I’m continuing my writing on Social Leadership this week, but today just sharing fragments of thought, as well as a new illustration. As a reminder: i’m building out a body of work that will contribute to a new Social Leadership book, and in parallel developing some new illustrations that will either be part of this, or will develop into what i need.
The illustration of a lighthouse is inspired by an image that Sae shared with me for a different piece of work, but which reminded me that lighthouses – a perennial image around leadership – often were not viewed in isolation. To navigate, you would triangulate between three things e.g. yourself, a church tower (these were often built to be visible from the sea, for their fishing bretheren), and a lighthouse.
It’s a reminder to me of our interconnected context of leadership. One monument is not enough. You need the landscape.
Perhaps a reminder that behaviour too – our culture – our Social Context – is also triangulated between and within groups. Not one leader at the top, in the front, up above, who makes us all behave, or do, one thing, but rather a network of influence, of distributed input, within which we weave our ‘self’ in the local ‘system’.
It also reminds me of the other recent work on leadership as motion – in that ‘movement’ is a part of triangulation. To line things up, or bring them into view. It is inherently a contextual activity.
Writing is thinking. I use my writing to expand and explore the central themes of my work, as part of a methodology of #WorkingOutLoud. Which is to say that i share my evolving ideas, not simply the ones that are fully formed. Within this process, there is an active development of language, usually unintentionally. As i explore new areas, or revisit old ones, i notice in my writing that certain phrases or ideas repeat, and in that sense i build my own vocabulary (and associated ideas). Today i’m writing about one of those phrases, the notion of our Social Context, and building it out into a broader aspect of the role of a Social Leader.
My description of Social Leadership previously described both our formal and social systems. Indeed, my most fundamental description of what Social Leadership ‘is’ has been to say that your formal power sits in the formal system – everything you can see, own, or control – and your Social Authority swirls around that – held in our communities, relationships, networks, and trust. More recently i have taken to describing Social Leadership as being at the ‘intersection of systems’. This reflects the fact that it is not fully ‘social’, beyond any context of work, but rather at the boundary or border of formal systems. Indeed, weaving it’s way over and under that boundary.
I have always been clear that Organisations need both: they need strong formal authority for the key mechanisms of consistency and conformity to give replicability and scale. This is the pillar of the global Organisations. But they need Social Authority to drive innovation, culture, creativity and change. Indeed, much of what we desire, or need, within our Organisations lies beyond that which is achievable with formal power alone, and we consistently see that leaders have an innate understanding of that, describing how much of their power is held in the permission and consensus of others.
And again, more recently, i’ve been using new work to explore ideas of leadership at the boundary – notions of the self as trespasser, of leadership as ‘motion’, and a dialogue with your practice.
The Social Context describes an overarching perspective on this: the leader operating within both formal contexts, and in a relationship with the Social Context, partly to ‘create’ it, but largely to nurture, understand, influence and engage with it.
The Social Context is therefore a broad space, representing both our individual experience and perspective, but also a more systemic one. I guess almost like a landscape and our experience of walking through it.
Crucial to this understanding is that whilst i previously described both formal and social aspects, i am now more explicit about how our Social Context is not simply a space we inhabit, but rather we create it, and it acts upon us.
This latter aspect is important, as it illustrates the impact of self upon system, an idea i’ve explored extensively in the Quiet Leadership work (which explores the Organisation as an Ecosystem) where we consider intention, action, and impact, and understand that you cannot be ‘in’ the system without both enhancing and degrading it. Nobody is neutral in their habitation.
Potentially this understanding would redefine the understanding of Social Leadership, to describe not parallel systems, but rather the Organisation as a structural entity that is entirely within the Social Context. Like the dome around the snow globe. You cannot, in this understanding, take the Organisations aside from it’s Social Context. It is enveloped, which is, i think appropriate. To abstract the Social Context out of the picture probably invalidates our understanding of how the formal Organisation truly works.
If i stretch myself into other areas of thought, i would also consider that the Social Context is not one thing, but rather one individual thing, so we each bring Social Context with us (like a Worldview), but also as a stage, and hence the understanding of the formal Organisation within it’s context becomes more kaleidoscopic.
This view suits my current understanding (and language) quite nicely, in that it allows us to talk of ‘lenses’ as part of leadership – understanding the lenses we are using, and how other lenses may give a different view of the same landscape.
Again, this is influenced by other aspects of my work (as a trans-disciplinary practitioner – or generalist – this cascade of influence is both a frustration and familiar feature).
It indicates that we may find value in ‘losing focus’, un-focussing our precision lenses, or of becoming wilfully disorientated or lost.
As i say, this is all early stage work. I’ve spent quite a bit of time this year so far in simply relaxing my focus, and exploring disparate ideas. And i think i will continue that for a period of time. But in the near future i will start to do more of this weaving work – drawing together a more holistic perspective around this new ideas, and with the foundation of work done before.
