The Craft of Complexity Leadership

Path Notes #6

I’m still hot on the trail of complexity leadership.

In the last post I tried to zoom out and explore it from the balcony. Here I’m going to dig into the craft; what do complexity leaders actually do?

Craft is about practicality. Making stuff. The practical skills, techniques, methods, tools and tactics, associated with a particular discipline. I sometimes think of it as being analogous to the Japanese suffix jutsu.

Martial traditions that end in jutsu -  ju-jutsu, kenjutsu, aikijutsu – usually denote a practical, combat-oriented discipline. The suffix dō (the Japanese way of saying Dao or Tao) on the other hand describes something intended to be a path or way. The founders of judo, kendo and Aikido took out the nasty battlefield-tested moves from the older traditions to create martial arts designed to help their practitioners cultivate something more than simply the capacity to kill or subdue armoured psychopaths wielding three-foot razor blades; things like virtue, respect, physical resilience, sportsmanship, spiritual refinement or even enlightenment.

This post is about complexity-jutsu.

Complexity describes the rich inter-connectivity between agents within a system. Leadership is simply social influence. Complexity leadership is the craft of influencing such inter-connectivity more skillfully.

It involves a range of tools, techniques and tactics emerging from a particular understanding and harnessed to particular mindsets or states of consciousness, that are applied in certain kinds of contexts with a particular spirit of intention.

I know that’s a whole mouthful, but there’s so much simplistic drivel written about leadership. What makes something complexity leadership is not just the tools and tactics but the understanding, mindset, intention and context that shape them. Let’s unpack that a little:

Tools, techniques & tactics: this is the easy part because it’s the most visible part of the craft. I list a bunch of these later in this post.

Understanding: your intervention can only ever be as good as your diagnosis. And every diagnosis combines a map of reality and a method for locating a particular phenomenon upon it. If the map is flawed, everything else that flows from it – no matter how skillful or well-intentioned – will be equally flawed. Bad intel inevitably results in bad tactics.

Mindset: all tools are harnessed to whatever state of consciousness is wielding them. It’s the old ‘guns aren’t dangerous; people are dangerous’ argument. Leadership that is rooted in complexity consciousness – a relational mindset of deep connectedness, love, and awareness – is qualitatively different than leadership rooted in a mindset of separation, fear, and control.

Intention: the same strategies can serve vastly different intentions. To my eyes, Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy are essentially the same book. Both describe adaptive patterns of distributed leadership, networked organization and self-synchronization in the face of external complexity. One describes the reconfiguration of US Special Forces during the War on Terror, the other the evolution of liberatory social movements. These essentially similar process intentions are shared by most complexity leadership approaches. But their strategic or existential intentions however are very different. Different boundaries have been drawn and different outcomes are being sought. At the same time - in my biased opinion – all ‘true’ complexity leadership holds the same meta-intention: influencing beneficial patterns of emergence in human systems and catalyzing successful adaptive responses to complex challenges. I’m guessing adrienne and Stanley would both say that’s exactly what they were up to!

Context: all leadership takes place within a context that is more or less complex. Such complexity is determined by multiple factors. The level of order and predictability within a system. Our capacity to understand it. The boundaries we draw around a system to define it – and everything our boundaries exclude. The degree to which critical system properties and emergent outcomes can be measured or known (along with the time and energy required to measure and know them). The number of inter-related variables and the nature of their relationships. The range of potential ‘choices’ available to systems agents. The relationship between cause and effect within the system and the degree to which our theories about them correspond to its reality. And so on. Identical leadership strategies can result in categorically different outcomes depending on the level of complexity.

For the rest of this post I’m going to share some rough field notes based on observing complexity leaders.

A couple of caveats:

• All complexity leadership, at its core, has to be a practice of inquiry and adaptive learning. People – especially if they have a cursory knowledge of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework - often say there’s no right answer or best practice in situations of high complexity but that’s only partially true. The right answer is always learn! If you’re not actively learning, you’re not really leading…even if it looks like you are to others. Almost everything on the following list is therefore either a variant of, or requires, learning. Complexity leadership is mostly about learning and facilitating learning.

• I haven’t sorted these strategies here. It’s a blog post not a refereed journal article! But it will be obvious to you that most of them fall into a few meta-patterns. Learning. Directing energy. Disturbing. Brokering. Connecting. You get the picture. There is a relatively small repertoire of leadership principles and moves – a pattern language of complexity leadership if you like – that can take an almost infinite number of forms. As a result, all of the leadership moves described here overlap. The distinctions are not intended to be categorical – just a way to invite new perspective.

