Tag Archives: culture

“The air we breathe every day” – Schools as cultural atmosphere

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Image: Pixabay

Schools are places where intentional teaching and learning happen, and they are also cultural atmospheres that shape the intellectual, social, and inner lives of young people over time. When I hear my school called a ‘bubble’ or that people are ‘institutionalised’ into the school, it indicates the immersive quality of our culture. Such descriptions could be concerning when the bubble is unexamined, but can be positive when we are aware and intentional about the kind of place we are shaping.

I have previously written about culture as the shared and often unspoken elements of school life: purpose, values, stories, relationships, behaviours, and language. Students encounter learning materials, classroom environments, and teacher instruction, while absorbing ways of speaking and listening, norms of attention or disruption, assumptions about intelligence and effort, and expectations about who belongs, who speaks, who is seen, and who is heard. The question is not whether schools produce culture; they do. Rather, it is whether this cultural formation is deliberate, ethical, and coherently aligned with mission, vision, and values.

Recently, in conversation with Fionnuala Kennedy, Head of Wimbledon High School, she described what students and families value most about her school as “the air we breathe every day.” That phrase stayed with me as it names the accumulation of small daily actions that shape our community’s experiences. The air we breathe in a school is what I call the “tangible intangibles” – the way classes begin, the ‘vibe’ in the yard, the buzz in the staff room, the feeling visitors carry with them as they move through the grounds. The cultural air we breathe can be evident in explicit things (school values, communicated messages, behavioural expectations, position descriptions, policies) but develops largely through daily exposure and immersion. The cultural atmosphere that percolates through every interaction in a school cannot be packaged or labelled, but it can be felt.

The power of Fionnuala’s metaphor lies in the constancy of breathing and its absence of conscious decision. Breath comes in and out, sustaining life through unassuming repetition. We often don’t take time to consider and value the air we breathe. We may not notice a change unless there are sharp changes in its quality – temperature, pollution, smell, humidity. School culture operates in much the same way. It exerts influence through repetition and immersion. It shapes what feels normal, possible and admirable.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus offers a way of understanding the cumulative effects of schools’ cultural atmosphere, and how school cultures endure. Habitus describes how dominant social and cultural conditions are established and reproduced. Individuals absorb dispositions, ways of perceiving, valuing, and acting through participation in social contexts, which are then reproduced through practice. In this sense, habitus is the embodiment of how cultural norms are sustained over time through prolonged exposure to particular cultural conditions.

Schools generate habitus through their structures, routines, language, and expectations. Policies encode assumptions about what matters and what is tolerated. Timetables, assessment practices, technology use, and pastoral structures all contribute to the conditions in which learning and wellbeing unfold. What we measure and make time for signals what we value. Teachers shape the air of classrooms through their relationships with knowledge, students, and each other. Leaders shape culture through what they communicate, what they protect and interrupt, and what they allow to pass without comment. The stories of a school’s alumnae often reveal how particular ways of thinking and being, shaped at school, are reinforced and carried forward over time.

One of the challenges of culture is that it is harder to see from the inside. We enter an organisation and are absorbed into its normalised ways of thinking, speaking, valuing, listening and acting. Early in my principalship, I remarked that “you cannot read the label when you are inside the jar” and I was, at that time, outside the jar – new to the organisation and able to be an observer of culture. With time, immersion brings familiarity, and familiarity brings ease. Now immersed in that culture, I am reminded that over time the air becomes less visible to those who breathe it daily. We can take the good, the bad, and ‘the way we do things around here’, for granted. What feels comfortable to those on the inside may feel constraining or confusing to those arriving from elsewhere. We need new eyes, ears, and voices to enter our schools to constantly show us what observers can see that we cannot, to challenge us to be aware of the air we are breathing and the culture we are constantly creating. Schools benefit from inviting new staff and families to tell us what they notice as they enter our community.

Thinking of culture as the air we breathe helps us to understand leadership as stewardship rather than directorship. It involves sustained attention to mission and values, pace and pressure, coherence and alignment, and the quality of intellectual and emotional conditions. It asks leaders to consider whether operational structures support excellence and care, whether teachers have the space and trust to teach with energy and depth, and whether students experience challenge as meaningful opportunity for growth. These are ethical considerations as much as strategic ones, because students and staff do not opt in or out of the air they breathe.

