Note (15.02.2024): Last updated on 23.09.2021 (changelog). This page has been replaced by a current version and is available here as an archive for the AEL book version 1.0 until further notice.
“The real role of leadership in education (…) is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn’t have expected”.
Sir Ken Robinson (2017)1
This version 1.0 of the Agile Educational Leadership approach is also the first step in the development of a transdisciplinary framework for Agile Educational Leadership.
Agile Educational Leadership as a framework is intended to help deal with the ongoing developments in the (higher) education sector with its dynamic contextual conditions and (highly) complex social challenges in a future-oriented manner and to remain capable of acting.
Agile Educational Leadership is based on the idea that a mindset based on agile values and principles can be adapted to the (higher) education sector in the sense of a specific agile leadership. Although the focus here is on the higher education sector, many aspects can be adopted for education and its areas in a specific way.
In the Prelude to this book, it was already important to me to illustrate with the help of Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle that Agile Educational Leadership as a conceptual approach in the sense of a how could be a possible strategic starting point — and probably not the only one – to shape the education sector differently than before with a focus on the digital transformation and under the conditions of a culture of digitality and to develop it on a broad basis along agile values and an agile mindset in a participatory and self-organised manner.
An agile approach and a future joint, participatory and self-organised (further) development of Agile Educational Leadership as a framework are also intended with this freely and openly available online resource in the form of an initial Minimal Viable Product (MVP). What exactly is meant by this and what consequences it has for the further development of Agile Educational Leadership is described below with regard to the intended framework, as well as connections and critical reflections. This chapter concludes with an outlook on the next MVP for the AEL framework.
Licence2
[Note: If the media file is not displayed correctly in your browser, all podcast chapters of the AEL book version 1.0 can also be listened to directly here.(german version)]
A frame, and yet not a frame
A first conceptual Minimal Viable Product (MVP) (see3 or a more detailed explanation in Ries, 20094 ) is now available – strictly speaking, the MVP in version 1.0 of the approach and transdisciplinary framework Agile Educational Leadership.
The MVP Agile Educational Leadership
The understanding of an MVP from lean management is adapted here: Version 1.0 of the AEL book is the first usable product and at the same time the result of a cognition and transfer process. It is functional and can be used immediately as an online resource with an additional podcast function, the basic idea of the objective is made tangible and the conceptual basis is shown in order to obtain feedback from interested persons and specific stakeholders as quickly as possible during the development process. This feedback can show that the direction is right, that certain aspects should definitely be expanded or already exist elsewhere and should be integrated – or that Agile Educational Leadership is absolutely useless. In any case, all feedback is helpful for the further joint development of Agile Educational Leadership and, fundamentally, for the joint decision as to whether it is worth sticking with it.
Agile Educational Leadership as framework
A framework is to be understood as an umbrella under which various activities that have agreed on a common frame of reference can be united. How narrow or broad this frame of reference is drawn, which activities and which actors are ultimately subsumed under it, is an open and constantly renegotiated process. A framework is not to be understood dogmatically, but provides a binding, common thread in the plurality of possible interpretations and realisations. Or, to stay with Sinek’s Golden Circle, the specific what within the transdisciplinary framework of Agile Educational Leadership still needs to be developed.
Accordingly, the Agile Eductional Leadership framework is not a clear method or a specific recipe-like approach, similar to the Scrum framework5. Based on the agile value of continuous improvement, the agile principle of constant review and adaptation is also followed in this way by enabling an ongoing public review of the freely and openly accessible framework. The fact that the agile principles here also overlap with those of good scientific practice, such as the falsification principle, review activities of the specialist community and, more recently, open access, seems almost self-evident, but should be explicitly mentioned here for the sake of completeness.
Against this background, it seems only logical that Agile Educational Leadership is not yet available as a fully developed, theoretically well-founded transdisciplinary framework that has been tried and tested in a wide range of (higher) education practice.
Connections and reflections
Although the aim is to create a transdisciplinary framework for Agile Educational Leadership, this version 1.0 of the approach in the form of the AEL book has already highlighted initial connections or relationships via the chapters published to date. In the following, examples of important connections are traced and critically reflected upon. My perspective is primarily that of an educational scientist when I orientate myself on the three obvious focal points: the A for Agile, the E for Educational and the L for Leadership.