• Virtually every one of these leadership strategies can be harnessed in service of wildly divergent intentions and mindsets. There are some dangerously powerful tools on this list.

• As you read through them, you might hold a couple of questions. Which of these am I/we doing? Not doing? What’s familiar? Unfamiliar? Superfluous? Missing? Do any of these  offer a fresh way to approach a challenge that feels stuck?

So without further ado, here’s a list of complexity leadership techniques.

1.     Optimizing for emergence. This contains a multitude of strategies depending where people are situated in a system and the kind of influence they wield:

a.      Harnessing or deliberately introducing pressure - amplifying crises, shifting power differentials, nudging systems towards chaos and destabilizing equilibrium. Turning up the heat and preventing things from settling.

b.     Increasing information flow; enriching the information ecosystem, breaking open information silos, simplifying overly complicated processes. Dismantling or challenging toxic hierarchies and cultures that impede or even punish the free flow of information, high quality feedback, truth-telling, question-asking and accurate data. It also may involve facilitating straight talk; creating a climate that enables and rewards robust and frank exchange, surfacing issues and, if necessary, moving into conflict.

c.     Incentivizing patterns of behaviour that generate emergence - exploration, innovation, experimentation, risk-taking, collaboration, curiosity, agency, self-organization etc.

d.     Increasing connectivity within and outside bounded systems - stimulating the formation of new networks, generative relationships, cross-functional teams, rich interaction and information flows, harnessing diversity and difference, enabling system agents or disparate networks to link up/converse/collaborate/fool around more creatively.

e.     Freeing up energy that is locked, forgotten, concealed or otherwise stored away in a system and then using all kinds of sneaky modulating tactics - boundaries, pressure, tags, attractors, amplifiers etc. - to direct that energy in ways that lead to the emergence of new patterns.

2.     Tracking: trackers follow that which they cannot yet see. They bring a quality of disciplined observation to signs and faint signals which they carefully analyze. They form and test hypotheses about their quarry’s behaviour or movements. They deduce where it might go next. Complexity leaders do exactly the same. What are they are tracking?

a.     Emergence. Finding patterns of coherence, noticing anomalies or actively seeking out examples of positive deviance. This may involve a relentless focus on data and evidence (perhaps with appropriate software), combined with a respect for intuition and a deep curiosity about anomalous and weak signals. Complexity leaders are always asking some version of the question what’s actually emerging here and looking for what is already ‘sticking’ or organizing energy within a system. And they are looking, sniffing, listening, tasting and feeling around in all kinds of unusual places. Because emergence always whispers before it shouts out loud.

b.     Adjacent futures. Adjacent possibilities and network attractors are patterns of latent coherence that generally only become visible when established systems are destabilized or break down. They are powerful gravitational forces that constrain and enable all forms of innovation and change – and complexity leaders are trying to understand and harness such latency in advance - rather than discovering it after they’ve already destabilized a system.

3.     Learning! Complexity leadership is, above all, a form of dynamic inquiry that takes multiple forms: engaging in continual sense-making, critical analysis, pattern tracking, careful observation, investigation, evaluation, data gathering and listening in iterative cycles of action, prototyping and reflection. Learning which variables can actually be influenced or managed within a system. Complexity leaders are constantly seeking deeper understanding, asking higher order or deeper questions and modeling relentless curiosity.

4.     Touching to read. The eros of emergence. Learning through engagement. This often means running and learning from multiple small - and potentially incompatible – experiments. Doing something and seeing what happens. And then trying something else in response. Big social media platforms do this all the time – release some new feature in one country to see what users do with it. Touching the system means working with emergence, learning what happens and modulating your response accordingly rather than analyzing it to death only to discover that your great strategic plan is useless in practice.

5.     Leading from the future: complexity leaders seem to stand as if they are already there. Also listening to the future – paying careful attention to trends, dynamics, tensions or openings that can be harnessed. There is an oracular quality to complexity leadership – a receptivity to the pull of adjacent possibility - combined with a clear-eyed sense of a system’s current reality.

