Paradox(es) in Education

Scott D. Anthony’s article in the current issue (Winter 2024) of MIT Sloan Management Review, “The Hidden Opportunity in Paradoxes,” nudged us to consider the paradoxes we encounter in education. To our minds, leadership and innovation represent two shining examples.

Leadership

In 2015, Herminia Ibarra, in her Harvard Business Review article, “The Authenticity Paradox” (Jan-Feb 2015), underscores that leaders are told to be authentic in order to succeed, but she astutely points out that an authentic leader can struggle to develop because that leader is easily fixated on being true to themselves instead of becoming fixated on what is required to succeed in their given environment and context.

[C]areer advances require all of us to move way beyond our comfort zones. At the same time, however, they trigger a strong countervailing impulse to protect our identities: when we are unsure of ourselves or our ability to perform well or measure up in a new setting, we often retreat to familiar behaviors and styles. But my research also demonstrates that the moments that most challenge our sense of self are the ones that can teach us the most about leading effectively. By viewing ourselves as works in progress and evolving our professional identities through trial and error, we can develop a personal style that feels right to us and suits our organizations’ changing needs. That takes courage because learning, by definition, starts with unnatural and often superficial behaviors that can make us feel calculating instead of genuine and spontaneous. But the only way to avoid being pigeonholed and ultimately become better leaders is to do the right things that a rigidly authentic sense of self would keep us from doing.

She goes on to talk about how the word ‘authentic,’ when used to describe leadership, can be problematic, and the result is that today’s leaders struggle with authenticity for several reasons:

First, we make more-frequent and more-radical changes in the kinds of work we do. As we strive to improve our game, a clear and firm sense of self is a compass that helps us navigate choices and progress toward our goals. But when we’re looking to change our game, a too rigid self-concept becomes an anchor that keeps us from sailing forth. […]

Second, in global business, many of us work with people who don’t share our cultural norms and have different expectations for how we should behave. It can often seem as if we have to choose between what is expected—and therefore effective—and what feels authentic.

Third, identities are always on display in today’s world of ubiquitous connectivity and social media. How we present ourselves—not just as executives but as people, with quirks and broader interests—has become an important aspect of leadership. Having to carefully curate a persona that’s out there for all to see can clash with our private sense of self.

In our advisory work, we see this paradox on display with regularity, especially in schools in financial distress that have just hired a new head of school, and that may not have divulged the severity of the distress to the candidates during the search process. Suddenly, the new leader (who is likely a first-time head of school), who adheres to authenticity as a rigid self-concept (as Ibarra notes above), is confronted by a series of complex, interrelated levers and dials that require them to flex and learn how best to align to the needs of the organisation (many of those needs not being known by stakeholders), and they are unable or unwilling to do so, due to rigidity around authenticity. They use social media to project a certain image of themselves and the institution, feeding the rigid self-concept, and the issues are perpetuated. It is not an easy task, by any stretch of the imagination. Many first-time heads in such a situation feel overwhelmed and completely helpless, which can be compounded by other heads in similar circumstances, who are unwilling to talk about it, leading to an incorrect assumption that there aren’t that many schools in such situations. As Ibarra suggests, “[T]he only way to avoid being pigeonholed and ultimately become better leaders is to do the right things that a rigidly authentic sense of self would keep us from doing.”

Innovation

One of the interviews that Anthony conducted with a lawyer seeking to innovate within a law firm resonated, due to similar encounters (of our own) in independent and international schools. The lawyer said, “[W]e’re meant to be doing innovation, which by definition is new, but if it’s too new, nobody actually wants to do it because they want to see some proof, or they want some reassurance that it’s going to work.” (Anthony, 30). Many schools are the same way, as evidenced most recently in our leading a session of ‘risk and innovation in schools’ at a conference for K-12 international schools in Southeast Asia, where participants from the region (China, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan) stated that, at the governing board level (if not at the senior leadership level), innovative projects were only being embraced if the decision (whether to pursue the projects in question) could be made on past precedent, or with a guarantee of success. That paradox can create a feeling of disempowerment, as well as quash opportunities to talk about the nature and [operational] governance of innovation. As Anthony notes, “Loss aversion and the status quo bias means people prefer avoiding risks over taking them” (30).  [For further reading, see S.D. Anthony and M. Putz, “How Leaders Delude Themselves About Disruption” MIT Sloan Management Review 61.3 (2020): 35-42]

How to move forward?

A compelling study by an international group of researchers offers a way forward, the paradox mindset. In their article, “Microfoundations of Organizational Paradox: The Problem Is How We Think About The Problem” (Academy of Management Journal 61.1 (2018): 26-45), co-authors from the UK, US, Israel, and Singapore highlight what they learned in their research, namely around sense-making and cognitive processes to help employees cope and thrive. This mindset concept holds that viewing a paradox as an opportunity, as opposed to a hindrance, can boost creativity and organisational performance. Anthony highlights three ways in which this mindset can be approached: (1) screening (via a brief diagnostic at https://paradox.lerner.udel.edu) to determine whether one is predisposed to this mindset; (2) using prompts (from the diagnostic) before a group discussion to help people consider multiple possibilities--relying on research showing that starting a meeting by stating that tensions create possibilities helps the group to adopt more of the mindset in question; and (3) developing the paradox mindset by building cognitive complexity through development plans that give participants experience launching new products (or services), or building new organisational capabilities — or even going on a ‘paradox quest’ that would be unusual for the participant, taking them out of their comfort zone by requiring them to learn something completely outside their area of comfort and/or expertise. (Anthony, 31-32).

This last point ties in with what we have written in earlier posts, with respect to leadership development programmes: they are in need of a serious overhaul. If leading a school today requires a practitioner to understand and encounter the authenticity paradox, the status quo bias and loss aversion as key detractors from innovation, among other paradoxes in our sector, why would we not design fresh programming around those principles, instead of adhering to (arguably) anachronistic leadership development principles? Perhaps that question itself points toward the status quo bias.