ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘strategic intention’ is adapted from the work of Max Boisot, Professor of Strategic Management at ESADE in Barcelona, examined in more detail in Chapter 10.
Strategic intention describes a process of coping with turbulence through a direct, intuitive understanding of what is occurring in an effort to guide the work of the school. A turbulent environment cannot be tamed by rational analysis alone so that conventional strategic planning is deemed to be of little use. Yet it does not follow that the school’s response must be left to a random distribution of lone individuals acting opportunistically and often in isolation as in a regime of intrapreneurship. Strategic intention relies on an intuitively formed pattern or gestalt-some would call it a vision-to give it unity and coherence. (adapted from Boisot, 1995, p. 36)
Track 3 of change ‘beyond the self-managing school’ is organized in this book around the gestalt, described in an overview in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.1, p. 13) and explicated in Chapters 8 and 9. This gestalt helped the authors give ‘unity and coherence’ to their understanding of what is occurring.
