Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

Schools Are Complex Adaptive Systems, Not Complicated Machines with Nick Hart

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 312

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Nick Hart is the Principal at Horizon English School in Dubai, part of the Cognita global network of schools.  Nick holds an MBA in International Educational Leadership and has authored two books on educational leadership, focusing on its cultural and impact domains.

A  Few Quotes From This Episode

  • "Schools are complex adaptive systems, not complicated machines."
  • “There is no such thing as a follower; everyone nudges the organization toward purpose.”
  • “Feedback loops in schools might not show up for weeks, months, or even years.”
  • “Leadership isn’t a hero up on the balcony, it’s about helping others hold ambiguity.”
  • “Designing decision clarity early is one of the most powerful things you can do as a leader.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. 

About  Scott J. Allen

My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective.



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Scott Allen:

Okay, everybody. Welcome to Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today I have Nick Hart. And I'm going to start by letting you have an opportunity to share how we came to be. But I know that you attended this event with the Center for Creative Leadership and the International Leadership Association in Singapore. So maybe tell listeners a little bit about you and what you do. And then I'm excited for this conversation. I think we're going to talk about a context we haven't often discussed on this podcast, but it's a critical context. Sir, welcome.

Nick Hart:

Thank you, Scott. Yes, I'm a school principal from the UK, but based in Dubai at the moment. So I work for an international school group called Cognita, who has schools all across the world. My school is Horizon English School in Dubai. It's one of the highest performing schools in the group and has a great reputation locally in Dubai as well. And my I suppose my involvement here is an interest in leadership and leadership development. The CCL, their work, I think, is becoming increasingly picked up by school leaders. And I think there is a really a really interesting opportunity for school leaders to learn from other domains in what has historically been quite a narrow kind of academic field, if you like. So the opportunity to learn from other industries, I think, is one that that CCL offers to school leaders, which hopefully I can elaborate on a little bit today.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, for sure. I'm excited for this conversation because I think the attributes, and I'm sure someone's done this research, any person is in a position of authority. I mean, you have an educator, you have a coach, you have a manager, a leader, a parent. I think if we were to do the research across all of those different domains, and what is it that makes a really effective coach or a really effective minister or pastor or spiritual leader, there's commonalities. There's a lot of commonalities, really cool commonalities. One would be look, is this person incredibly skilled at building relationships? You're a principal or a teacher working in a classroom or a coach or a minister. That's a skill you need. So it's fun because, yes, what we're learning in some of these other contexts, I think there's direct application, right? Definitely.

Nick Hart:

And I think that one on building relationships is particularly important in schools. We've got everyone is leading a group of people at some point. A teacher spends all day, every day leading a group of students through their learning for the day. And then you've got different layers of leadership that it interact in lots of ways. And that's one of the I think one of the most compelling models that the CCL has made a bit more widespread is that one, the DAC model, the direction alignment commitment. And everybody in a school contributes to the direction, the extent to which those efforts are aligned, and then how committed everyone is to doing that, regardless of role. And I like to think that in schools, which are complex adaptive systems, that there is no such thing as a follower. Everyone has a responsibility to nudge us all in a direction that serves ultimate purpose. Schools are social places that we're all fulfilling a moral duty of educating the next generation. And so I don't think schools are a place for anyone who isn't willing to step forward and try and move the organization or move a group of students understanding or some colleagues understanding on a little bit.

Scott Allen:

I really enjoy the direction that the DAC, right? Because again, a coach, what are they trying to do? That a parent, right? I literally last night I had a conversation with my daughter. We just finished midterms in the household, and she is being challenged, Nick. She is she right now is at her edge, and it's beautiful to see, but she doesn't understand it right now. And so there's just a lot of emotions. She's a sophomore, and things are getting more real as far as college and university and such. And a lot of last night was DAC. Yeah, were you providing much of the direction? Trying to influence. I have the relationship with her. That's down. The influence part, it's it's timing is important, tone is important, all of that. So, what are some of the things that are happening in your school that are exciting for you? I love the fact that we're bringing in some of this thinking from CCL. You've mentioned that. But what are some other things? How are you thinking about this work in that context?

