Fearless Schools by Douglas Reeves

Author:Douglas Reeves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing Company
Published: 2021-05-19T14:56:54+00:00

Chapter 7.

Organizational Resilience

In this chapter—

• Anticipating Disruption

• Defining the Environment: The Unknown Unknowns

• Disciplined Decision-Making

• Discretion, Collaboration, and Centralization

David Denyer reviewed more than 180 academic articles and a set of international case studies on organizational resilience. He defines the term as follows: “Organizational resilience is the ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper” (Denyer, 2017, p. 3). Resilience is essential for organizations that face challenges, especially challenges that threaten the survival of the organization and people within it. In seeking to become more resilient, organizations take two strikingly different paths: defensive, stopping bad things from happening; and progressive, making good things happen. In the early stages of a crisis, organizations trend to be defensive: They stay inside during the threat of virus, focus on learning the fundamentals of reading and math for underperforming schools, police the streets in high-crime areas. These are all rational reactions to current threats. But when systems are stuck in this mode of defensive thinking, they rely on monitoring and compliance, tactics that eventually demoralize people within the organization and those they wish to serve. To break out of a compliance-dependent system, organizations must be sufficiently adaptive and flexible to innovate solutions that are lasting. The research on organizational thinking suggests that leaders engage in paradoxical thinking—that is, “balancing preventative control, mindful action, performance optimization and adaptive innovation, and managing the tensions inherent in these distance perspectives” (Denyer, 2017, p. 8). In the context of educational systems, this requires that schools not only embrace technology but also maintain one-to-one relationships between students and teachers with and without new technologies. Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that interpersonal contacts through old-fashioned telephones, sidewalk visits, and other personal connections—all at a safe distance—are better than the illusion that mere placement of a computer in the hands of a child guarantees connection, engagement, and learning. In this chapter we will explore how resilient schools anticipate disruptions. This extends far beyond the traditional drills for fires and tornadoes and includes a wide range of scenario planning. Next, we will consider defining the environment with a candid acknowledgment of what we know and what remains unknown. While leadership decision-making is never perfect, it can be improved with discipline and an understanding that uncertainty and luck, as well as good strategy, influence every outcome. Finally, we will consider the types of decisions made in every educational system, from groups of teachers to large and complex systems. Some decisions are discretionary, some require collaboration, and others depend upon centralized authority. The tough part is deciding which decisions fit best with which level of decision-making, and then communicating that clearly throughout the organization

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.