Between the Idea and the Reality: Complexity Leadership in Liminal Times

Path Notes # 27

Between the idea 
And the reality
Between the motion 
And the act
Falls the Shadow...
T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

The ground beneath us is shifting.

I’m sure you can feel it. I’ve previously written about the wider horizon of our era and you don’t need me to tell you that we are living in liminal times. Instability - ecological, social, technological, institutional - forms the kaleidoscopic backdrop to our brief moment here on life’s main stage. Familiar systems are unravelling and reconstituting in real time.

Some of your maps probably feel like 1930’s travel guides!

I call these posts path notes deliberately. They’re ways to think out loud and in public about the trail I’m on. I just finished teaching a complexity leadership course and have been developing a new online program - the Complexity Code. Both have stirred up some juicy questions so in this post, I’m going to look at leadership through a complexity lens and explore complexity leadership itself.

Leadership?

Defining leadership is an evergreen industry.

There’s a well-worn path. Pick your favourite adjective or archetype. Bolt it onto the front of the word leadership. Transformative leadership, authentic leadership, servant leadership, transactional leadership, agile leadership, primal leadership… Write about it. Offer training…or better yet, a certificate. I’m being a little cynical but browse the shelves at any airport bookshop and it’s an easy conclusion to draw.

I think complexity leadership is different though.

Not because it’s a better adjective, but because it broadens the context. At its best, it can offer practical pathways for recalibrating human systems and for building institutions, technologies and cultures that work with rather than against the grain of complex reality.

Before unpacking it, let me offer a couple of framing propositions:

Leadership is simply social influence.

Whether we’re talking about exercising positional authority (leading down), lobbying decision-makers (leading up), network participation (leading out), self-cultivation (leading in) or the capacity of a collective to understand and shape its future (leading together), there are infinite ways to influence any kind of social field from a family to an organization to a civilization¹.

Beneficially or otherwise!

Leadership shapes what becomes possible.

Nothing exists in a vacuum – we are shaped by the constraints and possibilities inherent in everything from our environment to our historical moment. Let’s call those things externalities. And lying between any externality and any group of people is a field of relational possibilities or affordances. The same tree may afford shade to a child, timber to a logger or sacred meaning to a ceremony keeper. None of these things are intrinsic to the tree. They are latent possibilities existing at the intersection of condition, context and capability.

Leadership shapes a group’s collective capability to perceive such affordances, make sense of them together, and coordinate action around them. It expands what a group can do, and which futures it can realistically pursue. And it determines whether affordances remain latent, are misread, or are turned into adaptive action².

Leadership unlocks - or constrains - a human system’s adaptive capacity.

Leadership is a systems property.

It’s not just something an individual does or a role they inhabit. It’s an emergent property of human systems that can manifest in multiple ways - a charismatic individual, a council of grandmothers, an online influencer, a governance board etc. Each is a different expression of leadership. Every human system is perfectly ‘designed’ to generate particular patterns of leadership. There’s a reason that some cultures reliably generate wise and developmentally ripened elders who are able to guide their communities. There’s a reason that the British Royal Marine officer training process - the longest of any NATO country - reliably produces effective, selfless and highly adaptable leaders. And equally, there’s a reason that converging high scores in psychopathology, grandiose narcissism and Machiavellianism reliably predict leader emergence in some business contexts!

Leadership patterns of any kind tell us something about the conditions a system has created and the behaviours it rewards, tolerates, or amplifies. When certain traits reliably achieve influence, it’s rarely because individuals are uniquely gifted. More often it’s because the system - and its field of possibilities - makes those traits functional or adaptive under its prevailing constraints.

However….just because leadership is a systems property doesn’t mean individual leaders aren’t important! The whole concept of positive deviance highlights the way a single emergent pattern can shape a field. But in the quest to deconstruct ‘heroic’ individualism, collectivist frameworks risk minimizing individual agency. Hierarchical traditions, on the other hand, risk over-inflating it.

Complexity Leadership?

Complexity emerges from the interconnectivity - the relationships - between agents within a system, along with the relational and energy pathways that sustain and constrain it.

