Heart of the Art

Type 'what is leadership?' into google and you get 461 million responses. Do the same for ‘what is systems leadership?’ and you get 460 million. This suggests that there isn’t much clarity on the difference between the two. Indeed if you look at the NHS responses you’ll find they immediately fall into the trap of breaking things down into separate skills and competences, which from our perspective is a contradiction in terms. It's not helpful for helping people lead in human systems.

Why do we say this? Well critical to systems leadership is the capacity to overcome a cartesian mode of thought that tries to understand things through separating them into their component categories. By breaking things into their constituent parts you lose the importance of the relationship between them. Cutting an elephant in half does not make two small elephants any more than squashing two small elephants together makes one very large one.

People might ponder on that when they consider how they are approaching integration. If indeed they are considering ‘how’ they approach integration rather than simply doing it.

So critical to our ability to lead in systems is an ability to see the connections between things and work with them as a whole. This has all sorts of implications about how we see and use power, how we understand networks and how we believe living things behave.

A coherent approach to systems leadership takes us into the realm of working with adaptation, how we infect a system, how we work as insurgents against the collective power of the status quo. That means collective approaches.

So if your definition focuses on individual skills, competences or approaches you know it is simply an individual model of leadership re-asserting itself under a new label. Not helpful at all.