Developing Leadership: Disturbance - Meaning - Motion

Whilst we experience the landscape around us as a fixed feature, that is only because our perspective is so brief. In truth, the landscape is a fluid system, a product of deposition and erosion, at the mercy of geological forces, meteorological events, and of course human influence (both intentional and as a by product of our actions).

Geological processes give us mountains, and the weather erodes those mountains into sand. And humans? They dig up the sand to make buildings, changing the environment to suit their needs.

In this sense, whilst seismic activity and coastal dynamics are blind, human intervention is typically intentional and directional (although the acid raid and climate change caused as a by product of our actions, less so).

We change the world in specific ways. Humans build, whilst entropy waits.

What started as an evolutionary imperative to survive has itself evolved into a very human urge to shape. In the developed parts of the world we have long ago evolved from doing only the essential – that which is necessary for our survival – to investing predominantly in our comfort and desires. Our connection to our immediate sustenance, to the making of bricks and planting of seeds, tends to be peripheral at best. But we are heavily invested in Netflix and yoga.?

And part of what we have created are our social structures: we have, in a very real sense, invented our society and the civilisations that we inhabit. Bit by bit. Ritual by ritual . Belief by belief. And artefact by artefact. We have built our world and come to see it as real.

In part, it is our creative brains that have allowed us to do this: we have our imagination, to conceive alternative futures, and our language, to share those futures with others. If we are lucky (or powerful enough) we can build consensus (or impose labour) and effect change. We can collectivise and organise at scale (and of course by the same mechanisms we can collectivise and rebel at scale too!).

So we live in the world we inherit today, and dream of the world we desire tomorrow.

As our societies have become more advanced, so too they have become radically complex: our structures of society, of education, information, transport, telecommunications, agriculture and health are all immense and interlinked. To retain mastery in the face of this complexity we have invented mechanisms of understanding, structural power , and control.

We invented bureaucracy, we invented finance, we invented HR and paperclips. We invented Mission Control , Gantt Charts and Generative AI .

We invented busyness and cultures that reward it.

And somewhere in this mix, we invented leaders.

Leadership today is different things to different people: a need, a challenge, a vocation or a chore. Some seek it out, and others have it proverbially thrust upon them.

And leadership today inhabits a very dynamic context: we no longer seek to be simply monolithic, but rather agile. An innovative, whilst also transforming into some unspecified better version of our former selves.

Our modern Organisations seek to find, to discover, or to grow, the very best leaders that they can. But how is a leader made?

Not by geological processes, and nor by standing in a thunderstorm. It’s a feature that we can see, and sometimes admire, in people, but it’s also a delusion, a dogma, and a self belief.

Often we conflate ‘leadership’ with ‘like-r-ship’. We describe not evidence and fact, but rather belief and intuition. We know that some people are exceptional leaders, and have a well intentioned desire to help others to become so. And in service of this we spend vast amounts of money – eye watering amounts of money – on teaching, training, developing, and transforming both systems and the people who lead them.

So much money in fact, and so much time and belief, that you may wonder why we have not uncovered an underlying truth or golden nugget in the centre. A magical formula or set of rules.

We still ask questions like ‘are leaders born or made’? Can anyone lead? Or question whether we act from the front or the rear.

But all of this may be to miss the point that leadership is not a thing. Or rather, it is not one thing.

Or to put it another way – a very unhelpful and frustrating way – leadership is, of course, contextual.

At times we need someone to lead in a way that has been shown to them time and again – a way that has been hammered into their brain through repetition, simulation, rehearsal, and monitored performance over time. We need them to hit the nail again. And again. And again. And whatever they do, not to deviate from, the formulae. Lest the nail go un-hit.

And at other times, that failure to deviate, to question, to wonder, to be curious, to ask ‘why…’ leads us to fail. To stand there hammering the nail whilst the rest of the building collapses around our ears. Oblivious, as we have been deafened by the noise of the hammer.?

