Leadership in educational contexts

We live  making decisions, constantly. We like to think that humans make decisions rather rationally than emotionally, because it is tough that way, that humans are rational beings. Our culture has championed rational endeavors, more than emotional ones for a very long period in time. In fact, after the late modern period, entire history time periods are mainly ranged on science and technological progress or breakthroughs. It is not until post-modern time periods, rationalism and emotional factors together have being recognized as drivers of the vast majority of social systems. Social factors have became more prominent to the extent of supporting the idea of a technology development trend tightly coupled to social movements. Core philosophical concepts or ideas, such as "truth" or "real" -see Baudrillart and Kellner- transformed because of the symbiotic relation between technology and social changes.

Technology and social factors bending the truth. 
Here's a short example about how information age technologies affect social change.

I believe that that all social and technological game changer are driven by a number of different leaders -not a unique one- And every effecting change is always produced by a number of different leaders. According to an article found in Leadership-Central, leadership theorists agree on a detailed time line that begins with a "Great man theory" and then progress to some other "one man" leadership theories, only to finish with a more "distributed" concept of leadership and effecting change. In fact, post modern social theorists insist on the idea that social movements are affected by a number of concurrent factors, resulting in a fuzzy logic dynamics.

I support this affirmations  based on the concept of dynamic and chaotic systems. With the purpose of clarification, let me go into a very summarized intro to system dynamics. Chaotic systems are those highly sensitive to initial conditions. A very small variation on the initial conditions will create greatly divergent variants in system behavior, making impossible to cast long-term predictions. Take for instance voting predictions, as the voting process being a social and chaotic system in nature (a small variance in the initial variables, such as a small mathematical defect in the sample for vote intention polls, might affect the end result or prediction of the elected) Inside this kind of systems are what mathematicians call "strange attractors". Those attractors are subsets that seem to -literately- attract a number of similar results despite divergent initial states. Take a look at the following image:

The lines represent the general behavior of the chaotic system and the pattern you see in the image is caused by attractors. Different initial states will produce a different path each time, but all paths are shaped around the attractors, creating the pattern. This means that it is highly improbable to predict the exact path of a specific run, but it is highly probably correct to say that a specific run will show a given pattern.

Finally, this is what I think is leadership about in educational context. Leaders are attractors. Each of the lines or runs for the chaotic system can be a number of social entities: teachers, students, parents. This social entities will exhibit a specific behavior very difficult to predict, but within a given pattern produced by the leaders.

School leaders are not to create a deterministic context for edu actions to take place, but set the context for a multiverse set of actions withing an acceptance threshold, that is creating the conditions where different paths might converge to a desired pattern. Know that pattern will have fuzzy limits and it would look something like the above image, you´ll recognize the pattern appropriate for a school. Within the pattern a multitude of ways of thinking, a broad sense of reality and even some eccentric behavior paths should be accepted, in the name of cultural diversity. Jet again, you´ll recognize the pattern of a good school, when you see it.

For more detailed information:

• Chaos theory.
• Leadership theories.