Aqueducts, Improvement Science, and Leadership

In February this year I became director of the Educational Leadership doctoral program at Western Kentucky University, which forms practicing and aspiring leaders in K-12 schools, higher education, and related fields. One of my immediate goals was to redesign the WKU Ed.D. around the principles and processes of "Improvement Science." 

As a member of the Carnegie Project on the Educational Doctorate (CPED), WKU had been piloting a highly applied capstone project called the "dissertation-in-practice" based on continuous improvement protocols that have been heavily promoted by the Carnegie Foundation. Like other CPED institutions, WKU was interested in distinguishing its EdD as a practitioner doctorate, as rigorous as a traditional PhD but designed for a different purpose: forming "scholar-practitioners" who will continue to serve as leaders in educational organizations, equipped with a set of research skills to facilitate more rapid organizational improvement. 

With the incoming Fall 2023 cohort, we have made "Improvement Science Leadership" the theme of the entire program going forward. With the tools of improvement science, WKU doctoral students will identify a problem of practice within their organization and deploy a set of research-based interventions to address it.

Much of the language of improvement science is rooted in the management theories and change processes championed by W. Edwards Deming and other 20th century figures associated with business and manufacturing industries. In recent decades, these processes have been increasingly applied to health care and education organizations as well. Perhaps the best known feature of improvement science is the PDSA (plan-do-study-act) cycle: the practitioner seeks to define and understand a practice problem and hypothesize an improvement strategy (plan), deploy the intervention (do), analyze the results (study), and then plan a new cycle of interventions based on lessons learned (act).

This semester I am teaching a brand new course to this incoming doctoral cohort called Introduction to Improvement Science. The "cover photo" I chose for this course features the impressive Pont du Gard aqueduct in Southern France. Many of the images in the slides for the first class session also include pictures of Pont du Gard and details of similar Roman aqueducts.

The choice of the aqueduct as the guiding image for a course on improvement science is not (just) a reflection of my love for things old and beautiful. While improvement science is often presented as a product of 20th century management ideas and techniques, the principles and practices of improvement are not new and over emphasizing the social science aspects of leadership and organizational change often reflects the prejudice of "presentism," which, among other things, fails to give our ancestors credit for their immense knowledge, skill, and wisdom.

The ancient Romans and their subjects faced a significant problem of practice: how to get sufficient water supplies to their growing population centers in a hot Mediterranean climate. Their "intervention" was genius: use the natural force of gravity to channel water from the nearby mountains to where it was needed. Pont du Gard may have carried as much as 8.8 million gallons of water per day along a route of more than 30 miles. That this structure was not just useful but also beautiful should be noted, because such things should go together.

Also note, however, that this feat of engineering-art didn't just happen by accident, but through leadership, which is also the focus of this EdD program. And here we speak not just of the emperor who likely gave the initial order for the construction of Pont du Gard (Caesar Augustus, ruler of the realm, whose name you might recognize from the second chapter of St. Luke's gospel), but his son-in-law Marcus Vipsannius Agrippa, who oversaw the work a generation later, and the countless, unnamed architects, engineers, foremen, and masons who designed and built the structure, compelling excellence from themselves and others, through a process we would likely recognize today as "plan-do-study-act" (PDSA).

No work of collective human excellence is achieved without leadership, and here I speak not of the pseudo-social science of modern "leadership" theory, but the classical understanding that leaders are those who articulate a grand vision of excellence and, through their virtuous example, compel a desire for excellence in others. 

My aspiration for the WKU Ed.D. program is that it serve to form scholar-practitioners who can lead similar works of excellence in the organizations they serve. Here my thinking is influenced, in part, by Yuval Levin's 2020 book, A Time to Build.

Levin argues that faith in the institutions of modern society has declined because institutions (family, schools, government, the professions, once-respected industries) have abandoned their formative function. Human beings do not naturally seek excellence, and therefore we need institutions - including and especially education and professional training - to form us accordingly. Levin calls on institutions to reclaim that formative purpose.

Professional doctoral programs - especially those who seek to form leaders - should be the first to embrace this purpose. Therefore, my vision and mission for the WKU Ed.D. program is as follows:

• Our vision: The WKU Educational Leadership doctoral program aspires to improve education outcomes in Kentucky and beyond.
• Our mission: To achieve our vision, the WKU Educational Leadership doctoral program will form scholar practitioners who compel excellence in educational organizations by developing virtue and skill in the art and science of improvement.

Understood this way, the components of the WKU Ed.D. program might also roughly parallel the classic Greek ideals of the "three transcendentals:" the True (improving the human condition in discernible ways - improvement "science"), the Good (leadership that compels improvement toward the ideal of excellence), and the Beautiful (an aesthetic dimension of this process that creates experiences that are awe-inspiring and pleasing to our perceptions).

There is still much to work out in my thinking about all this, but the above represents a tentative first attempt to articulate my own goals for the WKU Ed.D. program. I look forward to working with stakeholders to further refine our mission according to this classic understanding of leadership using the tools of organizational improvement.

May the image of Pont du Gard remind us of all the useful, beautiful, excellent things leaders can do.

*Image above by Dimitris Kilymis