Managing Complex Educational Change

Book excerpt: Why is educational change becoming more complex? Are there patterns in this complexity? How may managers cope effectively with complex educational change? This book investigates initiatives to reorganise school systems, involving highly emotive closures and mergers. It reveals how reorganisation was a complex change to manage because it was large-scale, componential, systematic, differentially impacting and context dependent. These characteristics affected management tasks, generating ambiguity in the change process that limited managers' capacity to control it. The authors offer four management themes as realistic strategies for coping with complex educational change: *orchestration *flexible planning and coordination *culture building and communication *differentiated support Managing Complex Educational Change is essential reading for all concerned with educational change - managers in schools and colleges, students on advanced courses, trainers, local and regional administrators, academics and policy makers. The research has general implications for the theory and practice of managing complex change.