Leadership in the Quantum Age

Geek alert. In the next few lines I will talk about Newtonian and Quantum physics. My challenge, to make it fascinating….

Over 330 years ago, thanks to long bouts of ‘deep work’, a bad-tempered Isaac Newton changed the world. He defined principles explaining how much of the world behaved. He even invented the mathematics to support it (anyone still having Calculus nightmares can blame Isaac).  Magic was real. We could now calculate, predict, and create how the physical world interacts. The benefit (short term anyway) to humanity was vast. Machines, industry and invention flourished. Culturally we had a new narrative. The universe could be 100% understood, predicted and controlled. It is like a machine. Welcome the deterministic world.

It was good times until just over 100 yrs ago when scientists started finding obscure cases where Newtonian physics didn’t work. Electricity, planetary orbits, stuff like that. We found our universe consisted of a whole new realm that didn’t behave as we thought it should. At the quantum level things had their own set of rules. Bizarre kinds of not really rules, rules. My favorite is the ‘uncertainty’ principle. You can measure the speed or location of a quantum particle but not both. Measuring something changes it. In this world everything is a complex system, nothing totally as it seems. Physics had to get over itself, and let go of the deterministic world. It had to embrace more heuristics, rules of thumb, probability... It worked, thanks to quantum physics we have computers, cell phones, GPS, dancing cat videos and more.

What has this got to do with leadership? Lots… you see many people and the organizations they create operate with a Newtonian deterministic narrative. One that says we can control and predict exactly.  It’s time to catch up with over 100 years of physics and upgrade this idea. In this world, everything is a complex system, nothing totally as it seems. We have to let go of the deterministic world,  embrace more heuristics, rules of thumb, probability. Leadership, people, societies and our environment are complex adaptive systems. More a forest, less a machine. Let’s celebrate this, stimulate the systems, sense the patterns and respond to them while recognizing we can’t fully predict or even less, fully control them.  This gives us all the freedom to be more human, more part of something rather than make us central to it. 

So, are we applying Newtonian determinism to our leadership models, measurements and tools? The security of the deterministic model is appealing, but what 'quantum' leaps of understanding are we missing out on in applying this model to leadership?