I believe we are too quick to ascribe intricate motives to what others do.
As I write this, it is the week after the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. With each anniversary of the event, more information comes to light or, perhaps more precisely, old information is recycled and repackaged and re-released. As a younger man, I dove into some of the information surrounding the circumstances of the president’s death, reading hundreds of pages on the subject. I became something of a minor expert on a few theories and I found myself in the camp that believes that there was some kind of conspiracy involved in the assassination.
Most Americans believe there was a conspiracy behind the assassination, some 65% of Americans according to a 2023 Gallup poll.
I am unsurprised by this fact not because of anything I personally believe about a 60 year old murder, but because, in my experience as a school leader, most of those I work with are ready to believe there are conspiracies all around them. Many look at discrete things their colleagues do, or at slights that have happened to them, or at directions their schools are headed with which they do not agree and link incident to incident to incident as though they are putting together an elaborate puzzle, the solution to which is a predetermined outcome: there is a conspiracy among us.
I believe we are too quick to ascribe intricate motives to what others do.
This is not to say that there are, in fact, hidden agendas and plans within schools. There sometimes are. This is not to say that there are not bad actors in our profession. They exist. This is not to say that there are not ugly situations that play out among us. These happen all too frequently.
However, to always default to conspiracy is dangerous.
Most often, in my experience, those who have done us wrong or have done things with which we disagree or have led the school down a path which is inexplicable to us do not have a master plan which they are executing. They are too busy, too overwhelmed, or too tired to engage in such machinations. They are simply doing – perhaps well, perhaps poorly – but without a mosaic of strategic moves and countermoves.
Are there some conspiracies among us? I will grant there might be some.
Is every puzzle we put together about others’ motivations correctly assembled? I suggest that, more often than not, these puzzles are of our own creation.