Building breakthrough organisations by upgrading leadership and governance

How might we upgrade leadership and governance to build resilient and high-performing organisations; capable of successfully navigating a turbulent world, unleashing the power of people and modern technologies, and creating outstanding value and impact?

In my previous article about the Great Reboot, I introduced the idea of rebooting and upgrading our human operating systems – across system levels – in response to accelerating sustainability challenges and technological development. In this article I will dig deeper into how we might upgrade our organisations, in particular leadership and governance as key dimensions of their operating systems and key enablers of renewal and progress.

I argue that successful organisations of the future will have what I call Adaptive Leadership and Governance, applying different approaches to different situations and needs based on what is most suitable. Some of these approaches are well established, while others are more novel and remain to be adopted and cultivated by most organisations. By building adaptive leadership and governance capabilities, organisations as whole will also become truly adaptive – and better equipped for long-term value creation and positive sustainability impact.

The topics of the article are:

A. Why do we need to upgrade our organisations?

1. Growing turbulence and development needs
2. Human navigation capability struggling to keep up
3. Inner development and resilience needed for outer development and impact
4. Integrating inner and outer development in work life
5. A transformative sustainability agenda
6. New and continued journeys of organisational development

B. How can we think about organisational development?

1. Innovation frameworks can help us navigate
2. Becoming aware of gravity towards more of the same
3. Creating gravity towards renewal and progress
4. Working towards different development horizons
5. Cultivating "both and" development
6. Teaming up with our human nature

C. What can we do to develop breakthrough organisations?

1. Identifying and designing new solutions to meet development needs and opportunities
2. Defining coherent intentions and ideals for development of new solutions and capabilities
3. Navigating key drivers and dynamics in territories of radical change
4. Developing granular leadership and governance qualities needed ahead
5. Integrating adaptive leadership and governance in development of new solutions and capabilities
6. Moving forward by deliberately navigating, developing, and transforming

D. Closing and call to action

A. Why do we need to upgrade our organisations?

Organisations are our primary platforms for human collaboration, development, and value creation. They have served us well for a long time, but new challenges, demands, and dynamics are calling for new organisational ideals and qualities, especially in the fields of leadership and governance.

A.1 Growing turbulence and development needs

Some of the challenges facing our organisations, in particular boards and management teams responsible for strategic goal setting and decision-making, are:

• Accelerating environmental and social challenges, whereof ecosystem collapse due to unsustainable practices probably is most pressing on collective level.
• New and progressive legislation to prevent ecosystem collapse, and deal with other sustainability challenges.
• Exponential technologies such as Artificial Intelligence representing both opportunities and challenges, and potentially changing the fundamentals of how we operate.
• New requirements for commercial success in tomorrow's markets, given the above and other drivers such as unstable and unpredictable geopolitics, a transformative media landscape, rapidly shifting consumer and customer preferences, and an evolving work life.
• Summarised, we are facing accelerating VUCA conditions (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) requiring new navigation and development capabilities turning challenges into opportunities.

"New challenges, demands, and dynamics are calling for new organisational ideals and qualities, especially in the fields of leadership and governance."

A.2 Human navigation capability struggling to keep up

We are starting to realise that our human development and navigation capability, in the form of for example leadership, cultures, and governance frameworks, is struggling to keep up with the accelerating VUCA conditions as illustrated below. This can show up in different ways, such as feelings of disconnect, degeneration of ecosystems, cognitive and emotional dissonance, polarisation of people and opinions, and health issues such as mental illness and sick leaves.

"We are facing accelerating VUCA conditions requiring new navigation and development capabilities turning challenges into opportunities."

To succeed in the challenging landscape ahead – and create meaningful value and progress – we need to rethink our intentions and ideals, and which solutions and capabilities will be needed.

A.3 Inner development and resilience needed for outer development and impact

On the global scene, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) were established in 2015 to create an agenda for sustainable development towards 2030. More than half way on this journey, progress towards the goals are weak while there is growing evidence that we have already crossed six out of nine quantified planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come.

There is a huge gap between our knowledge about the need to act and the actual actions taken on virtually all levels and arenas of society. There are many reasons for the lack of action, such as structural, cultural, mental, and emotional blockages, but at the core it is up to us as individuals, employees, leaders, entrepreneurs, business owners, politicians, journalists, scientists, and fellow citizens to face and deal with the sustainability challenges.

The Inner Development Goals (IDG) is pointing in this direction and the need for developing skills important to make the necessary transformation happen.

