Transcript for:
Exploring Complexity Leadership in Organizations

and thank you ebrot i have to say i'm just really really excited to be here so i was telling them on the pre-meeting that i do a lot of talks on complexity leadership but i don't often get an opportunity to talk to a group that's interested in complexity so this is really exciting to me and i'm going to take you up on the fact that you're interested in complexity and hope that we can have some conversation around that what i will do is i'm going to present it oh i'm trying to do screen sharing so you brought you'll have to allow me to to share my screen as i'm teeing up here um so i will be presenting by starting with the more practitioner oriented approach because that's just i think an easy way to enter and then from there i'll give you a bit of the theoretical background and the academic um i'm going to start with some of the work that i've done in complexity but i also want to to talk about some really exciting developments that have been happening based on a book that benjamin lichtenstein wrote on generative emergence so this is a 2014 book this has been my bible recently i'm very very excited about it um benjamin and i are having really fantastic conversations so i'll tell you a little bit about that let me see if i can get my my slides up here first all right great okay so um when we started this work in let me think i started in 2001 i was introduced to russ marion who was doing complexity and jerry hunt was the editor of leadership quarterly asked me to write a paper with him because russ was writing on it but nobody was understanding what he was talking about with the complexity work so my job was to translate it for a leadership audience and see if i could make sense of it we made progress on that and then around 2005 we had a meeting of complexity scholars we had two meetings actually we brought a whole bunch of people together complexity scientists people with different backgrounds some leadership people and had a conversation and said so how should we go about this should we do this together should we do it separately and the conversation was let's all go see what we can figure out on our own and then see where that takes us and that's what i'm really excited about about this about benny means book because i went with russ marion and we started delving into complexity leadership and did a really intensive research practice partnership which is what generated this work and why i can present this in a way that makes sense to practice benny mean went and did generative emergence and really was drawing more from complexity sciences and the emergence element and what i'm going to show you is that we landed in the exact same place i mean literally precisely the exact same place so to me this is real evidence of the validity of the work it's triangulation in a research process where you do it separately and then find out that you're landing on the same thing so what i'm going to do is show you first what i call the adaptive process and then from there i'm going to show you what bendy mean talks about with this adaptive process i'm going to fly through some pieces of it that i normally do in more detail because we don't need it here you can find that in other webinars that i've done and i found out i've only got 30 minutes so i have to talk pretty fast here so i'm going to fly through these slides all right so let me start the general intro of complexity leadership is that old models of leadership were managerial they were focused on top down but what we do with complexity is we view leadership as enabling an adaptive process and i have done a lot of work on relational leadership as well to provide the theoretical background for that really it's leadership at all levels so you'll hear people refer to this as shared leadership distributive leadership collective leadership relational leadership it's all of those things it sees leadership as a co-creation among individuals so individuals get together they co-create leadership by engaging in leading and following acts that create leadership it constructs it and then that leadership can occur anywhere in the organization it doesn't have to be just in the hierarchical levels all right so what we've been realizing as we've done the work is that we're focusing on a theory of leadership for adaptability and we had a concept that i generated with michael arena who is my practice partner he was the chief talent officer at general motors he's now in talent management at amazon and we had this concept of adaptive space saying that to be able to enable complexity leadership you have to have adaptive space michael got very very excited went off and wrote a book on it but what i was discovering was he couldn't define it and we knew it we knew intuitively what it was we couldn't put words on it so as he went off to write the book i started thinking more deeply about the definition and what is it and that's what generated this adaptive process so at the core of complexity and complexity leadership is the adaptive process that starts when there are pressures on a system so a system you all know systems i don't have to define it pressures come into a system it can be a person a group an organization any kind of collective and that pressure then activates an energy around novelty and need to innovate so there's a push for something new novelty something different but in that push for novelty there's also a need for stability or a need for a production so you can think about this yourself anytime you've been put into an adaptive situation you've got one side of your head saying yeah let's go do this and the other side is saying wait wait wait hold on a second so these two things go into tension now what we found is that in organizations this tension and in leadership this tension is not well understood and what we've done in leadership is we've taught people to get rid of the tension so heifetz ron heifetz at harvard was really very early in recognizing this and started writing about tension he was the only one that did it but this tension dynamic is at the core of the adaptive process and of complexity so you need to have it as we were doing this work early on people weren't getting the word tension so we changed it to conflicting so this process of these two things these dynamics these push pushes from different forces or counter forces they come together in tension but it's conflicting they're conflicting up against each other um in complexity this is referred to as heterogeneity and it talks about partners or partnerships agents that have conflicting worldviews so you need to capitalize on the heterogeneity or the conflicting so the key in adaptability is to engage that conflicting that tension in the world in the past and this is a while past now it was the case that we didn't have much conflicting i would say now where we are in leadership because of social media and power shifts and organizations and in society is we have a lot of conflicting we have lots and lots of people now who have opinions who think they're the experts who are um trying to advance things and the challenge we have is not the conflicting piece we've gotten really good at that just go open any newspaper go watch any tv show you'll see conflicting everywhere the problem we have is it with the conflicting you have to have connecting so you have to be able to find connecting amidst the conflicting and this is really the key this is the key to the adaptive process and the key to enabling leadership this is what we call adaptive space so adaptive space is the place or the conditions that engage this conflicting and connecting to be able to generate um sparks of novelty or creativity that can be advanced into the organization in the form of adaptive outcomes or adaptive solutions so that's what generates adaptability all right that's the core process i'm going to show you this in different ways but the nice thing about this model is it has innovation in it which a lot of organizations are really excited about and they focus only on innovation there's a long story here i think they're off track with it i think what they're really trying to do is get at adaptability and they're they're not messaging right with just saying everybody should be innovative because everybody can't be innovative but innovation is still here but in addition we have the need to produce so this model focuses on the importance of production and results it's much more realistic to the world of the practitioner many times in leadership we don't focus enough on that all right so the adaptability gives us sustainability for the long term so what we end up having is the current results which is what we need for the present survival but then we have adaptability which gives us sustainability over the long term all right as i mentioned the key to complexity leadership is adaptive space so what is adaptive space well it's the conditions that allow that adaptive process to occur so when you have pressures that come on a system they create an adaptive challenge that challenge says we need to do something different so that then activates the adaptive process it's normal and natural for people to start ideating in the face of adaptive challenges now what benjamin has found and we found in our work is there are two ways this can happen one is it can be opportunity tension in the entrepreneurial world which is what benny mean looks at so and person who's more entrepreneurial who says i've got ideas we need to drive change in the system or it can be adaptive tension which is what we've all experienced this last year with covid and that we have a pressure that's forcing us to have to change we have no choice it's a doctor die that's an adaptive tension and then with that adaptive tension we've got to figure out how we get to an what we call an adaptive response or an adaptive solution so you've got the need to innovate the novelty and the ideation in our research we found that's not the hard part people come up with ideas ideas are everywhere as michael arena said in our work ideas are cheap so that's not the issue the issue is how do you get the idea into a workable solution that will be able to connect with the operational or this need to produce and generate an outcome that leads to long-term viability okay so that's the basic process all right so what i'm going to do now is show you this process mapped onto an organization because that dynamic i just showed you the adaptive process you can also call it the tension dynamic it's a