ROAD MAP
The focus of this chapter is to share the analysis that has been done on Rainbow Community School as an urban system. This analysis will begin to address the research questions posed at the end of Chapter Three. To remind the reader, this research is attempting to address:
1. What practices by individuals and groups create conditions for Complexity Leadership to emerge within an urban system?
1. Does Dynamic Governance play a role in fostering Complexity Leadership?
2. Does Complexity Leadership foster resilience in urban systems?
1. Is Complexity Leadership by itself sufficient to foster resilience in urban systems?
2. Does Complexity Leadership generate panarchy in urban systems? Does panarchy contribute to resilience in urban systems?
3. When Complexity Leadership is observed, what is offering a deeper cohesion across these many functions of leadership?
1. When urban systems are resilient, is there something unique about that cohesion?
To set up and address these questions, the first section of this chapter will deal with the resilience of Rainbow Community School as an urban system, and will offer a series of arguments about which qualities of resilience are observed within the data and why those qualities are present within Rainbow Community School. To accomplish this, the section will share the data from the storytelling for resilience project, and the set theoretic analysis of that data. Following that will be propositions about which qualities of resilience are present within Rainbow Community School, and the role of the various aspects of Rainbow Community School as an urban system play in generating these resilience outcomes. The second section will deal with leadership within Rainbow Community School, and will offer a series of arguments about the role that Complexity Leadership, Individual Strategic Leadership and Spiritual Leadership play within Rainbow Community School. These arguments will be supported with findings from the qualitative analysis, and illustrated with examples. The third
section will examine Dynamic Governance as a practice. This is a comparative analysis, using both the Residents’ Council and Rainbow cases identify what role it might play within Complexity Leadership, and to situate its use in different environments. This chapter will close with a series of questions about the connection between leadership practices and resilience outcomes. Responding to these questions will be the focus of our conclusion chapter.
To give a sense of where these next two chapters address the research questions, question one will be addressed in the second half of this chapter during our analysis of leadership in Rainbow Community School and of Dynamic Governance as a specific practice.
Question two will be set up during the first section of this chapter on resilience in Rainbow Community School, and addressed in the Conclusion chapter. Question three will be addressed during the Conclusion chapter.
To remind the reader, this chapter includes only a brief analysis of the Residents’
Council of Public Housing. The original intent was to use the same research design within the Residents’ Council. The research design, and its intended form with the Residents’ Council, is covered in the Methods Chapter. An explanation as to why it was not used is also within the Methods chapter. A discussion of the lessons learned from that experience are offered in the Conclusion Chapter.
MAIN ARGUMENT
To set up the main arguments from this chapter, there is evidence for qualities of resilience present within Rainbow Community School. Namely, there is evidence for inclusion, integration, effectiveness and flexibility. Rainbows culture and community are drivers of integration and inclusion. The organization also plays an important role in fostering integration. The physical site of Rainbow complements the role of the organization in setting the conditions for reflection and reflective practice. An important outcome of the Rainbow curriculum is a greater flexibility to challenges of an emotional, social, or intellectual nature.
Rainbow’s curriculum and organization plays a supportive rather than dominant role in driving these resilience outcomes.
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There is strong evidence for Complexity Leadership at Rainbow Community School throughout its history. Rainbow Community School has developed specific practices that
animate each of the functions of Complexity Leadership. That said, they are not sufficient to fully explain the patterns seen across Rainbow’s history. That history is better explained through incorporating Individual Strategic Leadership (StL), and a sixth function of Complexity Leadership, Spiritual Leadership (SpL). We theorize from the Rainbow Community School case that Individual Strategic Leadership’s role within complexity is rebalancing, or the active identification and strengthening of the weaker functions of leadership. We theorize from the Rainbow Community School case that Spiritual Leadership provides cohesion and coordination to the other five functions of leadership through subordination and tuning. Subordination is a submission to a larger purpose in the face of uncertainty. Tuning is the active alignment and coordination of various functions of leadership. Each of the functions of Complexity Leadership has interactions and exchanges with spiritual leadership, through which tuning emerges. These six functions of Complexity Leadership, in concert with Individual Strategic Leadership, acts to ground and dynamically rebalance the expression of leadership within an urban system.
1) RESILIENCE AT RAINBOW COMMUNITY SCHOOL KEY ARGUMENT
In the data from the distributed ethnography, there is evidence for the presence of four qualities of resilience: inclusion, integration, reflection, and flexibility. Of the seven qualities of resilience, these four are the most relevant and most likely to be observed in social systems.
Given the bias of our observations towards observations about social network, institutions, and organization will ecosystem, the presence of these four (and absence of the other three) is consistent with the expectations of this research. The observational data is consistent with a resilient urban system, but inconclusive to definitively demonstrate that Rainbow Community School is a resilient urban system.
