After a failure, you typically have two alternatives: withdraw or work things out. When it is time to double down or fold, educational leaders know how to handle risk and unpredictability by making strategic judgments about future actions.

How Education Leaders Manage Uncertainty and Setbacks

So, here is the situation. You are a third-year elementary school principal. You decide to acquire a new software package designed to assist your students in developing core arithmetic abilities and fluency in math. You buy 300 copies since you have 300 students. You were thorough in your research. You conducted research, examined the product, and demoed it before allowing the firm to present it to your executive team and teachers. Everyone believed it was a terrific product, even you.

Fast forward a year, and it is time to implement this new math program. It does not work as planned, and the implementation is a catastrophe. It turns out that, while the app is appropriate for your students’ devices, it does not perform optimally on them. The teachers are enthusiastic about the app’s potential, but it is too buggy to be useful when used on the tablets of their students.

When you call the firm, they tell you that there is nothing they can do. You want a refund, but the corporation is unreasonable. Do you give up on the product and look for anything new? If you keep using an app that is not performing at its best, you risk putting your students behind academically.

What would I do in this situation? I’d make it obvious that they can either risk being prosecuted by my district or do the proper thing and either address the technical problem or refund our money. I’d also ask them whether they want the negative publicity of getting sued for cheating a school system and jeopardizing students’ math proficiency. I ensure that they will either correct the problem or refund your money as soon as possible. Taking a chance in a circumstance like this can save your students from being hampered by something beyond their control.