"To succeed in the challenging landscape ahead, we need to rethink our intentions and ideals, and which solutions and capabilities will be needed."

The IDG framework is open-source and co-created by experts, scientists, practitioners and organisations around the world, and currently consists of 23 skills and qualities grouped within 5 dimensions:

1. Being – Relationship to Self: Inner compass, Integrity and Authenticity, Openness and Learning mindset, Self-awareness, and Presence.
2. Thinking – Cognitive Skills: Critical thinking, Complexity awareness, Perspective skills, Sense-making, Long-term orientation and Visioning.
3. Relating – Caring for Others and the World: Appreciation, Connectedness, Humility, and Empathy and Compassion
4. Collaborating - Social Skills: Communication skills, Co-creation skills, Inclusive mindset and intercultural competence, Trust, and Mobilisation skills.
5. Acting – Driving Change: Courage, Creativity, Optimism, and Perseverance.

Beyond developing the skills framework, the IDG initiative has mobilised several interesting efforts such as:

• Co-creating a toolkit on how to develop the IDG skills and qualities.
• Building a wider community based on a network of IDG Hubs, working together to put the IDG framework into action.

On the topic of inner development, I shared some broader perspectives, ideas, and approaches from my side in an article connecting the dots from systems thinking to systems feeling and -healing. In short, this article explores fundamental aspects of our human nature as possible root causes of our most pressing and complex sustainability challenges – and suggests radically new approaches to promote sustainable development as well as human development and flourishing at large.

"There is a huge gap between our knowledge about the need to act and the actual actions taken on virtually all levels and arenas of society."

While the Inner Development Goals and other frameworks offer guidance and support for development of skills and resilience, some questions remain:

• How can we develop and integrate transformational skills in our organisations and elsewhere in society?
• How can we create broader interest in inner development, and make it a good "business case" for investment of time and money?
• How can we integrate inner development in our daily work, including development of structures and cultures?

A.4 Integrating inner and outer development in work life

So far, we have looked at organisational development from an outside-in perspective, by orienting ourselves in the outer world and starting to explore what capabilities are and will be needed.

If we change to an inside-out perspective, we can become aware of other aspects that are important to foster what I call a flourishing and resilient work life – a key enabler of sustainable development across system levels. This is also an opportunity to integrate important learnings and development opportunities within the field of work life, recently illustrated by the benefits and challenges of remote and hybrid work as seen during and after the Covid pandemic.

Work life is clearly evolving, and possibly showing the way for organisational and societal development at large. To me, the most promising development trend is a growing interest in and understanding of our human nature and needs – and their importance to our individual and collective performance.

Spanning from inner development and resilience to outer sustainability and impact, important development layers of a resilient and flourishing work life include:

• Promote and maintain physical and mental health, well-being, and vitality.
• Lead and organise to unleash the best contribution of individuals, teams, and organisations along dimensions such as productivity and creativity.
• Adapt, develop, and progress through dedicated innovation and transformation efforts to drive deeper renewal and empowerment.
• Create value to and attract relevant stakeholders, for example in the form of sustainability impact and employer attraction, in essence cultivating our organisation's contribution and attractiveness.

The natural logic of putting human well-being and performance at the centre of organisational development, not only points at the importance of holistic approaches to sustainable development but also offers clues to how we can better understand and address the development needs and opportunities ahead.

A.5 A transformative sustainability agenda

The evolving sustainability agenda is a great example of how we are starting to redefine challenges and set higher ambitions for ourselves, gradually shifting from a paradigm of degeneration based on conventional, extractive practices and incremental performance improvements, towards a paradigm of regeneration based on restorative and regenerative practices with net-positive impact on the systems they are part of.

While leaders of organisations are increasingly becoming aware of the sustainability agenda and their need to act, there is a massive need to develop new solutions and capabilities to secure long-term value creation and achieve net-positive impact required to move from degeneration to regeneration:

"Putting human well-being and performance at the centre of organisational development offers clues to how we can better understand and address the development needs and opportunities ahead."

A.6 New and continued journeys of organisational development

Embarking on the journey of becoming truly sustainable, most organisations will need to step up their development agenda from incremental change to radical transformation of their offerings and ways of working:

• Shifting their ambitions and orientation: From being a reactive part of challenges, "making less harm", to becoming a proactive part of true progress, "doing the right thing".
• Increasing their efforts and integration of sustainability issues in their business: From a compliance-driven bare minimum to an opportunity-driven, fully integrated leader position.

