‘We need to deconstruct the mythology around leadership. There is so much in our culture and tradition that takes you down the path of seeing leadership as being something that’s innate to a special class of people. This is elitist and disempowering for the rest of us who have enormous potential to lead.’
— Doug Taylor, Uniting
Taking a Systems Leadership View
Leaders must grapple with chaotic and often uncertain contexts. Paradoxically, it is in times such as these that we expect leadership to provide a clear vision and direction for the future. The ‘reality’ for leadership has changed, with leaders needing to navigate between earlier paradigms of stability and growth to those of change and complexity; from control to empowerment; from competition to collaboration; from uniformity to diversity; from self-centredness to higher purpose; and from heroism to humility.
For organisations to survive this era of increased uncertainty, ambiguity, disruption and change, they need to innovate, adapt and develop new capabilities. This requires rethinking our approach to leadership. Increasingly leadership is thought of as a ‘shared social process’ that occurs throughout organisations, and this represents a transformation in the way that many organisations approach leadership.
The Dawn of Systems Leadership
Applying a systems approach to leadership asks us to consider the interconnected and emergent nature of the leadership context. Leading the system starts by understanding its needs.
It is one thing to recognise and agree that complex systems are ever-changing, unpredictable and uncertain. It is another to actually change our behaviour in response to the system. As the system is dynamic, we must be dynamic. Our old ways of operating may not work anymore. We may need to draw on strengths that we have never used before or that we have only used in other contexts. It is important for leaders to recognise that they do not stand outside the system, but are participants and are impacted by changes to it.
In systems leadership, leaders are seen as agents of change who are encouraged to collaborate in a process for collective benefit. The systems leader is a person who catalyses collective leadership. Leading the system (as well as the self and the organisation) has been referred to as a movement from an ‘ego-system’ of leadership (with a focus on one’s own well-being) to an ecosystem’ of leadership, where the focus is on ‘the well-being of all, including oneself.
Systems leadership is, therefore, a shared set of relationships and processes that use cohesion, community and creativity to deliver shared outcomes that benefit everyone the system serves.
Reflective Practice
Download the article Dawn of Systems Leadership, read through and highlight passages that resonate with you. Arrange a time to have a one-hour conversation with your Thinking Partner and consider what this means for Leadership in your organisation. How does this type of leadership help with the goal of creating a culture of learning and belonging?
Resource: Dawn of Systems Leadership
What do Systems Leaders Do?
There are three capabilities that system leaders can develop in order to foster complexity and systems leadership, as laid out by Senge, Hamilton and Kania:
The ability to see the larger system
This capacity refers to the importance of systems thinking and mapping. In any complex setting, people typically focus their attention on the parts of the system most visible from their own vantage point. This usually results in arguments about who has the right perspective on the problem. It will be helpful to situate our organisations in the context of the larger system.
Ask: what problem are we trying to solve? Who are the other organisations that are also trying to solve this problem? Who are the stakeholders in this issue, and what might the ripple effects of our work be? Answering these questions allows the organisation to develop a shared narrative about the complexity of problems.
This understanding enables collaborating organisations to jointly develop solutions not evident to any of them individually and to work together for the health of the whole system rather than just pursue symptomatic fixes to individual pieces.
Some Systems Mapping Questions
- What, if anything, makes the system you work in complex?
- What is good and right within the system? What is flourishing?
- What is the shared purpose for members of the system in which you work?
- Can you map the system in which you work?
- Who are the players (people)?
- What are the current changes coming from within the system or being imposed?
- What are some external influences?
- What are the key political, social and economic issues?
Fostering reflection and more generative conversations
Reflection can be a powerful tool for ‘holding up the mirror’ to see our habitual, often taken-for-granted ways of seeing the world – our ‘mental models’. However, it is also necessary to use reflective processes within the group or organisation, for example, through the reflective practice of double-loop learning.
One way of dealing with complex issues involves adopting new ‘habits’ of learning and critically examining the taken-for-granted ways in which we always look at things. How we look at an issue is shaped by the mental models we adopt, as well as the underlying assumptions and shared ‘truths’ about a situation. But we rarely question them. So, if a problem occurs, we go into error-correction mode. We scan the environment and act. This is what Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (1978) called ‘single loop learning’. Single loop learning is based on an ability to detect and correct errors, solve problems or ask how best to achieve current objectives. However, double loop learning is often needed.
Double loop learning is deeper. It involves taking a ‘double look’ at a situation or set of objectives – a reflexive inquiry into underlying assumptions by questioning the relevance of norms or objectives or shared truths.
For example, if you created and helped launch a project that is not achieving its outcomes, you may look for ways to revive or ‘fix’ the project because you do not want to admit that it has failed. This is single loop learning. Or, in another example, if you are accustomed to adopting habitual roles when working with members of your team, you may believe that these roles represent your entire capacity. This is single loop learning. In the first scenario, double loop learning would challenge you to acknowledge your attachment to the project, and in the second scenario, double loop learning would encourage you to swap roles with your co-workers.
Double loop learning occurs when people focus on the improvement of their inner values as opposed to merely understanding them. People begin to question the underlying assumptions behind their techniques, goals and values in order to understand why they do what they do.
Deeper conversations enable groups to identify the mental models that they operate from, and whether these models are useful. This builds the emotional intelligence of the group, as shared reflection is a critical step in enabling groups of organizations and individuals to actually hear different points of view different from their own, and to appreciate each other’s reality.
You can put this into practice by:
- Being aware, and expressing acceptance of individual team members’ emotions.
- Asking at the end of meetings: ‘Are there any perspectives we haven’t heard yet or thought through completely?’
- Making time to discuss difficult issues, addressing the emotions that surround them.
Resource: Dialogic Mindset
Shifting the collective focus from reactive problem solving to co-creating the future
This capability speaks to the importance of integrating our personal and collective visions. It’s about the direction the organisation is facing backwards to the past or forwards to the future. This is where a clear vision helps, as people articulate their deeper aspirations and build confidence based on tangible accomplishments achieved together. This shift involves not just building inspiring visions but facing difficult truths about the present reality and learning how to use the tension between vision and reality to inspire truly new approaches. This brings a deeper awareness to the work of the organisation.
For example, if you created and helped launch a project that is not achieving its outcomes, you may look for ways to revive or ‘fix’ the project because you do not want to admit that it has failed. This is single loop learning. Or, in another example, if you are accustomed to adopting habitual roles when working with members of your team, you may believe that these roles represent your entire capacity. This is single loop learning. In the first scenario, double loop learning would challenge you to acknowledge your attachment to the project, and in the second scenario, double loop learning would encourage you to swap roles with your co-workers.
Systems and complexity leadership are founded on conscious processes of organising collective responses to complex adaptive systems. They identify the gaps between what is being done and what needs to be done in the future to create change. The essential leadership contribution at a systems level is to monitor for emergence. This means that we must identify any changes that emerge from our interventions in the system, as these could signify the next step in the process. We read the signs and symbols to answer the crucial question of social purpose leadership: what does the system need from me today?