As part of this, i need a willingness to let things go. Some ideas are great, but time limited. Some are the ‘thing’, whilst others are keys that let you unlock understanding. But they are ‘one time’ keys. After you have used them, you can let them go. Or give them away.
Not everything has to be forever. Certainly not our understanding, which should always remain fluid.
The contractual bonds that bind us into Organisations are held within the evolved context of the Social Age. Whilst we have spent decades optimising our Organisations, ensuring profitability and agility, using aspects of scientific management, process optimisation, notions of humans as redeploy-able resources, outsourcing for cost and resilience, performance management (too often experienced as aspirational constraint) and cultures of busyness have given us some success, but at quite a cost – the cost being the fracturing of the Social Contract itself.
The Social Contract is wrapped around the written one: it governs not the utilitarian aspects of our job – what we do, who oversees it, and how we are rewarded – but rather the social context of it. This includes our discretionary engagement, invested trust, belief, pride, sense of belonging, loyalty, and energy. Quite important things… and indeed the very things that many of our Organisations are currently pinning their hopes and dreams upon.
We want ‘more’ from the people we employ – their invested engagement, energy, co-creation, collaboration, trust, ideas, belief and motivation – but at the very time when the Social Contract is at it’s most fragile, or entirely gone. When we need elasticity, we stand brittle.
We are right to have focussed on the efficiency and effectiveness of our Organisations: to drive profit is part of their purpose. But not at any cost. And the cost, where it has been borne, has often been borne by people who have weathered and survived multiple re-orgs, where they had to apply and reapply for their job – alongside what has been increasingly strident attempts to control every aspect of the ‘self’, when the broader context mitigates for greater agency.
And in any event, ‘work’ now exists within a broader space of engagement. The old paradigm, where you graduated, got a training position, spent your working life progressing through an Organisation, retired, and tended to the garden is so far gone that we can barely see it in the rearview mirror.
Instead, you may do an apprenticeship, or build your own startup, you will find a job through your community, carry your reputation in an external community, be coached, mentored, tutored, and challenged, through your most valued connections. You will learn more from YouTube, TikTok and podcasts than any wise old owl sitting in a corner office, and in any event you will have more ‘jobs’ than there are days in any month, across a wide range of Organisations, many of whom are consolidating, restructuring, being acquired, resisting change, or simply becoming irrelevant in the waves of change bought about by new technologies and, most importantly, evolved social expectation and desire.
Organisations are still important to us – our jobs still matter – but they are not the only thing. And if you want me to ‘bring my best effort’, the chances are that you will need to earn that right, not believe that you have bought it. There is a difference between utilitarian engagement and invested engagement. And it’s the latter that really matters.
This is not about being nice.
There is a structural imperative for Organisations to discover effective ways to contract the best talent, and to do so in ways that are sustainable for all concerned. And to learn how to do this when the nature of engagement (and contract) are shifting.
If we looked forwards, we would probably look towards models of Collective Capability, Interconnected Organisational Design, and the concept of the Socially Dynamic Organisation – or at least that is where my work takes me – the view that we know how to build structural Organisations at scale, but we have to learn how to build social ones at such scale.
To do so will give us the mechanisms of social engagement that fulfil the needs of both parties, in a deeply fair way.
The Pandemic – and particularly the road to recovery – have not helped this process. Much of the conversation about going ‘back to the office’ (or indeed ‘back to work’) has infantilised the relationship, and made stark the lack of trust in the very people we employed. It’s clear what people want – agency, belonging, trust, opportunity – and success. Often this aligns with what Organisations want. It’s just that the two sides, like waring couples, are finding more friction than trust.
Social Leadership provides a part of this solution: enhancing the Social Context of our Organisations, interconnecting beyond the structure, alongside an evolution of Organisational Design, and a reassessment of our mechanisms of effect. The foundational understanding of how our Organisations work.
To find this understanding requires a specific capability: an ability to look at the world through different lenses, and sometimes to make, or borrow, those lenses. A more trans-disciplinary perspective, and a willingness to recognise that much of what we consider to be ‘true’ is actually just familiar.
Formal contracts are moderated by HR and the law. The Social Contract is moderated by the communities that surround us. Meaning they are inconsistent, belief based, contextual, and often implicit, rather than transparent and clear. But they act strongly upon us nonetheless. To navigate this complexity is part of the role of a Social Leader. To ensure not only that we are ‘safe’ in the formal system, but also in the Social one, which may require us to consider how people hold their voice, and how it may be silenced. How they find agency, and when our mechanisms of control, and established power, may fracture that agency.
It is possible to be too safe.
