“Let us learn from the past to profit from the present, and from the present to live better in the future,” wrote William Wordsworth.

By connecting the three sequential states that make up the flow of time, Wordsworth captured a fundamental characteristic of what it is to be a wise leader.

Simply put, the wise leader can make powerful connections between the past, present and future; they are able to use these insights to make “good” decisions that have a positive effect on young people, the school and its surrounding community.

The wise leader can make powerful connections between the past, present and future

Yet, for all that this might appear to be a relatively simple asset, the reality is that few school leaders manage to pull it off naturally. The reason? It’s likely that most of us who are leaders will have a preference for one or other of these points on the time continuum.

Some leaders will focus primarily on the present - not in a caricature of mindfulness, whereby they draw sustenance from being conscious of the moment, but as a favoured strategy to concentrate upon the concrete nature of the “here and now”. Such leaders concentrate on data, short-term projects and performance indicators.

Then there are those who solely look towards the past and measure everything against that yardstick. Such individuals can adopt one of two approaches: firstly, a slavish adherence to what has gone before, characterised by nostalgia and regret, which they use to justify resistance to change; or, alternatively, to purge the past from every facet of their organisation on the basis that what went before cannot meet the need for change - regardless of its value.

A future called ‘perhaps’

Then there are those leaders who are transfixed by the future, which Tennessee Williams called the art of the “perhaps”. They are driven by a need for relentless change, by seeking out the new practices that would provide the “edge” in that imagined world beyond the sight of those who are trapped (in the leader’s eyes) in the present or the past - yet who are isolated from their colleagues by their failure to inhabit the present.

Personally, I am naturally drawn to the future, whereas my business partner is much more concerned with the present. That is not to say that either of us is disconnected from either the present or the future respectively, but that we tend towards a particular perspective. Without knowledge and awareness of these tacit preferences, we can miss out on what the other might see quite naturally.

Yet to suggest that we are one-dimensional souls would be a mistake. I recall a well-known leader who was once described, in frustrated terms, to be a “radical traditionalist”. The term was used as a way of capturing her capacity to meld the importance of tradition, ritual and custom with a fearless commitment to experiment with new ideas that challenged the boundaries of accepted practice.

Wise school leaders seem to have that capacity to move their perspective backwards and forwards in time to look at problems through each of these temporal dimensions. Such leaders appreciate that human beings have a fundamental need to feel that they belong to something that precedes their presence on Earth. Not perhaps Newton’s idea of “standing on the shoulders of giants”, but that they are part of something that builds upon the legacy of others and in turn gives them the opportunity to leave their own mark on the world.

‘Historical reservoir’

The concept of creating a historical reservoir helps to reinforce people’s cultural identity and sense of attachment to an organisation - and in turn helps them to make sense of the present and the future. That is why wise leaders help their colleagues to appreciate how their endeavours fit with those who came before and how they would contribute to the future.

Wise leaders do not accept that the present is a fixed state, either to be decried or celebrated, although they intuitively understand that the present is always a step towards the future. Yet through wise leadership they appreciate the need to avoid the pendulum created by what might be called an addiction to change, which can sometimes be the outcome of letting go too easily of old beliefs and attachments.

Wise leaders do not accept that the present is a fixed state, either to be decried or celebrated, although they intuitively understand that the present is always a step towards the future

Ironically, these self-same beliefs and attachments can merge with the present to create a bias towards the status quo, with people reluctant to engage in change for fear of losing what they know. Wise leaders, then, always have an eye on the future, for their judgement will almost always influence a future state, albeit that it simply alters the present.

Yet the past and the present also inform the future, especially in terms of learning from the mistakes we and our forbears have made before; this gives us a confidence to experiment and try things in the knowledge that learning from mistakes will make a valuable contribution to the future.

The task for the wise school leader is exceptionally complex, given the need to navigate the contradictory advantages and disadvantages of the past, present and future perspectives, in order to make good decisions that would have a positive impact on those around them and wider society. Those leaders who only tend to inhabit one temporal state - albeit unawares - will be locked into a decision-making framework that narrows and limits their effectiveness, and diminishes the lives of those whom they would lead.

Don Ledingham is chief executive of Ceanna, and a former education director and secondary head in Scotland