I’d like to share with you some elements of my journey in developing living systems leadership. When we consider human activity as a part of a living system then a very ‘natural’ way of working emerges. That sounds self evident yet so much of our thought is based upon quite mechanistic mental models of how the world works. These models both imply and rely on causality; if I do ‘X’ then I know ‘Y’ will occur. In non-living systems (eg a mechanical system like a racing bicycle) this pretty much holds. In living systems, even relatively simple ones, we cannot deal in such certainty. Allow me to explain further.

I shall start with the story of a chemist, Ilya Prigogine. Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977 for his work on dissipative structures. As a student of the physical sciences, Prigogine was troubled by their inability to describe the emergence of life. In other words they seemed incomplete. He was also troubled by the phenomena of time. The physics of Newton and Einstein was deterministic. In their equations time could run in either direction. Their equations were ‘determinstic’ because if you had the skill and understanding you could determine an outcome. You could prove causality. To Prigogine this seemed unlikely. Things grew and then died. You couldn’t run the clock backwards in life. As Einstein approached his death he agreed this was increasingly likely! So Prigogine introduced the idea of life being described through ‘non-deterministic’ equations. In other words, in life, in a living system, you cannot necessarily ‘determine’ the outcome of a set of inputs based on past events. Before Prigogine if your equations didn’t balance you either lacked sufficient data or weren’t a very good scientist. After Prigogine good scientists in this field dealt in the probability or the likelihood of something happening.

So if we are to explore, and thus hopefully develop, the nature of leadership in a living social space (and where else does it happen?!) my curiosity took me to our understanding of ecosystems, and as I increasingly began to work with ‘places’ as well as with global commercial organisations, the ecology of a place. One quick, simple and fundamental lesson was that you cannot separate a living organism from its environment and hope to truly understand it. That holds true for single cellular organisms, animals and ecosystems. This is the reality of symbiosis and it tells us that for leadership within any living environment, to work on only a part of a system is always incomplete and lacking in understanding. We don’t do change top-down, bottom-up or even middle-out. All elements in an organisation (which is an eco-system) need to be involved. And so does its environment. This wasn’t entirely new. The step forward was its application at scale across the places where we live.

This led me to a form of leadership intervention that was at the time quite alien. It drew a lot of criticism from some. People wanted me to design and run course programmes, offer coaching or publish models and their associated metrics. People didn’t even recognise what I was creating as a leadership development intervention. I was told to keep away from the political, policy, strategy or delivery spheres, ironically the very areas where leadership is supposed to operate.

The approach was very simple in outline and exceptionally challenging in application within the environment of the time. The focus then, and to a considerable extent still, was on targets, milestones and ‘delivery’ and it ran counter to enquiry, experimentation and learning. Such an environment is fundamentally deterministic. It says you can design a policy, set targets for what it will achieve and by measuring them ensure people are delivering it properly. A whole industry of consultants and business schools reinforce this as a tool-based approach; so much so that for many at the time it wasn’t a way of leading change in places, it was the way. An entire orthodoxy.

 So we focused on the things that mattered in the places we worked with. These were wide ranging and clearly non-deterministic, childhood obesity, recidivism, food, benefits, the ageing population. Even agreeing what the question was that people were trying to answer was a challenge. Yet for each, setting up a process of enquiry that explored what was really going on, what seemed to help, what made no difference opened up new routes forward. Policy was often neither good nor bad. A policy could be helpful in some circumstances and the same policy harmful in others. Help and harm can also turn out to be points of view.

For this to work it has to involve a wide range of actors. It can never be me (eg the state) enquiring into your (eg the citizen’s) life. It requires a wide range of actors from across a wide range of settings if it is to uncover anything more than our own existing prejudices and beliefs. It needs public and private, individual and organisation all recognised and in the same conversation. It challenges leaders to learn new ways of convening and structuring conversations that don’t simply reinforce the existing power dynamics. This isn’t ‘consultation’, it is a deep and honest enquiry into what we might learn together if we might become open to that. It is a way to grow together new approaches or uses for existing approaches that we think will work better whilst satisfying real needs and constraints. It is a process where the strategy for the future is not designed remotely but emerges through a constant process of adapting and experimenting with what we are actually doing now towards an agreed end. Learning is a deliberate focus as the intent is not only to find what might work better but how we might get to do whatever works better really well.