Leading through agonistic conflict: Contested sense-making in national political arenas

This article examines the social processes of political leadership in situations of contest and conflict, taking place within a key and long-established democratic institution, the UK Parliament. The empirical focus is on leadership in House of Commons select committees, which are concerned with holding the government to account. Headlines and media scrutiny, combined with internal challenge from the cross-party mix of politicians on the committees and a range of external stakeholders, create leadership challenges for committee chairs. The study is of two committee inquiries led by the same committee chair, which occurred concurrently and in real time, thereby providing a rare comparative study of leadership through the same leader at the same time but with different leadership challenges. Rather than shying away from conflict, as does much of the leadership literature, this research highlights how leaders who actively engage in challenge and conflict can build a degree of shared purpose among diverse groups of stakeholders. It examines and combines, in theory elaboration, two theories relevant to understanding these leadership processes: agonistic pluralism with its role in creating respectful conflictual consensus, and the theory of sense-making and sense-giving. The two cases (the two inquiries) had different trajectories and reveal how the chair recognised and dealt with conflict to achieve sense-making outcomes across divergent interests and across political parties. There are implications not only for understanding political leadership but also more widely for leadership where there are diverse and sometimes conflicting interests

Clear purpose or sheer survival? National ministerial leadership across multiple arenas

Day-to-day political life for the most senior national politicians can be very pressurized and exposed. How they as individuals cope with constant challenges and make the most of opportunities for leadership is an under researched area. This is addressed in this interpretive study of the personal accounts of a small group of prominent U.K. politicians as they reflect, soon after leaving office, on their experiences as national ministers. The article connects generic leadership theory around practice and purpose with political leadership studies as a basis for a thematic analysis of ministers’ experiences across three key prominent arenas of ministerial life: relationships with the Prime Minister’s office, within their departments, and with their constituencies. Analysis of findings leads to a proposed analytical framework of active leadership in their everyday experience. The article concludes that active leadership practice is difficult but possible for leading national politicians

Contested Sensemaking and Everyday Leadership Practices in the Context of UK Parliamentary Select Committees

This thesis is an exploratory study of everyday leadership in UK parliamentary select committees. It is based on a detailed analysis of the parliamentary context for leadership and highlights the distinctive characteristics of a chair’s everyday select committee leadership practices. It examines how a chair addresses the challenges involved in the social processes of mobilising and aligning committee members and stakeholders around the committee’s purpose: making sense of complex and contentious public policy dilemmas. While still largely bound by parliamentary routines and tradition, select committees offer chairs increasing opportunities for flexibility, influence and leadership. Based on privileged research access to the workings of select committees, this is a real-time embedded comparative case study of similarities and differences in the enactment of leadership across two parallel contemporaneous inquiries within the same committee. It highlights the significance of sensemaking and sensegiving to leadership while proposing that the politicised context accentuates how challenge and conflict are integral to the daily enactment of leadership, which is often more volatile and much harder work than the literature suggests. It builds on existing leadership theory to contribute a novel conception of leadership, based on an adaptive combination of sensegiving, praxis and challenge in this context, with potentially wider application

Structures, strategy and stakeholder communication: three key challenges for the public leadership and governance of education in England.

Substantial changes to the English education system most notably since 2010, have resulted in many changes to school governance, with schools, academies and free schools breaking away from Local Education Authority (LEA) control, and the emergence of new governance structures as the result of the formation of formal partnerships between schools that are very often geographically distant from one another. This combined with an increasingly marketized environment of education in England places new pressures on school boards as democratic strategic leaders of education. With 300 thousand volunteer school board members tasked with governing over 22 thousand schools, held to account for the performance and leadership of schools, one of the boards’ key duties lies in setting the strategic direction for their school or group of schools. This has resulted in a concerted drive to recruit governors for their skills rather than their representative role (Baxter, 2015,2016); James, Goodall, Howarth, & Knights, 2014). As a result school boards face an important challenge in managing the tension between a business-like, performance oriented and a democratic representative role reflecting the concerns of parents and the local community (Nolan, 1996; Cornforth, 2004b). It also constitutes a significant leadership challenge. This paper examines some of the challenges and tensions facing board members within multi-academy trusts. Using data from 40 qualitative interviews with board members of MATs and key individuals within governor support organisations, combined with documentary analysis of formal reports, the paper concludes that leadership challenges for boards are focused on three principal areas: governance structures; communication with stakeholders and using stakeholder information and knowledge to inform strategy and as a driver for school improvement. It also concludes that the three areas are key to future research in how board members in nested governance structures go about setting and monitoring the strategic direction of their organizations

