Transformative Educational Leadership Journal | ISSUE Fall 2023
How might district-level departments organize themselves to work together in order to better serve schools as they strive towards equity? Siloed efforts are familiar in large and complex organizations and merging departments often makes sense in theory. However, the entrenched and invisible status quo of colonial organizations (such as school districts which were explicitly designed to further colonial goals) can make it feel impossible to break down siloes. Brooke Moore’s organizational improvement plan explores how relational coordination can offer an anti-colonial and collaborative model forward.
By Brooke Moore
“If only we weren’t so siloed.” Have you ever heard someone say that?
My problem of practice focused on how to merge three central office departments (Inclusion, Pedagogy, and Indigenous Learning) to better support schools in helping learners thrive. Jody Gittell shifted my thinking from being distracted by the lure of wanting changes to our organizational chart to curiosity about the tougher and more transformative work of making changes to relationships within the org chart. Meridith Honig (2008) characterizes the difference in making changes to the org chart versus changes within the org chart as tinkering versus transforming. Relational coordination as a model holds us accountable for transformative work and invites us to look for the answers within ourselves and our organizations while learning from those in systems around us.
In my research I came to see how relational coordination is a distinctly anticolonial way of organizational being. Framing the merger in this way reveals the deep challenge of this transformation.
Colonial organizations such as school districts which were explicitly built to further colonial goals cannot be made less so by fiddling with org charts. The work requires going below the surface and examining the patterns, understandings, and ultimately relationships that we have with ourselves and one another.
Before you read the summary below, I’d like to note that the school district featured in the case study has made progress that is not reflected in the case study as the problem of practice reflects a particular moment in time.
The following executive summary has been adapted from the full Organizational Improvement Plan.
Read the full plan
The British Columbian (BC) Ministry of Education and Child Care (2023) is explicit about the need to address the inequities embedded in our educational systems and structures that continue to prohibit many learners from thriving. In its efforts to address some of these systemic inequities, the ministry has led in a number of ways: mandating a new curriculum that embeds Indigenous knowledge systems throughout each course; implementing a new strategic plan process that directly addresses inequities; providing extra funding to support historically marginalized learners; adding an Indigenous course requirement for graduation; and mandating that all educators learn about and address inequity in their own contexts. Riverstone School District, a mid-size suburban district with diverse communities, has responded to this call for equity in many ways. One strategy included merging three central office support departments— Inclusion, Pedagogy, and Indigenous Learning—into one department called the Learning Services Collective (LSC) with the assumption that the LSC would be better positioned to offer schools more wholistic and effective support. The problem of practice is that this merger has, thus far, proven functionally unsuccessful. Years later, members from the formerly separate departments continue to work in siloed and fragmented ways and thus continue to uphold, or at very best leave unchallenged, the status quo.
This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) works to clarify and then address this inertia. A readiness assessment finds LSC members ready for change but hindered by low change efficacy. Members discuss the need for more collaboration but efforts thus far have centred on unsuccessful structural reorganizations and fragmentation of work. The vision for change is that the LSC provides coordinated and wholistic support and guidance to schools in their efforts to create environments where all students thrive. The implications of this goal of students’ thriving means the LSC must support all aspects of wellbeing and learning—not just students’ academic achievement. The LSC currently holds the skills and expertise to address such a goal within its members as a whole – the struggle is in determining how to integrate members’ work so as to amplify and grow their skills and expertise. This vision for change requires adaptive leadership (Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2017) within the LSC, an approach discouraged by the bureaucratic systems and structures still in place.
The goal is to move from this to that.
Note: The image on the right incorporates Uhl-Bien and Arena’s (2017) definition of adaptive space within the LSC (shown here within the dotted box). Directors are represented with asterisks. The dotted line of the surrounding circle represents the state of an open system – a porous boundary so information can flow in and out (Kools et al., 2020).
To resolve this tension, this OIP applies the relational model for organizational change (Bolton et al., 2021) which maps the goal of becoming a relationally coordinated organization. In relationally coordinated organizations, members demonstrate mutual respect; have shared knowledge and goals; and communicate in a timely, accurate way to solve problems effectively. In using the relational model of organizational change, this OIP shows how the change itself will become self-reinforcing as long as structural supports are put in place to nurture this way of being. Importantly, the implementation plan enacts the sequence of change made clear by the model: Structural supports will emerge from relational and work process interventions (Gittell, 2016). This dynamic accounts for the tendency for new structures to take on relational patterns already existent in the organization. Therefore, the implementation plan enables meso-level leaders to enact adaptive, collective leadership by creating safe and enabling space for members to engage in change in a relational way, beginning where each member is at and building efficacy as they go in order to become a high functioning force for equity.
Enacting new patterns within an organization requires new communication routines, protocols, and opportunities to mobilize the new knowledge between organizational members.
Mobilizing knowledge is a key component of relational coordination because relationship is seen as a main conduit for efficient and effective problem solving (Gittell, 2016). In this way, members will co-construct many of the changes as they connect around problems and innovate their way forward.
The implementation plan is supported by the monitoring and evaluation plan which identifies points at which leadership and members can maintain momentum and gauge progress of relational coordination as it develops. Information generated by the monitoring and evaluation processes is mobilized through a feedback process of collaborative inquiry by which members, again, co-construct their way forward. In this way the communication plan and the monitoring and evaluation plan are interwoven and self-reinforcing.
As the LSC evolves deliberately into an organization distinctly stronger for its relational coordination, leadership might consider where else it makes sense to coordinate around the work of supporting and guiding schools. Therefore, future considerations for improvement could include investigation into the benefits of extending relational coordination from the LSC to and between other district-level departments such as human resources, finance, and facilities management.
Brooke Moore
Dr. Brooke Moore (EdD) has served in public education in many roles for nearly two decades. She is currently a District Principal in Delta Schools and an Adjunct professor at UBC. Throughout all these experiences and learning, Brooke’s central motivator is a sentiment she first learned of from the Network of Inquiry and Indigenous Education: that all students cross the stage with dignity, purpose, and options. Recently she has co-authoured Sorting it Out: Supporting Teenage Decision Making (Cambridge, 2024) and The Decision Playbook.
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