fractal dynamic it can occur at any level so it can occur in our heads and if we had time i could walk you through that and anytime you've had to adapt in your own head that process i just showed you has happened in your head but now i'm going to map it on to the organization or you could call this a society but an organization is any kind of collective social group and show you how this works in that that system all right so pressures come in they hit the local so pressures come in on a local level they don't come into the entire organization they're experienced in pockets and the pockets will experience it differently as well so the challenging thing about complexity is some areas will experience it one way some will not be in complexity or some will experience it differently so i i when i started this work i was really really excited about the concept of local that comes from complexity i think it's critically important heavily misunderstood in leadership you know if you think about the benchmarking that movement that we had many years ago people were trying to benchmark and just pull ideas from other organizations and they found out that didn't work you can't even take ideas from inside the same organization and have it not necessarily work because every situation is unique everybody's in a local context all right so the pressure's coming to the local that's sparkler activates that push for novelty and we call that the entrepreneurial system so it starts to trigger entrepreneurial entrepreneurial is learning innovation adaptability growth so it's focused on those kinds of things creativity all right so in a local level then people start to ideate and they socialize their ideas this is a collective creativity process as described by hargeten and bechke in a beautiful paper years ago that they published a qualitative study so it's a collective creativity process and again we could delve into a lot of discussion around what that looks like but they start to ideate they get an idea they start to implement it locally and they say well we want to now scale this and this is typical in innovation and you talk to organ people in organizations they'll talk about the need to scale so they want to scale it they want to take it bigger well to do that they have to then drive it out into the organization in a process of emergence so this emergence mindset is really critical people need to understand organizations are not top down they're not linear they're not driven by command and control they are an emergent situation in which if you're trying to drive this process you have to bring an emergence mindset to it all right so the entrepreneurial locals try to drive this out and what happens next is for this to work it has to go into adaptive space so if an organization or a collective does not have adaptive space it will not have the conditions for conflicting and connecting to occur and as a result the idea is likely to get shut down because systems are really really really good at pulling back to equilibrium they will what in our research i know early on russ marion believed you could put a situ or an organization into complexity i don't believe that i think it has to have pressures and it has to be in complexity pressures for it to change because i've seen just way too much stability and pull back to equilibrium so there has to be adaptive space opened up that adaptive space then creates the conditions for the conflicting and connecting for this thing to conflict which is always going to happen but then connect and scale up and the key there is then it needs to get into the formal operational system so the adaptive space is trying to help you create those conditions for it to emerge into and link up into the operational system this requires a lot of refinement and revision throughout so when i work with leaders i have conversations with them about how they do this they have to recognize that conflicting is going to happen they're going to get pushback and they get pushback they should pull it back to their local iterate the idea take that as feedback and then try it again but what you're essentially asking is these other network areas to also iterate and change and that's not an easy thing to do so there's a whole process around this and i've given other talks so you can you can go watch those if you're interested all right so then once that happens and it gets into to the operational system that's when you have adaptability that's when you have an adaptive outcome and it feeds back on the system in the form of new order all right so that's the adaptive process mapped on the organization if we put leadership on this thing we have in the entrepreneurial system what we call entrepreneurial leadership which is the ideation the generating and really scaling up and energizing an adaptive solution and then we have enabling leadership which is a very different kind of activity that means the individuals or the groups have the ability to make those connections they can navigate the emergence process in the organization they are skilled usually in networks they're skilled in persuasion and influence they understand how to deal with the conflicting to to break down barriers or break down walls or or any obstacles that are facing the the innovation that's trying to scale and they're really really good at linking up right so this is a process of linking up and then there's operational leadership so the operational leadership is what we've always had in organizations the difference here is that in this case it has to be flexible so it's different about operational leadership and the complexity leadership model is it's flexible to be able to accommodate change this is a mindset difference we work with organizations to get leaders there and what they've been doing the organizations we've been successful in they actually go out and they're like give us your ideas we want it we we're trying to drive strategy we have strategic initiatives we know what our initiatives are we need your ideas in healthcare we've been doing this and they say doctors we know that you don't understand the business side or how to put a business case around it bring us your idea we will literally help you put the business case around it to try to get this into the system right so that's a very different kind of mindset in operational leadership all right so now i'm going to give you some definitions entrepreneurial leadership individuals and groups who act as leaders regardless of title to advance novelty leading to beneficial change so these are people who see the entrepreneurial opportunities are able to identify needs and problems and link them up with creative solutions and typically here when we're working with leaders we're trying to get them to think outside the box then there's enabling leadership these are individuals and it can be groups of individuals but this is really more this requires a very different kind of leadership skill they're often in positions of authority and what they do is they enable and protect adaptive space so the left picture here is nurturing the idea that's the adaptive space that's needed for ideas to to be able to um surface crystallize energize amplify all of those things it needs protection and there is a skill and enabling leadership skill around doing that and then the right hand side i get really excited about this picture because this is such a beautiful depiction of emergence it's the messiness of emergence it's non-linear it's up and down and all around sometimes you hit dead ends it's just a really topsy-turvy process really to get through but then you're driving through the emergence to try to get it to scale up one of the key things we say the leaders here is to the entrepreneurial leaders don't fall in in love with your idea because your idea is going to morph and change and adapt as it goes across the organization so it's not about getting my specific idea in it's about the change the type of change i'm trying to drive and recognizing that that is going to be different by the time it gets to the outcome as long as it's accomplished the basic goal i had in mind that i was successful and then operational leadership so as i said before these are individuals who accommodate the change and they do that by realigning and loosening up the operational system to be able to generate new order so again i love this picture because you see the messiness of the emergence coming in and then what happens is they're able to put it into something that makes sense so they take the messiness and they operationalize it into something that will generate alignment efficiency order to be able to produce the outcomes for sustainability for the long term okay now this one i'm going to go through really really fast because i want to spend some time at the end so i'm just going to show you one more time the adaptive process and how it works so this is an animation that i have so on the left hand side we have an agent and this one is a human agent but agents can be non-human as well and this is an agent under pressure so it starts to energize and pulsate under pressure gets an idea starts to socialize the idea locally does that through collective creativity a huge process all around that and then as it gets to grow this thing starts to take off so they're still in their local with the idea generating then what they need to do is they need to go out to other areas so now they're trying to scale it when i work with practitioners i ask them what this picture is and they often don't get it it's shocking to me but they don't know that this is a network this is a network map you would be really surprised to know how many people do not have never seen a network map and this is really essential because complexity is a network theory organizations operate as networks they get the concept of networking but we really need to start thinking about organizations as network dynamics all right so now this this group starts to try to aggregate and scale this and they go out and they reach out to the others and they start to link up a bit but what is going to happen this always will happen is they're going to hit conflicting and this is what many people don't understand what conflicting is and how it works so we work with them to get them to understand this is a natural part of the process and to be expected it's not failure it's not a brick wall don't take pushback as a brick wall and you're stopped and whatever you do do not set up a meeting and ask for a yes no this is the most important thing what you're