Is "Ed-leadership" Really "Ed-followership"?

Hey there,

Welcome to Provocation #38, where I’ll likely alienate even more of my education friends by challenging our current definition of ed leadership. Hope you stick with me.

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As always, thanks for reading. ~W

I spent most of yesterday reading and digesting a new paper authored by two people who have been great teachers for me over the last 10 years, Vanessa Andreotti and Peter Senge. If you’ve been following my work, you know that Vanessa’s books Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity literally changed the arc of my career. And when I was working with schools on change projects, Peter’s book Schools That Learn was a frame for much of what I was trying to accomplish.

That they have now co-written a piece titled Everything Is Nature: Meta-Relationality, Nervous Systems, Systems Thinking, and AI, and it’s kinda amazing. When you put two great minds together in pursuit of more deeply understanding this moment and what our next moves might be, the result is profoundly impactful. (Note: The writing can be a bit dense, but it’s definitely worth the struggle.) I’ll admit to a wide range of emotions at the end: anger, confusion, hope, frustration, and even joy, to name a few. It’s a wild ride.

Much of the anger and frustration part stems from how few educators and leaders have specifically started to wrap their brains around the metacrisis, AI, and the myth of separability at even a surface level. Here’s how they frame the current situation:

“Much of what passes for leadership in modern institutions is still shaped by a familiar image: the one who sees clearly, decides decisively, inspires others, manages uncertainty, and guides the group toward better outcomes. Even where this image has softened, become more participatory, more emotionally intelligent, more aware of complexity, it often remains anchored in the same underlying architecture. The leader is still the one expected to orient the field, absorb ambiguity, provide coherence, and convert difficulty into direction.

But what if the predicament we face exceeds what leadership, understood this way, can honestly promise? In conditions of systemic unraveling, ecological destabilization, ontological exhaustion, and intensifying contradiction, the fantasy of innocent leadership becomes especially dangerous” [Emphasis mine].

It happens that I read that the day after engaging in a fascinating conversation about school leadership with a group of alumni from my workshop that has been meeting regularly for the past four months. Of course, we framed the discussion through the lens of collapse; we were immersed in those conversations throughout the workshop and, for many, far beyond. And it occurred to us that what passes for “educational leadership” may actually be misnamed.

I know that being in a leadership position in schools right now is very challenging, metacrisis or not. To define true “educational leaders” as those who confront head-on the realities we face, question the system at its core, tell those truths clearly to their school communities, and then embark on collectively charting a more relevant path forward with an emphasis on learning, not schooling…that’s an extremely high bar of expectations right now. It’s more than unsettling and disorienting, and there’s actually not a lot of career upside to take all that on seriously.

Andreotti and Senge capture well what I think a lot of educators in general are experiencing in this fraught:

“When the ground that has oriented one’s life and work begins to shift, when the very terms through which reality has been made intelligible start to fray, the nervous system registers this as a threat to survival. Metabolically. What is under siege is not only the nervous system as a biological substrate but an identity structure the nervous system has been trained to protect: the separate self that experiences implication as threat, and cannot easily distinguish between a disturbance of concept and a disturbance of being.”

Schooling is under threat because the planet is under threat. The status quo is not sustainable. But our collective sense of separability, that myth that humans are separate from the planet and biosphere, is what puts us into protection mode, not for the collective but for ourselves. Remember, “Everything is Nature.” But this is where they suggest leadership is most needed right now, and they frame it as “stewardship.” And that work requires some massive shifts in practice:

“From this perspective, the first discipline of stewardship is not clarity but honesty. Honesty about complicity. Honesty about the limits of one's perception. Honesty about the seductions of authority. Honesty about the projections people place on leaders and the projections leaders place on themselves. Honesty about the costs that are being absorbed elsewhere in order to preserve coherence, comfort, legitimacy, or movement in the center.”

And so, it’s arguable (and I’m arguing it) that most in “educational leadership” positions are acting more like “educational followers” or managers who are content with tweaking their way into more “success” in the traditional sense, regardless of whether that traditional orientation is adding to the problems we’re facing, not mitigating them. Regardless if many of the practices they’re supporting stand in direct opposition to the ways in which humans learn best. They focus on treating the symptoms of the breakdown (technology, attendance, test scores, etc.), not the root causes.

To be frank, they are not about honesty in the sense described above. And that all just draws energy away from the conversations about the current realities of the world and of education that we need to be having.

I’m reminded of the famous scene in “A Few Good Men” where Jack Nicholson asks Tom Cruise, “You want the truth?” but then adds, “You can’t handle the truth!”

Can we handle the truth? Honestly, it doesn’t seem like it right now. We'd better figure that out, and quickly.

And just a final note: I’ll be sharing a bit about the AI part of the Andreotti/Senge paper in the Sunday wrap-up, but I seriously urge you to work your way through the whole thing. I’m telling you, the last part about schooling and AI will change the way you think about this moment.

What questions might you add to this process?