We can say some more specific things about the participant-observers' impressions of the role of various system elements in generating those outcomes. Rainbow’s culture and community are drivers of integration and inclusion. Rainbow as a place, in combination with the curriculum, is a driver of reflection. Outside of its role in creating spaces for reflection, the physical space of Rainbow is rarely perceived as an important driver. An important outcome of the Rainbow Curriculum is a greater flexibility in responding to challenges. This
isn’t limited to academic or intellectual challenges, but emotional, practical and social challenges as well. Rainbow as an organization is perceived as playing an active role in driving integration. Rather than playing a dominant role, Rainbow’s curriculum and the organization play a supportive role in driving most resilience outcomes. From the perspective of the classic expectations about a school, this is somewhat surprising.
ROAD MAP
To substantiate these arguments, the first section will do several things. First is a very specific look at the survey data that was collected and how it enabled us to perform a theoretic analysis. Second is a look at that data, and some specific examples. Third is to walk through our analysis of the data, and how these propositions were reached. Fourth is to enumerate some of the limitations to the data, and their implications for the findings.
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XAMPLE RECAPOF DATATo remind the reader, a key aspect of this research design was to use a distributed ethnography to acquire observational data from throughout Rainbow Community School is an urban system. The entirety of this process is described in more detail in Chapter 3. The data analysis will be detailed here. The distributed ethnography was operationalized through a Google survey. The survey had several stages. First was to acquire some general information about the respondent: their name and email address, their relationship to Rainbow (I am a student, parent, alumni, this staff member, etc.). Next was the story prompt:
“Tell me a story about a time in the past month where you were aware of the Spirit of Rainbow in your life in some way.” This question follows a general appreciative inquiry format, and was generated in collaboration with the staff at Rainbow. “The Spirit of Rainbow”
was used as a phrase because of its resonance for Rainbow Community School members, and
its capacity during survey and interview testing to elicit episodes of leadership. After respondents had finished telling their story, they were asked to interpret their story using two frameworks. The first asked: What parts of Rainbow are important to the story? Then, For each of the parts of Rainbow that are important to your story, tell me how important they are to the story. The categories used were:
1) The Rainbow Community: Your friends, family, teachers at Rainbow Community School.
2) Rainbow's Culture: the way Rainbow feels, how people treat each other, what it means to be a part of Rainbow.
3) Rainbow's Curriculum: the activities, special events, the stuff that you get to do during the school day at Rainbow.
4) Rainbow as a Place: did your story take place at Rainbow Community School.
5) Rainbow as an Organization. The non-profit, its staff, board, and official activities and practices outside of the act of teaching the curriculum.
These categories were used as the closest approximation to our five elements urban system framework that retained reference to elements at Rainbow Community School that our testing respondents recognized and readily responded to. These responses were set up on a zero to three scale, with zero being not important, one being somewhat important, two being important, and three being essential. This scaling is a traditional set theoretic scaling, providing a coding for cases that are fully out of a set, one third in, two thirds in, and fully in a set (Ragin 2008).
The second framework inquired about qualities of resilience, and asked: How much does each of the following qualities figure into your story? This framework described each quality in this way:
1) Grit. Jessica has been building a fort in the woods with her father. Even though the snow storm knocked most of it down, she's determined to finish it before spring!
2) Redundancy. If one light bulb burns out, it’s okay because there are three others that are still glowing.
3) Resourcefulness. Well, if I can't use that... maybe this will work?
4) Reflection. Learning from experience because you actually thought about it.
5) Flexibility. Sure, I'm okay with doing it that way.
6) Integration. The parts being connected so that they are a greater whole.
7) Inclusion. Everyone/everything can participate.
Grit was used in replace of robustness, because the concept did not have meaning for our testing groups at Rainbow Community School. Grit, while focused on individual experience, retains the essential quality of “the ability to withstand disruption and pressure.”
Respondents were asked to teach the importance of each of these concepts to the story using the same framework as above. The survey yielded 99 responses, 61 from youth and 38 from adults.
There are couple of things to keep in mind when looking at this analysis. It is, in essence an analysis by the community on the question of whether resilience outcomes are generated, and if so what causal combination of urban system elements are doing so. Set Theoretic analysis gives us internally consistent determination on drivers of outcomes across a series of observations. This analysis also has two external points of contact. The first through calibration. To remind the reader, calibration is the adjustment of a set of observations to match externally verified values. For this analysis, calibration was indirect. In indirect calibration, the researcher calibrates the set by their own analysis of various stories within the set. The second point of external contact is through comparison with the traditional ethnography, to see whether the arguments about causal drivers and outcomes generated by the set theoretic analysis seem plausible given observations within the ethnography.