The Ambidextrous School and School Leader

Awhile back I came across a version of this phrase, ‘The Ambidextrous Organisation’ in the excellent Be Radical Substack which I’d strongly encourage you to sign up to. This is often written by Pascal Finette or Jeffrey Rodgers of Be Radical. This particular post was written by Jeffrey and a number of things resonated with me about the ‘seeing-being’ gap for companies.

This came back to the forefront of my mind after discussions with two executive school leadership teams as I began to think about what being ‘ambidextrous’ might mean to schools and education leaders.

In the post, Jeffrey references Amy Webb who talks about the need to meaningfully integrate foresight with strategy. I think this is largely missing in the education system with measures of ‘success’ generally being quite limiting and limited. Jeffrey suggests going a step further and that translating organisational vision not only into strategy but into actual action and then sustaining a productive conversation between vision and action probably requires a deeper dual capability that they describe to their clients at radical as a kind of “ambidexterity.”

Whilst different education systems have different requirements around planning from a minimum of annual plans to some requiring 5-year plans with 1-year implementation plans, I’m really not confident that many school leaders are encouraged to really explore foresight and what it might bring to the school community.

There is an inherent tension between adopting such an approach and wondering what the next political leaders will be requiring schools to focus on, which brings me to a number of possible meanings to ‘The Ambidextrous School and School Leader’.

I think the most effective school leaders are already ambidextrous in their leadership.

Whilst this is most likely to be focused on short-term improvements, their ability to lead the school in the best direction for the school community alongside effectively keeping all of the potentially contradictory processes, structures, and success metrics required by the system in which they operate.

From recent discussions with executive leadership teams, it is apparent that where there is more of a challenge is enabling their school and leadership within the school to become ambidextrous.

What I mean by this is creating the climate and culture where all are encouraged to explore what might be in 5/10 years’ time, adopting a foresight attitude, alongside what’s important and expected now.

When I distil this down to its simplest form, everything should be as simple as possible but not simpler, it’s about 2 things.

One, change management.

Two, quality conversations which are a pre-requisite to many things including successful change management.

I am excited to partner with these executive leadership teams to firstly unpack ‘The Myriad of Leadership Conversations’ tools and frameworks, and to build in further pondering on finding/creating change management tools and frameworks that might be useful.

Watch this space, and be curious to hear from others about tolls and frameworks they’ve found useful in successful change management, which for me, is inextricable tied to changing cultures which I believe happens through quality conversations.