As my school prepares to launch a new strategic plan, I find myself returning to these questions. Strategy can be approached as a list of actions to be implemented, or it can be understood as a means of cultivating culture through careful attention to the conditions that sustain learning and human flourishing over time. Every strategic decision carries assumptions about learning, relationships, authority, and care. Each one shapes how a school feels to those who inhabit it daily.

The most important strategic questions may be experiential ones. How will this be lived by students and staff? What forms of attention will it invite or discourage? What kind of learner and teacher will it make possible? What kind of air are students breathing each day, and what does that air make possible or difficult for them?

What schools offer, day after day, is the air in which young people grow, think, and come to know themselves. That responsibility demands humility, intention, and leadership committed to tending the conditions in which values are lived and people enabled to grow and thrive.

Small actions matter: Rhizomes, butterflies and flywheels

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In schools and other complex human organisations, long-term predictions are notoriously difficult. The interconnectedness of parts of the system (people, practices and contexts) means that cause and effect are rarely linear or tidy. We often find ourselves searching for the ‘one thing’ that might make a big difference, yet change is hard to correlate to particular actions.

Complexity theorists remind us that human systems are characterised by emergence, sensitivity to initial conditions, and constant adaptation. Three metaphors help us think about the dynamics of small actions in complex systems: rhizomes, butterflies, and flywheels. Each offers a different lens on how change happens, how momentum builds, and how leaders might navigate the tangled ecosystems of schools.

Change is unpredictable

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari conceptualise change not as hierarchical or linear, but as rhizomatic: networked, subterranean, and multi-directional. Rhizomes grow in unpredictable ways. They spread laterally, pop up unexpectedly and resist containment and control. Seeing change as rhizomatic invites us to let go of the illusion of control and the comfort of neat linear narratives of change. It encourages us to ask: What are we noticing? What do we know and how do we know it? What remains unseen or unknown?

This perspective foregrounds the distributed, relational nature of change in school, where ideas sprout in unexpected places, and influence flows through conversations, relationships, and shared practice as much as through strategy and policy documents.

Tiny events create major disturbances

Art Garmston and Bruce Wellman offer thinking that has long shaped how I conceptualise schools and the teams within them. They remind us that organisations, especially schools, are non-linear dynamical systems. In such environments, small actions matter, sometimes in ways we expect and sometimes in ways we do not. Their principle that “tiny events create major disturbances” reveals that small, seemingly insignificant actions can lead to large, unpredictable consequences.

Like Edward Lonenz’s well-known chaos theory metaphor, that “a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas” this concept reminds us to consider the sensitivity of conditions, the unintended side effects of actions, and the potentially amplified impacts or big differences in outcomes that can come from small moments, incremental changes or a single decision.

Seeing schools in this way means accepting their complexity and the tangled ecologies of relationships, rhythms, priorities and actions. In complex systems, conditions matter and every decision and action, no matter how small, creates side effects, some intended and some unintended. In schools, a seemingly insignificant decision – a timetable adjustment, an offhand comment, a minor tweak to a process – can disrupt a system or, equally, enable it to evolve in generative ways.

Creating positive momentum

While the butterfly effect helps us understand how small actions can create big, unpredictable disturbances, the flywheel effect points out how small actions can create slow, steady, cumulative momentum that eventually becomes self-sustaining. Popularised by Jim Collins in Good to Great, the flywheel effect describes how disciplined, consistent, small actions, in the same direction over time, build persistent and powerful momentum.

A flywheel is heavy. At first, each push barely moves it. But each push adds to the previous one. Over time, as the result of many small, aligned actions over time, the accumulation of effort creates acceleration. Eventually, the flywheel turns under its own momentum. Over time, these small efforts compound, generating stability, coherence, and direction. While the butterfly effect warns us about unpredictable amplification, the flywheel effect teaches us about the power of intentional accumulation.

The little things are the big things

In schools, new practices emerge in pockets and innovation bubbles in hallways. Culture is built in daily conversations or eroded in micro moments of mistrust or disappointment. Much of what shapes work in schools is subtle or easy to overlook. The effects of incremental change are often chaotic, unmeasurable, or invisible, until suddenly they are not. Hindsight is always clearer than foresight.

If we are looking to harness the momentum of the flywheel, we need to be intentional about what we tweak, what we amplify, and how we act in alignment with each other as a team and a community. There is no single breakthrough moment or heroic actor that leads to long term improvement. Small gestures and tiny actions, aligned across an organisation, shape the future of the place.

