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School leadership and innovation in action: introducing linkography to study strategic conversations
Date
2026-07-20
Abstract
Understanding how innovation emerges in schools requires close attention to strategic conversations, through which leaders navigate complex problems and co-construct new initiatives. While research in educational leadership often relies on surveys and interviews that capture participants’ reflections after the fact, fewer studies examine how innovative thinking is co-constructed or unfolds during interaction. This paper introduces linkography, a protocol analysis method from design research, as a method to study the moment-to-moment interactions and conversations during collaborative problem solving. Linkography maps how each conversational move relates to others, offering visual representations together with quantitative metrics and qualitative interpretations that trace how ideas evolve in strategic conversations. The paper outlines three methodological advantages for educational leadership research: (1) preserving the sequential and relational structure of the dialogue, (2) combining visual and numerical indicators to assess conversational quality, and (3) enabling reflection-on-action through the visualisation of team reasoning. Linkography offers a process-based methodology for analysing how leadership and innovation are enacted and distributed through everyday professional conversations.
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Description
Publisher
Routledge Taylor & Francis Group
Citation
School Leadership & Management pp. 1-36
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Blom_2026_School.pdf
Adobe PDF, 1.99 MB
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Funding code
Funding Information
Sustainable Development Goals
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License
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International