How Much Information Is In A System? #WorkingOutLoud on A Transdisciplinary Lens In Leadership

We expect leaders to make good decisions, based on the evidence at hand.

This ‘evidence’ may come in many forms: hard data (the quantified landscape of the Organisation, the things we can enumerate and observe directly), softer data (the subjectivity of opinion and supposition, the qualitative, the things we can infer, the imagination and ideas) all through both formal evaluation structures (business planning and productivity tools, legal, financial and ethical frameworks, cultural norms) and personal experience (our varied schema and frames of understanding, our worldview and cultural context).

All of this is information within the observed system, or inferred about it.

But the data upon which we operate and make our decisions is not fixed: where we stand within the landscape may provide a different view (our individual cultural and organisational context), and indeed who we are (our individual cognitive context) will influence what we can see, and how we think about it.

Or to put it another way, we make our decisions based upon a subset of the total amount of information available: we inhabit a sketch of the landscape, not a fully detailed image.

A transdisciplinary approach to leadership is one whereby we exchange the lens we use to observe the landscape, sometimes for one that is borrowed, and someone for one that we grind ourselves.

Inherent in it is the idea that we can escape from a single perspective to move (relatively) freely into others. If so, if that is true, we would have to ask ‘how’ we do this, and what may prevent us from so doing, as well as to consider whether such a shift were worth the effort. Would we simply end up seeing the same system from a different vantage point, or can a different lens allow us to extract additional information from the same system.

Essentially to ask whether it’s possible to build a stronger platform through a transdisciplinary approach.

In part this may depend on how we answer a question: is ‘more’ information always a good thing. Would access to additional information help us make better decisions, or simply paralyse us with choice? Is ‘more’ always ‘better’?

That question itself may depend on the context in which it’s held: our own solitary head, or a collective social one. Do we hold this inside us or between us: is leadership as a collective and multi disciplinary function inherently more capable than a solitary heroic and domain, or functionally defined, one?

It’s always risky when something is defined in opposition, or absence: if we describe ‘transdisciplinarity’ as being ‘better’ because it is not held in one discipline alone, then we are failing to imbue any real value. We are simply describing an alternative approach. To be ‘better’ there must be a reason: perhaps a tool, framework, or perspective from one approach may allow us greater insight in a different domain.

In my own work i may argue that the biological evolutionary perspective of ‘the organisation as ecosystem’ in Quiet Leadership provides a different lens through which to conceptualise leadership. But it’s not necessarily a ‘better’ one in and of itself.

It’s only better if such a perspective allows me to conceive different action, or perhaps negates a previously held perspective.

This may lead us to consider that the lens in and of itself is of less value than the stacked perspectives and analysis that takes place behind it – again, both internally and collectively.

We may end up considering that a new lens is not an answer, but may enrich the landscape within which we will explore to find an answer. And perhaps this itself will point to core capabilities for a leader in the complex and evolutionary landscape of the Social Age.

Leadership held lightly: where certainty is actively fractured and where we seek out the intersections of systems.

Perhaps we may consider that the light at the edge of the lens, where it’s distorted and refracted, is the most valuable illumination.

This fragment of work is itself held as part of a principle of #WorkingOutLoud, more as a narrative of reflection than of certainty.