Courageous Leadership: Empowering Risk-taking for Innovation and Change

Innovation is central to ongoing efforts to evolve and improve education so that it can be fit for purpose in today’s world of complex and urgent challenges. Leading such innovation takes courage, and it can be risky; therefore, this chapter focuses on risk-taking to highlight why educational leaders must navigate teachers’ emotional experiences during innovation. Historically, research on educational innovation has emphasized cognition and behavioural change while paying scant attention to the role of emotion. More recent evidence reveals how emotions, cognition, and behaviour are deeply interwoven. Emotions significantly shape and are shaped by individuals’ perceptions of risk. Risk perception is understood as the subjective construction of uncertainty surrounding future events and their possible negative consequences (Aven & Renn, 2009). These perceptions of risk arise when people anticipate the potential loss of something they value. If the risk is perceived as too high, people will not engage with innovation (Le Fevre, 2014, 2021). Because emotional responses, including vulnerability, are commonplace within complex educational settings, leaders play an important role in intentionally cultivating environments where risk-taking is supported. This chapter uses a case of professional learning for innovation in Aotearoa New Zealand to illustrate how leaders can emotionally support educators to navigate risk, thereby fostering educators’ courage to experiment and their capacity to support innovation within their communities. Findings from this research have implications for leading innovation in a range of cultural contexts from those that are de-centralized and relatively autonomous to highly centralized policy-driven contexts.