trying to do here is inquiry and conversation do not ask for a yes no because once you ask for a yes no and you get a no you're stuck that is not the way to frame things up so you're doing more of an inquiry approach all right so then once you get that pushback what you have to do is take it back and and iterate it so there's local iteration you take the feedback and the information come back you say okay what does that mean what did i just learn how do i iterate this so that i can now connect so reach out again and now the connection has occurred so there's success and these other areas are now going to change so this is the key thing and what you have to understand about why this is so difficult you're basically asking them to change so the iteration this time occurs in the other units as they start to take on the new order all right so this process continues and it continues to reach out and across conflicting connecting all the way through until it hits this point of this gray dot and this gray dot is really really important this gray dot is a sponsor what we call a sponsor and so what this person or agent or people does is try to tip it into the operational system what i will tell you is that the left side of the picture the entrepreneurial we don't have problems with people can do that the middle part some people can get to places in that to build some energy around a movement in an organization the real problem we've seen and it is a massive problem is this part right here of tipping it into the operational system and this is where our sponsor really is important we can talk more about that i can tell you more what they do but essentially what they're doing is they link it up and connect it into the operational system to help that system realign and that's the new order okay so i'm carefully watching my time um here's the problem of bureaucracy and we can talk about bureaucracy bureaucracy is the enemy of adaptability and it's just like fighting a system i don't i this picture is not resonating as much anymore because now we have less bureaucracy than we did when i started using it but i still enjoy the picture and then we have the problem with the brick wall which is that what i told you earlier of them trying to scale and push but they hit what they call the brick wall and this term came from people i was talking with and from our research from our teaching and our research this is these are their words they'd say yeah i'm doing everything you're saying but i hit the brick wall so we spent a lot of time talking about how to not hit the brick wall and what that means all right so here's the theoretical basis and this is the part where i'm going to now wrap it up and show you how this ties to what i was talking about earlier with the complexity research so i'm going to use benny means work which is the book i've been showing you and then also the 2018 paper that we wrote to try to get this everything we learned from practice back into to theory into the research that was a paper that i wrote with michael in lq all right so here's the lq paper i don't have a whole lot of time to describe this but i have to tell you this i can geek out on this this is where i get really academically geeky because i find it absolutely fascinating and so exciting this is a result of a literature review that we did on adaptability when i started looking to see what was out there at first i couldn't find it i had to work really hard because there's nothing really called adaptability they don't use those words but i started to find it in different literatures and then when i saw it it was everywhere but not only was it everywhere it was our three circle model so the three circle model that we had generated in our complexity leadership research from complexity theory and then from our practice work is everywhere in the literature it's all over strategy um it is the classic march exploration exploitation and where they've gone into ambidexterity it's dynamic capability operational capability adaptive capability it's flexibility efficiency differentiation and integration and org theory it's in entrepreneurship they talk about it as endogenous entrepreneurship operating for absorptive capacity um in the classic ot literature very very early on we had organic mechanistic and then as they've been developing that in the structure area they call it temporary decentralization and then in leadership it would be the informal bottom-up the formal top-down with now what's collaboration and network so that is just really cool because what we have found is a very pervasive dynamic this is everywhere i think it really helps to explain what's going on and we see lots of people talking about it but not realizing they're discussing the same thing and then the other cool piece is this tension is everywhere in the literature it's not obvious you go read it and it starts to pop out to you you have to understand what you're looking for nobody's known what to do with this they haven't talked about it but it's all over the literate literature and then in addition to the tension they talk about integrating so that would be my conflicting and connecting in our model so bottom line here a tremendous amount of support in the literature for what we have found this is in entrepreneurship this is the transformation process and actually it comes from dynamic capabilities too and i'm just showing you this to show you how this is our model so you start with the initial configuration and you go for a transformation and then a new configuration but they talk about exogenous shock which is our pressures and then endogenous entrepreneurship which is our entrepreneurial leadership ideation and then the feedback in the new order so again when i saw this this is really what helped me to map out the adaptive process from the 2018 piece that's how i i got to the the development of that adaptive process model and then this is innovation so innovation has now started to link up with networks thank goodness our areas are finally starting to talk to each other a little bit but it starts with ideation and then in the network literature that's brokering and structural holes then there's idea elaboration and in networking that's cohesion then there's championing and amplification which is brokering and structural holes then there's adoption which is network closure and implementation which is network closure so michael had already linked up and when he wrote his adaptive space book his whole book was on network because he had partnered with uh he had brought ron burt in and we talked with him and ron bird is the network theorist at university of chicago and so we talked with him and he started laying this out and that really helped michael in the practice work to know what to do as a chief learning officer in terms of trying to enable networks and network dynamics all right so here's benjamin's work which is dissipative structures and what between did is he went to he had the whole first part of this book um first third maybe even more than that is a review of complexity he pulls together all the different complexity sciences and then what he does is he realizes from that distributive structures is the one that has the most relevance for what we're talking about in leadership and organization and this is a real clarification for us because when i started the work we were using all different kinds of complexity sciences and i wasn't a complexity scientist so i didn't know these different areas and fields all right so what benjamin did was he then took dissipative structures theory and the concepts are far from equilibrium thermodynamics and law of maximum entropy entropy production and then emergence so his real focus has been on emergence and this is helpful to us because where i had the biggest breakthrough in our work was when i brought bill mckelvey and russ marion together in the 2007 paper russ came from a biological kaufman order for free model and bill came from more european model doing thermodynamics and dissipated structures and i knew that what bill had to offer was really beneficial so that's why that paper was a breakthrough and now benjamin has taken that and really laid it out so i'm going to show you what he's done with that all right so this is the start of it where it talks about basically the bernard experiments and the idea is that there's a container so something is contained but then it starts to heat up so the pressures are it heats up inside of this container and then that creates turbulence in the system and the thing goes into flux and then what what they studied was what happens and how does it generate new order in that and this has really been validated over and over again with private gene and prixing and stengers but there's an experimental outcome after a threshold point in which new order emerges so you see the the more com complexity language here but essentially what benji means doing is using physics and physical sciences to describe an emergence process that also applies to social systems when he laid that out he originally had five but now he's down to four conditions which i agree with because the sport condition is not perfectly under ours so his four conditions in emergence and generative emergence are disequilibrium which is far from equilibrium then you have fluctuations which are experiments and that when those experiments start to take off they amplify that's our emergence process that then generates into emergence of new order and then the final state is stabilizing feedbacks right so he has lots of basis for that here's his model again in the first stage he calls it organizing because he comes from an entrepreneurial background so he's doing this work in entrepreneurship in the second stage he talks about stress experiments and a critical threshold a critical threshold is a breakthrough where it starts to tip into new order and then the emergence is a recombination and stabilizing feedback is where it starts to be formalized into the new order so if i take that and i put it on our model which i've already shown you then we can see very clearly how the two things work together so here's benue means disequilibrium that's what we would call pressures and the pressures can come from either side but when we do our emergence one we draw that picture starting from the left hand side i can talk more about that but um the idea of that is that it starts with the ideation so that's the decent dis equilibrium is the pressures that puts the system into a far from equilibrium state then you