Making sense of conflict: a case study for educational leaders
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Sensemaking is the difficult art which lies at the heart of academia. Academics bring their own ways of examining and explaining things they see. A key challenge for Carrie is how to make sense of complex and challenging situations, recognize available solutions, choose the best path moving forward, and convey all of the above to the different stakeholders, in a clear and compelling manner. According to Bolman and Gallos (2011), sensemaking involves three steps: (1) noticing something, (2) deciding what to make of it and (3) deciding what to do about it. Humans are known to be good at all three of these steps. In fact, we do it so automatically, all the time, that we often tend to overlook some important aspects of this process. Design/methodology/approach Academics in colleges and universities attain levels of autonomy and collective power beyond employees in most other industries, which not only create challenges for administrators but also for colleagues who find themselves in conflict with one another. This chapter chronicles a composite scenario describing a conflict between two scholars, Carrie and Paul. Weick's sensemaking framework and Argyris and Schön's organizational learning framework illustrate how Carrie made sense of and learned from a situation which remains all too common in higher education. Bolman and Gallos's four learning routines provide some resolutions to Carrie's dilemma. The most important lesson to take from Carrie's conversation with Paul is not whether the conversation went well or not. In many ways, we are always moving toward what is real, or what Popper calls “closer to the truth” when we are unable to see our destination clearly. Findings The authors, Bolman and Gallos (2011), recommend that we use a two-sided case with the same format that Carrie used, when dealing with difficult situation. One side reflects what was said (or anticipated conversation) and the responses (or anticipated responses; or how you think they will respond) on the left column and, on the right column, your unspoken thoughts (what you were thinking but did not say). According to the authors, if one subscribes to this practice, one would gain greater clarity with respect to one's strengths, comfort zones and flat spots. The two-sided model is low-risk and it enables one to visualize one's intended strategies, how one speaks to one's colleague and the possible consequences. The model can also let one know how optimistic or pessimistic one is about the situation. Knowing our position in advance may help us to develop and practice new strategies, which may also assist in building confidence and communication skills. Practical implications To conclude, interpersonal skills are central to good communication but, in higher education, interpersonal skills are insufficient. Often, when relationships among colleagues go awry, it is because they know what they intend but they do not know what they did to have contributed to unsatisfactory outcomes. As a result, it is easier to point fingers at others than to reflect and learn from one's mistakes. The ones who succeed are those who are persistent and proactive in reflecting on their behaviour and in learning from those around them. Furthermore, they seek feedback from their colleagues, put their assumptions to the test, work on balancing advocacy and inquiry, and learn about the pattern of their daily practice. Originality/value This chapter/paper chronicles a composite scenario describing a conflict between two scholars, Carrie and Paul. The most important lesson to take from Carrie's conversation with Paul is not whether the conversation went well or not. In many ways, we are always moving toward what is real, or what Popper calls “closer to the truth” when we are unable to see our destination clearly.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it