In essence, to build a Socially Dynamic Organisation will require not simply a formidable approach to structural strength, but also to distributed social strength. To view the Social Context with as much clarity as our visible mechanisms of systems, process, hierarchy, formal reward, and formal control.
To weave a new type of Organisation, within a new context, and under both formal and Social contracts.
The history of human social evolution can be charted through the technologies of enclosure, and trespass, and mechanisms of separation and control. Our modern society is built upon principles of collectivism, but part of that collectivism involves notions of ownership, and with ownership comes differentiation (of wealth, of status, of power). Our collectivism creates separation.
Or to put it another way: if we come together to build a village, we build a wall around it.
We separate field from field, and field from wilderness. We map our boundaries, partly to know what is ours, and partly to tell others to keep their hands off it.
It’s no surprise that one of our earliest architectural innovations was the wall: to keep people out, or keep them in. Although it may have taken us significantly longer to invent the lock.
Locks represent a change state: the gate, when locked, is part of the wall, but when open is a break within it. And gateways are transition spaces. Nobody lives in the gateway (although someone may live above it, or next to it, to control movement).
Locks are a specific technology as well as elaborate art form. They don’t simply carry out the action of separation, rather they visually represent it. If i see a lock, i inherently understand that access may be denied. And if i break a lock i inherently understand that my access is trespass.
We use locks for assorted ends: to keep people out, and to keep people in. To protect something of value to us, or to separate things that cannot be put together without good cause (we lock up guns in houses with children, and we lock away medicines).
We lock up things that have worth: either financially or intrinsically, like books, bibles and baubles, as well as things that we fear, like tigers in the zoo.
We talk about common goods, things that cannot be locked away, like access to fresh air, or water, but of course these things are controlled. Or stolen from us. And we have a tragic tendency to abuse the common, to neglect it. Sometimes separation, security, is a mechanism of safety and preservation.
A lock is not necessarily a binary separation: if the door is locked, i may be able to see through the keyhole. A tantalising glimpse of what lies beyond. Or perhaps i can shout through it.
An old lock can seize up, unless maintained. Indeed, it may even rust away, with access being granted by time alone. Or it may be a time-lock, preventing the vault in a bank being opened except during normal business hours.
Where there is a lock, there is a key. Or many keys. Walk around any major city and, in the suburbs, you will see lock boxes chained to railings, housing the keys for nearby AirBnBs (the keys have to be physically separated from the property, so the tax authorities or landlords don’t discover the illicit letting of the space.
We give spare keys to friends, or ask them back from former lovers. Or, if all else fails, change the locks (or lock people out, when their password stops working).
For all this talk of locks: what is unlocking?
We talk in Leadership about ‘unlocking’ things. About unlocking potential in teams, unlocking capability at scale, unlocking innovation, or unlocking change.
I like this language. I use this language. But as part of my own practice i am revisiting my core work on Social Leadership, and considering new ideas, such as ‘Collective Capability’, and ‘Imperfect leadership’, and hence find myself pondering locks.
The idea of the Leader as gatekeepers, as key holder, these things may be true, but exist within a more formal or power based view of leadership. Within the social domain (our broader Social Context), power may be more dynamic and collective, and capability may be a networked feature.
I’m particularly interested in the emergent features of our Social Context right now: what synergies or amplifiers exist, and how we (unlock!) access them.
I’m left wondering if there is maybe a proliferation of keys, and a proliferation of locks. But that the knowledge of what fits where is contextual.
This would align with my broader perspective on the multi dimensional organisation: that we inhabit multiple systems, of power, of influence, of control, concurrently curating the relevant ‘self’ in each one. So a ‘key’ that works in one domain may be useless in another (like your ‘job title’ may grant you access to a room, but not to my trust). This would present a more three dimensional view of capability, that it’s not simply a lock and a key, but rather a lock, a context, and a key.
And maybe a connection?
Perhaps the connection is the thing here: under a model of collective capability it is not enough to hold simply knowledge, or power, but rather we need to create meaning too (the ‘creation of meaning’ is another key aspect i’m exploring separately right now), which is both an individual and collective feature, so the ability to curate a community is a core leadership skill in that context of the Social Age.
Which makes sense in a somewhat circular way, as i describe how curating the ‘self’ is also a foundational aspect of Social Leadership (this was the first chapter of the first book about the subject).
This speaks of Leadership as an act of curation – creating conditions – weaving culture – interpretation – sense making. Leadership as a fluid and distributed function. In which case, not one lock and one key.
I guess there are other interpretations and conditions too.
I remember visiting the zoo in Singapore, walking through an enclosure, and at the end were two doors. Only one of which could be open at a time. To prevent whatever was inside from getting out (i forget if it was bats, monkeys, butterflies or birds – whoever it was clearly had a vested interest in escape). This type of conditional lock may be a useful perspective as well – where our actions do not ‘unlock’ something, but create other conditions under which a thing may be unlocked. Indeed, perhaps this gives us a perspective on something like reputation, or authenticity (if it even exists).