Nick Hart:

I suppose that the starting point is, and I think this is really useful for school leaders and probably leaders of other organizations as well, is to think deeply about the conditions that we work in. My my master's study and some prerequisite work towards that through just engaging with people on social media is the idea of organizational complexity. And the schools are certainly that there is that there's no linear cause and effect. The feedback loops that we get from students and from colleagues are so far away. So I was listening to your podcast with Jonathan talking about short feedback loops when you're learning a movement, when a child is learning to walk, they get immediate feedback. But as a teacher or a leader in a school, that feedback might not come. It might not come for weeks, months, and it might even be that and there's some interesting research on this, that a good teacher's influence affects them years down the line and not in the moment. And the idea of learning and performance being different, and that performance in the moment that appears as struggle can actually be an indicator of longer-term learning and vice versa. So that the idea of all these blurry feedback loops in schools make it incredibly complex. And so I think the starting point for us as leaders of organizations is that, like understanding what we're in. What's really frustrating from a school leader point of view is that the dominant leadership narrative, it really is treating the complex as complicated. You've got, for example, a dip in student achievement data. And so if we pull a lever, which me might be employ better teachers or change the curriculum or change the pedagogical approach or flood with particular resources, and then expect the outcome to change, like a simple cause and effect chain. And that's the dominant narrative. We're forced into thinking that way or behaving that way because of regulators, because of the need for great results in schools. But that's not how it works. And that tension, I think, sits right at the heart of what it means to be a leader of a school.

Scott Allen:

You're living that each and every day. I think you're going to Snowden and Boone here. Simple, complicated, complex, complex adaptive challenges. If we go to Heifetz's language, and you're that's it's just gray. And what's signal, what's noise, and what do we need to be acting on? What experiments do we need to be running to see if they're moving the needle? Because to your point, I think, and Heifetz talks about that, that one of the greatest challenges is that leaders treat what he calls adaptive challenges as technical problems. Technical ones, yeah. And that's not the case.

Nick Hart:

Yes, yeah. And and I like his work, it was interesting. It's part of my master's, and I and one of the things he said was, get on the balcony, just try and see the whole. I got a bit of a problem with that because there's that for years we've put up with or the dominant leadership narrative has been the hero paradigm, right? You've got great leader into behavioral, into traits, that kind of thing. But if that lens stays the same, that leadership is a person, someone who will save the day, and then you pretend about all those other things to do with complexity. Okay, I'm gonna get onto the balcony and look down, and I'm gonna be the one that figures everything out. It's not how it works. So back to my original point was there is understanding what we're working with in. You can't do you can't do both. I think there's a real fundamental difference in how we think about the work compared to what the work is, which really needs resolving.

Scott Allen:

Yeah. I have a guest that's been on a few times, just a wizard. His name is Ron Riggio. And Ron says in one of the episodes, it was it just it has stuck with me. He said leadership, and we can put that in quotes, is co-created by leaders and followers working together. Now we could change some of the language there, but yes, it's not like you are heroically gonna jump up on the balcony, look down at the system, and say, aha. I think in these cases, and I'd love to get your opinion on this, but this is how I've been framing it recently is in especially in complexity, I think the real work of leaders is to elevate the right questions and even create space for those right questions to be elevated because they may or may not have the right questions, but they're at least it's on their radar to be keeping a list of questions of okay, what are the most pressing questions to work to see if we can move the needle? You've been in the meeting before where you know the leader has propped up question number 77 out of 100 on the list, and you're like, for real, everything's burning down, but we're gonna talk about this right now. So it's elevating the right questions, but then creating that space where the team has the psychological safety to wander and struggle a little bit with some of those really gnarly questions. We've got the norms and how we're gonna have these conversations, and then ultimately it's what are the experiments we're gonna run? What do we think will help move the needle? And then we're gonna learn and we're gonna fail forward and get feedback and learn and move forward. How do you think about that? Do you agree? Do you disagree? I'm excited to hear.

Nick Hart:

