In our fast-paced society, many of us are under pressure to show leadership, assertiveness and make decisions. CEOs, managers, politicians and other types of leaders are often faced with a variety of problems that require more than a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Welcome to the complexity of emergent systems!
More than ever before, new challenges require new ways of working. Decisions need to be made quicker and more often. Managers become the bottleneck of the organisation – unless they actively drive the autonomy of their teams. Exploring the collective intelligence and creativity of teams also enables better solutions to emerge.
Progressive organisations have demonstrated that a profound rethink of leadership is needed, from traditional command-and-control to a systemic approach.
What does progressive leadership look like?
- Trusting the workforce to deliver
- setting up an intentional and safe context for collaboration
- analysing failures as an opportunity to grow
- exploring a constant state of emergence through safe-to-fail experiments
- driving decisions to be made close to where the work happens, and
- developing the system’s competence from a continuous learning journey
Leaders should resist the urge to control uncertainty. There is no magic formula for handling VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environments, but we can build resilience in teams and leadership. This is where complexity thinking meets ORSC: complexity makes sense of the context and the organisation to support it, ORSC organises and aligns the teams to function with it.
During the next ORSC UK Community event on September 12th, 2019, we invite you to explore complexity thinking with the Cynefin Framework and connect it with our practice of ORSC. We will also run a small SenseMaker® exercise with attendees. It promises to be engaging and to offer complementary perspectives when working with systems.
The Cynefin Framework
Cynefin was created by Dave Snowden at Cognitive-Edge. Cynefin is a sense-making framework offering a structured approach to contextualise a situation and some principles for making decisions within the context. It helps calibrate the engagement with a system. SenseMaker® is a way to probe the system of work in an unbiased fashion, allowing for emergent thinking. It can help greatly with system entry.
Read more about the Cynefin Framework and SenseMaker® here: https://cognitive-edge.com
… and see you at the community event.
