Complex Adaptive Leadership

Angie’s Take Aways from Complex Adaptive Leadership I recently had the opportunity to read the book Complex Adaptive Leadership: Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty by Nick Obolensky. Afterwards, Nick and I chatted about his wisdom on leadership and he was a guest speaker for a knowledge call which I facilitated. When you think of leadership, what comes to mind around the words anarchy, oligarchy and polyarchy and the pace and how leadership has developed during changing times? Complex Adaptive Leadership declares leadership should not be something only exercised by designated leaders. The book also looks at various types of organizations and where decisions and solutions come from.  Nick shares his views from research on leadership, complexity and chaos theory and makes it clear that we have indeed changed the context of leadership faster than we have changed our assumptions about what leadership actually is.  A brief review of my key take aways from Nick’s book below: Key Learning/Messages:

• Interesting exercise on gathering input on where solutions come from
• Despite radical changes, organizational hierarchy has not changed much
• Fascinating exercise on YouTube by Nick on why leaders are not always needed
• Charade- The challenge and support approach & the Organizational waltzes; those at top pretending to know, those at bottom pretending not to know
• Key challenges are:  fear of letting go, working too hard and playing the leadership charade- overlap=unnecessary leadership stress!
• Quantum mechanics part in helping us let go of some of the more deterministic assumptions which are held,
• Butterfly effect, fractals and attractors
• Bifurcation theory; buttons and threads
• Differing types of leadership & framework for various strategies; Tell, Sell, Involve and Devolve mapped against the skill & will framework and the various attractors that emerge
• 8 principles needed for polyarchy to work well; implicit purpose, freedom to act, tolerance to ambiguity & uncertainty, people’s skill & will, explicit objectives, boundaries, feedback, simple few rules

Personal Reflections/Ideas:

• Functions of leadership
• Catalytic mechanics and leadership, small effort with big effect
• Coaching’s role as an attractor of selling and involving
• LEAD; Learn, eExercise, Achieve and Define
• Complex systems; self-org, inter-relatedness, adaptive nature & emergence
• Underlying complexity there are a few simple rules
• People can achieve very complex tasks if certain principles in place and in balance
• The key for leadership is being adaptive and knowing when to let go

Favourite Author’s Quotes:

• Leadership at the top needs leadership at the bottom
• KISS- Keep, Increase, Start and Stop
• Edge of chaos; balance of order and chaos
• The best learning interventions are like a fractal- in other words there is a repeating pattern of how the learning is imparted

Overall, while this was a deep read, it was a great book with a lot of great visuals and information from research findings and I found it intellectually stimulating. Thanks Nick for sharing your wisdom!