Excited to finally share the fruits of my 2022 Service Design labour.
For the past year I have been lead researcher and PM on a study into Primary School Principals and whether applying a service lens might be useful in supporting how they run schools.
The research: Supporting Primary School Principals to Manage Complexity in Contemporary Education Settings: Applying a Service Lens to Support Education Leadership (links to Summary Report, 19 pages) was funded by the Principals Australia Research Foundation and sponsored by the Australian Government Primary Principal Association (AGPPA).
It took work from my time in DMA to test a hypothesis of whether service artefacts we had developed with a Principal between 2018-2021 could be of use to all Primary Principals within Government, Independent and Catholic primary schools across Australia, in NZ (to a limited scope).
It was a piece of service design research, therefore it uses evidence from background and expert sources – and more explicitly, lived experience in context. We created models, hypotheses and findings that we believe enable implementation of solutions because the research intent was to deconstruct the system, through the use of created artefacts, in order to understand if they could be useful in practice.
The research itself provides a detailed description of the vast roles expected of Principals, the management capability they require to do their job and an analysis of tools that might help in a contemporary setting. It is the first and most comprehensive evidence-based depiction of current Principal activity released in Australia or New Zealand.
The findings will be used to broaden the recognition of Principals beyond educators to being accountable for instructional leadership, organisational management and cultural and community establishment.
- In Australia, AGPPA is working with researchers to develop material (maybe resource package) based on the research findings to support Principals directly, at a time of great upheaval in the way they must do their work for children, young people and the community.
- In NZ, I am having conversations with representative intermediaries about the potential for the research findings here.
Link to Full Research Report (PDF, 65 pages)
Service Design Research
From a service design perspective it was a typically satisfying piece of work – challenging, engaging, educating (about service design approaches and techniques to non-service designers). The highlights:
- This work is ‘By principals, for principals’.
- We have an evidence-based view of the contemporary state of PS education sector and PS Principals in Australia, and NZ and can describe the Complex Adaptive System they operate in.
- We can use a service lens to articulate and breakdown a Principal’s Three Core accountabilities:
- Instructional Leadership
- Organisational Management*
- Culture and Community Building
- The *Org Management concept and accompanying tools and service concepts we tested (which are new to the sector) we believe, makes an aspect of Principal accountabilities clearer and less potentially stressful – for current, new, aspiring, and those requiring re-setting.
- We have delivered practical tools, not rules – service artefacts, service concepts, user typologies.
- A new style of research has been used that engages the sector voice and agency.
- Our findings, and tools may be of use to other contemporary researchers and their recommendations.
From a service design perspective, and from the vantage point of now sharing and socialising the research, a number of concepts and paradigm shifts in my thinking have occurred and I look forward to mulling them over here, including:
- What is a service? What is service?
- Service design research to generate designs that can be implemented (but are not service design specifications)
- The delicious complexity of complexity. Including, how annoying are browser caches and algorithms for limiting your search fields to what you’ve already searched.