Leadership and Complexity: Implications for Practice within the Advisement Leadership Bodies at Colleges and Universities

As academic advising has become more central to the work of universities and colleges, especially in relation to retention and graduation, efforts are being made to improve collaboration among different advising groups within these institutions. These efforts, at a number of campuses, include the emergence of training programs and institution level leadership bodies that oversee advising processes. Many of these efforts, however, are based on older paradigms of leadership and strategy. This article proposes a new model for guiding the work of these bodies based on more recent thinking that has emerged from the fields of leadership studies and chaos and complexity science as they relate to human behavior.