About the A in AEL
The term agility has taken on a trend-setting position with increasing reflection and exchange in the context of Agile Educational Leadership – and thus overlaps and integrates original considerations such as digital educational leadership when we now speak of a transdisciplinary framework of Agile Educational Leadership under the conditions of digital transformation and a culture of digitality. Agile stands for both an orientation towards agile values and an agile mindset (being agile), as well as deciding against this background and from this perspective how I can move and develop appropriately as a person myself, together with other people or in and with the organization and the goals associated with it and the project (doing agile). Being agile and undergoing change in the sense of improving further development is also the aim of the Agile Educational Leadership framework itself.
Roles and responsibilities
There is a strong reference here to the subjects or persons in their respective areas in an educational organization – and this does not explicitly mean their responsibility or function. The focus is on the different areas of action in which each person sees room for manoeuvre for themselves or in coordination with the people around them. The question here is not what function and management and control task have I been assigned, but what responsibility do I want to take for my own area of action and in what way, and what framework supports me in doing so. In a systemic sense, that not one person alone can change an organization with its culture, but each individual person can already begin to cultivate other or alternative behaviours through their behaviour, the person orientation in the Agile Educational Leadership approach is also intended. The perspective of lifelong learning and education also plays a role here: Emancipation and the experience of autonomy are fundamental to personal development, just as dealing with (challenging) situations beyond routines can contribute to personal transformation and personal growth. Basically, the idea of education is also embedded in the transformational leadership perspective and, in particular, in person-centred approaches such as agile leadership. Although one group of people in particular is repeatedly emphasised here when talking about the interests of customers or stakeholders, the importance of agile teams and their good cooperation with good communication and interaction is also emphasised at the same time. Critically, the reason for an agile team is never an end in itself and therefore the creation or development of a product is the reason for coming together – but at the same time it becomes clear here that the work, the performance or the work that the team performs or creates together is always created in relation to development in the sense of empowerment or enabling growth of the team members.
Agile values and an agile mindset
The agile values can also be considered more broadly than the four values from the agile manifesto. Based on the five values that have become a fixed part of the discussion with the Scrum framework, which include openness and transparency, courage and encouragement, respect, focus and commitment, further values can also be formulated. The great overlap in values such as communication, responsibility and openness as well as diversity and courage appears to be particularly central to the education sector, which also has to fulfil a democratic educational mandate for a pluralistic society.
It is assumed here that although the application of methods and practices can be trained, they can only develop their full effectiveness – including at the relationship level – when it is clear to everyone that being agile is the driving force in a person for doing agile. Authentic doing agile can therefore only be cultivated with grown inner conviction and attitude. Assuming responsibility and trust cannot simply be imposed or adopted as new team rules overnight. These very sensitive values can only develop if there is critical reflection on how the power structure and actual openness in the team and the organization should be classified. This raises important questions, such as how this type of collaboration can support network-orientated work and how this can sometimes succeed alongside other, classic, line-like forms of collaboration.
About the E in AEL
Agile Educational Leadership aims to contribute to the joint further development of the (higher) education sector with a perspective on people, culture and educational organizations.
The Specificity of the Education Sector
Es ist eine besondere Herausforderung, denn das über Jahrzehnte gewachsene (Hochschul-)Bildungssystem mit seinen Zuständigkeiten zwischen Bund, Länder und Kommunen sowie Funktionen und Hierarchien des öffentlichen Dienstes erscheint in der externen Betrachtung zumeist sehr statisch. Zugleich führen Neuerung, man denke hier nur an die Digitalisierung, immer wieder vor Augen, dass es einigen Standorten sehr gut gelingt, diese für sich passend zu integrieren und zu adaptieren und andere hier sehr lange Anlaufzeiten benötigen. Das Beispiel Unterricht und Lehre zeigt es derzeit eindrücklich: Die aktuelle Pandemie-Situation nach nunmehr 1,5 Jahren und die breite Sorge vor dem Start nach den Sommerferien bzw. nach der vorlesungsfreien Zeit im Herbst zeigt öffentlich wahrnehmbar deutlich auf, welche Bildungsorganisationen und Personen derzeit hohes Zutrauen von ihren Zielgruppen und Akteur_innen genießen und wo Skepsis überwiegt. Es scheint also möglich zu sein, durch Impulse von außen und Engagement und Kreativität aus dem Inneren heraus mit spezifischen Veränderungen beginnen zu können.