Yeah, I do. I think there's that the work of leading a school is to try and help people to hold those tensions, to hold to deal with the ambiguity because that the ambiguity is what cripples people. I think when you see people step into leadership roles in schools, I think an interesting pattern is that typically people succeed if they're able to hold that ambiguity in mind, to see two competing truths at the same time and not implode with the magnitude of variation, that kind of thing. The reason I think it's particularly harder in schools, I'm full disclosure, I've only worked in schools, so I not haven't got a particularly good frame of comparison, is that teachers are doing the day job all day, every day. The amount of time available to reflect, to think, to adapt, it just doesn't exist. Teachers across the world are burning out because of workload, because of the complexity of the job. And then when you've got leaders who are trying to help teachers to make better sense of what's going on in classrooms and to build practice that genuinely improves student achievement, when do you do that work? And so is it in twilight sessions after school? Is it in service training days at the beginning of the year or dotted throughout the year? The reality is that's not how it works. And I think teachers who thrive, I think tend to be really good at naturally and implicitly reflecting on what's happening in front of them and adapting as you go. It's same with leaders, really. My problem, I think, as a school leader is when do you do the development work? When do you do learning development, leadership development? The reality is it's in the day-to-day interactions. You have to try and bring frameworks and heuristics and ways of thinking about things and decision-making strategies into those daily interactions and not hope for the best, but let emergence happen, provide people with the conditions, the thinking, the strategies, the situations, and hopefully complexity does its thing, and you've got the right people in the organization who really care about student achievement, who want to get better as teachers, want to develop, and you let it run to a certain extent. But I know that's not as simple as that, but that's where I'm leaning towards at the moment.

Scott Allen:

I don't know if across those three uh episodes of Jonathan, I just don't remember if we touched on this. I and maybe we did, but it's at times I think this is no offense to CCL, but you can start with the DAC model, get it? Yes, that's a thing. Transformational leadership, complex adaptive challenges. You can have those conversations, but how do we scaffold this work? And from the get-go, for these people in positions of authority, coaches, parents, ministers, leaders, what habits of mind do we create as a starting point to do that work that you just said? We can start with theory, we can start with all of those things, but really and it gets to a really beautiful point on your part of how do we spend our time? What's going to be the most impactful way of us to spend our time? And if I have a teacher who is mindful, who's critically reflecting, who is paying close attention to the feedback loops that are happening in their environment, adjusting, experimenting, and a heat-seeking missile at building relationships with their students, well, is that kind of getting us closer? Or again, do we spend our time on other things in that precious time that we have, that very little time we have?

Nick Hart:

There's an interesting school leadership consideration, a trade-off, if you like. So if I'm taking the position of an outsider of a school, I would make an assumption that the curriculum, the lessons that need planning, that kind of thing, is done expertly in the background. Really careful choice of content, really careful sequencing, really good connections between different ideas across a long period of time. But I think the reality is that a lot of teachers are winging that or being expected to plan from scratch on their own little section of a student's entire educational journey. This took me a little while to figure out, and I'm still trying to get my head around the implications of this. But some teachers are really good at instruction, they're really good at explaining something, they're really good at getting buy-in from students and what, like you said, a heat seeking myself and building relationships. But are they good at designing a series of lessons that get you would you would make an assumption that they are, but it's not always the case. Some teachers are really good planners, but they are not as good at the delivery. Some teachers are brilliant at the delivery, but terrible at the at the planning. And I think we have to be careful about that. I think l one of the jobs of a school leader is to provide the infrastructure through which teachers can do the thing that they need to be doing every day, which is delivery instruction, which is responding to students, building relationships, and not then go home and spend another five hours designing lessons themselves.

Scott Allen:

Yes.

Nick Hart:

Which is the pattern. That's the pattern is the out of hours work for teachers who care and want to work hard and possibly who are working in schools without infrastructure is that they're 18-hour days.

Scott Allen:

And there's some industries we could go to education, we could pick on healthcare, we could pick on uh accounting and law, kind of built on this assumption that humans will give a ton of discretionary effort, right? That you know, to become partner, I'm gonna work above and beyond and actually give you a lot of my time over a period of years. And at least what I'm seeing is that millennials and Gen Zs are a little less interested in I'm not really all that interested in doing all of that to become partner. I'm good, I have a good quality of life. I'm not interested in your working 80 hours a week. And so I love how you're thinking of how do we create the infrastructure where that doesn't have to be the pace, the that doesn't have to be the situation or the context, but we're still delivering on those two dimensions that you mentioned.

Nick Hart:

When you add to that things like wanting to improve something, so that's just the base state, that's just what happens every day. So when you take into account needing to increase the number of students reaching above age-related expectations or um getting better higher education destinations or anything else that requires some improvement, that requires teachers and leaders to do something different, whether it is being more efficient or to add something else. And so when you've got this murky baseline of what everyone's doing every day, and sometimes that's not particularly clear, and then you add something else, the level of complexity and level of ambiguity raises even more, which makes it even harder. So again, I think our job is to minimalise and to reduce as much as possible from the people that are doing the what the organization is there to do, and the organization is there to teach children. But if teachers are working at a level that isn't what they should be dealing with, then that's where I think some issues arise. And Stefan Norbell is writing about this at the moment on Substack about it's from Jacques levels of work and and the and where complexity sits in an organization. And that's fascinating for me at the moment about protecting protecting teachers and middle leaders from things that they shouldn't have to worry about, yeah, so that they can get on with the things that really matter in the organization. And then those with higher levels of responsibility who are paid to think with that level of ambiguity and that level of complexity to let them do that heavy lifting there so it doesn't of cause problems elsewhere.