It speaks of leadership as indirect power.
As i write this, i can feel myself sensing the way, but also struggling with ideas, which is part of #WorkingOutLoud. To sketch out a landscape and then to think within it.
I’ve been working on a series of longer pieces around Social Leadership as i explore the idea of a 3rd Edition of the Social Leadership Handbook, or possibly a separate book around the subject.
Today, thinking about Collective Capability, and the idea of the ‘key’. We talk about ‘unlocking potential’, but a key fits a single lock. When we consider ‘collective’, we may either need to think about many keys, or many locks, or simply that the metaphor is outdated (and possibly autocratic and controlling in any case).
So what – or who – unlocks capability… or frees it?
Reflecting that we act upon each other: through our words, actions, but also the folklore that surrounds us (of success or failure).
That learning is not a linear process, but that some connections re-contextualise that which came before.
So – perhaps – leadership is an act of re-contextualisation?
Is the key something made or traded? Or is curiosity, or learning, a lock-pick?
A reminder to myself to research when locks were invented – because i assume it was by people who had power (or wealth) and wished to retain it. Or that the knowledge was locked away. Or was it to lock people up?
Locks as the act of separation and division. Keys as power.
What i’ve really noticed using Generative AI in research is the speed of my curiosity. Not simply speed of retrieval, but speed of synthesis and iteration. It reminds me of the process of marking up a large illustration, where you sketch out the rough outline before filling in the fine detail. Or the way i often create a high level structure for a book before actually writing much content, to allow me to balance the effort across all the sections.
Using tools like Claude i can more easily try things out: synthesising ideas, asking for depth, or inspiration. I can mark out a landscape and then delve more deeply into it.
I find that it’s easier to retrieve half remembered theories or facts, or to dive into entirely uncharted waters. In a weird way it’s like asking the server what their favourite desert is when you can’t decide.
It’s not efficiency without cost: i notice that i’m overall reading less. Partly because i do not need to, but partly because i have become impatient. Perhaps i will lose some of the happenstance and emergence of long form exploration, but overall the landscape i traverse will be broader?
It’s hard to know: will my perspectives become superficial, or will my self critical lenses survive the convenience of my accelerated curiosity?
I am, as you know, an optimist, so naturally i feel the benefits acutely, especially when i think back to my earliest experiences of research as a postgraduate, where i still had to get my supervisor to sign a piece of paper (after i’d cycled to the campus and wandered around till i found them), which i’d take to the library who would, after six weeks usually, ring me up to tell me that a photocopy of an article i’d requested had arrived. From there to here is a journey that sees the radial compression of time – to near instantaneous, through to the radical expansion of the creative space, as i have a partner in thought at my fingertips.
I know it will make me different, but better? Hard to know: to an extent it depends on which measure you are using.
My favourite use case (which i must not therefore mistake for a broad truth) is that Generative AI lubricates our collective thinking: working with Sae this week on new ideas we have used it as a dynamic dialogic partner, in the flow of our thinking. It’s felt like an energy added to our (already energetic!) conversations.
I’m pragmatic, but also stubborn. I do not intend to write ‘with’ Generative AI, any more than i intend to stop illustrating by hand. But will i use these tools to mark out ideas, to broaden my thinking and challenge my output? Asking for feedback, critique, ideas, or where to look next? I’m sure i will.
It’s easy to get caught up in the popular debate: about bias, about validity, about influence or infiltration, about the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. All of those things are important. But let’s not miss the potential, the excitement, the dynamism and change.
I have no hesitation in saying that Generative AI will change almost everything, and faster than most Organisations will be able to think, let alone react. Things that we feel will last forever will be tumbled into the sand (including the memories of those very Organisations who felt their intelligence, history, money, and pride would make them agile, whilst failing to actually change).
At the heart of it, Generative AI will challenge legacy notions of value, and we will need to recalibrate marketplaces to accommodate that. I look at this within the broader context of the Social Age (which is already exerting existential pressure onto our systems) and the legacy of the pandemic, which has fractured some of the pillars that we rest upon.
I’m sharing work this week on ‘disorientation and being lost’ in learning – part of a broader pattern of work around the ‘Unreconciled Self’ and ‘Imperfect Leadership’ – so as a word of warning, expect this writing to be convoluted… or possibly adrift! I’m playing with new ideas.
To say that leadership is systemic is tautologic. At least until we question our understanding of where the boundaries of the system lie. In my work on the Social Age, i would argue that the context of our Organisations has shifted, and much of that shift has permeated the boundaries of our Organisations, to the extent that we may now need to consider leadership as a more holistic feature, held both within the formal structure and, at the very least, at the boundary of the system (if not trespassing beyond it).