Complexity leadership means influencing and managing those relationships more consciously and skillfully.

It’s one answer to the question “what would leadership look like in practice if we fully embraced a complexity perspective?” Not as an abstract intellectual exercise, but as an embodied response to the lived reality of governing, organizing and caring in systems that are increasingly volatile, contested and beyond any one actor’s control. It’s complexity consciousness in action.

The term was formalized and popularized by Mary Uhl-Bien and her colleagues who helped establish it as a distinct framework alongside its close relatives like adaptive, generative and systems leadership. All of them arose from a growing conversation in the late 1990s as scholars and practitioners worked to apply the insights of complexity science to organizational leadership and development. If I was going to summarize the body of theory and practice that emerged, it would be something like this:

Complexity leadership is about cultivating adaptive capacity in complex human systems.

Rather than relying on hierarchical control, it works with system dynamics (boundaries, attractors, constraints, information flows, feedback loops etc.) to amplify generative disturbances, constrain destructive ones, and create the conditions under which adaptive responses can emerge.

Crucially, complexity leadership is also about contextual differentiation and discernment.

You have to recognize when you’re playing a complex game and choose your moves accordingly. The strategies needed to stabilize crises or fix technical problems often backfire unpredictably when applied to complex social phenomena. Such category errors, according to scholar practitioners like Dave Snowden and Ron Heifetz, are the reason so many leadership and organizational change efforts not only fail but actively make things worse.

Four Patterns of Complexity Leadership

The term complexity leadership is widely used but, as always, people mean quite different things when they use it. I’m noticing four distinct patterns running around out there in the wild:

Unconscious influence: implicit complexity leadership. It’s what the oft-cited wolves were doing when they were reintroduced into Yellowstone Park. They did a few, very simple, wolf things. They hunted elk. They chased off the coyotes and made life harder for the mountain lions. They reproduced. And when their family pack got to a certain size, they split off and created new ones. Taken together, those actions and protocols had a range of first, second and third order effects within a complex living system that have made them the poster child for ecological rewilding. But the wolves, of course, had no such meta-intention. They weren’t consulting complexity frameworks or optimizing for system health. They were simply being wolves. Following their own original wolf-nature.

And that’s what we’re all doing all the time!

With our every thought, word and action (or inaction), we exert our agency and influence in contexts that are more complex than we realize. And those actions result in unanticipated consequences that are largely invisible to us. As network agents, we are all complexity leaders. But for the most part, we wield our agency unconsciously.

We can’t opt out of shaping the systems we’re part of!

But we can choose how awake we are while we’re doing it.

Symbolic complexity: allegorical or superficial complexity leadership. Here we see a spectrum of approaches that range from the benign use of complexity as an inspiring metaphor or aesthetic to more problematic work that appropriates complexity language while fundamentally misunderstanding and misapplying its principles. There’s a mismatch between the language of complexity and the causal logic actually governing the intervention. I would include here faddish leadership and management trends; new-age or quasi-mystical thinking that cherry-picks and distorts complexity science to support pre-existing ideologies; well-meaning social movements that aspire to system-level impact and use the language of complexity while employing forceful linear strategies; simplistic theories of change that are unmoored from actual system dynamics; regenerative work that overly fetishizes emergence, networks, holarchy or self-organization while ignoring constraints, power, feedback, and path dependence.

Every one of them risks reinforcing the very dynamics they seek to transform.

At the same time, I don’t want to be overly critical here. The children of modernity are rarely exposed to systems thinking. Rarer still to the living embodiment of skillful complexity leadership. Not only can complexity – and the implications that flow from it – be hard to understand; it challenges some of our foundational mental models. Metaphor can be an important gateway to complexity thinking. It certainly was for me!

But if there is no meaningful change in system dynamics or if nothing important becomes harder (e.g. requiring greater accountability) for incumbents, complexity is probably being used symbolically.