On this development journey, organisations must take different steps depending on their context and starting point. However, a general sustainability roadmap for organisations will typically include the following, iterative steps:

1. Waking up to the realisation that rapidly changing surroundings will require new solutions and capabilities.
2. Orienting ourselves in the new landscape and how to move forward.
3. Acting from where we are now to move forward, progress, and start learning.
4. Refining our development efforts, solutions, and capabilities based on continuous learning.
5. Redefining ourselves more fundamentally in terms of what we want to create, contribute and become.
6. Impacting our stakeholders and material issues positively through new offerings and ways of working.
7. Regenerating our wider ecosystems through net-positive impact.

"Organisations need to step up their development agenda, from incremental change to radical transformation of their offerings and ways of working."

The sustainability agenda will require more extensive and radical development efforts both within and across organisations. Considering also other drivers of change such as exponential technologies, it is evident that a new and more progressive agenda for organisational development will be required – and that we need to drastically increase our ability to innovate and transform both our offerings and ways of working.

B. How can we think about organisational development?

Having explored why new levels of organisational development will be important, we will now dig deeper into how we can think differently about organisational development; first by adding an innovation perspective and then expanding on the previous point about setting our human nature and development at the centre.

B.1 Innovation frameworks can help us navigate

It can be helpful to look at the need for renewal and progress through the lens of innovation and different degrees of innovation, i.e., how new something is to us as an organisation and how new it is to other stakeholders such as customers.

While we historically could come a long way by innovating on existing business and through stepwise innovation, what I call incremental innovation, we will increasingly need to also work on platform- and breakthrough innovations, what I call radical innovation or transformation given that such renewal will more fundamentally change the nature of our business.

This framework can help us to not only distinguish between different development needs, but also understand and handle potential barriers and drivers of renewal and progress as outlined below.

"A new and more progressive agenda for organisational development will be required – and we need to drastically increase our ability to innovate and transform both our offerings and ways of working."

B.2 Becoming aware of gravity towards more of the same

People experienced within the fields of innovation, transformation, and change management know that it is challenging to create change and renewal. My personal take on this is that there is a strong gravity towards more of the same in our frameworks and human nature as illustrated below, where I share some key barriers of change and renewal:

• Moving into new territory is associated with uncertainty, risks, and complexity, which we consciously and unconsciously avoid unless explicitly embracing it in order to move forward and learn.
• Organisational frameworks such as structures, processes, principles, roles, KPIs, and even professional identities typically pull us towards more of the same – not only in relation to uncertainty, risks, and complexity but also because such frameworks tend to be self-preserving.
• Even our human nature has evolved to create more of the same, for many good reasons. In order to save energy, our brain runs on autopilot most of the time based on past experiences, an insight popularised by Daniel Kahneman by introducing the concept of System 1 and 2 in this book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Heuristics and cognitive biases are an important part of our autopilot, such as the negativity bias emphasising negative impressions including uncertainty and risks. This has been a valuable trait for our survival and evolution, but now pulls us towards more of the same also when risk-taking is needed.

"There is a strong gravity towards more of the same in our frameworks and human nature."

B.3 Creating gravity towards renewal and progress

To stimulate change and renewal, and counter the gravity towards more of the same, we need to create attraction towards renewal and progress through deliberate efforts and support such as:

• Attractive stretch goals that motivate people, trigger creativity and learning, and foster development of new capabilities.
• Inspiring cases and role models that further sparks motivation, creativity, and learning.
• Balanced and dedicated efforts and frameworks that ensure a healthy, diverse development portfolio while being clear on the nature of each effort and the corresponding development frameworks needed.
• Smarter collaboration that enhances knowledge integration, problem-solving capacity, creativity, and continuous learning and improvement.

"We need to create attraction towards renewal and progress through deliberate efforts and support."

B.4 Working towards different development horizons

On the topic of creating renewal and progress, a key question is what horizons to target. The Three Horizons model by Bill Sharpe from the International Futures Forum is a great tool to explore the role, characteristics, and opportunities of different development horizons as beautifully explained by Kate Raworth in this 7-minute video. In the context of innovation, the three horizons framework can help us navigate different development needs and ambitions from a "both and" perspective crucial for long-term and sustainable value creation:

"A "both and" perspective on different development horizons, needs, and ambitions is crucial for long-term and sustainable value creation."