As with various aspects of the modern Organisation, this represents a shift in the Social Context and Contract, and one which we focus on more from the perspective of what we can take, than what it will cost us.
We already see the increasing anthropomorphism of Organisations through the facility of the ‘Social CEO’, the one with the stream of narrative on social channels about their strategy, direction, humility, and pride (with varying perceptions of authenticity from their audience), and in parallel this reflects the general experience for many of us – against a backdrop of a fractured Social Contract – that we operate as an irreducible unit of one – and that we should curate and maintain the strength and reputation of that ‘self’.
When we hire someone, we hire their time, and their portable persona, as well as renting access to their network – which essentially means hiring access to their collective ‘sense making’ space. Or at least we do if they trust us with it.
Whilst utility can be bought, access, trust, and community are gifted and privileged.
All of this – as well as broader trends around our radical connectivity, the new nature of knowledge, and the full context of the Social Age – lead to a strange phenomenon whereby the strength of our Organisations may be more distributed (and negotiated or gifted), where we need leadership to be more interconnected and inter-connective, at the very time that our sense of belonging, purpose, and opportunity may be fleeing to external structures (like communities of practice or purpose, where we earn no money but find great value).
Or to put it another way: we know what Organisations were, but not necessarily what they are today, or what they need to be tomorrow. And whilst we view our Organisations as formal and owned constructs they are, in fact, social constructs and devolved. Organisations are what we dreamed them up to be – and must become something new.
Around all of this, the weather. We are rebuilding in a storm. Potentially a tipping point or fracture: moving from the Structural Organisation to the Socially Dynamic at the time when the storm of Generative AI, social context, and the Social Age all break over us.
Tomorrow i’m sharing new work on ‘Disorientation and Imperfection’ here in Sweden. It’s very early stage writing and thinking, considering how we may wish to build systems that can hold greater ambiguity, and a capability to ‘get lost’, to move things ‘out of focus’, and to embrace imperfection.
I have to say it’s been a really challenging day, trying to find a narrative through this. So challenging that, at times, i’ve considered retreating to safety.
There will be around a hundred people in the session tomorrow, and of course i do not wish to fail, so my sense is that i will need to share the vulnerability of this work itself, whilst also trimming back what i intend to cover. Too much will simply make it fall apart.
And i don’t have to find the whole story in one go: it’s ok to build out the components first of all.
Key questions i will ask include ‘what does it mean to be lost’, which is about how our safety can be tied to our certainty, and how we tend to view learning as the discovery of an ‘answer’ or fixed capability, when in fact what we may need is the ability to get truly lost.
We will consider the nature of our strength: when held in systems, or in uncertainty and curiosity. I think i will talk about how nets are made: the idea that they can distort, and that different hands can tie the knots. About how they can be distorted and yet remain strong. Strength through distribution, and a kind of decentralised model of power.
We will think about the nature and role of perfection in our practice, and how imperfection may be a different type of strength, something that i’ve been particularly interested in around leadership, and the work on ‘Imperfect Leadership’. And finally i want to bring in some of the ideas around boundaries – around the things that cross over and the role of trespass as an act of leadership and learning.
I think i am almost there with a coherent story – or coherent enough to share – but i have to say it’s been a challenging process! A reminded that our certainty is comfortable, and that – no matter how much we identify as being independent of thought – to move from certainty carries risk.
Whilst we experience the landscape around us as a fixed feature, that is only because our perspective is so brief. In truth, the landscape is a fluid system, a product of deposition and erosion, at the mercy of geological forces, meteorological events, and of course human influence (both intentional and as a by product of our actions).
Geological processes give us mountains, and the weather erodes those mountains into sand. And humans? They dig up the sand to make buildings, changing the environment to suit their needs.
In this sense, whilst seismic activity and coastal dynamics are blind, human intervention is typically intentional and directional (although the acid raid and climate change caused as a by product of our actions, less so).
We change the world in specific ways. Humans build, whilst entropy waits.
What started as an evolutionary imperative to survive has itself evolved into a very human urge to shape. In the developed parts of the world we have long ago evolved from doing only the essential – that which is necessary for our survival – to investing predominantly in our comfort and desires. Our connection to our immediate sustenance, to the making of bricks and planting of seeds, tends to be peripheral at best. But we are heavily invested in Netflix and yoga.
And part of what we have created are our social structures: we have, in a very real sense, invented our society and the civilisations that we inhabit. Bit by bit. Ritual by ritual. Belief by belief. And artefact by artefact. We have built our world and come to see it as real.