Defensive adaptation: adaptive strategies to maintain existing structures. Here we see institutions that have traditionally operated as conventional hierarchies shifting in response to adaptive challenges and complex contexts. Conventional military forces adapting to the challenges posed by distributed networks. Public services responding to cascading socio-economic, demographic or transnational challenges. Governments adapting to the new realities presented by fintech and infotech. Corporations adopting agile methodologies to increase shareholder value. Tech platforms masquerading as open ecosystems while concentrating data, value, and decision-making. Monopolies of any kind (political, media, cultural, technical, corporate…) leveraging network effects and ecosystem dynamics to concentrate rather than distribute power and value.

It’s all basically the same thing.

Traditional hierarchies adapting to the realities of unpredictable emergence and networked complexity in order to maintain their resilience, relevance, market share, influence or control. In crude terms we could say it describes the use of complexity leadership strategies to maintain hegemony (i.e. basically keep things the way they are). As a result, it’s where most of the money, along with most of the consultants and practitioners, are to be found!

And…while some of those traditional hierarchies might be indefensible, I’m not saying that defensive adaptation is morally inferior or inevitably egregious. It’s a necessary part of how you build a viable healthcare or child welfare service…or prevent catastrophic systems collapse…in a modern society.

Regenerative systems-craft: co-evolutionary, whole-systems practice. The distinction here is intentionality and scope. A very real fault line within complexity leadership practice is whether complexity-informed strategies are used to preserve existing network attractors (power structures, metabolic flows, paradigms, narratives…) or to shift them towards conditions for greater mutual flourishing.

Regenerative systems-craft is oriented towards tending to the collective substrate rather than optimizing individual or institutional performance. It uses strategies like restoring ecological relationships, reconnecting social networks or reintroducing beneficial disturbances to regenerate degraded or calcified living systems and stimulate the emergence of beneficial new patterns. In truly regenerative approaches (as measured by its outcomes not its intentions) there will usually be explicit work with constraints, precise attention to feedback loops, a willingness to introduce or absorb disturbance/loss, and a blend of patience and uncertainty tolerance that sits alongside some real precision, specificity and disciplined curiosity. Such interventions can re-complexify living systems where complexity itself has been eroded by generations of reductive thinking, oppressive control, mechanistic management or unchecked extractive monopolies - in ways that actually change underlying³ attractor dynamics.

The trouble with tending the substrate of course is that you can expend endless time and treasure without seeing any visible results!

It’s probably why so many funders have pulled back from ‘systems change’ work in recent years to focus on more immediate and tangible outcomes. Funding frameworks often demand predictable deliverables while claiming to support emergence. Or they welcome failure rhetorically but punish it structurally. The irony is that while true complexity enables precise, long-horizon tending of the substrate, some of what actually gets funded as “regenerative” work never leaves the territory of symbolic complexity at all.

To be clear, these four patterns are not types of leaders, but modes of influence.

And, of course, they are not absolute distinctions. Whatever you’re up to, you’re probably doing at least two of these things at the same time. Maybe all four across the full spectrum of your life. Ultimately, complexity leadership is less about adopting a particular style or set of tools than about cultivating awareness and discernment. It’s about the capacity to sense what kind of system you’re in, how your actions shape its dynamics, and which forms of influence are appropriate to the moment.

And it’s about the deeper purpose or paradigm that all these things are in service to.

All of this matters because we are no longer operating within the safety margins of existential consequence. We’ve already crossed the line. The cumulative effects of our everyday decisions - institutional, cultural, personal - are now shaping planetary-scale outcomes. And whether it’s exercised unconsciously, rhetorically, defensively, or regeneratively, leadership shapes the conditions from which future possibilities for you and all that you care about emerge.

Complexity leadership is an attempt to take responsibility for that fact.

Especially when doing so is inconvenient, uncomfortable, or costly.

And that’s kinda…..complex!

Don’t forget to breathe…

Julian

p.s. if you want to see some complexity leadership in action, check out the polyrhythmic conversation between these three musical geniuses!

1. A shout out to my colleague Nick Turner who has really helped clarify my thinking here

2. Another note of recognition here - for anthropologist Tim Ingold who I was lucky enough to have as my undergrad tutor

3. To be more accurate - and to recognize the importance of downward causality - I should probably include overlying attractors here to avoid falling into the trap of uni-directional root-causism!