B.5 Cultivating "both and" development

The idea of creating gravity towards renewal and progress may leave the impression that all we need to think about is how to stimulate radical change. However, an important aspect of developing breakthrough organisations is to develop what I call "both and" mindsets, -efforts, and -capabilities:

• Granular and adaptive mindsets: Being able to identify different development needs – such as incremental vs. radical – and approach them with suitable mindsets, efforts, and ways of working and making decisions.
• Strategic portfolio of efforts: Balancing ambitions, resource allocation, and efforts across different development needs along dimensions such as time horizons and value-creation drivers.
• Deliberate and deeper capabilities: Building capabilities in line with current and future development needs, including ability to deal with gravity towards more of the same and stimulate renewal and progress.

"An important aspect of developing breakthrough organisations is to develop "both and" mindsets, -efforts, and -capabilities."

B.6 Teaming up with our human nature

There are many dimensions of building "both and" capabilities, and I already mentioned important aspects of our human nature that we need to understand and navigate such as our autopilot and cognitive biases.

On an even deeper and more fundamental level, our thinking and behaviours are shaped by our primal emotions and instincts, also referred to as our human drives by neuroscientist Jaak Pankseep. He identified seven biologically inherited primary (emotional) affective systems; fear, panic, rage, lust, care, play, and seeking.

When relating our human drives to the concept of creating more of the same vs. renewal and progress, two essential dimensions of teaming up with our human nature appear:

• Preventing aversive emotions such as fear and panic is key to avoid fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses typically resulting in more of the same.
• Stimulating rewarding emotions such as play and seeking is key to create renewal and progress, ideally supported by states of flow as described by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

"Our thinking and behaviours are shaped by our primal emotions and instincts."

The implication of this reasoning is that – in order to function well and enable renewal and progress – we need to team up with our human drives and organise accordingly:

• Observe them and respond more deliberately.
• Nudge them through framing and facilitation.
• Cultivate them through personal, group, and organisational development.

In my previous article about evolving from systems thinking to systems feeling and healing, I looked into many different approaches to team up with our human nature, and in a follow-up article I looked at boosting well-being and clarity in nature as development opportunity. I will now look more specifically into important implications for organisational development, on both cultural and structural dimensions.

"In order to function well and enable renewal and progress, we need to team up with our human drives and organise accordingly."

C. What can we do to develop breakthrough organisations?

Having explored why new levels of organisational development will be important, and how we might think differently about it, we will now become more concrete and look into what we can do to develop organisations that are more-than-fit-for-future and can take a leading role in driving the broader sustainability agenda – what I call breakthrough organisations.

Organisational development can be approached from many angles. I will build on the above thinking and frameworks, focusing on how to drive innovation in the form of new solutions and deeper transformation in the form of new capabilities.

C.1 Identifying and designing new solutions to meet development needs and opportunities

A natural and pragmatic entrance point for building organisations fit for future is to explore what solutions will be needed to successfully create value and positive impact. "Ten types of innovation" by Doblin group offers a great framework for this, describing three main dimensions of innovation:

• Offering, meaning the actual product or service and its performance and possible wider system of complementary products or services.
• Customer experience, such as customer service, communication and delivery channel, brand identity, and customer engagement through relevant interactions.
• Configuration of how to deliver the offering and customer experience, including process, structure, network, and business model.

?"A natural and pragmatic entrance point for building organisations fit for future is to explore what solutions will be needed to successfully create value and positive impact."

Having identified concrete development opportunities and desired solutions, we have a great starting point for zooming out on the larger picture of what we want to create and become.

C.2 Defining coherent intentions and ideals for development of new solutions and capabilities

To create a roadmap for development of new solutions and capabilities, defining the broader picture of what we want to create and become, a functional approach is helpful. Important functional drivers and vehicles of organisational development, to build organisations fit for future, include:

• Strategy design and deployment defining, realising, and refining goals through an iterative process of development, execution, and learning.
• Organisational design enabling goal realisation through suitable frameworks for decision-making, cooperation, and other key activities.
• Leadership development cultivating required and desired leadership ideals and skills within areas such as relations, communication, and decision-making.
• Innovation and design frameworks and skills helping identify insights about important needs and develop corresponding solutions.
• Transformation initiatives mobilising capabilities and efforts to execute or facilitate change at larger scales.
• Other know-how and operational excellence such as environmental, social, legal, and technological expertise, R&D capabilities, and best practices.

