From leadership to collective leading functions
The idea of a leader with exceptional qualities to create a vision that inspires others to work together, with excellent strategic and decision-making skills, and being aware and resilient sounds like a superhero character more than a real person.
The leadership paradigm
Traditional leadership projects an image of leaders as visionary managers on steroids. While vision, organisational skills, decision-making, and strategy are critical for success, addressing today’s complex challenges requires all people involved to develop and combine these skills with others to respond to these challenges better.
The word “leader” itself comes from the Old English term “lǣdere,” meaning “one who goes, a guide, a conductor.” Interestingly, it originates from the verb “līthan,” meaning “to go, to travel.” Somewhere along the way, we took this personalisation a bit too literally. Perhaps it’s easier to mobilise people behind charismatic, authoritative figures than an abstract concept. However, I find the original meaning more compelling: an act of going, navigating a journey towards a better future.
While traditional leadership is still valid and helpful in making decisions and personalising attributes that make it easier for people to follow and trust, it is ill-equipped to address and respond to the problem of the complex adaptive systems we all live in.
Individual leadership, where an individual provides direction, motivation, feedback, etc., assumes that this person “knows better” than the group they are leading. This is a flawed assumption that collective action with transparent processes and rules can overperform. Collective action is not exempt from challenges like group thinking or the need for effective facilitation and decision-making. However, there are mechanisms to tackle these challenges.
Redefining leadership
An organisation needs to adapt when the environment changes and to change when the environment remains stable to stay viable and relevant in its context. To do this, it needs to coordinate people, information and resources. Traditional organisational leadership is based on privileged access to information, resources, and authority. This creates an unequal distribution of power, which disenfranchises people. Not surprisingly, the challenge under this type of leadership is to motivate, commit, and engage people to work together.
There is a way to distribute leadership to improve people’s ownership and the capacity to collaborate to create and pursue their desired future, redefining leadership as an emergent property arising from the collective performance of leading functions.
From this perspective, leadership is the capacity of two or more people to create a better state of the system they are a part of and coordinate their actions to go from the system’s current state to the desired one. Leadership won’t happen if we only imagine the trip, plan it, gather a crew to build a ship and row together, or wake up at the destination after a long nap. Leadership emerges from the combination of all these actions because all of them are necessary for proactively keeping us viable and relevant.
This approach allows people to steer the process and take responsibility and pride in it. This autonomy and responsibility create a context for people to self-motivate and commit without needing an exceptional individual at the front.
The four leading functions
Instead of personal qualities, I propose four leading functions for people to perform:
Synthesise complexity.
Conceptualise the ideal state.
Adapt to the future as it emerges.
Evolve our understanding.
An advantage of having leading functions is that, on the one hand, people can participate in any of them depending on their interests, skills or capacity. On the other hand, they also can participate in improving the function itself to optimise or adapt it to the current circumstances.
We are part of an interdependent world where, as individuals, we only have access to a small fraction of it. To develop a holistic understanding of the changes in our environment and organisation, we must bring and integrate different perspectives. Synthesising complexity is about connecting the dots and finding patterns in unstructured information and unrelated actions to reveal the dynamics that influence us directly or indirectly. This will help us better understand the potential obstacles we would face on our way.
However, understanding the system’s current state is insufficient for us to go. We need to conceptualise the ideal state we want to achieve. It will create tension for us to move from where we are now to where we want to go. These two stages are critical for people to motivate themselves, engage with the process, and take responsibility for leading.
Adapting to the future as it emerges is about making decisions in a constantly flowing situation while keeping the organisation’s coherence. Changing the underlying structure of relationships to pursue the ideal state will change the dynamics and the current behaviour patterns our organisation has adapted efficiently. These decisions must align with responding to short-term challenges while keeping the organisation within its viable boundaries.
Evolving our understanding requires perceiving changes and deviation from the expected outcomes and feeding them back into the steering function to respond appropriately. It also implies updating our beliefs and mental models to feed them to the synthesis function.
There will always be exceptional individuals with exceptional capacities. Unfortunately, most of us are not this person, but we can combine our talent and experiences to face the complex problems that unfold before us. We can create effective ways to self-organise to create the future we want to live in and the means to achieve it without the need for a central authority or source of inspiration. Shifting leadership from individuals to an emergent property of a set of leading functions allows us to participate and contribute to creating our way of travelling.
