This Fragile Work

This week I will share fragile new Social Leadership work on the ‘Self as Trespasser’ for the first time at the Open University Business Agility conference. And I am far from ready.

I don’t mean that I am unprepared: I have spent a great deal of time carefully cutting out all of the materials about which I am certain, to leave me with the spaces of exploration and story.

That in itself is kind of the point: some things I know about, and can share with confidence, whilst others I am figuring out, and the sharing is part of the sense making. This work falls firmly into the latter category.

I’m sandwiched in the middle of the day, between Prof. Dave Snowden, sharing his globally respected Cynefin work on complexity, and then some academic and practitioner perspectives on disruption in government and academia. I feel pretty sure that everyone else is going to be better prepared than I am, and will probably make more sense too.

Part of #WorkingOutLoud is to find comfort in uncertainty, but that is, of course, easier said than done. Like anyone, I do not wish to sound like a fool, although I am willing to risk mild ridicule.

So I can turn: into the ambiguity, or towards certainty.

The work on Social Leadership as Trespass and Boundary is a perspective on leadership at the intersection of systems. It views our formal and social authority as parallel features of multi dimensional systems, and concludes that the key features of leadership are to be in motion, to hold uncertainty, to convene, to take systems views, to support sense making, to embody imperfection as practice, and to be in constant dialogue – with self, with technology, with community.

I like Milton Keynes, and have a soft spot for the Open University, but I am not going there to perform. I am going there to figure stuff out.