Organisational leadership and chaos theory. Let's be careful
| Published date | 01 February 2004 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230410517440 |
| Date | 01 February 2004 |
| Pages | 9-28 |
| Author | Peter Galbraith |
| Subject Matter | Education |
CHAOS MINI-THEME
Organisational leadership and
chaos theory
Let’s be careful
Peter Galbraith
School of Education, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Keywords Chaos theory, Metaphors, Modelling, Leadership
Abstract This article addresses issues associated with applications of ideas from “chaos theory”
to educational administration and leadership as found in the literature. Implications are
considered in relation to claims concerning the behaviour of non-linear dynamic systems, and to
the nature of the interpretations and recommendations that are made. To aid the analysis a simple
non-linear model is constructed and its behaviour simulated. Questions emerging from the analysis
are used to focus on issues deemed significant, both for evaluating arguments presented on behalf
of chaos, and for furthering insights aimed at enhancing the understanding and practice of
leadership in organisations.
So my answer to the question “How do you know? What is the basis of your assertion? What
observations led you to it?” would be: “I do not know: my assertion was merely a guess. Never
mind the source ...if you are interested in the problem which I tried to solve by my tentative
assertion, you may help me by criticizing it as severely as you can” ...(Karl Popper, 1968).
Introduction
As we are all aware, language forms and descriptors from the wider world of
business and industry has increasingly become part of the discourse of
management and leadership as education providers and institutions have
become increasingly corporatised. In this respect no term has received greater
exposure during the past decade than “learning organisation”. A recent Web
search located 82,803 sites for “learning organisation” (36,000 when combined
with education and 458 when systems thinking was added also). As a
comparison there were 66,102 sites for “performance indicator”, 21,900 when
combined with education. Now there is no denying that the term “learning
organisation” is invoked by those who embrace a variety of system faiths, as
well as faiths that do not overtly espouse a systems view. Furthermore, the
search for legitimacy frequently encourages proponents to borrow or use terms
such as “non-linear”, “complex systems”, “systems thinking”, “feedback”, in
ways that are at times idiosyncratic, and at times seemingly unaware of
essential properties implicit in these terms.
There have long been severe reservations about the “scientific approach” to
leadership and management in organisations, which sought to identify
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
Organisational
leadership
9
Received November 2002
Accepted January 2003
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 42 No. 1, 2004
pp. 9-28
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/09578230410517440
generalised skills to provide keys to successful management practices. Such
approaches adopted a positivistic stance within which the nature of an
enterprise or the characteristics of individuals within it were deemed of small
importance. So called “paradigm wars” which emerged as the basis of such
assumptions were challenged.
The publication of The Fifth Discipline (Senge, 1990) provided an impetus for
a reconceptualisation of organisational leadership, and the way that this has
impacted on education is interesting. A passage from Schools that Learn
describes how The Fifth Discipline and the subsequent field books, despite their
focus on business corporations, “found a large and avid audience among
teachers, school administrators, parents and community members who care
about schools” (Senge et al., 2000, p. 5). Now the fifth and fundamental
discipline of “systems thinking” requires an understanding of the structure and
behaviour of non-linear systems, and during the same decade the
popularisation of chaos theory has resulted in a number of attempts to apply
its principles and insights to the field of organisational management and
leadership. Deterministic chaos is also associated centrally with non-linearity.
The purpose of this article is to examine claims for applications of chaos
theory, in so far as they are applied to leadership and management in
educational organisations, and this will involve in part a discussion of the
properties of non-linear systems. To address this purpose four articles from the
Journal of Educational Administration have been selected as representative of
this field of interest. The approach involves considering selected texts from the
respective articles, and analysing their claims from the perspective of complex
systems. System dynamics concepts (e.g. Sterman, 2000) provide a framework
within which to engage the claims and implications of the arguments presented
– an approach rendered appropriate by the contemporary focus on “learning
organisation”, and the references in the articles to mathematical structure and
behaviour, feedback loops, initial conditions, non-linearity, oscillations etc.
Literature sources
The new science of chaos: making a new science of leadership (Sungaila, 1990)
This article appears to be one of the first to seriously develop ideas from chaos
theory for purposes of addressing issues in educational leadership and
management.
The first principle, which the new science of the global nature of systems recognises, is the
principle of self-renewal. The second principle is the principle of self-organisation. This is
simply order through fluctuation. The characteristic non-equilibrium in the system can be the
source of a new order, whenever the fluctuations that constitute it, can no longer be absorbed
within a particular dynamic regime (p. 8).
A system dynamics view would endorse the recognition of non-equilibrium as
characteristic of system behaviour, but would hold open another possibility in
which explosive fluctuations lead to disintegration or collapse rather than
JEA
42,1
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