determines whether a human system thinks well or poorly. Six principles describe the conditions that decide where a school's attention actually goes.
Read this →You Can't Bring Back New Eyes
Organisations change when they increase their capacity to think together. Why professional development so often fails to travel back into the school that paid for it.
Read this →These essays sit underneath the workshops. Beneath the Waterline turns the ideas in The Hidden Ecology into six encounters a leadership team works through together. The Waterline Lab applies the same lenses to a school's own recurring problems, and Designing the Waterline installs one routine that holds. Boards work the same diagnostic through Strategy by Design.