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Greetings Colleagues!

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With over 10,000 results for “Leadership Development” on Amazon.com, one might wonder what more could possibly be offered or said.  With the plethora of thought and research that is available, my pondering on this will be more an exercise in connecting the dots of inspiration and insights that have been gleaned over years of experience and personal research.

 

For most organizations, surviving and thriving in today’s environment depends on making a fundamental shift in recognizing that their context is one of complexity rather than merely complicated. Those making the shift successfully are often energized and engaged by being focused on a noble or “North Star” purpose coupled with an ability to “see” abundance as opposed to scarcity in emerging or evolving opportunities for collaboration and growth (personal and organizational). 

 

The dominant view of the traditional organization model evolved primarily for stability in a predictable environment – the province of experts and cause-and-effect. It is based on the idea of an organization as a machine, with a static, siloed, structural hierarchy that operates through linear planning and control to execute organizational strategies.  Many institutional organizations are still structured in this mechanistic way even though they frequently give lip-service to understand the need to be a “living system”.

 

Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations, 2016) among others, has identified organizations embracing a living systems approach, that have evolved to thrive in an unpredictable, rapidly changing environment. These organizations are both stable and dynamic. They focus on purpose, fluidly adapt to environmental changes, and are open, inclusive, and nonhierarchical; they evolve continually and embrace uncertainty and ambiguity.

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More than any other factor, the key to a successful shift is for leaders to develop substantially new mind-sets and capabilities to deal with complexity and the required collaboration for connectedness. 

 

But first, some …

 

Helpful Background

 

Complex Contexts: The Domain of Emergence

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In a complex context, right answers can't be puzzled out. It's like the difference between an airplane and a rainforest. Airplanes are complicated machines, but experts can take one apart and reassemble it without changing a thing. The plane is static, and the whole is the sum of its parts. The rainforest, on the other hand, is in constant flux – a species becomes extinct, weather patterns change, an agricultural project reroutes a water source – and the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. This is the realm of "unknown unknowns;” and it is the domain to which much of contemporary organizations have shifted.

 

We take complex systems thinking for granted in understanding biological, ecological, climatological, and natural systems.  We know that these systems have patterns and values that as a whole exceed what their constituent or component parts would be if merely summed up individually.  They are adaptive “wholes”.  Organizations, discretely and in relationship with other organizations, are complex systems too! 

 

A complex system has the following characteristics:

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• It involves large numbers of interacting elements.

• The interactions are nonlinear, and minor changes can produce disproportionately major consequences.

• The system is dynamic, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and solutions can't be imposed; rather, they arise from the circumstances. This is frequently referred to as emergence.

• The system has a history, and the past is integrated with the present; the elements evolve with one another and with the environment; and evolution is irreversible.

• Though a complex system may, in retrospect, appear to be ordered and predictable, hindsight does not lead to foresight because the external conditions and systems constantly change.

 

Complex Adaptive Systems:  Understanding Interactions and Relationships

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