Week 11 Agile and Servant Leadership/ Lean education

Agility means the capability of rapidly and efficiently adapting to changes.
Agile leadership It is the art of being flexible under the influence of rapidly changing external conditions. It means being flexible, responsive to change, and willing to learn and adopt new ways, leading to effectively survive and succeed in the complex modern competitive business environment."It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change." - Charles Darwin.
Agile Leadership Style

Agile leadership is situational, adaptive, empowering and inspirational. The most important leadership theory applied to agile is that of servant leadership (Highsmith, 2009).“For the Agile Leader, servanthood is the strategy. Situational actions are the tactic” (Filho, 2011).The key characteristics of the servant leader include awareness, listening, persuasion, empathy, healing, and coaching. Situational leadership means that the servant leader may act as a democratic leader, a laissez-faire leader, or an autocratic leader in different situations (Koganti, 2014).
Servant Leadership

The originator of the servant leadership concept (though inspired by a Herman Hesse story) was Robert Greenleaf. “The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?” (Greenleaf, 1970
Teachers as Servant Leaders

Servant leadership has been applied by a number of authors to teaching. “The teacher as servant leader functions as a trailblazer for those served by removing obstacles that stand in their path. Part of unleashing another’s talents is helping individuals discover latent, unformed interests. Art, music, and science teachers are prime examples of educators whose genius lies in leading students to discover unarticulated interests.” (Bowman, 2005),

Agile methods

The Agile movement proposes alternatives to traditional project management. Agile approaches, such as Scrum and eXtreme programming were designed for the software development to help businesses respond to unpredictability. Aspects of Lean production (from the Toyota Production System) are also increasingly utilised by agile practitioners, for example Kanban boards, where limiting the number of current work items elegant workflow. Kanban's 'pull' model makes the flow of work visible across the team. In software development, 'Scrumban' is a populate fusion of Scrum and Kanban.
Nowadays Agile and lean practices are used in industries outside of manufacturing and software development. Agile is recognized more generally now as simply a great way of getting things done in rapidly changing and highly unpredictable situations.

Agile and Lean Ideas in Learning

In this week's classes we ponder what Agile and Lean methods can offer to the education sector. Even though Agile was developed within the software industry, the bridge is that it is fundamentally about learning, people, and change - three things we struggle with in education. Many are amazed at how easily Agile and lean ideas translate into education, and how perfectly-suited they are, for example, to running schools.