6.     Brokering between mainstream and margin: complexity leadership often seems to be a sort of ambassadorial role between parts of a system that don’t see/respect/understand one other, communicate effectively or even see themselves as being part of the same system. This is an adaptive leadership role that enables a more generative connectivity between the edge and the centre - e.g. between an organization’s entrepreneurial and bureaucratic functions or between the managers and users of a critical public service.

7.     Bypassing institutional immune systems: successful brokering invariably means protecting deviants, dissenters and outliers, along with their ideas, from the majority - organizational systems, conventional wisdom, established practice, orthodoxy, groupthink. All established human systems – entrepreneurial businesses, religions, social movements etc. – have a tendency to punish and suppress (fire, demote, ridicule, demonize, stick an icepick into the skull of) the very kinds of people and processes that created them in the first place.

8.     Articulating a 'good-enough' or 'dynamically incomplete' vision and providing minimum specifications that allow their organizations and teams to engage creatively and energetically within minimal boundary constraints. Say what? A dynamically incomplete vision is one that holds space for the vision and energy of others. If it’s too ‘complete’ there’s little room for the rest of us to participate, contribute our creative intelligence, or feel a sense of agency and ownership. Complexity leaders light many small fires in the darkness around which different people can gather and add their own wood.

9.     Making the invisible visible: identifying, visualizing, modelling and mapping networks, relationships, patterns, trends, scenarios. It’s not only a form of learning; it’s about making things visible to other systems agents so they can modulate their own responses. ‘Dysfunctional’ human systems invariably have incomplete, invisible or intentionally suppressed flows of information (displaced consequences, deferred costs etc.); entire industries (lobbyists, advertisers, social media influencers) are dedicated to weakening the negative feedback loops that might otherwise enable a system (e.g. the ‘market’) to self-correct. Establishing or rebuilding such negative feedback loops is a go-to move in any complexity leader’s toolkit.

10.  Listening to the shadow system: paying attention to informal networks, relationships, language, symbols, rumour, storytelling, jokes, workarounds within a system along with the tacit values and motivations that drive it. What conversations are people having? What is unsayable yet whispered about? That door that is always propped open with a rock might be an important weak signal or learning opportunity rather than just an irritating safety violation! All of these things are critical sources of information about the relationships within a complex system – what the brilliant Nora Bateson calls warm data.

11.  Seeing doubly: complexity leadership always seems to involve being able to hold at least two perspectives at the same time – usually involving both the whole and its parts. Paying attention to patterns of local interaction as well as whole system properties. Jennifer Garvey-Berger’s analogy of being on the dancefloor and watching from the balcony is a good example of such perspectival capability.

12.  Growing complex systems by ‘chunking’ or allowing them to emerge in a cellular way from links in simple systems that work well and can self-organize and operate independently. It’s the team of teams approach; a great example is the Dutch home care organization Buurtzorg that Frederic Laloux describes in Reinventing Organizations.

13.  Facilitating discovery rather than providing answers: this almost always requires sitting in tension and uncertainty for longer than is comfortable – and thus also requires managing the consequences – such as a desire for closure or ‘action’ - that inevitably arise. Prolonged uncertainty, especially during the liminal period when one paradigm is breaking down and another emerging, is psychologically painful for many people. It frequently catalyzes some version of an order response – which can often be a regressive over-compensation by re-establishing control and reverting back to familiar patterns. People may gravitate towards ‘strong’ leaders and romantic political movements, and even be willing to surrender their own agency.

There’s no use being personally comfortable with uncertainty if it's making everyone around you freak out and regress! Uncertainty is a non-negotiable feature of complexity. Our experience of uncertainty however is something that can be skillfully managed by complexity leaders; they may amplify it as a form of systems pressure, utilize the dynamics of pressure-release, work to create psychological safety during periods of particularly stressful uncertainty, or build greater collective capability for tolerating certain forms of necessary uncertainty such as beginning without end in mind or moving toward a horizon rather than a fixed point that cannot be seen.

14.  Articulating, clarifying and restating purpose. Purpose here is a kind of story or myth that has the capacity to organize human endeavor across time and space. As such, it often has more power within a system than any individual leader. Complexity leaders are often thinking about purpose expansively; we’re not just talking about setting a vision for everyone else to follow or clarifying an organization’s ‘why’ and then putting management and control systems in place to ensure compliance. Complexity leaders are thinking about evolutionary purpose, tacit or competing purposes, alignment and meaning. They’re not just telling or selling stories – they’re stimulating and shaping new conversations about purpose and possibility. Story-making.