Biosimmer: A Virtual Reality Simulator for Training First Responders in a BW Scenario

BioSimMER (Bioterrorism Simulated Medical Emergency Response) is a Virtual Reality-based mission rehearsal and training environment. BioSimMER employs contingency-oriented, multiple-path algorithms and MOESINIOPS focused on real-world operations. BioSimMER is network-based and immerses multiple trainees in a high resolution synthetic environment, including virtual casualties and instruments that they may interact with and manipulate. Trainees are represented as individuals by virtual human Avatars. The simulation consists of several components: virtual casualties dynamically manifest the symptoms of their injuries and respond to the intervention of the trainees. Agent transport analysis is used to simulate casualty exposures and to drive the responses of simulated sensors/detectors. The selected prototype scenario is representative of combined injuries anticipated in BW operations

Through the eyes of others : using developmental peer reviews to promote reflection and change in organizations

Purpose This paper seeks to critically examine the principles, mechanisms, and critical success factors of developmental peer review as a way to promote reflection and change in organizations. Design/methodology/approach This paper calls developmental peer review the structured, managed, and collaborative process whereby reputable others are invited into an organisation to provide feedback and offer guidance on organisational change and improvement. In the paper, the authors use the example of developmental peer review in UK local government both to foreground some of the distinctive aspects of the methodology and to identify some of its critical conditions of use. Findings The paper argues that this type of initiative often co-exists with a more judgemental inspection-oriented double. The institutional framework that surrounds developmental peer review makes it therefore both a powerful and delicate tool. There is a need in this initiative to maintain a dynamic balance to avoid either coercion or collusion in review. Practical implications In order to achieve its potential, peer review needs to be clearly framed and constructed as a developmental initiative. In the paper, a number of suggestions of how to do so are offered. If doubts exist on the nature of the exercise, it is likely that people will interpret it as a form of inspection and react defensively, reducing its capacity to trigger learning and transformation. Originality/value This paper advances knowledge and understanding about developmental peer review, by drawing on the relevant literature and also analysing a prevalent form of such review in current use in local government organizations in England and Wales

Design and implementation of a virtual reality system and its application to training medical first responders

This paper presents the design and implementation of a distributed virtual reality (VR) platform that was developed to support the training of multiple users who must perform complex tasks in which situation assessment and critical thinking are the primary components of success. The system is fully immersive and multimodal, and users are represented as tracked, full-body figures. The system supports the manipulation of virtual objects, allowing users to act upon the environment in a natural manner. The underlying intelligent simulation component creates an interactive, responsive world in which the consequences of such actions are presented within a realistic, time-critical scenario. The focus of this work has been on the training of medical emergency-response personnel. BioSimMER, an application of the system to training first responders to an act of bio-terrorism, has been implemented and is presented throughout the paper as a concrete example of how the underlying platform architecture supports complex training tasks. Finally, a preliminary field study was performed at the Texas Engineering Extension Service Fire Protection Training Division. The study focused on individual, rather than team, interaction with the system and was designed to gauge user acceptance of VR as a training tool. The results of this study are presented

A virtual reality patient simulation system for teaching emergency response skills to u.s. navy medical providers

Rapid and effective medical intervention in response to civil and military-related disasters is crucial for saving lives and limiting long-term disability. Inexperienced providers may suffer in performance when faced with limited supplies and the demands of stabilizing casualties not generally encountered in the comparatively resource-rich hospital setting. Head trauma and multiple injury cases are particularly complex to diagnose and treat, requiring the integration and processing of complex multimodal data. In this project, collaborators adapted and merged existing technologies to produce a flexible, modular patient simulation system with both three-dimensional virtual reality and two-dimensional flat screen user interfaces for teaching cognitive assessment and treatment skills. This experiential, problem-based training approach engages the user in a stress-filled, high fidelity world, providing multiple learning opportunities within a compressed period of time and without risk. The system simulates both the dynamic state of the patient and the results of user intervention, enabling trainees to watch the virtual patient deteriorate or stabilize as a result of their decision-making speed and accuracy. Systems can be deployed to the field enabling trainees to practice repeatedly until their skills are mastered and to maintain those skills once acquired. This paper describes the technologies and the process used to develop the trainers, the clinical algorithms, and the incorporation of teaching points. We also characterize aspects of the actual simulation exercise through the lens of the trainee. Copyright © World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine 2001