Scott Allen:

And if the leaders, the senior leaders aren't discerning in that way, aren't mindful, then just everything gets filtered through and shows up, and it's just again a lot of noise. And how do we ever really get traction? But you said something a few moments ago, which again, maybe some of those things that we need individuals to understand are that we can call them polarities, we can call them tensions. But you know, look, folks, these things are never going away. These tensions will never be eliminated. We're just trying to manage them as much as we can. And sometimes we might overshoot and sometimes we might undershoot, but that's the work of leadership is managing some of these tensions. But then also, I love what you just said because I've worked with leaders where there's no umbrella, everything just flows through to the team, and then it's just it's a shit show. Yes. And then you have leaders who can discern that, who can filter that, who can prioritize that, who can scaffold that, and it's a little more manageable. Absolutely.

Nick Hart:

I think the schools are a bit of a weird microcosm of society as well, because you inevitably you get leaders who were teachers and who probably were good teachers at some point, which is typically why they get end up getting promoted. So I did this as a first-time principal as a first-time head teacher, is I thought I know what great teaching is, I'm gonna try and make every other teacher in my school teach like that. But then that was a crazy mistake to make because there were lots of different ways to get great outcomes from students. And then so when you so that there's you can expect too much of teachers, but you can have also leaders who are going too far down the chain of operational and sticking their oar in with all sorts of things that they shouldn't have to do. Which means that their time is taken away from the systemic condition building work, which never then fixes the root of the problem. And then you just get a cycle of toxicity and kind of burnout.

Scott Allen:

Yeah. I just I was the word that came to swirl, just stuff's swirling, right? I think of the red dot on Jupiter. It's just swirling. It's forever. At least for a few hundred years now. It's swirling, right? As we begin to wind down our time, what are a couple other things you're thinking about as you? I just so much respect for what you're navigating. The again, the complexity that kind of you're confronted with. And I think at times, at least I've come across some educators who very much like the process and like the rules. And again, when you get to some of these senior levels, it's all gray. It's you're swimming ambiguity. What should we be prioritizing? I don't even know. And where do we start? It's just complex. Uh, what are a couple of other things you're thinking about as you're navigating some of these dynamics?

Nick Hart:

So, where in the world I am at the moment? There, there's a lot of new schools being built. And I'm founding one, one of them. So, I'm in a few months, I'm moving out of my role as a principal of an existing school to become the founding principal of a school that is being built at the moment. And so that provides a quite a unique opportunity because it doesn't typically happen that often when new schools are being built. And so my thinking at the moment is when you have a chance to build something from scratch instead of adopt what already exists, that presents opportunities to do things a little bit differently to maybe avoid some of the systemic issues that create a system that we have in education. But particularly within that, I'm thinking of leadership structure. So schools have a very common pattern of leadership, how it's spread across the school. So you'd have the head teacher or the principal as the top of the organization chart, and then you'd have deputy or assistant head teachers who are part of a senior team, then you'd have some middle leaders who often teach as well as have some responsibility, like they might be a head of department or a head of a subject or a head of a year group. And then typically that's a funnel for teachers, that's a career path. You go through that hierarchy. But then there's so much to running a school beyond education. There's operations, there's finance, there's human resources, there's recruitment, there's health and safety, there's safeguarding, there's a whole variety of other things outside of the classroom that is required. Where I'm going is that the senior leadership of a school is not just educators, because if you only have educators as the senior team, they cannot possibly have the domain-specific expertise in finance, in human resources, in recruitment, in all those other operational parts of running an organization. And then all of a sudden, what happens in a lot of schools is you get 35-year-old assistant head teachers all of a sudden in charge of health and safety of a school who've never done anything to do with health and safety before. There's a massive risk for an organization when you when most schools where I am now are two, 2,000, 3,000 students, 250 members of staff, they're huge organizations that require a lot of coordination, that require a lot of coherent working between different functions. That's what on my mind at the moment, which is challenging the dominant leadership structures of schools, the hierarchy thinking, like the org chart thinking, and using people like Stefan Norbell, who I've just met on LinkedIn, really interesting work he's doing, building on Jack's work of levels of work and various other things, to try and build a leadership team that is a bit more reflective of the ontological reality of schools, which is complexity. And you can't just whack a hierarchy, an organization chart, and say, off you go, deal with that. I'm in a very unique position at the moment to be able to build an organization and a structure that hopefully can mitigate some of the complexities and try something a little bit different. I've got a year and a half before I open, so plenty of time. Plenty of time. You got some time to figure it out.