?These functional drivers are on the agenda and fairly well established within most organisations. However, they become more interesting and challenging when we apply the previous perspectives on incremental vs. radical development needs and opportunities (see illustration below). While most organisations are optimised for and well capable of navigating incremental change, they typically need to strengthen their ability to handle and drive radical change.

In what ways do radical change differ from incremental change, and what are the implications for how we think, learn, act, organise, and develop? That is what we will look deeper into by investigating some underlying drivers and dynamics, followed by a new and more granular look at corresponding leadership and governance qualities needed.

"While most organisations are optimised for and well capable of navigating incremental change, they need to strengthen their ability to handle and drive radical change."

C.3 Navigating key drivers and dynamics in territories of radical change

To successfully navigate new territories and radical change, we need to develop our ability to sense, identify, evaluate, and handle key drivers and dynamics in our external and internal systems.

Every context and situation are unique, however, inspired by scientific fields ranging from systems and complexity theory to psychology and neuroscience, there are a few key drivers and dynamics that are relevant to consider in most scenarios:

• Turbulence in surroundings: To what extent is and will the surroundings be characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA)?
• Dominant mindsets: Which mindset are currently dominant, and which will be needed, on dimensions such as how we look at the world, people, organisations, and resources?
• Learning modes: How do and should we approach and stimulate learning, such as how we seek and inform new understanding, and how we scaffold learning?
• Human nature: Which aspects of our human nature are and need to be present and cultivated or not, for example in terms of active brain mode (system 1 vs. 2), nervous system, and processes?

"We need to develop our ability to sense, identify, evaluate, and handle key drivers and dynamics in our external and internal systems."

By developing our ability to navigate key drivers and dynamics in the different contexts and situations we operate, we create a strong foundation for high resilience and performance even in VUCA conditions.

C.4 Developing granular leadership and governance qualities needed ahead

Based on a better understanding of key drivers and dynamics, today and ahead, we can develop and apply corresponding leadership and governance qualities – which in the context of radical change will require fundamentally different intentions, ideals, and design criteria. Important dimensions and topics to consider include:

• Goal setting: How do we balance different development horizons, goal orientations, and needs for constraints?
• Governance: What types of organisational design, decision-making, and cooperation will be most effective?
• Culture: What types of cultural orientation, relations, and communication should be cultivated?
• Leadership: How do we approach leadership, what qualities do we embrace, and how do we face important aspects of being human such as our struggles and emotions?

In the same way as key drivers and dynamics change from situation to situation, so does the need for different leadership and governance qualities vary – hence the importance of what I refer to as granular leadership and governance qualities:

"Key drivers and dynamics in the context of radical change will require different intentions, ideals, design criteria, and qualities within the fields of leadership, governance, and beyond."

By building granular leadership and governance qualities, we increase our odds of creating outstanding value and impact even in VUCA conditions. However, when seeking to upgrade leadership and governance to deal with new realities, we should be careful to disregard and leave behind old ideals and qualities for the sake of new ones ("either or") but rather embrace the new on top of the existing ("both and") in line with previous reasoning. Even when times ahead require radically new solutions and capabilities, incremental renewal of existing solutions and capabilities will still be most relevant in many situations.

C.5 Integrating adaptive leadership and governance in development of new solutions and capabilities

Building on the previous perspectives, adaptive leadership and governance combines our ability to navigate key drivers and dynamics in different contexts with our ability to apply granular leadership and governance qualities based on the needs present:

?"In the same way as key drivers and dynamics change from situation to situation, so does the need for different leadership and governance qualities vary."

Realising that different situations, needs, and opportunities may require totally different approaches, and being able to mobilise and apply corresponding qualities, is at the core of adaptive leadership and governance.

While these perspectives are important to navigate new territories of change, they have limited value alone and become really powerful only when integrated in key processes and the broader development of solutions and capabilities discussed earlier and illustrated below: ?

"Realising that different situations, needs, and opportunities may require totally different approaches, and being able to mobilise and apply corresponding qualities, is at the core of adaptive leadership and governance."

Summarised, adaptive leadership and governance is essential to build resilient and high-performing organisations, in essence developing and applying granular leadership and governance qualities in key processes based on a deeper understanding of development needs and opportunities rooted in underlying drivers and dynamics.

Boiling this down to established practices and stereotypes, we might say that the challenge is to combine traditional governance and management with entrepreneurial agility and disruption mentality. While these domains have long been separated, I argue that management teams and boards of the future will need to embrace both and know when to apply them.

