The COVID-19 culture lessons that apply to AI in schools.

In 2020, seven for-profit private schools in the UAE and Nigeria went online in less than two weeks. A dissertation study of those schools, using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument alongside interviews with every principal, tracked what changed inside their cultures and what stayed changed. The findings apply directly to how schools are now adopting AI.

The initial hypothesis was straightforward. A catastrophic event coinciding with rapid technology adoption would produce a new era of innovation in education. That hypothesis was only partly borne out. The change was fast and almost total. Within two weeks nearly every school in the sample was teaching fully or almost fully online. Within six months most Dubai private schools were operating in socially distanced hybrid pods. The innovation, though, was thinner than the pace of change suggested. People, not systems, absorbed the disruption. Teachers were isolated and burning out. School leaders balanced the demands of parents, regulators, and, at times, their own staff.

The more interesting question is why the pace of adoption did not produce a corresponding depth of learning. The study argues that the answer lies in organisational culture. Culture is what mediates the response to disruption. Culture shapes which experiments a school can run, which relationships survive the response, and which practices stay in place after the crisis passes. This piece walks through the culture findings and shows why they matter now, when the disruption schools face is not a public health crisis but the arrival of AI.

The framework.

Cameron and Quinn's Competing Values Framework describes four organisational cultures. Clan culture holds a school together through family, mentorship, and trust. Adhocracy holds it together through innovation, risk-taking, and agility. Market culture holds it together through results, competition, and targets. Hierarchy holds it together through structure, rules, and coordination. Every school contains all four cultures. What differs is the mix, and the leader's ability to move deliberately between them when the situation demands it. That ability is what the dissertation calls cultural agility.

Cultural agility is the leader capability of moving between all four cultures deliberately. Schools leading through AI need leaders who can read their own culture and navigate it on purpose.

The seven schools contained all four cultures. Their mixes differed sharply.

Staff at each school divided one hundred points across the four cultures on the OCAI. The chart below shows the current culture reported by staff at each of the seven schools in the sample. School S7 was strongly hierarchical. Schools S5 and S6 were market-led. School S2 was the most clan-oriented in the sample.

Four of the seven schools were dominated by Market or Hierarchy at the time of the study. The pattern matters because those two cultures share an orientation toward stability and external accountability. Neither is well suited on its own to sustained experimentation. When the disruption arrived, the schools with a stronger Market and Hierarchy tilt moved quickly on operations. The schools with a stronger Clan and Adhocracy tilt found it easier to sustain the professional learning and collegial reflection that experimentation actually requires.

Staff wanted more Clan and Adhocracy in almost every school.

The OCAI asks respondents to complete the exercise twice. Once for current culture. Once for the culture they would prefer. Aggregated across the sample, the picture is striking. Staff wanted more Clan and Adhocracy and less Hierarchy in almost every school.