Autonomy gets damaged by complexity. And over the long run, complexity takes over completely.
I spent the last week in Croatia with a mix of practising teachers and senior school leaders from all across Central and Eastern Europe. I listened to about a hundred of them over the course of workshops, masterclasses and social occasions.
What did they want most? What was the most common goal and need? To have the permission to do great work.
Permission from their boss. Their line manager. Their head of school.
Permission from the Board Chair, or a sense of permission from the broader community.
Of course, if they ask in the right way, they’ll likely get a ‘yes’ (or an ‘ok’ at worst). So what’s stopping autonomy really? It’s rarely the boss.
Complexity is how you thwart autonomy. Complexity creates dependency and learned helplessness, a constant questioning about what to do and how to do it next.
Simplicity is how you empower other people and get them creating their own work.
Don’t believe me? How about doing a quick audit of complexity of your own, and you’ll realise the small things that present brick walls to the progression of autonomy. For example:
There’s a policy on everything. Some schools create policies for every possible scenario, in ever-increasing detail. Instead they might prioritise the things that go over and above the expectations we should have of every teacher and student from the get-go.
There’s no policy for anything. In some schools, nobody knows what there’s a policy on. So they have to ask or, more likely, assume that there’s probably a reason not to try something new.
Decisions need to be approved by too many people. Not all decisions are born equal. While the best decisions are often made closest to the point of impact, complexity moves decision-making further away. Create a ‘decision-making thermometer’ that gives a clear indication of the threshold for involving more than one other person in a decision.
Curriculum is too complicated, and there are still many teachers who feel unsure about what to prioritise. Coupled with that are overly detailed and dogmatic assessment rubrics and reporting structures, leading to ‘box-ticking’ rather than conversations focussed on learning. We end up spending far too much time translating differing expectations best we can into one ‘correct’ approach.
Roles and responsibilities are unclear. Too often, job descriptions don’t always clarify expectations, are years old, vague and don’t reflect the strengths of the person hired for the job. Very often, there isn’t even a job description for everyone in a school. ‘JDs’ can also encourage silos of work: “what department you’re hired to” defines the work you’ll do today, but what about the collaborations of tomorrow we can’t yet predict?
At the core of all this is one idea: simplicity isn’t about dumbing things down.
It’s about making things clearer and easier to act on. When schools strip away unnecessary complexity, they free up time and energy for what actually matters.