Indeed it was a revelation to me that Organisations that fail are often full of brilliant leaders, as well as bright and engaged people like you and me. They just act in the wrong context. Persisting in behaviours that no longer suit the times. Somehow they are constrained – even if only by their own beliefs. Of course there are many reasons that people – and systems – fail, but it’s not simply a case of deficit. It’s not just that people do not know something: sometimes they know it, but are unable to use it.

This tips me towards a perspective whereby leadership is not simply additive: giving people new knowledge , skills, behaviours, purpose, or belief. Instead, it may be about changing focus, perspective, context, about fracturing certainty, creating space, and exploring ideas. Leadership may be a far more fluid feature of our systems than we imagine, and certainly one that moves beyond a hierarchy and job title alone.

In my work on Social Leadership i describe our Organisations as having two systems: a formal one (which you can see, own, and control) and a social one (which is the people that surround us, in all our erratic glory). Social Leadership posits that we lead at the intersection of these systems: between formal and social.

But how do we learn to do this?

How do we develop leaders if there is no defined, or universally accepted, measure of success?

How do we develop leaders if leadership may not even be a real thing?

I was prompted into this reflection by a conversation last week, where someone asked me that very question. How do you make people think differently, how do you make them into a better leader?

To which i replied that you don’t.

It would be a form of arrogance to believe that you can ‘make’ people be anything. Instead, we should consider it from a learning perspective: how do we learn to see the world – and hence how could we learn to see it differently.

But also from the perspective of belief: who do you believe that you are? What is your ‘self’, and how does that ‘self’ change?

Seeing the world differently? What possible use could that be?

Surely we want people to view the world with absolute clarity, in granular detail, and with an engineers mindset?

Well, maybe. But (of course), it’s contextual.

To tackle a known problem in a known space, that may be correct.

But if we are seeking to reinvent, reimagine , or re-contextualise our Organisations, we may need people who can look at the world in different ways, because they carry with them different lenses. People who can hold ambiguity, who can maintain dynamic tensions between varied ‘truths’. And who can withstand the comforting allure of certainty. Time and again.

For me this speaks for a dynamic quality: i’ve written about this from an Organisational perspective in ‘The Socially Dynamic Organisation’, considering how we build more fluid and reconfigurable structures, but it’s equally valid to consider it from a leadership one.

How do we build Socially Dynamic Leaders? Crucially to develop leaders who do not hold answers, but rather can create new meaning – who can look at the familiar and see it in different ways. People who can turn their certainty out of focus, and create (or borrow from each other) these different lenses, then to make sense of what they see. Individually, and by convening ‘sense making’ communities.

This is a model of humble leadership where there is no hero, but rather a collective capability. A model for leaders in service of community, but also connected to structure. At the intersection.

Escaping capture by the familiar, and powerful, and yet powerless. Not necessarily holding the power of direct action, but rather woven into a social context that permeates the organisation in breadth. Connected – within existing structures – and interconnected, beyond them.

But back to the key question: how would we develop this?

’Disturbance’, ‘Meaning’, and ‘Motion’ would be three words that come to mind.

Firstly, to create space, provocation, and context whereby delegates may discover their own disturbance. Disturbance is a foundation of learning – whether by curiosity or need – but that which we discover has a special potency. So helping leaders who are (by certain conventions and self belief) clever, powerful, confident, and used to performance, to move into uncertainty is a powerful thing. More powerful than simply telling them or trying to dazzle them.

I wrote recently about ‘Reflective Surfaces ’ as one technique we can use here. Getting people to tell stories allows us to externalise the conversation, and when it is externalised, we can consider it differently. This is a therapeutic approach, but equally valid for learning. And of course Generative AI tools make it easy to do this in different modalities and at a collective level. Taking small groups and reflecting their stories back to them, then working together in response, and dialogue, with those stories.

Dialogic approaches work well. Not teaching, but exploring. Establish community, build trust, then look down.

