Leading from the Side

By John Burns, ISS Director of Creativity and Innovation

Leading and managing organizational change is a difficult endeavor at the best of times. It requires clarity, foresight, empathy for others and a range of micro and macro strategies. Educational change leaders generally lean towards one of two approaches.  

Some take a Top-Down approach, and use the decisive mechanisms of a defined scope, delegation, and articulated action plans. This relies on decisions and ideas from the few, communicated to the many. It can eliminate confusion, reduce risk, and tends to keep initiatives organized across larger teams.  

On the flip-side, others may lean into a Bottom-Up approach that includes authentic feedback from a wide cross section of stakeholders and the collective wisdom of a diverse team. This promotes inclusion but follows a more organic approach which requires a tolerance for ambiguity and a willingness to rapidly pivot.  

But what if there was a third approach that could marry the best of both styles with less of the associated downsides? Enter Sideways Leadership. Sideways leadership leverages the strategic direction of an organization, while also empowering individuals to share and scale ideas that could support ongoing change. On a practical level this can be embraced through the deployment of an idea management strategy that utilizes design routines that garner the collective wisdom of the team while still respecting wider strategic aims.  

Over recent months, ISS has continued to support schools and organizations in developing their sideways leadership approach. Through a series of design sprints, married with the idea management platform, ISS CHALLENGES, we have co-facilitated the crowdsourcing and scaling of strategically aligned prototypes across a number of organizations.