Growing Organizations

In today’s VUCA world, leadership is key to organizational effectiveness. But to understand this, we need to generate a new way by which we understand leadership.

The current model of leadership tells us of a leadership that happens primarily at the top; one which is defined in primarily in terms of action taken, of “going first” and “eating last”.

We need to see leadership as an essentially everywhere phenomenon. A notion of leadership that arises wherever people have the urge to take responsibility for their world—whether that be a team or a company—and a willingness to influence others toward a commonly held vision.

Such a notion of leadership sees itself as arising from an inner capacity for complex sensemaking and consciousness.

When coping with the volatile and complex world in which we live and work, each and every one of us— software delivery team members and executive leaders alike—need to have at our fingertips, at any given moment, the capacity to sense, the capacity to respond and—more importantly—the capacity to make sense in ways that enable the creation of something new, as-yet un-thought, and as-yet undone, whether it’s a new idea, a new tool, a new approach, a new vocabulary, or even a new self-definition.

Only by such an act of creation—not just in terms of what action we take, but also in terms of how we think and how we make sense—is it possible to generate outcomes that can have the intended impact on an ever-changing and ever-evolving world. To do this, people need to be able to step beyond their fear of the unknown, of the un-tried, of the un-tested. They need to be willing to question cherished assumptions and to challenge well-established habits of mind. They lead not by telling, not by directing, not even by “going first,” or “eating last.” They do so by “pointing the way,” to use Peter Senge’s term.

When people engage in such a form of creation, they are already leading. They are pointing the way, not to a right strategy or goal, but toward a different way of sensing, a different way of responding, and—most importantly—toward a different way of making sense.

I call such a leadership Sense-and-Respond leadership to emphasize the highly adaptive nature of leadership to which I am pointing and its inherent grounding in the sensemaking dimension by which it is necessarily defined.