The challenge of adapting agility and leadership to the German education sector with its special characteristics lies primarily in its framework conditions. Public funding and thus independence from economic requirements sometimes leads to being perceived more as an institution with its traditions than as an educational organization in the context of a dynamic VUCA world. Particularly with regard to the education sector and with a special focus on the increasingly developing market for higher education or general academic education, the question still arises as to whether it can and wants to do without a contemporary organizational and interaction framework for educational offerings and stakeholders that is suitable for these dynamic times?
Focus on people
With its primary orientation towards values for joint interaction and communication, Agile Educational Leadership focuses primarily on diversity-sensitive individuals as designers of their organization and thus their (educational) system. They are the actors who can promote change in the teaching and learning culture, including the examination culture, in the various areas from the centre of the organization with the knowledge of organizational ambidexterity in the sense of lifelong learning. They are also the ones who can provide decentralized impetus for changed forms of collaboration with short-term iterations along horizontal, network-like structures and develop suitable working methods between the departments. And they are the people who can build and live a culture of facilitation together – with the aim of stronger self-organisation that can go well beyond participation and the empowerment that goes with it.
As much as this development offers the opportunity for personal growth, the process can also be exhausting for individuals. This is because a commitment to agile values and working methods also requires individuals to constantly engage in dialogue, make decisions themselves and take on responsibility in order to strengthen a culture of appreciation and communication on an equal footing.
Prozess und Produkt
From an agile perspective, the process described and the people who have taken responsibility for it take on greater significance than just the fact that a product was created on time. A similar duality between process and product can also be found in the field of education. Especially at the micro level of teaching, this can be illustrated by analogy when it comes to formative considerations of learning processes (e.g. the iteratively produced e‑portfolio or project- and research-orientated learning) on the one hand or summative considerations of the results on a deadline (e.g. the exam or presentation) on the other. In the context of e‑portfolio work, the fine line to a sometimes more neoliberally motivated shift of complete responsibility for one’s own learning process and educational success to the subject is justifiably criticised when the ambivalence of self-techniques is reflected upon (see, for example, the contributions under Views in Meyer et al., 2011)6 – a discussion that the design of learning environments that emphasise transparency and self-control rather than external control must continue to face today and should be answered. This discussion should also be considered for agile teaching.
The quality of a process and the extent to which it can contribute to a better product is often a question of the teaching, learning and examination culture and the associated organization of relationships. In this case, from the subject’s perspective, the product represents the personal learning process of each person or, from the organization’s perspective, the fulfilment of the requirements to enable successful educational qualifications in the allotted time.
Agil teaching
Agile learning and studying is currently the anchor point in the education sector through which agility is frequently approached – although the impression is that doing agile, i.e. the question of methods, is initially emphasized somewhat more strongly here. However, the agile values and the agile mindset are emphasized more strongly by those people who, according to another impression from the discussion, have already worked and experimented with progressive, open and more learning-oriented pedagogical and didactic approaches. These people will probably not discover as much that is new in agile approaches and adaptations of Scrum for teaching, but can nevertheless supplement them with newer concepts and thus expand the diversity of process-orientated methods. With regard to 21st Century Skills as well as so-called Future Skills, it can certainly be argued that knowledge of agile working methods and principles alone is an important competence in itself.
Adapted to the educational context, agile methods for teaching and learning from a didactic and educational science perspective enable, for example, the actors to deal with the assumption of different roles and responsibilities (similar to open lessons). They also offer a suitable framework for jointly and openly reflecting on relationship constellations with regard to the distribution of power between teachers and learners in the teaching and learning process. Particularly from the perspective of cross-functional teams, there is an opportunity to reflect on questions of inequality as well as actual inclusion and participation in the context of heterogeneous learning groups and their collaboration in the course of agile teaching.
Lcarning Culture instead of error cultur
A perspective between process and product also makes it very clear why it seems charming to speak of an error culture and lessons learnt; however, from a subject-oriented perspective and the claim that lifelong learning is completely normal, it would not be necessary to speak of errors or error culture at all, which are mostly based on externally defined criteria, but rather on subjective learning and educational processes. However, this is already a question of values and the image of learning and learners that prevails in each case. From an educational theory perspective, there is sometimes talk of situations that are crisis-ridden for a person, the overcoming of which can contribute to personal and professional development. However, this (educational) crisis is linked to the socialisation and biography of each person — for one person, only 98% of the goal achieved is already a crisis, while for another person 80% is good enough. In each case, the corresponding framework for these perspectives is provided by the set of values that each person brings with them and that is established and cultivated in the respective area or organisation. Agile values take into account both the person in their development and the value of good cooperation, from participation to self-organisation; in these leadership perspectives, they represent the view that overlaps greatly with progressive understandings of education, learning and teaching.