have amplification as you start at the bottom here you start to energize and activate this now you're trying to scale it and then he has an emergence process so his emergent stage maps exactly onto what we're talking about and then his stabilizing feedback is the new order so as you see this is why i'm excited we have i think a lot of validation around a model let me just conclude by talking for a minute about covid because we all know covid and it's something that we can use to help us understand this process so i'm going to circle back to like a more practical just for my conclusion which is what happened in covid is that the world went into complexity and we all know that so now people understand that we are in complexity they might not know what it means but they know we're in it that complexity required every one of us the entire world to have to adapt that complexity came from an emergence dynamic of a virus that was in a bat that bit of pangolin this is the story we don't know but let's just go with the story bitter pangolin that a human ate that a human then got sick so an interactive non-linear effect of a human eating this animal that generates a novel coronavirus that's an amplification critical threshold kind of situation and then because we are so interconnected in the world that spread rapidly so that is a complexity emergence dynamic that put all of us then into a complexity pressure of disequilibrium that put us in a far from equilibrium state when that happened it naturally opened up adaptive space so adaptive spaces conditions that allow the adaptive process to occur and most organizations adapt to space is not there that's the problem we have organizations that are in equilibrium do not have the conditions for the process to emerge they have conditions for stability and order so complexity pressures are what open up those conditions or create the adaptive space when that space opened up for us the world then had an opportunity to adapt and innovate and change in ways it would never have been able to do otherwise that's why we see us out now all on zoom that's why we see doctors on telehealth and in doing medicine through remote we see all kinds of changes that have come from that so that adaptive space opens up this is winston churchill's never wasted good crisis he didn't know it but what he was talking about is a crisis it puts a situation into disequilibrium that opens an after space that allows change to occur that's essentially a complexity dynamic that's essentially what is meaning and so then once that happens it's open but then it's going to close so this adaptive space we're in is already starting to close a bit and we're locking into a new order we see this um it will eventually close and we'll be in a new order and then it will be harder for things to change again so that is i think you're getting um what complexity is and how it works and the leadership process around this is how do we lead to enable an adaptive response rather than an order response in an order response we deny the complexity is happening we try to stay in the old order and if we look at leaders in the world failed leaders we had one in our country they did an order response trying to stay in the old order so what we really need is leadership skills of people who can understand how to enable an adaptive response using the process i just described okay so with that i will conclude and i think i'm back to andre right that's it yeah i was just good i was just unmuting myself yes thank you thank you very much mary uh such a such a rich and energetic presentation uh there's so many um ideas that it provoked i must say and uh or resonated with rather um including for example a long conversation that we had here in the strategy group about approaching strategy and strategic management as enabled emergence right so as as a process of um of doing something in that in that space in the adaptive space um and i also i must admit i didn't know that um i didn't know the connection between um uh benjamin's ideas and yours but i'm i've also been taken by his book as well and i was at his first um emergence caucus at the academy of management long time ago um but if i may if i may just ask you to talk a little bit more about about this idea of emergence and what it looks like in organizations because um theoretically in theory it's it's an uncontrollable process right you can't really engineer an emergency you can't design certain things it's that it's it's a property of the system or or dynamic within the system and it's certainly poorly understood and uh one of my colleagues at oxford actually calls it the weasel word you know so if you don't know how something is produced you call it emergency but what what really is it and uh and suppose more importantly uh can you do anything in the adaptive space still with the kind of um prescriptive design centered approach or does it call for different ways of of acting in that space in that world it's such a great question andre and i get that people think it's a weasel word but it's really not so i just want to say this it's a weasel word for people who don't necessarily understand it if you understand it and if your brain works to understand and have an emergence mindset it's crystal clear in terms of what emergence is and so those of us who work in this or who who understand it and i know on here is what is a student so i see ammonia baker has joined i she's a doctoral student i'm working with in copenhagen business school and she and i have connected and i really think that we've connected because she has an emergence mindset and gets it so i just call her out to say that you know if you have a mind that works this way and understands it you get it the people who struggle are those who don't really have the right mindset for it would you agree with that edmonia yes i will definitely agree with that mary um but it's also always a difficult conversation to have you know then what does it mean right yes and so is it a weasley word to you or is it crystal clear to me yes it's not a weekly word okay so so your mind also operates in this way if you understand so um so i'll call i might call on you again in a second but thank you for chiming in but i think that the point here is that if you have the mindset that understands it what you do is you understand that the world is interactive that it is not a linear deterministic controlled world and you understand that things occur in interactions and so you're looking to see what are those things that are going to interact or engage together in ways that can can generate something that would be unpredictable but it's predictable in the short term so in the short term if you know the dynamics and the dynamics are what i talked about the dynamics are conflicting and connecting so things come together and they they conflict but if they can find a connection when they connect they generate what's called a phase transition so a phase transition is a transition to a new state it can produce something that we didn't expect to see produced before and that's really exciting so people i know and we've worked with a bunch of them because we have a practice group and i would included money in that a practice group who has been along through this whole journey these are people with emergence mindsets and who are complexity thinkers and they it's so natural to them and if you were to ask them the question is this prescriptive they would say no it's not prescriptive you can't prescribe but what you can do is you can use your thinking to engage with it so they're really really good at engaging with the emergence because they watch the dynamics they're looking for things out there that might link up and if they link up they'll create a phase transition now the easiest answer here is this is why benjamin studies complexity and entrepreneurship because entrepreneurs this is what they do what entrepreneurs do is they look at and they see that there are opportunities and these opportunities can be influenced if they engage with them a certain way so if we take jeff bezos at amazon my gosh i mean that's all emergence but he drove that emergence by watching things that are going on engaging injecting things into the system in ways that can influence the way the dynamic goes well he couldn't have known the outcome of his actions right but they're comfortable with that that's the difference and this is really what i was trying to describe earlier is that it's not about my idea it's not my specific idea but i'm influencing where it's going to go it will go somewhere and then i can play in where it goes so for us this work we didn't know where it was going to go and i've had to learn all along emergence because i'll have a word i i'll tell you the biggest problem i've had with this is we've had to morph words all throughout so i'll fall in love with the word and then it's like i gotta drop that word so we have done that entirely every time i get into it i'm like darn it i'm going to have to unlearn again the way that i've described this to take on the new learning it's consistent throughout i would say that the spirit of everything we've done is very consistent but we've had to adapt and learn along the way so it's not that it is i think the the problem is control what people think of control my view of control is i think it's controllable if it's within this realm of the dynamic and i walk into a classroom any of you teaching probably can relate to this if you do a style that's not lecture i walk into a classroom or i come into a webinar and i say i don't know what's going to happen but i'm going to create the conditions and i trust myself that i can engage with whatever's going on so if i go into a classroom let's say an exact one where i can really get a conversation going that conversation is going to take off it's not controllable but i have enough expertise that i can trust in myself that i can engage with the emergence i know i'm trying to get them to understand something about complexity if i go in with a specific thing that's a lecture but instead i see where they are i let it surface and then they learn whatever element they need to learn on the simplest level that would be describing emergence which is very different from the traditional way we kind of teach strategy and organizational design yes maybe one more question from me and i'll pass it over to um hey brad but can you talk a little bit more about the managerial practices or leadership practices that that are needed for that space for that um in that