Scott Allen:

We have similar conversations in Reddit. What should I do, folks? What do you think?

Nick Hart:

Yeah.

Scott Allen:

I always wind down these conversations by asking guests what they've been listening to, streaming. It could be something you've been reading. It could have something to do with what we've just discussed. It might have nothing to do with what we've just discussed. But what's caught your attention in recent times that might be interesting for listeners?

Nick Hart:

Yeah, so I have a couple of work-related ones. One is I've referenced it a couple of times, the idea of levels of complexity in an organization. And this is where I think I'm appreciating thinking from outside of education. Because I don't think you get educators thinking in those ways. Originally, I think uh Jacques's work in the late 80s that I'm trying to pick apart thanks to Stefan Norval on Substack. But I'm also looking at decision making. So where there are a lot of how organizations are set up with hierarchies and leadership, line management, and that kind of thing. There's often who's responsible for that thing? Like who is accountable when that thing goes wrong? Who do you point at when something has stopped working? But in the last year or so, I've been looking at a racy matrix for responsibilities, accountabilities, and who's consult and who's born. But again, I'm not particularly pleased with that. And so picking up again through read through reading on social media some different models of that and starting to look at the DARE model from McKinsey now, which is trying to place decision making to try and make sure this is particularly relevant for me, I think, as a founding principle of a new school. A lot of what happens from why here in new schools is when you've got a whole bunch of people together for the first time for the first few weeks and months, and there aren't cultural or ingrained ways of working, you can quite easily have people turn around and go, I don't know, who's who decides? And then they all go to you as a principal. And what I'm quite keen to establish straight straight away is who decides stuff. Like what are the decisions that need to happen every day, who decides, and push that as slow down as possible, and to try and provide some clarity on that. I'm really interested in reading about these things at the moment, and school holidays do provide an opportunity to do that. So we're on a four-week break at the moment for winter, and so the opportunity to read, step aside, think, reflect is just invaluable.

Scott Allen:

I was reminded of I don't know how much you've read how Bezos thinks about decision making. It's a really interesting. I'll put some articles in the show notes for listeners. But you may not agree with everything that he says, and you might not like Jeff Bezos. But what's interesting is people like him and Jensen Huang, they have very clear principles about what is the process of how we're going to navigate some of this ambiguity. He calls them one-way doors and two-way doors. So he they have a rule at Amazon, or they had a rule at Amazon that we don't have a committee larger than two pizzas could feed. So there's just these different ways that they think about problem solving. And for instance, another one is that in the context of Amazon, a person who owned the challenge would bring a memo, and the decision makers would read the memo in real time, so all their heads were in the same space, and then Bezos would sit back and not really intervene all that much. He'd watch the conversation, but then they also had a rule that was uh disagree but commit. Yeah. So I don't think this is the right path, and but I'm committed once we walk out this door to try and do the meetings after the meeting type stuff. So I love that you're thinking about that because it's if we have some clarity around how we're going to do the work and people are given permission at different levels. What a wonderful opportunity for you to experiment with building a system that does it differently, that better, right? That's a cool opportunity.

Nick Hart:

It is. It's one of a career-defining one, I think, an opportunity of a career. So I'm really grateful to have it and to make the most of it.

Scott Allen:

Nick, thank you so much for the work you do in the world to make the world a better place. We appreciate you. I appreciate you being with me today. Thank you so very much, sir, and best of luck as you start to build literally and figuratively. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, be well. What a wonderful opportunity for Nick to build in the way that he's building. What I love here is you've got a really beautiful theory-to-practice kind of situation. And in some ways, practice the theory. Nick is taking on this challenge of building a totally new school. And how do I do that in a different way? How do I design for a culture in 2026 where young people can thrive? Absolutely love it. So excited to hear how this story unfolds. Nick, thank you so much for the work that you do in our world. Thanks for the conversation today. I definitely appreciate it. And to all of you, happy 2026. This is going to be a great year. Take care. Be well.