Enabling Transformational Complexity Leadership in Education

Abstract

This chapter answers calls for a transformational, distributed, action-centered approach to leadership to engage with, problematize, and take action to address complexities and challenges facing education. Complexity leadership theory is informed by complexity theory, grounded in complex adaptive systems, and characterized by multi-level, dynamic interactions, and emergence. The authors describe ways that their formal and informal leadership roles as consultant, administrator, academic, and teacher-leader, illustrate and illuminate the potential of complexity leadership for the education system. They explore this potential as embedded in the context of an action research project enacted across all levels of the education system. These leadership practices may motivate and encourage formal and informal leaders to consider purposeful, planned ways to enable transformative change within complex adaptive systems.