In part, it is our creative brains that have allowed us to do this: we have our imagination, to conceive alternative futures, and our language, to share those futures with others. If we are lucky (or powerful enough) we can build consensus (or impose labour) and effect change. We can collectivise and organise at scale (and of course by the same mechanisms we can collectivise and rebel at scale too!).
So we live in the world we inherit today, and dream of the world we desire tomorrow.
As our societies have become more advanced, so too they have become radically complex: our structures of society, of education, information, transport, telecommunications, agriculture and health are all immense and interlinked. To retain mastery in the face of this complexity we have invented mechanisms of understanding, structural power, and control.
We invented bureaucracy, we invented finance, we invented HR and paperclips. We invented Mission Control, Gantt Charts and Generative AI.
We invented busyness and cultures that reward it.
And somewhere in this mix, we invented leaders.
Leadership today is different things to different people: a need, a challenge, a vocation or a chore. Some seek it out, and others have it proverbially thrust upon them.
And leadership today inhabits a very dynamic context: we no longer seek to be simply monolithic, but rather agile. An innovative, whilst also transforming into some unspecified better version of our former selves.
Our modern Organisations seek to find, to discover, or to grow, the very best leaders that they can. But how is a leader made?
Not by geological processes, and nor by standing in a thunderstorm. It’s a feature that we can see, and sometimes admire, in people, but it’s also a delusion, a dogma, and a self belief.
Often we conflate ‘leadership’ with ‘like-r-ship’. We describe not evidence and fact, but rather belief and intuition. We know that some people are exceptional leaders, and have a well intentioned desire to help others to become so. And in service of this we spend vast amounts of money – eye watering amounts of money – on teaching, training, developing, and transforming both systems and the people who lead them.
So much money in fact, and so much time and belief, that you may wonder why we have not uncovered an underlying truth or golden nugget in the centre. A magical formula or set of rules.
We still ask questions like ‘are leaders born or made’? Can anyone lead? Or question whether we act from the front or the rear.
But all of this may be to miss the point that leadership is not a thing. Or rather, it is not one thing.
Or to put it another way – a very unhelpful and frustrating way – leadership is, of course, contextual.
At times we need someone to lead in a way that has been shown to them time and again – a way that has been hammered into their brain through repetition, simulation, rehearsal, and monitored performance over time. We need them to hit the nail again. And again. And again. And whatever they do, not to deviate from, the formulae. Lest the nail go un-hit.
And at other times, that failure to deviate, to question, to wonder, to be curious, to ask ‘why…’ leads us to fail. To stand there hammering the nail whilst the rest of the building collapses around our ears. Oblivious, as we have been deafened by the noise of the hammer.
Indeed it was a revelation to me that Organisations that fail are often full of brilliant leaders, as well as bright and engaged people like you and me. They just act in the wrong context. Persisting in behaviours that no longer suit the times. Somehow they are constrained – even if only by their own beliefs. Of course there are many reasons that people – and systems – fail, but it’s not simply a case of deficit. It’s not just that people do not know something: sometimes they know it, but are unable to use it.
This tips me towards a perspective whereby leadership is not simply additive: giving people new knowledge, skills, behaviours, purpose, or belief. Instead, it may be about changing focus, perspective, context, about fracturing certainty, creating space, and exploring ideas. Leadership may be a far more fluid feature of our systems than we imagine, and certainly one that moves beyond a hierarchy and job title alone.
In my work on Social Leadership i describe our Organisations as having two systems: a formal one (which you can see, own, and control) and a social one (which is the people that surround us, in all our erratic glory). Social Leadership posits that we lead at the intersection of these systems: between formal and social.
But how do we learn to do this?
How do we develop leaders if there is no defined, or universally accepted, measure of success?
How do we develop leaders if leadership may not even be a real thing?
I was prompted into this reflection by a conversation last week, where someone asked me that very question. How do you make people think differently, how do you make them into a better leader?
To which i replied that you don’t.
It would be a form of arrogance to believe that you can ‘make’ people be anything. Instead, we should consider it from a learning perspective: how do we learn to see the world – and hence how could we learn to see it differently.
But also from the perspective of belief: who do you believe that you are? What is your ‘self’, and how does that ‘self’ change?
Seeing the world differently? What possible use could that be?
Surely we want people to view the world with absolute clarity, in granular detail, and with an engineers mindset?
Well, maybe. But (of course), it’s contextual.
To tackle a known problem in a known space, that may be correct.
But if we are seeking to reinvent, reimagine, or re-contextualise our Organisations, we may need people who can look at the world in different ways, because they carry with them different lenses. People who can hold ambiguity, who can maintain dynamic tensions between varied ‘truths’. And who can withstand the comforting allure of certainty. Time and again.
For me this speaks for a dynamic quality: i’ve written about this from an Organisational perspective in ‘The Socially Dynamic Organisation’, considering how we build more fluid and reconfigurable structures, but it’s equally valid to consider it from a leadership one.