Agile (eucational) organization
Even though agility is increasingly being trialled in the German education sector and a conceptual and theoretical reflection on agility for the (own) education sector is beginning, this debate is still in its infancy. In retrospect, it could also be an oversight not to take these developments, which are not really all that new but have been taken up anew for the education sector, into account more broadly with regard to agile learning and agile organizations.
The example of the institutions of higher educations l therefore be used to examine the legitimate question of the fit and non-fit of agility in the university organisation in greater depth – also because these are assessments of fit that are presumably also made in the same or a similar way in other places.
As early as 2017, Baecker came to the following conclusion in his article: “The keyword agility thus catches universities on the wrong foot twice over. (…) But the field is ready”(Baecker, 2017, p. 20, translated with DeeplPro)7. Baecker argues that universities are already prepared for at least one form of agile management because they have always traditionally practised it (ibid., p.22)7, when he describes agile management as follows and at the same time emphasises that, regardless of this, there is still a need for further action at institutions of higher education:
“For the purposes of the university, agility can be understood as a management concept in which the recognition, cultivation and development of the individuality of faculties, chairs and staff positions is conditioned and controlled by the establishment of feedback loops that combine this individuality with tasks that come from outside. The definition and moderation of what is understood by an outside is the foremost task of the university management, which must find an internally manageable balance between the various candidates for this outside, such as student applicants, the state of science and requests from supervisory authorities” (Baecker, 2017, p. 22, translated with DeeplPro)7.
It is already clear here that Baecker is talking about agile management and is addressing university management rather than prioritizing the leadership perspective. However, he goes on to emphasize that maintaining the balance between the different vertical demands between internal and external is the dominant main task in a university — and this does not even take into account classic competitive situations with the (not only international) private market. The extent to which agile principles can be applied here and where exactly the attested need for further action for specific agile leadership in the context of higher education lies would have to be examined in detail. This almost raises the question of whether agile, decentralized and vertical impulses from and into society do not form the actual tradition of universities? This question does not arise from the perspective of Wilhelm (2019)8, clearly criticises agility in higher education and speaks of the dilemmas of agile organisations when she summarises the pros and cons of agile universities in nine theses, some of which are outlined here as examples, as they contain arguments that are heard more frequently. She points out that neither the increasing complexity nor the principles of agility are new and that development dynamics are currently being dramatised; similarly, there is no convincing concept in the current management literature that would be suitable for universities:
„There is no large organisation and no university that manages without a hierarchy. Organisations and universities are still based, to a considerable extent, on the hierarchy principle and will do so in the future as well“ (Wilhelm, 2019, p. 74)9. Wilhelm spricht sich ganz klar auf Grund von Koordinationsproblemen gegen eine Dezentralisierung von Entscheidungskompetenzen an Hochschulen und für starke Hochschulleitungen aus. Hierbei stellt sie die Ansicht heraus, dass Hochschulen ein Innovationsproblem hätten, bezweifelt allerdings, dass sich dieses via Agilität lösen ließe. Wilhelm merkt schließlich an, dass am Ende von der Idee von Agilität in ihren Augen allein der stärker regionale Bezug in die Umgebung bliebe und sie den Wert in Agilität dort sehe, wo Agilität eine Form sei, „is a mode to create the environment rather than to adapt to it“ (Wilhelm, 2019, S. 76)10. Die Gründe, weshalb eine Statusveränderung kaum möglich erscheine, werden zudem mit der These untermauert, dass agile Organisationen an einem Übermaß an interner Unsicherheit scheiterten, da sie sich trotz hoher Flexibilität stabilisieren wollen würden und somit zu neuen Machtfeldern und gar einem Komplexitätsdilemma führen.
In view of these critical assessments, which presumably meet with broader approval for the time being, the question arises as to where exactly the certainty comes from that structured flexibility, such as that made possible by the Scrum framework, leads to decision-making uncertainties?
