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I mean working with others to shape direction and enable action, while investigating and changing the patterns that produce our situation. Our own part in those patterns, whose purposes count, and who gets to decide what ‘better’ means all belong in that work.
Leadership development isn’t reducible to personal development. It concerns how leadership happens in the work, including the relationships and arrangements that make it possible. (There’ll be plenty of opportunities for personal development along the way – and sometimes a need for it).
Leadership development is ‘personal’ in much the way road safety is ‘personal’. Individuals’ actions matter. We also need to examine road layouts, vehicle design, delivery schedules, transport alternatives, town planning, a geat many cultural norms, stochastic flow, weather and climate breakdown, and whose movement takes priority.
Suppose a delivery schedule allows too little time. The driver rushes, other people brake, traffic slows, and the pressure to rush grows. What looks like a ‘personal’ decision is already bound up with other people, material conditions, and obligations. Even the driver’s judgement involves expectations and habits learnt with others. What is ‘personal’, anyway?
Leadership development isn’t systems leadership, either. An embodied, enacted account of leadership – or ‘hey! everyone’s a leader, folks!’ – may be useful. It doesn’t, by itself, explain how a system behaves or give us ways to investigate and change it.
A systems | complexity | cybernetic perspective examines how patterns arise and persist, how our interventions affect them, and how we learn when the consequences disturb our understanding.
The leadership work is making that inquiry and action possible. In the road example, it could include challenging whose journeys are prioritised, securing changes to delivery contracts or junctions, and learning whether the result merely moves danger elsewhere.
We may have to reconsider what we’re calling ‘the system’, who has authority, and our own role as we go.
When has understanding a recurring pattern changed who you thought needed to act – and what they needed to do?