How do we build Socially Dynamic Leaders? Crucially to develop leaders who do not hold answers, but rather can create new meaning – who can look at the familiar and see it in different ways. People who can turn their certainty out of focus, and create (or borrow from each other) these different lenses, then to make sense of what they see. Individually, and by convening ‘sense making’ communities.
This is a model of humble leadership where there is no hero, but rather a collective capability. A model for leaders in service of community, but also connected to structure. At the intersection.
Escaping capture by the familiar, and powerful, and yet powerless. Not necessarily holding the power of direct action, but rather woven into a social context that permeates the organisation in breadth. Connected – within existing structures – and interconnected, beyond them.
But back to the key question: how would we develop this?
’Disturbance’, ‘Meaning’, and ‘Motion’ would be three words that come to mind.
Firstly, to create space, provocation, and context whereby delegates may discover their own disturbance. Disturbance is a foundation of learning – whether by curiosity or need – but that which we discover has a special potency. So helping leaders who are (by certain conventions and self belief) clever, powerful, confident, and used to performance, to move into uncertainty is a powerful thing. More powerful than simply telling them or trying to dazzle them.
I wrote recently about ‘Reflective Surfaces’ as one technique we can use here. Getting people to tell stories allows us to externalise the conversation, and when it is externalised, we can consider it differently. This is a therapeutic approach, but equally valid for learning. And of course Generative AI tools make it easy to do this in different modalities and at a collective level. Taking small groups and reflecting their stories back to them, then working together in response, and dialogue, with those stories.
Dialogic approaches work well. Not teaching, but exploring. Establish community, build trust, then look down.
Formal systems react to disturbance in predictable ways: analysing it, mitigating the risk, repapering over cracks, isolating or ring-fencing it, occasionally persecuting it, or celebrating it. Social Leadership may be an act of collecting it up: understanding that a wave is both the thing that you see, breaking on the foreshore, but also the energy that travels within it. Disturbance, both that which we enjoy and fear, is the energy of the Organisation.
In my more recent work on Learning Science, i’ve been exploring the idea that the ‘creation of meaning’ is the pivotal aspect of learning. Not the acquisition of knowledge (and of course not simply the passing of tests). ‘Meaning’ is our understanding of the world: held not as an abstract notion, but rather as the stage that we act upon (and think within).
To understand how meaning is created, how it fractures and flows, competes and fails, evolves, is to understand the stage upon which our thinking, and acting, takes place. Essentially the ‘meaning’ is our view of the world, and hence the primary limiting force upon both our thought and action.
And it is, naturally, individual. My ‘meaning’ resides within my head, and yours within your own. We may share language – a way of articulating concepts and understanding – but our meaning is essentially individual. Indeed, one may possibly argue that our ‘meaning’ is in fact our ‘self’, in that our identity is related to our performance and experience.
In this sense, we can consider that developing leadership is in fact an evolution of ‘self’, but not in terms of new knowledge, rather in terms of new schemata and beliefs. Which sounds dangerously voodoo. I can see what it’s more attractive to talk in terms of skills and capabilities, as opposed to describing a reformulation, a re-authoring, of the ‘self’. But again, perhaps it can be both, dependent upon the use case.
The central idea is that we act within our sense of meaning – we act upon the world as we understand the world to be – and as we hope it may become.
Leadership development is hence a matter of reconceptualisation of the self, combined with developing a deep understanding of the mechanisms of effect. Of how the world around us at the social, collective cultural, and individual cognitive level, works.
Or to put it another way – indeed a way that kind of carries us back to engineering approaches, but in a very different context – leadership development is about understanding how humans work. With a recognition that this is at the individual and group social level. In parallel with an understanding of how systems work, again through a broad range of lenses – how systems make us safe, secure, static, and constrained.
These are our two dimensions of operation: people and systems. Selves and systems.
To understand how our systems of understanding (hence of meaning, and self) are disturbed. And to understand how ‘meaning’ is created and evolves, and the mechanisms by which our systems change – or remain constrained.
Understanding the ‘self’ and the ‘system’ is the context: Motion is the act of change.
Motion, in this sense, is a broad idea, but is the purpose of leadership. To be in motion.
At a personal perspective, this is the motion of dialogue with your practice. At the cognitive level it is to be in motion as the act of learning. At the cultural level it is to understand culture as a social context and movement. In the domain of innovation it is to understand ideas as fixed points and how we kick off from these. And at the organisational level it is to understand change as both formal (structural) and social phenomena.
As i said earlier: Organisations spend a great deal of money on leadership development, and indeed we often see common patterns in what they do. Asking people to look within (discovery of ‘self’ – often in a lovely hotel, with some good meals and perhaps an inspirational speaker). Articulation of challenge (articulation of the known and imagined spaces). And planning for action.