space for that process thank you for that question because i wanted to go there but i didn't want to keep talking so now we continue the stream so managers who do this well and we have one that i work with right now his name is brian allen and he's a capital one um brian is one of these people i've been talking about who's an emergence thinker he also i linked up with him maybe four or five years ago when we were doing interviews and i realized he gets it so i just listened to him because it was this is when we were in our active stage of our qualitative research and gathering information well brian we haven't had the chance to talk for a couple of years we've reconnected and now he's talking everything so when he talks his what he has learned in practice maps perfectly onto our model so he's excited because he's like oh yeah well mary can tell you what it is i'm doing because she has the framework to describe it he was trying to develop his own framework but essentially he does exactly this process now what brian has learned is he has now gotten so good at it he started off um so he works at capital one he's in in the card area and he was very much an entrepreneurial thinker so he was an individual in an organization who was doing the entrepreneurial then he learned the enabling himself and he started to drive emergence in terms of really trying to drive change the words we would use in practice are driving change but he was doing this in a complexity way so then what happened was he was what we call flying under the radar he was doing this stuff and this stuff is really fun if you know what you're doing and nobody else knows what you're doing you can fly under the radar and you kind of sneak this stuff in um so that's what he and i were talking about a few years ago what happened was he got started to get noticed and recognized now he's on the radar he describes this and we were talking at this time as danger it was danger because if you think about being on the radar now you're a target people can shoot you down so he had to then really morph to learn how to do this in a way that he wasn't going to get shot down and so what he did is he started to recognize the collective process and all of the collective that went into it so the challenge and where he would get shot down is if he was ego driven and it was perceived as power in politics instead he would say he would link up what he was doing with other people and then he would bring those people in and he would not take the credit he would acknowledge the collective that went into it this then really elevated him now he's on the more executive level and now he's literally training the rest of the executive team on how to do this process he's calling it in his words the innovation flywheel but his innovation flywheel is our model so now he and i are going to write this up in a paper i have a target for it so i'm going to take his words in what he's doing the practice words and map it onto our model and help people understand the framework but essentially he is he now says in his innovation flywheel he's constantly looking for ideas so let me tell you two more things about brian when we started the most interesting thing i found a few years ago was he said i said how do you have time for this how do you do this in the organization he said well i have a portfolio of results i said tell me what you mean by that he said because what we know is in organizations this work isn't rewarded because people don't understand this as leadership so what brian was doing people don't recognize they this doesn't look like classic leadership to them so he had to still produce results so he said what i've done for myself and this is innovation i've created a portfolio of results this is maybe 2016. he said i have it out to about 2019 right now so i have all my stuff in place that it's going to deliver results that then frees up time for me to do the work i want to do which is this complexity and innovation work all right so that was really cool well now where he is he's so good at it and people are recognizing and rewarding him for it finally that he is now has a portfolio of potential emergence events so what he'll do now is instead of thinking about the result side he's thinking about the idea side and he has multiple ones based on pressures because he's constantly scanning the environment for opportunities you would call this opportunity tension and entrepreneurial work and he goes out and he sees which ones do people have ideas around so now all of his work is around talking with people to see where is their energy is there a solution is this something i should run with so then he won't go with the one he wants he'll go with the one that there's energy around and that's his flag wheel so then he starts to do the process of linking it up and managing the conflict and connecting to get people in the organization energized around that and he can now spearhead multiple ones of these very much on the radar thank you yeah and i think again it resonates with quite a lot of um quite a lot of conversations we've been having here and i think it also speaks to a very i would say a radically processional view of the organization right it's a very dynamic dynamic view i don't want to i don't want to take up more time uh hey brad thank you andre and thank you mary a very uh fascinating talk and not very helpful insights my question to you i suppose is more coming from the research side of things um after doing this research on complexity and leadership for 20 years where do you see this research going forward that's a great deal um i i've been giving some thought to this lately so i'm hesitating a little bit on here in terms of how i say this uh i'm going to own up and fess up that i've been holding this stuff pretty tight so people have been contacting me early on they were saying where's your measure and i just don't really even reply to that i mean there's not a measure this is not leadership where we're going to put together a seven item measure that measures an entrepreneurial leader or an enabling leader this is it's not the right mindset so i pretty much ignored that um people on the leadership side then have learned just pretty much ignore me because they want to measure and they want to do plot work and survey work so but the other thing i think i've done is i realized the danger of this getting out in ways that people who don't understand it will take it and morph it and use the words in the language but do it in a way that's not appropriate or accurate so that's where i will say to you i've been holding tight i'm not interested in getting famous i'm not interested in having a theory in a school of people who follow me i'm really interested in advancing work that has real meaning for the world and i believe passionately this work is it and so does bending me when i spoke with him a couple of weeks ago he said mary this stuff is so powerful this is really an answer to how we can help humanity in the world from his entrepreneurship standpoint and i've heard the exact same thing from the practice group i have a former ceo a retired ceo who absolutely believes this work can change the world so i've been holding very closely to it um i think now what i'm working on doing is i've got the language and the messaging right i'm confident it's really validated so i'm finding ways to get it out in messages that are appropriate and hopefully can't be taken and um morphed in an inappropriate way so i'm doing practice articles i'm i've done a couple of research articles covid was a really good opportunity for me to get some papers out to show people what's going on i'm going to work on a hopefully a theory piece that lays out the adaptive process and try to target that at a top journal and then i'm going to work on a research book and a practice book so and as far as other people i'm not so worried where they go with it right now but i'm working with people like edmonia so edmonia really as i mentioned before really gets this and she has her mind works the way her mind is an emergence complexity mine so i am just encouraging her to do her qualitative work in a way that allows the work to tell the story and isn't driven by theory because i think that too often our theory driven approaches particularly in leadership are really creating problematic models so she's on the issue of tension she's focusing on the tension dynamic she's now using a context of gender and women's issues and looking at the the challenge of con conflicting and how do you get the con even the connecting around the problem so that's going to tell us more about the tension dynamic there are other contexts that can do that and then i have another student i'm work former student i'm working with we've got a paper on tension dynamic so we're going to kind of sneak the stuff out and just like the fly under the radar approach sneak it out and try to get enough out there but i will tell you about it's all over the literature so the 2018 piece really showed it it convinced me we don't need to have a whole lot of studies on this because of the fact that the fact of the matter is we have them already they're everywhere what we need is an organizing framework uh meta theory if you will to pull together all the findings we have and make sense of them because so many people are doing studies but who's doing the work of saying this is what it all means when you put it together in the big picture so i'm sorry long answer but hopefully it's good it's helpful and if i may one more question perhaps related to this um before we open it up is you know what advice or maybe some avoiding traps or giving some tips to those who starting this journey doing research on complexity and leadership i think the good news is we have so much more understanding now than we did before so we're starting in a place where we've done a lot of the pioneering work and i think that the rigorous foundations are established so people don't need to worry about rigor of this it's there it's established it's very very clear not this is a concept that's not only in the leadership literature now this is a concept of the natural world this dynamic we're talking about is a dynamic that is so robust and so profound in nature this is how the natural world works and as i said it's fractal so coming back again to how do you use this the way you know we knew in early leadership work that leadership was situational they called it contingency theory right but and so i remember when i started off as a leadership scholar it's like