15.  Thinking about thinking. Leaders are often valorized for taking action and getting things done. But complexity leadership often requires us to resist the emotionally-satisfying hunger for immediate action! To not-act. To break the cycle of stimulus-response and find new possibilities for decisive creative actions – ones that may be oblique, counter-intuitive or adjacent. To shift our gaze from solving problems towards a focus on how decisions are made, problems identified, challenges conceptualized etc. within teams and organizational systems. To remember that the ‘solution’ rarely lives in the same house as the ‘problem’ anyway. How are we thinking about this problem? Why is it a problem? How might our thinking itself be part of the problem? How is the system that we are intimately a part of perfectly designed to generate this problem? Who is it really a problem for? What is our process for deliberating about it and coming to action? Where is our thinking constrained or habitual? Where does it need to be challenged or expanded? Above all, what is the underlying paradigm or worldview from which we are trying to act? Complexity leadership at its deepest level is about collective worldview shift.

16.  Cultivating complexity capabilities. Complexity leaders are not only learning about the systems they are trying to influence. They are engaged in a lifelong process of transformative learning and are working on themselves. They intentionally develop and model critical attributes like curiosity, humility, open-mindedness and self-awareness. They are constantly working to identify and circumvent cognitive and other forms of individual and collective bias. They are always trying to expand their perspective. And they often seem to intentionally shift state: they endeavor to access and work from deeper, optimal or flow states of consciousness. They are shifting the ground of being from which they are leading. Complexity leaders often seem to have a capacity to not only shift their own neuro-physiological states, but to influence the states of those around them.

So there it is. A list.

It turned out to be way more satisfying taking field notes than it was writing this down and putting it out into the world. It’s like displaying a portrait of somebody that you drew. It might be anatomically accurate but every time you look at it, you know it misses something essential about their soul. When I read the list, it feels unsatisfying and incomplete.

Because you can’t learn the craft of complexity leadership by reading a list of bullet-points.

Anyone that’s tried teaching it that way will tell you it just doesn’t work. Without the necessary contextual and relational entanglement, the correct understanding, the embodied state of consciousness or mindset, and the requisite spirit or intention, it’s just a poor facsimile. It’s like some lost soul attending workshops to learn how to drum, harvest and prepare medicine or build a sweatlodge, and then setting themselves up as a teacher or shaman.

Let me put it another way from my own direct experience.

Whether you're a civilization, an ecosystem or a novice fighter, it’s often the one-two punch that knocks you to your knees. I learned that sparring in the dojo with a guy called Kerry. I’d blocked his first punch.

Thwack!

The knuckles of his other fist slammed into my cheekbone, stunning me and leaving a juicy bruise. Beginners often spend too much time and energy reacting to the first punch. They can’t yet manage the complexity of an extended encounter.

My first move had simply opened the space for his second!

But it was a great teaching that was impossible to get in any other way. In the Japanese combatic traditions they call this taiden – the transmission of body knowledge.

It complements the other three lines of transmission; the shoden, the kuden and the shinden.

The shoden are the written scrolls or sutras that list the core techniques and teachings. But in centuries-old esoteric traditions like ninjutsu, tantra or Nei Dan, those scrolls and sutras are largely incomprehensible or even deliberately misleading without the kuden or direct oral teachings delivered by the lineage holders to unlock their meaning and fill in the intentional gaps. And then there’s the shinden – the direct transmission from the heart and spirit of a true teacher. The shaktipat.

Without the taiden, kuden and shinden, a shallow knowledge of the shoden all too quickly turns into yet more bullshit online posturing.

You can read about the craft of complexity leadership and systems change. You can think you’re doing it. But it is important to study it deeply. To see and feel it being done. To find good teachers and mentors. To expose yourself to a rigorous community of practice. To touch and be touched by it. To immerse yourself and swim in it. To persevere. To keep working on the complex meta-system that is yourself.

And then you have to find your own way.

Because in the end, complexity leadership is simply another way to describe your most authentic way of being in relationship with the world. Of dancing the dance that only you can dance in this brief flash of a lifetime.

Life is short my friends and the times are deeply unsettling. Let’s step in together with all that we are, with all that we’ve got and with everything that this beautiful world invites and asks of us. Let’s put everything we’ve got into that ephemeral dance and leave it all on the dancefloor. On the mat. On the field of consciousness and culture.

I’ll see you out there!

Julian