Here's something nobody told me when I started as a superintendent. The job comes with a playbook until the day it doesn't, and you rarely get a warning before that day arrives.

Early in my career, the instructions were mostly clear. Chain of command, budget cycles, curriculum adoption schedules, board meetings on the second Tuesday of the month. You could learn the playbook, run it well, and the system would mostly do what you expected. That world is gone. I watched it go, piece by piece, over 35 years in the field.

What replaced it wasn't chaos. It was something harder to name: a set of demands that don't come with a manual because nobody has written one yet. Leadership itself stopped meaning "the person with the answer" and started meaning "the person who builds the structure that finds the answer." Data stopped arriving slow enough to plan around and started arriving faster than most districts can absorb it. Mental health stopped being a referral you made to someone else's department and became a responsibility that sits, whether anyone likes it or not, inside the building. Curriculum stopped assuming one classroom could serve one pace for every student in it. And now AI runs through all of it at once, changing the terms of every problem on this list before most systems have finished adjusting to the last one.

That's the argument behind this series. Over the next five issues, I'm going to take one piece of the job at a time, the pieces where the old instructions have quietly stopped applying, and ask what a leader does next. Here's where we're headed: adaptive and collaborative leadership, data-driven decision-making, mental health and well-being, personalized learning, and AI. This week, we start with the one that sits underneath all the others: how you lead when the answer isn't yours to hand down.

Ronald Heifetz drew a distinction in 1994 that still holds up better than almost anything written on leadership since. Some problems are technical. You bring in the right expertise, apply a known fix, and the problem closes. Other problems are adaptive. They can't be solved by expertise alone because the fix requires people to change their beliefs, their habits, or their sense of what the work is even for (Heifetz, 1994). Most of what lands on a school leader's desk now falls into the second category, and most leadership training still prepares people for the first.

I have watched capable leaders fail not because they lacked skill, but because they had no framework for the moments that don't come with a playbook.

That gap, between technical competence and adaptive capacity, is where this issue lives.

Command-and-control leadership assumed the person at the top had the answer, and that assumption made sense when problems were mostly bounded and known. A staffing shortage, a budget shortfall, a scheduling conflict. Someone with authority and expertise could solve it and move on. That model breaks down against adaptive challenges, because no amount of authority manufactures an answer that doesn't exist yet. The answer has to be built, usually by more people than the person in charge.

James Spillane's work on distributed leadership reframes leadership as a function spread across formal roles, informal relationships, and daily interactions rather than a title held by one person (Spillane, 2006). That reframing matters practically, not just theoretically. When leadership concentrates in one office, the system becomes fragile. One departure, one bad quarter, one crisis that exceeds that person's bandwidth, and the whole structure wobbles. Spillane's research suggests the fix isn't finding a stronger leader. It's redesigning the structure so leadership doesn't depend on any single person holding it together.

Ron Heck and Philip Hallinger's research on collaborative leadership found measurable effects on school improvement when leadership functions were shared rather than concentrated (Heck & Hallinger, 2010). That's not a soft claim about morale. It's a claim about outcomes.

Richard DuFour's work on professional learning communities gives this idea a concrete mechanism. Lasting improvement, DuFour argued, doesn't come from a mandate handed down from the district office. It comes from building cultures where educators routinely examine their own practice, look at real data together, and solve problems as a group (DuFour, 2004). Bryk and colleagues extended that logic into networked improvement communities, where educators across a system test small changes, learn from what fails, and build knowledge together instead of waiting for a solution to arrive fully formed (Bryk et al., 2015). Both models treat leadership the same way. It's a capacity you build across a system, not a role you fill at the top of one.

I want to be honest about where this idea gets misapplied, because it does. Alma Harris raised a fair challenge to distributed leadership almost a decade after the framework took hold: spreading leadership out can also spread out accountability until nobody is quite sure who owns a decision (Harris, 2013). Distributed leadership isn't the absence of leadership. It's a different shape of it. Someone still has to set direction, hold the structure together, and be answerable when something goes wrong. What changes is where the thinking happens before that moment, not who's responsible after it.

The leaders I've watched do this well don't disappear into the collective. They build the room where the right people can find the answer together, and then they stand behind what the room decides.

If you're running a district, a school, or a company built on educators, the question worth sitting with this week isn't whether you're a good leader by the old definition. It's whether your structure still depends on you personally having the answer, or whether you've built something that can find one without you in the room. Most systems are still designed around the first. The ones that are going to hold up over the next decade are being redesigned around the second, starting now.

Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America's schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.

DuFour, R. (2004). What is a "professional learning community"? Educational Leadership, 61(8), 6–11.

Harris, A. (2013). Distributed leadership: Friend or foe? Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 41(5), 545–551. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143213490701

Heck, R., & Hallinger, P. (2010). Collaborative leadership effects on school improvement: Integrating unidirectional- and reciprocal-effects models. The Elementary School Journal, 111(2), 226–252. https://doi.org/10.1086/656299

Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Belknap Press.

Spillane, J. P. (2006). Distributed leadership. Jossey-Bass.

This week's Edupreneurs Network essay makes the same argument as this issue, just aimed at your vendor relationships instead of your leadership structure. It makes the case that institutions benefit from a portfolio of strategic partnerships rather than single-source dependency, because over-reliance on one provider carries the same fragility as over-reliance on one leader. If the case for distributed leadership landed for you, this piece extends that same logic to how you structure institutional partnerships.

Thought Leadership in Education - Chapter 4: "Systems Thinking and Organizational Transformation"

Chapter 4 lays out the frameworks this issue draws from directly. Its Leadership section, built on Spillane's distributed leadership research, makes the case plainly: leadership transitions derail progress when leadership concentrates in a few individuals, and redesigning school structures to support shared responsibility is what makes change durable rather than fragile. That's the same argument at the center of this week's newsletter, just from a different angle.

This week: Read the "Leadership" and "Using Multiple Frameworks in Tandem" sections in Chapter 4. Then ask yourself: which frameworks, distributed leadership, coherence, equity, complexity leadership, are you already using without naming them, and which one is missing from how you lead?

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