And yes, agility is not a new topic, nor has the pressure to act currently increased — on the contrary, this has been pointed out for decades. The question is therefore about our sense of time and whether we have been moving at the right pace for social dynamics since the introduction of the railway? The fact that the people in an organization will react between euphoria and resistance to the introduction of agile processes and working methods is indeed the great challenge of an agile transformation, or rather any transformation. The question is whether the image of a transformation journey, i.e. a longer journey together rather than a switch movement, can encourage, figuratively speaking, to keep the travelling group happy with interesting experiences and adventures? Because an agile transformation primarily pursues an evolutionary basic idea and not a destructive one – similar to how an organizational ambidexterity would allow the modes of Exploration und Exploitation to coexist. What Agile Educational Leadership could already build on would be starting from the status quo and relying on a collective willingness to change, as has already been identified as a central success factor in the course of the digital transformation of teaching (see Graf-Schlattmann et al., 2020)11. The question is therefore how we can find out whether (higher) education organisations can also fulfil their social mission in education, research and transfer along agile values and principles as well as the freedom of research and teaching.
About the L in AEL
The L in AEL stands for the adoption of agile leadership in the specific context of (higher) education.
Assumption of leadership
Agile Educational Leadership is essentially about assuming leadership — deliberately in the sense of leadership vs. management. The form of leadership here once again goes beyond the familiar situational leadership, because the decision of situational appropriateness is made with an ambidextrous view of the needs of exploitation and exploration from the point of view of an agile leader with a correspondingly agile attitude (mindset). The responsibility for decisions can be assumed by all persons involved in their roles for their area — in line with the aforementioned perspective of a horizontal orientation along inside and outside and vis-à-vis. What is important here is that leadership combined with the willingness and ability to take on responsibility can and should take place independently of a powerful management function. In the higher education sector, for example, leadership for one’s own area or a specific area can be lived and supported for the development of the educational organization by learners such as teachers or professors, employees in administration and in the so-called third space as well as in the supporting services and, last but not least, as a framework in the functions of deaneries and university management. In the future, Agile Educational Leadership can develop into its own variant in the field of transformational leadership styles.
Maturity level
Agile leadership is based on the assumption that basically anyone can develop this form of leadership. Agile Educational Leadership is based on the idea and assumption that every person can take on leadership in their environment and that the (higher) education sector can thus develop from the centre and change in perspective (see, for example, the numerous creative and highly committed people in the education sector in teaching, administration, research or in academic support systems, who develop or improve processes with a broad view and in coordination in line with requirements through customised solutions).
This is based on the educational perspective of personal development and growth over a (long) period of time. Basically, Agile Educational Leadership can be seen as part of the (professionally orientated) lifelong learning process of people who work in or are committed to the education sector. Good leadership therefore depends not only on talent or a special spirit, but also on an individual’s level of maturity and willingness to develop.
Evolutionary maturity models are not uncommon (see DigCompEdu, for example, for media-related competences)12, but for Agile Educational Leadership it would be necessary to discuss the extent to which this is a step-by-step model along growth stages or a circular model with a holistic view, in which the individual areas of action and competence of agile leadership for the education sector, which have yet to be defined, are equally developed further. With a view to organizational ambidexterity and sensitivity as well as the ability to act for two parallel operating systems of exploitation (more management) and exploration (more leadership) and the corresponding personal ambidexterity, further considerations with a view to a holistic circular model appear promising.
Personal ambidexterity
Personal ambidexterity has so far been more of a phenomenon that has emerged on the fringes and yet, in terms of the basic idea, forms the core of a person who takes on agile leadership for the (higher) education sector. Because being able to endure and balance, to act skilfully in the context of both exploitation and exploration and to be sensitive and open to the needs and advantages of both areas for an organisation and its processes is a major challenge and requires a high tolerance for ambiguity. This in turn, coupled with agile values and principles and the ability to possess coaching and inspirational skills in addition to a participative leadership style, is what characterises agile leadership. And if you take a closer look, it is something that many people already have and are possibly just not yet aware of. In higher education in particular, it is virtually part of everyday life to think and develop research ideas creatively and exploratively from the outset, while these have to be adapted in parallel in a linear and highly standardised way to application forms and small-scale specifications – sometimes at the cost of reducing the innovation or completely new ideas in favour of the chance of funding approval because they do not fit into the familiar scheme. In teaching, more and more lecturers are developing creative ways of teaching online and taking responsibility for their area, supported by an open administration that seeks and finds ways in the formal requirements to enable teaching and examinations to be formally compatible with the curricular and administrative requirements of the examination offices. This and other examples already characterise everyday life in the (higher) education context and further examples can probably be found immediately.
