Leadership
Most conversations about operating models begin with structure.
Who reports to whom? What sits centrally? What remains within schools? Where does responsibility ultimately sit?
Those questions matter. But increasingly, I think some of the more important organisational challenges sit between the boxes.
Take AI governance.
A trust can appoint a senior responsible officer, publish an AI policy and establish a clear approval process.
Structurally, everything can look sensible.
But what happens when a teacher identifies a new use case?
When should the DPO become involved?
When does curriculum leadership need to engage?
Who speaks to procurement?
How does learning from one school reach another?
And what happens when an issue crosses technology, safeguarding, education, data protection and finance at the same time?
The answer rarely sits neatly within a single role or reporting line.
That is relational architecture.
It is the way people, teams and responsibilities connect around the work that actually needs to happen.
This feels particularly relevant to our Connect theme for this year’s Digital Leadership Summit.
As trusts grow and become more digitally mature, the challenge is not simply to design clearer structures. It is to ensure that the relationships between those structures are equally deliberate.
Evidence around organisational decision making consistently suggests that allocating roles and responsibilities is only part of the answer. Effective organisations also need clarity about how those roles interact, where information moves, who needs to be involved and how disagreement is resolved.
The same is true of organisational networks. Performance is shaped not only by formal hierarchy, but by the connections that allow knowledge, challenge and expertise to move across traditional boundaries.
For MAT leaders, that creates another set of questions.
Who needs to connect with whom?
About what?
How frequently?
What information should move between them?
Where does a decision ultimately sit?
And what happens when there is legitimate disagreement?
These questions become even more important in a trust model, where local agency and organisational coherence will always need to coexist.
The ambition should not be to centralise every decision or create another layer of process.
It should be to design the connections that allow the right decisions to be made, by the right people, with the right information.
That is why Connect is not simply about collaboration.
It is about organisational design.
It is about recognising that the quality of a trust’s operating model is shaped as much by the relationships between functions, schools and leaders as it is by the structures themselves.
So the provocation I would offer MAT leaders is simple:
If you removed every box from your organisational chart and left only the connections between them, would there still be an operating model?
If not, we may have designed the organisation, but not yet designed how it actually works.
Jonny Wathen
CEO, TransforMATive
TransforMATive Insights brings together learning from our work with multi-academy trusts, sector leaders and partners, informed by the latest research and emerging evidence, to explore the issues, opportunities and practical choices shaping digital leadership across education.
