Coping Mechanisms of Effective Leaders in Chaotic and Complex Educational Settings

Abstract

Many events that take place in the education sector can be shown as examples of chaos and uncertainty. These events indicate that the foresight we previously demonstrated linearly is insufficient and the factors that we overlook or undervalue can result in enormous and unexpected consequences. This shows that poorly managed small factors lead to large and negative consequences. Besides, regardless of the positive or negative nature of its consequences, the butterfly effect is expressed as: “small events lead to big events”. If innovation and improvement are desired in education, leaders begin from the lowest stage instead of the upper stages of the system in order to accomplish this. In this case, the leader must have further information with the aim of providing more activities and information to respond to the challenges within the system. Thus the leader both equips himself better and forces senior management to offer better opportunities. In this way improvement does not remain only in the education system, it also spreads to the other systems of the country. In this case, the leader would have achieved a better health care system, a better construction system, a better security system, etc. as well as a better education system thanks to the trigger created within the system. This paper sought to demonstrate that although chaos and complexity within systems scare and bother us, they force us to change and evolve better. For this to happen though, leaders must adopt coping mechanisms to counter chaotic and complex situations which the paper dully explored. There is no gain saying therefore, that effective leaders, can prevail over chaos and complexity laden situations and transform their systems or organizations in order to catapult them to even greater heights.