Courage for Ambidexterityut
The step towards a self-evident acceptance and handling of permanent ambidexterity, as it stands for the digital transformation, is a conscious one, but sometimes less significant than initially feared. After all, there is already plenty of experience of how linearity and network structures can work and develop together – including in the education sector. Everything is already there!
The step towards personal ambidexterity, on the other hand, requires more courage. After all, becoming aware of the VUCA world and your own prerequisites and areas of development is one thing, but embarking on a personal development journey (again) together with a team with a view to constant change in line with agile values and principles is another. This step can once again be a challenge for some people; after all, it starts with retrospectives in the team, reflecting on the joint collaboration on a small scale and improving it together, instead of cultivating attributions and finger-pointing and taking the prevailing team culture as a given alongside the factual level of task completion. Engaging in Agile Educational Leadership therefore also means engaging with one’s own personal ambidexterity and developing it further – simply referred to as Ambidextrie4me. These supporting skills should then make it possible to develop and implement specific Agile Educational Leadership within the framework of Agile Educational Leadership for the respective specific educational sector; in Sinek’s words: to create the What.
Developing Ambidextrie4me
The development of one’s own personal ambidexterity can take place in conjunction with acting in an organisational ambidexterity and happen incidentally. The idea here is also to further understand and differentiate personal ambidexterity in order to specifically promote it and support its development.
First and foremost, the coaching style and the special role of a coaching attitude should be emphasised here. Especially with reference to the fact that many contradictory experiences have already been experienced and made, the perspective on one’s own resources and the promotion of help for self-help through systemic coaching appears to be an important aspect in the development of ambidexterity. Coaching focussed on the development of one’s own personality can take a variety of forms — from accepting a coaching offer to peer coaching in a team or across the work area. The circle-based Working Out Loud (WOL) method, for example, is currently being experimented with in various areas of education such as higher education, which can be seen as a form of peer coaching, collegial counselling and a stage of lifelong (self-)learning in networks (see for example https://hochschulforumdigitalisierung.de/de/blog/working-out-loud-hochschule or for the wider area https://workingoutloud.com/blog/wol-for-education-an-update)).
The extent to which generally circle-based methods, i.e. methods in which fixed small groups work together over a limited period of time along a guiding structure and network beyond their own area of work or even beyond their own organisation, can contribute to personal development in the sense of ambidexterity, or whether alternative formats or formats that have yet to be developed are required, will be shown in practice.
The comprehensive promotion of the development of Agile Educational Leadership can contribute to the development of strong and satisfied teams that lead each other well and are able and willing to assume leadership for each other and from the centre for the educational organisation as a whole. And this is where the circle closes with regard to agile transformation, where the question must be constantly asked to what extent it suits everyone, whether there is fundamental satisfaction and open-mindedness and what each person needs to be able — and willing — to continue the process. The extent to which everyone can be taken along in the end can certainly be better answered if the respective starting point is known at which the agile transformation journey begins in the respective educational organisation.
The Power Question
Although the explicit focus on people and agile values takes centre stage here, one important question remains, namely how to deal with issues of power. Here, it seems sensible to look at the micro-level of interactions and their connections in an organisational ambidexterity from the perspective of power theory as well as psychological questions of motivation and socio-psychological perspectives.
At this point, the role of the organisation as a framework that can be shaped and, above all, as an established and set framework from an organisational sociology perspective must also be critically discussed via the question of power.
Last but not least, the critical view of the aspect of power or acting against values invites us to open up broad perspectives and critically reflect on Agile Educational Leadership in the context and contradiction between systems theory and constructivism as well as organisation and subject. In this context, the possibilities of an integral view of agile transformation and evolutionary forms of organisational development should also be critically explored. From a cultural perspective, with a view to the digital transformation and the associated development of specific modes of communication and action, it remains to be explored how a corresponding culture of digitality in (higher) education can emerge in this context.
In this respect, the approach via the question of where exactly power remains in Agile Educational Leadership offers a central starting point for a theoretical consideration – with a focus on a clear solution orientation for the development of the (higher) education sector.
