Leadership and Rocket Science

Twenty years of leadership development in the academic world has taught me that independent and international school headship isn’t rocket science. It’s harder. There are more variables, and many of the variables have independent minds and wills of their own. For the school head, control is at best an illusion, and a dangerous one at that. Prediction is for the most part nonexistent. The same solution applied to different schools will have wildly opposite effects.Rocket science rests on predictability and control because the physical sciences themselves are all about prediction and control; about calculating within narrow tolerances the outcomes of various actions. Airplanes can fly more than 7,000 miles and land within a 5-minute window predicted before takeoff because so many parameters can be known. Not so management, and even less so school leadership. How many teachers will support a change in schedule? Well, the same change might happen with no opposition in School A, yet go down in flames in School B just three blocks away in the same city.Even the “dismal science” of economics yields greater certainty of outcome than school leadership. But, economics is more like school leadership than rocket science—the best macro-economic strategy founders against the micro-economic effects of fear and greed in individual investors or organizations.To say that private, independent schools are emotionally complex environments is at best an understatement. Board and administrative aspirations for the school collide daily with the anxieties of parents about their children’s futures. Faculty preferences for autonomy and independence collide with the need for a coherent curriculum and pedagogy, School schedules and curricular scopes and sequences get hijacked when the occasional drama of family life turns a community upside down via a student suicide. Sub-constituencies pit themselves against each other in ways that mimic big-city political life.No, school leadership isn’t rocket science. It is harder, because so much is just beyond our grasp.