okay so we have these situational theories that say everything depends on the situation and the contingency theories when you teach it it's like okay your leader style is going to lead to effectiveness depending on the situation i can't tell you what that box is i can't tell you how to do this you got to go figure that out i'm just telling you that it's situational right so that's always been part of leadership they tried to get really prescriptive and when they did i think it bombed i just think it bottomed out but essentially what this is saying is it is situational but we can give you a dynamic so if you understand the dynamic if you can have an emergence mindset an adaptive mindset if you can understand that leadership is a collaboration which we're calling the collaboration mindset and that goes into all the network stuff as well and the collective that mindset then is what we train you in and with that mindset you can go out into your context and figure out how to do it in the situation so we're teaching mindsets dynamics and processes rather than specific behaviors and styles thank you mary andre thank you i think it's time for us to open it up to uh to everyone on the call we can do it in two ways so we will do it in two ways um if you'd like to post a question in the chat room please do ibra is looking at the chat and he will pause it to um to marry alternatively if you would like to speak and and interact with mary kind of live just make sure you you use the reactions button at the bottom of the screen to raise your hand and then we'll come straight to you um and in the meanwhile maybe brad maybe we'll start with a question from the chatroom yes so i'll start with the um in the order of appearance or in chronological order if you like matthew archer says many thanks mary i always am so interested in this space of research and conclusions what are some of the common tangible issues that you have learned working with organizations that prevent ideas to scale and come into new order and there's one more fantasy as i find commonly that there are numerous interesting ideas but very few are realizing to practice rightly and wrongly yes that is spot on so it gets to a couple of issues i was alluding to in the top so one is this whole issue of what i call the brick wall and again i learned that from the practitioners the brick wall i think it's created in multiple ways so one of the the really difficult challenges we had when i was working with the practice group and i have to tell you these are high-level people these are ceos people who are on the ceo 100 board their friends are all on the boards and they were this particular person was a complexity thinker and he was trying to find other ceos and other board members who think like this so he went out and he started thinking about it came back and he said mary i'm really sorry to tell you this is pretty dismal this is really really bleak they don't think like this what they think like is short term end results everything is results everything is numbers results operational side focused which we knew but we didn't realize how bad the problem was so i would say the bottom line number one problem we have is the measurement what i call the outcomes mindset the measurement reward systems the mentality around results and it doesn't have to be that way so that was also you know i knew that from practice from our practice group but then i found it when i did the 2018 piece and i started looking in research and i was studying adaptability and even the research that was looking at adaptability had no adaptive outcome measures their measures were all classic performance so they'd look at adaptability and then they'd have a classic performances they're like oh my gosh i mean this is really a problem so i wrote that up in the discussion of that paper saying we really need to start looking at outcomes and thinking about that now that then translates into incentives and incentives and reward systems and organizations and how we reward leadership as i said to you about brian this kind of leadership isn't recognized now it's getting to be more so now this is changing really quickly but even as of three four years ago this kind of leadership was not recognized and so as a result people who were doing the more classic management results operational kinds of things were the ones who are getting rewarded and moved up they don't have the complexity and emergence mindsets unless they're like brian and they've been able to sneak through because they fly under the radar by doing the operational producing the results but then doing these other things all right so and the people who do this often drop out because they get tired they get burned out or tired by trying to fight this in the organization so those are all some dynamics around it as far as specifics on every day i think the biggest issue is when you have an operational leadership or system that doesn't recognize the importance of adaptability that's the number one issue and so there they have a default or a bias to know they don't want to do things that are new they have a bias to know and they are rewarded for the results they're producing in the short term people who are trying to push innovation are shut down so that's the operational side problem the there's a lack of enabling leadership people don't know how to do that and if they do again they're not recognized at all and then the final piece is the entrepreneurial classically the entrepreneurial are people who are idea people and they don't know how to do the enabling or how to talk to the operational so then you have that problem of they're trying to push it but they're using the wrong language so if i this is a collective leadership process in that it requires different skills um i happen to have skills across just because that's who i am and brian does as well but i most people don't so they have a strength in one of these areas if they're entrepreneurial typically they don't have a strength in how to sell this or how to do the networking and in the connecting so those are the challenges so thank you for the question matthew sorry i have to mute for a minute and clear my throat fantastically yeah i will just um i'll just add that it certainly resonates again with um some of the work that i've been doing because i originally come from the performance measurement background academically and um and yeah i also take a very critical look and a very critical view of the dysfunctional effects that performance measures can generate um and in the meanwhile we have a question from the audience and it comes from your student in bernie yes mary hi everyone uh it's not really a question i just thought of something while you were talking mary and in terms of the question you know what can stand in the way of this um and i think you mentioned that your software attention and conflicting and connecting but actually um a leadership language that's not capable of connecting to tension a leadership language that is not capable of opening up a space for conflicting and connecting around tension that is actually something that i see in my research that actually stands in the way of adaptation and stands in a way in ways that people don't even they don't even realize that they're shutting down tension it just happens automatically because we're educated to be on the same page search for consensus reach the goal and all of these things but it stands in the way of the tension that is you know the process of adaptation and that just you know make i'm thought of that when you were talking mary and that's so subtle we just don't have a language where you know tension is often often feels highly uncomfortable and inefficient and i actually stress feel because people feel uncomfortable and they want to shut it down and that actually stands in the way of this so i think there's something about you know knowing how to be comfortable with the uncomfortable uh that is actually really key to this yes and as you and i both know and we're we've learned recently the other thing the other part of this is recognizing the whole person and the whole in the body in this work so i think we're i did a talk at durham and they do psychology but you know psychology even psychiatry in terms of how our body reacts to these kinds of things when we're talking pressures and tension and stress we're talking a physical reaction in the body and what it does to to deal with this and i think that ties into your point ammonia that what we've typically done in organizations and in management is we go for the more rational the disembodied kind of work and i think it's time for us to really start digging deeper into the humanity that we bring to the workplace absolutely thank you um thank you demonia another question the chat is from maggie chuck thank you mary i happened to read your work in 2018 and i was very impressed by your theoretical work my questions are more related to your experience and how leaders recognize and acquire the skills to react and be adaptive in practice and how do you see the connection of your work to paradox theory okay thanks lee brenton thanks maggie um so what i will say is that to this point what we have done is we have found people who naturally know how to do this so um as i have referred to the practice group i've been in the good fortune of i've been um in complexity you talk about an attractor theory or there's an attractor fortunately the work i do becomes an attractor and so people who are attracted to it come to me so i end up meeting a lot of these people it's not anything i'm doing it's just the nature of the work whereas others are trying to find each other so i become like an attractor of all these people say yeah i do that i do that so that's where our practice group originated and we've learned from them so we've done a lot of conversation i have so much clear insight and we i have resources we can use with these people to try to really elaborate what they're doing and that is clearly a next step so a next step now is to elaborate more the leadership behaviors the leadership mindsets and more specifics around what these individuals do i've also had the good fortune of being able to teach this in the classroom and in this last year because we went to complexity so i always did it kind of it was i was struggling do i give them the classic stuff do i do my stuff and they would encourage me to do my stuff my stuff but so many people were still needing the classic that i was kind of doing a hybrid but this last year with complexity