Leading in complexity

Leading, then, means navigating complexity with care, curiosity and coherence. It means tuning in to people, patterns and feedback. It means careful noticing, sense making, listening, holding our assumptions lightly, stepping gently where possible, and connecting with others in order to keep our eyes and ears open for unintended disturbances and gems of opportunity. As we work together with shared purpose, we can collectively build positive, directional, values-aligned momentum over time.

Together, these metaphors (rhizomes, butterflies and flywheels) invite us to accept the paradoxes of leading in complexity. Change is unpredictable, yet also shaped by intentional, cumulative action. Tiny events can derail a system, and tiny events can strengthen it.

Our task as leaders is to embody these truths simultaneously by being strategic and adaptive, tuning in to what might be emerging while committing to the steady work of building momentum over time. In doing so, we honour both the unpredictability and the possibility inherent in non-linear dynamical systems, and we help cultivate systems that are thoughtful, resilient, relational, and capable of evolving in values-aligned ways.

Culture: Who do we want to be, together?

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Source: @spalla67 on pixabay

I have talked with staff this week about together creating the conditions for all of us to grow as a community of learners, through fostering an environment of high support and high challenge. Our staff have been preparing for the return of students and coming together to work through the idea of organisational culture, including hearing from students about their experiences of and insights into our school culture.

We have been wondering: Who are we now, and who do we want to be and become?

Peter Drucker famously said that “Culture eats Strategy for breakfast”, implying that strategy falls flat without a positive culture that empowers and supports the people in an organisation to enact the strategy. While most would agree that culture is important in organisations, it is one of those fluid, nebulous, and slippery terms that evades clear definition. Richard Perrin defines organisational culture as “the sum of values and rituals which serve as ‘glue’ to integrate members of the organisation.” The metaphor of glue is central; culture binds individuals together as a collective. Culture is about those things we share, consciously and unconsciously. When I think about culture, those things we share, or aim to share, include:

  • Purpose – Our shared why.
  • Values – What underpins our beliefs and actions.
  • Stories and symbols – What we say about ourselves, to ourselves and to others.
  • Relationships – How and who we are with each other.
  • Behaviours – How we do things around here.
  • Language – How we talk around here.

Herb Kelleher famously said that “culture is what people do when no one is looking.” We perform culture through our presence and our actions, seen and unseen, accepted and challenged. As Lieutenant-General David Morrison’s oft-cited message goes: “The standard we walk past is the standard we accept.” We become enculturated through our immersion in a culture and our observations of how a place and its people present, interact, and operate. As a new principal to a school this year, I am at the outset of my own journey of enculturation; of absorbing, being influenced by, and being initiated into, an existing culture.

In their work on culture this week, our staff were guided by organisational psychologist Hayley Lokan, from ISC Consulting, who described culture and both intangible and palpable. She shared Robert Kreitner and Angelo Kinicki’s definition of culture as “the set of shared, taken-for-granted implicit assumptions that a group holds and that determines how it perceives, thinks about, and reacts to its various environments”. Hayley likened culture to an iceberg and challenged us to look beyond the visible aspects of culture to interrogate our deep-seated assumptions. It reminded me of one of the findings from my PhD study: that in order to change our behaviour we often need to change our beliefs. In order to shift culture we need to challenge our norms, and our accepted attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours. Story, symbols, rituals, and traditions are important markers of and continuers of culture, but we need to be honest about those things that we allow to continue that are not aligned with our moral purpose or current community. Context, as always, is Queen, and our communities and their needs change over time.

This week’s staff workshops and student panel on culture revealed insights into the school. Staff described the school’s culture as supportive, caring, welcoming, inclusive, kind, collaborative, friendly, aspirant, dedicated, proud, respectful, hard working, and with a mixture of tradition and trailblazing dynamism. Students in a panel discussion described the culture as safe, caring, close-knit, empowering, inclusive, and one in which students feel encouraged to be their best while being supported during times of difficulty. In exploratory discussions about the future of our culture, staff began to wonder about how we might elevate wellbeing, agency, and celebration of the diversity of the individual, to strengthen what is great about our culture and to grow with our community.

If we can build and maintain a culture of trust in which there is openness, honest and gracious feedback, diverse voices, varied aspirations, and a commitment to lifting each other up, we can all learn, lead, be well, and be in community with one another. We will continue to ask ourselves, our students and our wider community:

  • What about our culture do we want to keep?
  • What about our culture might we like to change or develop?
  • What are our next steps to move forward with intentionality?