Formal systems react to disturbance in predictable ways: analysing it, mitigating the risk, repapering over cracks, isolating or ring-fencing it, occasionally persecuting it, or celebrating it. Social Leadership may be an act of collecting it up: understanding that a wave is both the thing that you see, breaking on the foreshore, but also the energy that travels within it. Disturbance, both that which we enjoy and fear, is the energy of the Organisation.

In my more recent work on Learning Science , i’ve been exploring the idea that the ‘creation of meaning’ is the pivotal aspect of learning. Not the acquisition of knowledge (and of course not simply the passing of tests). ‘Meaning ’ is our understanding of the world: held not as an abstract notion, but rather as the stage that we act upon (and think within).

To understand how meaning is created, how it fractures and flows, competes and fails, evolves, is to understand the stage upon which our thinking, and acting, takes place. Essentially the ‘meaning’ is our view of the world, and hence the primary limiting force upon both our thought and action.

And it is, naturally, individual. My ‘meaning’ resides within my head, and yours within your own. We may share language – a way of articulating concepts and understanding – but our meaning is essentially individual. Indeed, one may possibly argue that our ‘meaning’ is in fact our ‘self’, in that our identity is related to our performance and experience.

In this sense, we can consider that developing leadership is in fact an evolution of ‘self’, but not in terms of new knowledge, rather in terms of new schemata and beliefs. Which sounds dangerously voodoo. I can see what it’s more attractive to talk in terms of skills and capabilities, as opposed to describing a reformulation, a re-authoring, of the ‘self’. But again, perhaps it can be both, dependent upon the use case.

The central idea is that we act within our sense of meaning – we act upon the world as we understand the world to be – and as we hope it may become.

Leadership development is hence a matter of reconceptualisation of the self, combined with developing a deep understanding of the mechanisms of effect. Of how the world around us at the social, collective cultural, and individual cognitive level, works.

Or to put it another way – indeed a way that kind of carries us back to engineering approaches, but in a very different context – leadership development is about understanding how humans work. With a recognition that this is at the individual and group social level. In parallel with an understanding of how systems work, again through a broad range of lenses – how systems make us safe, secure, static, and constrained.

These are our two dimensions of operation: people and systems. Selves and systems.

To understand how our systems of understanding (hence of meaning, and self) are disturbed. And to understand how ‘meaning’ is created and evolves, and the mechanisms by which our systems change – or remain constrained.

Which brings us to ‘Motion ’.

Understanding the ‘self’ and the ‘system’ is the context: Motion is the act of change.

Motion, in this sense, is a broad idea, but is the purpose of leadership. To be in motion.

At a personal perspective, this is the motion of dialogue with your practice. At the cognitive level it is to be in motion as the act of learning. At the cultural level it is to understand culture as a social context and movement. In the domain of innovation it is to understand ideas as fixed points and how we kick off from these. And at the organisational level it is to understand change as both formal (structural) and social phenomena.

As i said earlier: Organisations spend a great deal of money on leadership development, and indeed we often see common patterns in what they do. Asking people to look within (discovery of ‘self’ – often in a lovely hotel, with some good meals and perhaps an inspirational speaker). Articulation of challenge (articulation of the known and imagined spaces). And planning for action.

Where the opportunity lies is in a deeper engagement with the underlying forces behind this: to truly engage with disturbance (and related notions of ambiguity, complexity, and discomfort), to build a better understanding of the organisation as a system of belief and invested engagement (creation of meaning), and to recognise, and to be in, motion. Individually and systemically.

If we shift our focus, away from the granular, right up to the ecosystem level, we could see the following – but be aware that here i am including my own speculation, and nested concepts such as a belief that the ‘Social Age’ is a useful abstraction.

The context of our Organisations has changed – and hence our Organisations must evolve.

Leaders are a thing – or rather are many things – but crucially operating in multiple domains, and by different mechanisms in each.

Change is both structural and social – relating to both knowledge and conception. Change can be viewed as both logistical and epistemological – what we see and what we believe – our ways of being and knowing.

So to change our leadership is to discover disturbance, to create new meaning, and to be in motion.

#WorkingOutLoud on Leadership