I don’t typically write about leadership, but I’m having trouble getting last night’s zoom discussion out of my head. I’ll get it down here, to have some place to put it, to be able to look at it in words on the screen, to see if the Aha! I felt yesterday has turned into an Ugh. Thank you Manuel from the Nordic Building class of Lene Rachel Andersen.
If you are reading this, you will know I have decided there is enough Aha! worth sharing. You’ll also understand that I’m being pretty vulnerable here – neither leadership nor complexity are expert areas. Help me out, those of you who think about leadership, who try to lead, and who are shaping culture. Are the notes below helpful?
Imagine a space full of options. These options are all potential factors to consider, current realities and future possibilities, or perhaps in complex systems terms, agents.
The agents are all doing their own thing, and in so doing, they are having an effect (or not) on other agents in the system. Effects may be small or large, slow or fast, important or insignificant. It’s an ever-extending messy collection of variables. Into this interlocking, interactive hubbub walks a leader. What skills are going to be helpful? Here are at least a few.
- What agents can the leader safely ignore? There are far too many to grasp, many or most of them are unlikely to have a significant impact on others. Trying to handle them all is impossible. So what is the heuristic, or the gut feeling as one of my colleagues puts it, to know which to ignore, at least for the moment?
- Which agents will lend themselves to manipulation? The leader’s time, experience, ability, influence, collaborators, setting, and so on are all limited. Is there enough of what the leader needs to actually massage this or that agent, to actually give an agent a nudge in the first place?
- Which nudges of which agents will have the desired effects on other agents? Can a leader leverage a change in one area to lead to further changes in another? Can the leader at least somewhat predict knock on effects?
- Which agents need to be nudged simultaneously? Can a leader bring about a tipping point through collective nudges of multiple selected agents, so that the effect on additional agents ripples across the system? It seems likely to me that multiple agents need attention at the same time.
- How do you keep up with constant changes in agents? Once an agent has undergone some degree of change, or changed other agents, things (might be) different. Even the space between the agents, the manner in which they have an effect on each other (or not), is changed. How does the leader keep up with the evolving changes?
I’m afraid the list could go on and on. For one thing, so far I’ve been thinking of one leader in this imagined hubbub of agents. But of course a leader is surrounded by other people, many of whom are leaders by title or personality, and all of whom have personal interest in their surrounding environment and any changes to it. They are exerting pressure on agents, purposefully or unintentionally, to remain the same or to change in a manner to their liking.
Complex indeed. Just before our zoom breakout room’s time expired, it occurred to me that 1-5 above, plus any additional considerations you would like to insert, are not necessarily about improvement to the existing system. A leader with a good sense for affecting change through the manipulation of the right agents may still be creating a worse system. More often than not it might be unclear if things are heading in a good or bad direction.
And whether or not the direction is ethical?