Finding Agency in Complexity: Equipping Education Leaders for Uncertain Times

In a political moment charged with uncertainty, education leaders across the country are seeking new ways to navigate increasingly complex challenges. National Equity Project's Leading for Equity in Complex Systems (LFECx) Institute offers exactly that—a space where participants could develop practical approaches to seemingly intractable problems while honoring their commitments to equity.

The April 2025 event in Oakland, CA drew 60 leaders from school districts, foundations, and other education organizations, signaling a growing hunger for frameworks that acknowledge complexity rather than oversimplify it.

"It felt different this year in terms of the interest in this kind of engagement," noted Asha Sitaram, Senior Equity Leadership Consultant at NEP and one of the institute's facilitators. "People are better able to see the complexity, perhaps that was harder at other moments."

Beyond Admiring the Problem

The institute stems from NEP's realization that conventional approaches to educational equity weren't delivering the systemic change they sought. "Victor Cary [now an Advisor Emeritus to the organization] in particular, realized that our work in the equity domain was not sufficient because the kinds of change we wanted to see happen weren't coming about,” explains Tom Malarkey, Director, Strategic Consulting. “It was not enough to just hold a set of equity commitments." This recognition led NEP to incorporate complexity into the Leading for Equity framework, and build an institute and programming to uniquely  address today's challenges.

What distinguishes the approach is its emphasis on action despite uncertainty. "Part of navigating complexity is on the one hand you're slowing down to better understand the nature of the challenge," Malarkey noted, "but there's also a real methodological approach to taking action to learn—you don't just sit there and admire the problem."

This resonated deeply with participants like Jenelle Nila, Training & Engagement Manager with Girls Leadership in Oakland, who brought the insights back to her organization. "What I've been taught is that problems are complex but the solutions are linear, and that's actually not the way Black, Brown, Indigenous folks create solutions," Nila reflected. "It's usually community-based and all hands-on. I have never seen leaders in any of the sectors I've worked in talk about how we can approach complex problems in complex and nuanced ways with multiple people."

From Hero to Host: A New Leadership Paradigm

For Jessica Cannon, Executive Director of Early Learning for Oakland Unified School District, the institute provided language and frameworks for transforming her department's approach. "We are designing safe-to-fail experiments," Cannon shared. "We now have a common language and a common framework that we can use throughout the leadership of the department."

This reflects a fundamental shift from traditional leadership models. As one participant from Oakland Unified articulated in their event feedback, it's a transition "from hero to host leadership" [Wheatley, 2011]—moving away from the expectation that leaders must have all the answers toward creating conditions where collective wisdom can emerge.

Moreover, within this model, educators don't need to solve everything at once either. As NEP’s Evette Jasper, Sr. Equity Leadership Consultant, recounted from one participant's experience: "I didn't have to solve the whole system; I just had to pay attention to the 2-3 people around me."

Creating Sanctuary in Tumultuous Times

Beyond its practical frameworks, the institute provided what many educators desperately need: a space to process current challenges while maintaining hope and agency. "They really created a very sacred space," Cannon observed. "I was very impressed with the way they tackled the realities of our larger political national landscape right now and brought that in."

The experience balanced acknowledging difficult realities with practical hope. "The work that the National Equity Project does, it's such a great combination because it is certainly educational, it is political, it is social justice, and there's a kind of spiritual element to it also," Cannon reflected. "That's what our political movements at this point in time really, really need."

A Growing Movement

For participants, the impact extends well beyond the two-day experience. "I downloaded all the resources," Nila shared. "It was really important to me and impactful.'"

As educators face unprecedented challenges, NEP's complexity frameworks offer something increasingly rare: practical approaches that honor both the difficulty of the moment and the agency of those working within it. By embracing complexity rather than denying it, participants discover new possibilities for creating the educational systems our students deserve.

NEP will offer more in person Leading for Equity in Complex Systems Institutes in California and Illinois this year. In addition, a complexity-informed approach to change management and strategic planning is embedded in NEP’s support to school districts and education leaders. NEP provides strategic consulting to co-design new solutions across a system, as well as communities of practice to support entire systems to engage with these frameworks together.  

"If you kind of take care of what's immediately in front of you and what's in your purview with integrity and with vision and with bravery, then that can influence a larger system,” Canon reflects. In uncertain times, that might be exactly the wisdom educational leaders need most.