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The main thrust of this paper is to explore factors from the business sector, which could inspire school leaders in terms of issue/problem formulation during their decision-making process. This conceptual paper examines diachronically and conceptually the issues of uncertainty, not only in terms of context and decision-making, but also having in mind leaders' and leadership's main characteristics as well. The question remains whether concepts of uncertainty management practices from the business sector might offer insights for school principals in order to make connections between what is happening inside and outside the organization. The paper is organized around five sections dealing with the conceptual basis of the two main terms, crisis and uncertainty and how leaders in the business sector deal with these. Following, we focus on educational leaders and their ways of navigating through crisis and uncertainty and we conclude with some observations about how leaders make the best possible decisions under the circumstances. We end the paper by stressing that, perhaps, many of the leadership qualities and characteristics needed in times of "normality" are more or less similar to those needed in times of uncertainty. However, school leaders need to learn to act faster with clearer and constant communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The doctrine of leader centrism, supported by the concept of methodological individualism, dominates contemporary accounts of leadership in education and is generally applied as the default option that explains how organizations such as schools function. We argue that methodological individualism is not defensible and that as a result, the explanatory value of leadership is an open empirical question, not a default option. Leadership, and especially problem-solving, is always exercised under a set of constraints. Making the study of these constraints the focal point for determining leadership not only requires the resources of sciences not usually employed in leadership research, but leads to a reconceptualizing how leadership ought to be studied. In this paper we identify three broad contexts that help determine the constraint sets that define problems and their solutions. A defensible theory of educational leadership, we argue, must incorporate context as sets of constraints and develop empirical procedures to investigate context. Only after investigation is it possible to determine who or what the unit of leadership was, or whether leadership occurred at all. There are no default options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The government of Chile mandated a system-wide reform in public school education in 2017. The reform calls for de-municipalization of the public school sector (345 municipal education departments under mayoral control) and the creation of 70 Servicios Locales de Educación Pública (SLEPs) between 2018 and 2025. The reform represents a largescale attempt to improve and save public education in Chile. This analysis is based on case studies of implementation of the first four SLEPs in the first year of the reform. Using Stake's method for multiple case study analysis, the analysis explores how context influences the professional capacity of the SLEPs to provide professional assistance to schools. The study relates to research on the effectiveness of intermediate level agencies in school systems and on contextual influences on organizational innovation and capacity building. The analysis reveals that contextual factors shaping initial professional capacity of the SLEPs reinforced traditional practices of local education agency support to schools in three of the four cases. The differentiating factor centered on the actions of local agency leaders who responded to capacity gaps and lack of direction from government authorities as either constraints on change or as an opportunity for innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]