C.6 Moving forward by deliberately navigating, developing, and transforming

By broadening our perspectives on organisational development, in particular leadership and governance, we have a better foundation for moving forward more deliberately and developing resilient and high-performing organisations.

The way I see it, we need to work in parallel on three main dimensions:

1) Navigating the new agendas: Getting a better grip on the evolving sustainability and business agendas, and how to handle the challenges and development opportunities – in essence navigating new realities in tune with our outer and inner systems.

2) Developing solutions and skills: Creating insights, products, services, customer experiences, know-how, practices, and ways of working that drive business and sustainability – in essence discovering and designing our way forward from where we are now.

3) Embracing the deeper shifts: Cultivating transformative capabilities and redefining business for long-term value creation, positive sustainability impact, and ultimately regeneration – in essence upgrading leadership, governance, and business for a better future.

An important clarification is that organisational development, along all these three dimensions, is not about creating a big bang but rather facilitating deliberate and gradual capability building including structures and cultures.

There are at least two important reasons for this:

• It takes time to develop and integrate new knowledge, mindsets, skills, practices, and habits.
• VUCA conditions makes it risky to make large bets and efforts, and rather invites a portfolio of smaller bets and activities combined with a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

This leads us to a fourth dimension of organisational development I am convinced will be an important success factor in times ahead:

4) Utilising collective intelligence: Collaborating smarter to enhance knowledge integration, problem-solving capacity, creativity, and continuous learning and improvement – in essence unleashing capabilities needed to take on the most pressing and complex challenges.

Collective Intelligence, as described here, is a key enabler of organisational development in general and adaptive leadership and governance in particular.

"Organisational development is not about creating a big bang but rather facilitating deliberate and gradual capability building including structures and cultures."

When I emphasise the importance of utilising collective intelligence, I do so with reference to research at the Stockholm School of Economics introduced here. Their publications highlights skills and practices that are essential to knowledge integration – including problem-solving capacity, creativity, and continuous learning and improvement – and perhaps more fundamentally points out that such skills need to be developed and utilised within groups of people collaborating around a task in so-called microsystems.

Another main idea is that such microsystems need to develop self-navigating capabilities, in how they handle the task and develop as team. This is very much in line with adaptive leadership and governance, especially the more progressive qualities fit for radical development needs.

"Collective Intelligence is a key enabler of organisational development in general and adaptive leadership and governance in particular."

Collective Intelligence will clearly become more relevant and important in future organisational development, which will be more about organisation as a verb and process rather than noun given the accelerating VUCA conditions introduced early in this article. We will simply not be able to design and develop the perfect organisation, but rather need to facilitate dynamic organising based on continuous learning and improvement based upon what is already existing.

Furthermore, Collective Intelligence can function as a key lever for integration of all sorts of knowledge, perspectives, and skills in teams and organisations – and hence be an essential catalyst for broader development and transformation.

Summarised, Collective Intelligence in microsystems offers valuable and scalable frameworks and design principles for self-navigation and capability development needed ahead.

"Future organisational development will be more about organisation as a verb and process rather than noun."

And a great thing about development of Collective Intelligence is that you don't need to invest resources in stand-alone training activities, but should rather focus on existing tasks and how to improve performance of efforts that are needed anyway:

• Microsystems per definition gather around a task or assignment, and for training purposes you ideally choose an important and challenging task.
• By utilising Collective Intelligence, you will be able to more effectively manage the efforts and mobilise the team.
• As a result, you are likely to strengthen the team's performance and outcome.

While harnessing such benefits from the start, learning and capability development takes place simultaneously:

• We mobilise for learning and development by focusing on the task.
• Through deliberate collaboration we build new capabilities and habits.
• As a result, beyond the team's improved performance and outcome, we strengthen self-leadership and well-being among those involved.

As you may have noticed, Collective Intelligence and smarter collaboration bridge outer and inner development in a way that very few development frameworks do:

"Collective Intelligence in microsystems offers valuable and scalable frameworks and design principles for self-navigation and capability development needed ahead."

D. Closing and call to action

In this article I have shared several perspectives on we can upgrade leadership and governance to build resilient and high-performing organisations, capable of successfully navigating a turbulent world, unleashing the power of people and modern technologies, and creating outstanding value and impact.

The article is to a large extent inspired by the work we do and mobilise around at Influence AB , so reach out if you are curious how we might help you move forward in your context.

Since you took the time to read this fairly long article to the end, I am very curious to hear your thoughts about the future leadership and governance – so I would love if you leave a comment or get in touch!