1: System Leaders Scaling Successful Educational Reforms in an Uncertain Future

This edited book focusses on the challenges and opportunities for education system leaders in contexts of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – known as a VUCA world. Currently, organisational environments are increasingly characterised by global disruptions that create unprecedented challenges for leaders of complex systems, such as businesses, hospitals, schools and education systems. The pandemic, COVID-19, has presented all citizens and, indeed, leaders in every context with a supreme and ultimate challenge of unimaginable proportions. Moreover, recent technological transformations have unleashed their own challenges and disruptive forces.

Brown (2020) pointed out that the most powerful disruptions in education including big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, robots, digital automation and an explosion in the speed and connectivity of smart technologies are all emblematic of what has been termed, ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’. He claimed that, according to Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, this revolution of skills and technology is disrupting almost every industry in the world (The World Economic Forum, 2017). It extends from energy to education, mining to manufacturing, aviation to agriculture and it is pervasive and relentless (Brown in Foreword to Duignan, 2020).