A Theory of Constraints

Ramallah, Palestine -

Today was a remarkable series of discussions about school leadership with principals, supervisors and trainers from the Education Ministry of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.  Several (most, really) talked at some length about the barriers to using leadership as a lever to improve schools; e.g., resource limits, macro-economic conditions, bureaucracy in the governmental sector, etc.  As they spoke, I could feel my energy draining as the enormity of the challenge of achieving change became evident--a challenge that surely exists in every bureaucracy around the world.

Nonetheless, toward the end of the day one of the supervisors remarked that a principal in her district had been quite successful at attracting external funding and implementing some very progressive changes in one rather remote school.  Wow!  Image that: despite being under the same administrative standards and curricular circumscriptions, this principal had, in some smallish ways, achieved what others said was nearly impossible.  

Without diminishing the significance of the constraints schools have here and everywhere, it certainly seems like this principal found work-arounds that stayed within the prescribed boundaries, yet still got outside the proverbial box.  And in this is a leadership lesson on how to achieve change in stuck systems.