i was finally able to morph it and merge it all together and taught whole courses on this so i'm starting to also put out some developmental educational pedagogical kinds of things um mindsets are one of those we have some behaviors and some other pieces so i don't have time to go into those now but i will tell you that those things are coming we're going to have materials coming out on them and meg if you want to write me i can give you more specifics and share a syllabus and that kind of thing can i do a quick follow-up on this ibrate if you don't mind um mary i'll just just kind of curious when you talk about this maybe more to say executives rather than your postgraduate students um do you do you encounter a lot of resistance and skepticism or do you find that you're pushing in an open door so i encountered mostly resistance and skepticism for the first part of this there's no question i mean we had to be pretty darn tough we got we had a lot of bullets we had to go in being able to take a lot of shots early in the work um it started to tip around 2010 and that's because we had the gfc so the global financial crisis really helped people to understand that we're in a complex world and then the next stage of it was 2014. in 2014 i don't know what happened i i it it just so happened that it was that year that i saw this so i would talk about in 2010 the the tower like the it fell over it tipped over into complexity right the gfc got leaders that was when the ibm global ceo report came out they said the number one issue facing executives and leaders in the world is complexity and we anticipate complexity is only going to continue to grow and the fact of the matter is we have no idea what to do about it so frankly practitioners were easier to talk to than academics because they were seeing it all right so that tipped around 2010 and harvard business review started writing a little bit about it but they still didn't know what to do with it they were just too traditional 2014 i said the foundation crumbled it's like if we had foundations it was all gone things that we assumed and that we expected rules norms standards they were gone people didn't realize it but i saw it in the classroom because i would do this every year in the classroom and i'm out with audiences the the world was already starting this where you could ask a question that in the past to get a straight answer and now you're getting no answer there's no agreement from people on anything in the u.s in 2016 in 2015 we had an election and we elected a very different kind of leader for us and so when that happened then i didn't have any trouble with audiences because i could use donald trump as an example and i was able to use him as an example of a person who wrote on a complexity wave to get into office and there are lots and lots of examples of what happened with that that people weren't understanding but complexity theory explained okay now interestingly if you take donald trump full circle the thing that got him into office of complexity and knowing how to ride it that's what got him also out of office so another complexity event happened the problem with donald trump was he knew one way of doing it when the world shifted on him he was out of sync if he had used his the things he was doing and pivoted or morphed to that other stage he would have been okay but he only had one ride which was he created chaos he knew how to create chaos and put everybody off their their balance and then he would inject things he understood the dynamic of that he did not was not able to cope with that change when it happened all right so 2016 in the us it was much easier and now in 2020 in 2021 everybody gets it so i have no problem with it people are asking they're begging for it they want more explanation and understanding they want to know why they feel the way they do they want to know what they can do to manage better in this they want they want to know how to lead people and one of the things i do there is i talk with them about how people respond to this and what you need to do some i talked with one um who was dealing with entrepreneurs interestingly and she was saying they're all off balance they are waiting for the new normal this is in the fall they're waiting for the new normal what do i do and i said you have to first of all get them to understand we're already in the new normal they have to stop waiting they need to start acting and she said well they're not and i said they're not because they're experiencing loss right now they are entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity their businesses are set up she's thinking they're entrepreneurial they're they're able to adapt and i said no they're entrepreneurial in the old world they set up these businesses and are locked in to an opportunity that was there but isn't there now that's why they're trying to hold on and wishing for it to go back they're actually doing an order response so you've got to get them off that and get them to understand we're in it right now which is what i did with my students in the fall i said you guys are all waiting stop waiting this is your senior year it's not going to change this is what it is operate in this right now it's going to continue to unfold in something else so bottom line is people want to know about this they're interested they don't question the complexity as much now they want to know how do we lead differently and they want specifics on that thank you thank you certainly parallels my experience as well thank you another question comes from don van tempo thank you for this presentation it was fantastic i wonder how you address this from the level of analysis questions for research it seems that it can be the practices slash dynamics level and the individual level enabling the adaptive space and the organizational level the collective for the organization yes yes yes yes it's all of it that's exactly right it's all of it and that drives researchers crazy so researchers want to do reductionism that's how we're trained and that's it's good it helps us with the scientific process it helps us to narrow down studies the problem is the world isn't really reductionist it is whole and it's complete so what i think the biggest learning i've had and where i've really tried to um help my colleagues is in my students is getting them to both and thinking so we are always doing dichotomies always doing things breaking it down one or the other and i just continue to push on people and and and so when i started this work i got into the big academic debate between the american side and the european side on issues of ontology epistemology oh my gosh my head was hurting i was trying to understand what all these people were talking about is it constructionist or is it realism and oh my gosh were they embedded in their view and locked in so deeply the world is constructionist and nothing else the world is individual entity and nothing else and i kept listening to this going sorry this just doesn't work for me because i'm not one or the other i'm a both so that was the work i did with sonia ospina and we really dug into what we called relational leadership and really addressed the core philosophical foundation so to do this work i've had to address the philosophical foundations which i wasn't trained in i have had to address the theoretical foundations so it's been quite a journey but the philosophical component is that complexity really is its own ontology it sees the world as a complex interactive dynamic and it occurs in relational interactions that has the constructionist element of the relational element relationality but that includes individuals with it so there are individual agents occurring in interactions in that then that dynamic scale is scale free so that would be bill mckelvey's word scale free that's the fractal idea this dynamic occurs across all levels so you can study the dynamic and think about how that works and it includes it if you want to pick out a level that's fine you can do that for your research but the answer isn't that it's one or the other it's all of it so if you're going to dive in then maybe you're just going to take a zoom in focus and take a snapshot picture of a certain part of it and that's okay i would encourage you though to again look at the dynam so this is dawn i appreciate that response tremendously um i am finishing up classes at dw and embarking on the dissertation and that is what exactly what i'm struggling with is the yes and piece of this as a as a practitioner myself so um i appreciate that answer and i'm gonna go do a bunch more reading right and john i would say you know you're at gw they do complexity right are you part of that group there i've been there before so um i'm in the human and organizational learning group so um particularly looking at leadership within the hol so not necessarily on the complexity side however i will say that some of our professors and my advisor in particular is definitely engaged in this dr julia storberg so they have a at gwu in the business school they have an executive leadership program that has done complexity and they would ask me early on and i would go and talk and give classes there so you might want to reach out to them because they really were on top of it absolutely yeah thank you for that if you can't find them write me and i'll i'll help you find them okay i appreciate that thank you sure thank you thank you don and thank you mary um now i'd like to read one of the questions from practitioners because we've got a few questions from the research side uh bob andres asks you know what are the identifiable sorry it's not in the chat he wrote to me directly what are the identifiable key characteristics of organizations that allow an adaptive process to operate effectively the key identifiable characteristic is that they enable adaptive space they have adaptive space and that means that they now again i'm going to say there are different ways to say this one is they probably bring an adaptive mindset so an adaptive mindset is the mindset of learning and growth so a growth mindset focusing on difficulties as a growth opportunity so when you're if you have a growth mindset you're experiencing something hard and you say okay this is horrible and i hate it but i know there's some learning i can get from it and i can grow from this that's a growth mindset a learning mindset is saying i'm interested in how i can learn and develop i'm not going to be in a fixed mindset of the world is this way and i'm going to stay this way so carol