Why the margins of a system hold the clues to its future

Written by: Adelee Penner

New Series

Inclusive Leadership: Creating Conditions Where Everyone Thrives

Inclusive leadership is not a program, an initiative, or a checklist — it is a daily practice of expanding who belongs and who has a voice within our systems. This series invites educational leaders to step beyond familiar language and deeply examine how their actions, assumptions, routines, and relationships shape what becomes possible for students, staff, and communities. By blending research, narrative, and reflective provocation, each post explores a different dimension of inclusive leadership: belonging, innovation, voice, psychological safety, shared power, and the future-ready mindsets required for equity to take root.

Together, these pieces offer a companion for leaders committed to creating systems where every person is seen, valued, and able to contribute to the collective work of learning and change.

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Abstract: Innovation rarely emerges from the centre of a system. It grows at the edges — in the perspectives and experiences of people who have historically been excluded from decision-making, agenda-setting, or strategic conversations. Inclusive leadership requires leaders to treat these edges not as places of deficit or disruption, but as powerful learning sites that illuminate system blind spots and expand collective imagination.

This blog explores how leaders cultivate practices of deep listening that draw insight from those who experience school, policy, change, and community from the margins. Through research, reflective narrative, and leadership coaching stories, we consider how listening to the edges strengthens equity, fuels innovation, and builds future-ready systems. When leaders honour the wisdom at the margins, they reposition inclusion as a generative force — one that shapes possibility, not just participation.

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Systems reveal themselves at the edges.

Not in the polished boardroom conversations or well-rehearsed staff meetings, but in the quiet stories shared in hallways, the questions whispered in classrooms, and the experiences of those who move through the system without the power to shape it. These edges — often overlooked, sometimes misunderstood — are where the future takes root.

Inclusive leadership calls us to turn toward these edges with intention, curiosity, and humility because innovation lives there too.

Many leaders assume that the most reliable information comes from the center of the system: committees, leadership teams, policy groups, and high-level planning. But the center usually reflects what the system already believes. It protects what is established. It reinforces what feels safe, recognizable, and predictable.

The edges, on the other hand, tell us what the system does not yet know how to hear.

The Edges as Early Warning and Early Wonder

Research consistently shows that marginalized perspectives reveal system blind spots long before the system is ready to acknowledge them. Voices at the edges identify inequities sooner, challenge assumptions more directly, and surface possibilities that feel bold or disruptive from the center (Özdemir, Gün, & Yirmibeş, 2023).

Inclusive leadership means creating mechanisms to ensure those voices are heard before a crisis — before inequitable practices calcify, before mistrust grows, before innovation stalls.

The edges act as both early warning and early wonder.
They tell us what is not working and what could be.

To ignore them is to limit the system’s imagination.
Listening to them expands it.

A Leadership Coaching Moment: Listening Beyond Familiar Voices

During a recent leadership coaching session, a principal shared frustration about staff who seemed “resistant” to a new task design initiative. He had presented the rationale, offered professional learning, and clearly communicated expectations. Yet a handful of teachers — mostly those newer to the school and two who often felt on the periphery of staff culture — kept raising concerns.

“They’re missing the point,” he said.
But as we unpacked the situation, it became clear:
The teachers weren’t resisting.
They were naming things the system wasn’t yet ready to see.

One described how multilingual learners were struggling with the language-heavy tasks being introduced.
Another noted that students who identified as neurodivergent were being overwhelmed by multi-step assignments.
A third shared that the tasks seemed culturally narrow — beautiful on paper, but disconnected from many students’ lived experiences.

The principal paused.
“These aren’t holdouts,” he finally said. “They’re showing me the gaps.”

Exactly.

These teachers — positioned at the edge of staff influence — were not barriers to innovation. They were catalysts for it.

Listening to them helped reshape the initiative into something more equitable, more culturally responsive, and more aligned with student needs.
Had their voices been dismissed, the system would have moved forward — but blind.

Edges as Sites of Innovation

Innovation emerges when leaders pay attention to people who see the system differently:

• Students who do not fit the typical mold
  
• Staff who have lived through exclusion
  
• Families who navigate schools with caution
  
• Communities whose histories sit outside the normative narrative
  

In inclusive leadership, listening becomes an act of design.
When leaders are attentive to the edges, they invite new possibilities into the core of the system.

Innovative ideas often start as discomfort — a challenge to the status quo, an invitation to rethink familiar practice. When leaders dare to welcome that discomfort, the system becomes more adaptive, imaginative, and alive.

Listening as a Leadership Stance

Listening to the edges is not passive. It is a disciplined practice of:

• deep attunement
  
• suspending assumptions
  
• asking better questions
  
• recognizing emotion as information
  
• valuing lived experience
  
• redistributing power
  

It requires leaders to move from “What do I want to hear?” to “What do I need to hear?”
And beyond that, to “Whose perspectives have I not yet made room for?”

Inclusion demands that leaders intentionally widen the circle of participation — not to be fair, but to be wise.

The system becomes stronger, not weaker, when diverse perspectives shape its direction.
The center becomes wiser when it listens to the edges.

Reflection Questions for Leaders

1. Whose perspectives in your system remain unheard or undervalued — and why?
   
2. What assumptions do you make about “resistance,” and what might those signals be telling you?
   
3. How often do you intentionally seek out voices at the margins when making decisions?
   
4. What structures could you design to bring edge wisdom into the center of your system?
   
5. How does listening to the edges change your understanding of innovation?
   

Let’s talk again soon.  Take good care of yourself.

Adelee

References

Özdemir, N., Gün, F., & Yirmibeş, A. (2023). Learning-centred leadership and student achievement: Understanding the mediating effect of the teacher professional community and parental involvement. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 51(6), 1301–1321. https://doi.org/10.1177/17411432211034167

Leithwood, K. (2021). A review of evidence about equitable school leadership. Education Sciences, 11(8), 1–49. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11080377

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