Everything is already there! – Outlook on the framework
The Agile Educational Leadership framework is currently being developed. Version 1.0 of the MVP is now available. In the individual chapters, these explanations highlight important perspectives that underpin Agile Educational Leadership. Reference is made to existing concepts and their potential or specific elements for adaptation, as well as initial theoretical connection possibilities, and corresponding lines of thought and critical reflection are suggested. However, the elements of an Agile Educational Leadership framework are basically not new. The only question that remains is what should be further deepened, what should be supplemented or what should be discarded and how the re-mix should continue to be organised.
What may be new in this context is that, starting from an educational science perspective, the endeavour is to think leadership for the ability to act in complex contexts and starting from the status quo of the educational sector’s own transdisciplinary needs. The perspective of personal ambidexterity serves as inspiration.
It may be courageous to call for integrative, solution-orientated action beyond responsibilities and positions of power — and to remind everyone that anyone can take on leadership in their area at any time. It may also be courageous to suggest a different path for the (higher) education sector than the one taken so far and to present the approach for a transdisciplinary framework for Agile Educational Leadership for joint consultation and coordination – and to continue thinking and researching its justifiability and feasibility in the meantime. After all, there is a lot there – but only a first step has been taken, which can be followed by others to turn the MVP into a finished product or, in this case, a framework.
Agile Educational Leadership can currently be used as a collection of values, principles and practices for a specific educational practice and can be developed concretely and appropriately within this framework. Version 1.0 of the MVP currently combines concepts, approaches and methods adapted for the specific field of education from different disciplines and practice with a view to the goal of a transdisciplinary framework for Agile Educational Leadership.
With Agile Educational Leadership, I want to encourage solution-orientated rethinking and step-by-step change from within the education system.
- Robinson, K. (Autor). (2017). An Interview with Sir Ken Robinson [Podcast]. Los Angeles: Art Ed Radio. [↩]
- Licence: https://de.freepik.com/psd/mockup”>Mockup PSD by Vectorium — de.freepik.com; Book-Cover by Kerstin Mayrberger, Lizenz CC BY 4.0 [↩]
- https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Minimum_Viable_Product&oldid=208755859 [↩]
- Ries, E. (2009, 3. August). Minimum Viable Product: a guide. Accessed 30.07.2021, from http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-product-guide.html [↩]
- see https://www.scrum.org/resource s/what-is-scrum/)) or the IATF framework (Integral Agile Transformation Framework) ((see https://www.trans4mation.coach/trans4mation-approach/)). Currently, version 1.0 of the MVP Agile Educational Leadership combines concepts, approaches and methods adapted from different disciplines and practice with a view to the goal of a transdisciplinary framework for Agile Educational Leadership for the specific area of (higher) education.
What is special about a framework is that it is not static or intended to be static. The strength of a framework lies in the fact that the current version is repeatedly subjected to a critical review and adjustments can be made from time to time to meet the requirements of the respective time and needs (see, for example, the latest version of the Scrum framework with its changes every 2 – 3 years) ((https://scrumguides.org/revisions.html [↩]
- Meyer, T., Mayrberger, K., Münte-Goussar, S. & Schwalbe, C. (Eds.). (2011). Kontrolle und Selbstkontrolle. Zur Ambivalenz von ePortfolios in Bildungsprozessen. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. [↩]
- Baecker, D. (2017). Agilität in der Hochschule. Die Hochschule: Journal für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 26(1), 19 – 28. [↩] [↩] [↩]
- Wilhelm, E. (2019). The university as an open platform? : a critique of agility. Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung. 41(3), 66 – 79. [↩]
- Wilhelm, E. (2019). The university as an open platform? : a critique of agility. Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung. 41(3), 66 – 79. [↩]
- Wilhelm, E. (2019). The university as an open platform? : a critique of agility. Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung. 41(3), 66 – 79. [↩]
- Graf-Schlattmann, M., Meister D. M., Oevel G., & Wilde M. (2020). Kollektive Veränderungsbereitschaft als zentraler Erfolgsfaktor von Digitalisierungsprozessen an Hochschulen. In: S. Hofhues, M. Schiefner-Rohs, S. Aßmann & T. Brahm (Hrsg.). Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung, 15 (1). 19 – 39. https://zfhe.at/index.php/zfhe/article/view/1302 [↩]
- https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/digcompedu [↩]