dweck's work on that is really beneficial in terms of learning and growth mindset i call that i package that into a broader adaptive mindset which brings in some other things too then you have the emergence mindset so if they're really really good they have an emergence mindset and usually that's a more entrepreneurial organization so entrepreneurial organizations what entrepreneurs typically are good at is they can see opportunities that's the emergence they see that things can connect up they see that they can engage and drive things in ways that um the whole idea is generative emergence essentially that's why again benjamin is saying entrepreneurs are all about generative generative emergence and i'm saying that's what is the emergence in our theory our theory is no longer the scale free or no longer the order for free kaufman kind of stuff it's generative emergence and generative emergence is defined as intentional actions so andre started the whole thing with that um we are very specific on the intentional actions that leaders can do and then the other thing they have is um this is more advanced but they have what i'm calling the collaboration mindset this is all the work i've done i told you about with the theoretical and the philosophical of understanding and really dig into the core of what is leadership so when we started to do this work we were realizing that the problem we had as people are thinking in our field leadership is management so leaders are managers so when they would use the word leader they met manager and that was not what i meant by leadership because i've never viewed leadership as a manager i viewed it as a behavior an influence to try to create change so it's a behavior or it's it's an enactment so when we pulled leadership out of the position and it wasn't a manager people were like what is it then so we had to really dig deep and go to the core okay if it's not the manager what is leadership and you'd be shocked people had no idea how to answer that so that was where i spent a lot of time and actually went to sweden and talked with matt alvison quite a bit and he really helped spark my thinking on it that leadership is a co-creation so it's a co-creation it's indiv in this this brings together the construction work but also the individuals so individuals come together and they start to innate enact uh or engage with one another leadership is combined acts of leading and following so at its core you have to have leading which is somebody trying to influence you have to have following which is somebody being willing to follow when those two things come together now you've got leadership co-created or co-constructed and this is the followership work that i do we also lay this out in terms of there are different ways to look at it it can be a position it can be an informal role it can be a collective practice so there are lots of ways to look at leadership but that all comes together in a collaboration mindset that says we understand that leadership is not about a manager and a subordinate we understand that leadership is a collective act when people come together and they engage in actions that can drive change so organizations that have or that are best at this have the collaboration mindset the adaptive mindset the emergence mindset and then the outcomes mindset i mentioned earlier which that's the really hard one and then they do that to all enable adaptive space and they're structured to allow that thank you mary andre maybe another question abroad yeah perhaps one more question from the chat um [Music] before we start closing um from just last question is from catherine peters uh thank you so much mary the process to me seems like it's always there on a certain level you talked about the adaptive spaces opening up and complexity arising but on those present all the time even though not necessarily always in our collective awareness i wonder if it just presents itself to us in the way you described once it all crosses a certain complexity threshold that goes beyond our automatic and unconscious adaptability wow that's a great question to end it okay so let me think about this for a minute i'm not sure i got all of it i didn't read it i was listening so um the first thing i would say is it's really important to understand that while the world is complex we don't have to and shouldn't always be in complexity so as people if we're in complexity all the time it is going to kill us it's really it requires a lot of energy so i hope and pray that organizations are not constantly in it because i feel for their people and this is what we've seen in the last years we've all been in complexity we see stress burnout mental health issues i mean that is an exhausting kind of thing so yes there is complexity in the world and there's potential for complexity but i don't want to say we're always in it and some leadership occurs not in complexity it's it is more in the operational routines and we need to allow that and we need to recognize that there's nothing wrong with that we need to have it so we want the things that are operating in a routine way that they're operating efficiently efficiently and effectively like classic organization and management theory the challenge is that in classic otn management theory we didn't have adaptive space we didn't have complexity so they had they talked about it as organic or mechanistic and they've struggled with this in strategy all along i think the the idea is if complexity then starts to enter and you know this by the pressures coming in an adaptive challenge or pressure to change that's when you allow the adaptive space to open up it addresses and works through it gets to a new order a new state of adaptability and then can operate in the routine again hopefully so you want all of that this again is very much inclusive both and thinking it's not one or the other oh and somebody asked earlier about paradox paradox is important i think that the literature is starting to just discover what we're talking about here that things are paradox paradoxical and that tension is a part of what we do i don't think they fully get it i think they're admired in their literature and writing to each other in the way that we do as academics i'm trying to steer clear of them because they're going to try to impose their paradox thinking on my work so i'm very careful not to use paradox when i talk about this but it is completely consistent with it so hopefully i answered that question but um yes it's all around us but we shouldn't be in it all the time thank you mary thank you we do have quite a few more questions in the chat room so what we'll do is we'll edit them and send them to you so that you can have a look and see what um what sort of thoughts your talk has provoked um but we also uh we always um close these webinars um in the same way uh asking sort of three very quick questions in a blitz and the first question is who do you think is doing interesting work in this space at the moment and i know we've met edmonia and you've mentioned benjamin but who else um well i do think there's interesting work and strategy happening i just don't think they realize they're doing it i think there's interesting work happening as strategizing as practice i think there's interesting work happening in the practice community the practice practices literature and communities of practices so it's all over the place if you really look out it's happening everywhere it's just that people don't have the awareness and the challenge we've had historically is people don't get complexity and it's too complicated for them to learn so they reject it but if we could get more people understanding if we really could teach people complexity and get people in the mindset of complexity so many things would open up to us which is why i think the work you all is doing you all are doing is interesting in terms of trying to advance the understanding of complexity fantastic we we hope so as well um so the second question is is a bit more reflective i suppose what would you say um is your formative reading in this space what was the formative reading for you so the first book i read was russ marion's edge of organization that was his 1999 book that's what started the whole thing for me um and then he trained me in complexity and then i struggled to find other complexity books that worked so i would then say any mean will love me for this this is the formative reading the generative emergence book because we i kept looking for complexity books that would work and none of them did and then i actually literally just sat on my pool last summer and read this and marked it all up and made all of my notes and comments and then called benjamin and said i'm so excited by this because i wasn't ready for it before i needed to have the right time to read it i needed to solidify my own understanding and once that locked in and it crystallized then i was able to look at this and say okay now we've got it so okay and then the final question is what are you reading at the moment what's on your desk um so i've been mostly in the last year gathering examples from covid and from the social justice movement so i'm not reading as much theory stuff although i really my next dive in is to go look and see what the literature says on the adaptive process and adaptability i cannot wait i mean that's going to be so exciting so you know when in 2018 i went and looked at the the literature to see adaptability itself and that took me to strategy ot kinds of things in qualitative work now i want to with the understanding of the adaptive process really dig in and find out more the human side of it and see what psychology has to say about this and that's the paper i want to write as looking at tension so i think it's going to be more conflict literature i want to get into innovation literature a bit more um i know the network stuff pretty well so i don't need that but it'll be more conflict more stress um more looking for things around connecting and how we we do that and then the psychology literature around this fantastic thank you and thank you again for uh for making the time to to talk to us um and thank you for a fascinating talk i appreciate it and if you could save the chat for me i didn't get a chance to read it so i'd love if you could download it and send it to me we'll absolutely do that yes thank you mary thank you thank you everyone for joining me pretending thank you very much thank you everyone have a good rest of the day you too thanks we'll be in touch thank you bye bye