How do you foster emergence?
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
- Niccolo Machiavelli
Complexity leadership theory developed as a response to the limitation of top-down, alignment and control, leadership mentality – which severely limits emergence and innovation. Most current leadership behavior is based on a bureaucratic framework representational of the industrial age in which it was developed. This includes the assumption that goals are rationally conceived, and that the achievement of these goals should be done through structured managerial practices. As a result, much of leadership theory focuses on how leaders, amidst formal and hierarchical organizational structures, can better influence others toward desired goals. So many people in my profession want to help leaders “align the organization towards the goals” or foster workshops to “build trust” without realizing the shortcomings of these approaches and so much more. The core issues within this leadership paradigm is in the belief that the right thing to do is to motivate workers regarding task objectives, ensuring their efficient and effective production, and inspiring their commitment and alignment to organization objectives.
The main 2 myths of leadership are:
- Leaders can specify or otherwise control others to create their desired future. We know that in living systems, the interactions of its members are not controlled by its leaders over time.
- Leaders can direct change or make change happen. Most change emerges from a sudden and unpredictable event which occurs when the systems are far-from-equilibrium and there is a deterioration of order. The leader cannot control these conditions.
Complexity leadership fosters informal network dynamics within the system to increase the organizations capacity to be productive, especially when uncertainty exists. Leaders stop trying to control individual outcomes and instead shift their focus to the interactions within to create healthy conditions for people to self-organize around relevant issues. In this world the leader’s attention is not on directing people, but on fostering interactions within the organization.
There is a new theory these days – call it what you want but it is based on living systems – social systems, ecological systems, you name it. Whereby instead of concentrating on basic building blocks of a construction, you concentrate on principles of organization. Meaning that instead of cutting the organization into pieces and then create the product or service as a result of the summation of the parts – you look at the organization as a whole, living system. And with this new view you realize the meaningfulness of the system, that life itself, is not the sum of the parts, but rather the interconnectedness between the parts.
Guidelines for leading in complex organizations include:
- Foster Network Conditions. Complex leadership is the process of fostering conditions in which the new behaviors and direction of the organization or system emerge through interaction. Rather than trying to control or direct what happens within the organization, learn to cultivate interdependence within.
- Catalyze Bottom-Up Organization. Reorganize the work and the teams to support interaction and networking. Create new myths and rituals which foster this work environment.
- Create a Space of Organized Disorder. Let people experiment, pilot new approaches, and challenge them to evaluate and adjust their experiences. Encourage novelty to amplify actions.
- Think Systemically. You cannot understand the whole by the sum of the parts, but you can understand the system through the interaction of its parts with other parts both within and external of the system.
We have finally realized what nature knew all along, that living systems cannot be forced along a linear trajectory towards a predetermined future. You cannot strategize your way into a planned outcome. When people interact, they change due to the influence of the relationship, interdependent behaviors, and the emergence of other people who engage one another interdependently. Not because someone told them to change.
6 Principles of Complexity Leadership
- Scan the system continuously and pay attention to patterns, emergent behaviors, multiple casual loops, and the impact of small fluctuations.
- Allow the behaviors of individuals or systems to emerge, rather than trying to control them.
- Only set broad orienting values, creating the condition for the system to generate the most timely and appropriate specifics.
- Dance with the system - adapting along the way and focusing on creating the conditions for emergence - rather than trying to chart and follow a linear path.
- Don't feel that you need to keep the system in constant harmony but allow for and even foster disequilibrium. Novel structures and innovative ideas often emerge out of destabilized states.
- Cultivate experimentation, novelty, and prototyping; these support the emergence of small successes that can become positive deviance to be scaled across a system.
When systems are at their capacity limits, they either collapse or reorganize. As a leader you are the agent in the system responsible for observing the issues within and then making adjustments based upon localized needs to help emergent change better adapt to the specific context and allow for positive deviance to be amplified.
