Leadership, complexity and change

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[Insert your professional field] “ … has developed a specialised discourse to allow individuals within the profession to communicate effectively about all matters associated with the design and implementation of [insert the things you do]. Yet have we locked ourselves into a self-perpetuating set of values and practices that make it difficult to move thinking forward? Have we positioned ourselves so strongly within the rhetoric of the profession that it is difficult to introduce new ideas, or indeed, think of ‘other ways of doing things’?

Our profession, with its own codes of practice, its own discourse and its own theoretical perspectives, has built itself into an institution that has taken on a life of its own.”
Marilyn Fleer (2003)

“For the structure of human exchanges, there are precise foundations to be discovered in the institutions we establish between ourselves and others; institutions which implicate us in one another’s activity in such a way that, what we have done together in the past, commits us to going on in a certain way in the future. … The members of an institution need not necessarily have been its originators; they may be second, third, fourth, etc. generation members having ‘inherited’ the institutions from their forebears. And this is an important point, for although there may be an intentional structure to institutional activities, practitioners of institutional forms need have no awareness at all of the reasons for its structure – for them, it is just ‘the-way-things-are-done’. The reasons for the institution having one form rather than another are buried in its history. ”
John Shotter (quoted in Fleer, 2003)

Marilyn Fleer’s words were written in 2003 (download a copy of the article here) in relation to early childhood education practices, but as I read them I was struck by how they could apply to many fields of endeavour. From my perspective they certainly apply powerfully to the activities of leading, managing and organising.

A significant focus for me over the past few years has been to explore some of the voices that sit at the boundaries of conventional thinking about organisational practices. Some of what I have taken from all this as being particularly useful in shaping both my thinking and practice, relates to complexity and the role of conversation, story and narrative in sustaining collaborative action.

There are some situations that are so complex that predicting and or controlling the outcomes of the actions that you take, either as an individual, a group or even globally, is difficult if not impossible. However it seems to me that there is more than one form of this complexity. One I call “natural” complexity – the kind you find in living systems in the natural world eg; ant colonies, local ecosystems, weather patterns etc. Natural complexity operates through “rules” that may evolve over time but do not do so based on the intentional and conscious intervention of the agents or actors in the system. The other I call “participative” complexity – the kind that involves human beings as engaged, intentional participants eg; teams, organisational cultures, villages, communities etc. Participative complexity operates through complex social processes of human interaction, eg; embodied responses and emotion, conversation, story and narrative as well as the development of conceptual frameworks and socially shared views of the world. These processes form and sustain and at the same time are themselves formed by the multitude of local interactions that make up day to day relating and responding. It is in this complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship that continuity and the possibility of change arise Whether it is continuity or change depends largely on how people both engage with and respond to each other.

These forms of complexity are present, to varying degrees, in almost all circumstances where public and social policy changes and initiatives are being attempted and so its easy to see them as the same. The danger of doing so is that we keep trying to make “rules” to govern how participative complexity might work, forgetting that the “participants“ are not mindless and instinctive rule followers! Perhaps we should describe ourselves as pattern makers and breakers! Our engagement with each other is open to be ”patterned“ in many different ways.

All this seems to me to have major implications for the way in which we think about and enact leading, managing and organising. Here are some things it seems to me that it is worth considering:

• Focusing less on predicting and controlling situations and circumstances that are high in “participative complexity”.
• Giving up on the illusion that we “design” organisations, policies, changes and strategies from the outside and developing more sophisticated ways of finding the way forward as engaged and committed participants.
• Rethinking and refining the extent and the way in which leaders and managers engage with people day-to-day so that these engagements become more open-ended, iterative and improvisational.
• Opening up organisational conversations to a wider range of voices and adopting approaches that enable apparently divergent views to co-exist, interact and compete for longer.
• Developing and nurturing ways of engaging that paradoxically combine influence, curiosity, uncertainty and responsiveness.
• Recognising that every engagement with others involves a power dynamic and being alert to the possibility of exercising any form of power in ways that suppress others and their voices.
• Opening up organisational conversations to the unspoken knowledge that already exists within the localised communities of common interest and practice while recognising that the moment you try to codify such knowledge you alter it irrepairably.
• Valuing expressions of doubt and uncertainty as potential indicators of useful perspectives and possible ways forward.
• Doing more rapid-cycle experimenting or prototyping when it is clear that the next steps let alone the “solutions” to complex social and public policy issues and challenges are far from predictable and linear.
• Focusing less on the measurement of long-term outcomes and targets and more on developing better ways of gathering information about the immediate impacts of change efforts so as to be better able to detect emerging patterns and trends and to be more sensitive to weak but important signals.
• Getting over our discomfort with qualitative (anecdotal) evidence.
• Recognising that the frameworks, models and “best practices” that we can value so highly are tools that we can use in the everyday interacts about how to get things done. Like all tools they were constructed to suit certain circumstances and to be used in certain ways. It might pat us to use them with less certainty outside the circumstance for which they were designed.

At this point I can imagine some of you suggesting that this is all well and good and asking how it could possibly be a practical approach for a leader or manager in an hierarchically patterned organisation. Is any of this at all practical or is it just another form of idealism?

I believe it is practical because in many ways I think what I have roughly described in a kind of manifesto for some different ways of working is often what actually happens. For example, I know that as a leader and manager I worked improvisationally and experimentally a good deal more than I preferred to admit. It’s just that because it doesn’t fit the dominant models leaders and managers rarely talk about what they do in this way.

BUT … I don’t for one moment think it’s easy. Working in this way, even tentatively, calls upon leaders and managers to do what Debra Meyerson described in her book that was originally called Tempered Radicals and has recently been re-issued with the title Rocking the Boat: How to Effect Change Without Making Trouble. In the book she explores, in a very practical way, what people can do when they seek to express identities and ways of working that are different from the majority culture of their organisation while fitting in to that culture. When she describes the leadership of people who are attempting this juggling act she talks about patience, self-knowledge, humility, flexibility, idealism, vigilance and commitment as being more powerful than charismatic flair and inspirational visions. Here is how she describes what can happen as a result.

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“As people act on identities and values that are different from the majority culture they disrupt and implicitly challenge normal ways of acting and thinking by making visible alternatives. In this way, small acts of self-expression can open the door to new practices and expectations.
Debra Meyerson

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