Where the opportunity lies is in a deeper engagement with the underlying forces behind this: to truly engage with disturbance (and related notions of ambiguity, complexity, and discomfort), to build a better understanding of the organisation as a system of belief and invested engagement (creation of meaning), and to recognise, and to be in, motion. Individually and systemically.
If we shift our focus, away from the granular, right up to the ecosystem level, we could see the following – but be aware that here i am including my own speculation, and nested concepts such as a belief that the ‘Social Age’ is a useful abstraction.
Leaders are a thing – or rather are many things – but crucially operating in multiple domains, and by different mechanisms in each.
Change is both structural and social – relating to both knowledge and conception. Change can be viewed as both logistical and epistemological – what we see and what we believe – our ways of being and knowing.
So to change our leadership is to discover disturbance, to create new meaning, and to be in motion.
Steering an Organisation is a tricky thing: partly because the boundaries of the system are more elusive than we may imagine, and partly because there is no steering wheel or joystick in sight.
Add to this that it’s not always clear who the Captain is (despite various people wandering around with badges and hats on, saying that they are in charge). And it may not be clear where the engine is. Or, indeed, how it works.
Organisations exist in two dimensions: the ‘Structural’ and the ‘Social’.
The Structural aspects are those most clearly visible: the physical assets, codified knowledge, formal systems, monitored processes, quantified metrics, brand identity, people, and publications. Everything that you can see, own, or control.
The Social aspect is equally ‘real’, although not in a physical sense: it’s the beliefs, dogma, hope, purpose, trust, connection, fear, dislike, community, authenticity, belief and belonging. Plus a bunch of other murky stuff that feels important, but is hard to pin down. Like the notion of ‘home’, which is both very concrete, but can also move with us when we travel.
We inhabit both: one through our formal contract, the other through our sense of community and belonging. And we are effective in both – or more accurately through both.
There is a great deal of doctrine and dogma about how we manage the formal, Structural, Organisation: the principles of scientific management, and the various schools of effectiveness and domain. Indeed, not only is there a whole industry of industry, there is a whole educational support structure, a regulatory web surrounding it, and various rockstars and wannabes hanging around it.
But clearly it’s not as simple as learning the rules and pressing ‘go’. Just about every Organisation has a formal leader, but very few of those Organisations are standing still. And their ability to change is variable at best (and there is, of course, a multi billion dollar change industry supporting those efforts).
So a reasonable question may be, ‘what is the point of a leader’?
If my car breaks down, i can hire a mechanic with a degree of confidence that they can fix it. But if culture breaks down, it’s a more tenuous belief as to whether a particular leader can fix it. Or if i need innovation, or change, or solidity, or fluidity, or efficiency, or mobility… indeed whatever i need it’s not usually as simple as advertising for a perfect candidate and achieving a perfect result.
Because to a large extent, leaders can do almost nothing at all. At least, not directly. Because a significant amount of what we need, to be truly dynamic, lies beyond the formal domains. The power given to us within a formal system does not translate into a social one.
Indeed: one reasonable view of leadership is that leaders hold all the formal power, but that effectiveness lies in places where they cannot spend it. At least not unless they earn a different type of power.
In the context of the Social Age, the ‘Social’ has been elevated (it’s where engagement, belonging, belief and purpose may lie), but the ‘Structural’ is still important. Both systems are aligned, but act differently, and deliver different outcomes.
Formal systems excel at doing what needs to be done. But much of our challenge today lies in figuring out what needs to be done differently.
Through history the byword of ‘power’ was ‘stability’, and ‘might’. Infrastructure, knowledge, force, control.
Today the bywords of power may be ‘community’, or possibly ‘belief’, or ‘curiosity’, or ‘authenticity’, or maybe ‘belonging’, or ‘trust’. All these things convey or carry power, yet sit beyond a formal system.
The reality is that we need both: we need strong Structural systems, but also dynamic Social ones. And strong leadership within, and between them.
This carries me to the language of intersections: leadership at the intersection.
The reason why the system of the Organisation may be elusive is that it is so much more than the formal assets we can see and directly control.
And the reason why it’s hard to find the steering wheel or joystick is because people are not moved by these things, so much as by their own engagement and agency.
To move a car you turn the wheel. To move an Organisation you create the conditions in which it chooses to turn.
Which sounds crazy. What is the point of power if you cannot use it? Or if it does not do what you want?
Well – it does, and you can – it’s just that the Organisation itself is so much more than that narrow definition of the things that fall directly under your control. So truth be told, you can steer something, but it may be a hollow victory if the movement is not willing and invested.
julianstodd
Julian Stodd's Learning Blog 