We need complexity fit leaders more than ever

Leaders need to lead more transformations, handle more complexity and balance more competing perspectives than ever before. Organisations therefore need leaders and boards that can make quantum shifts in individual and collective mental complexity.

I have, for a long time, been a fan of adult development theory and have incorporated it into my leadership models and programmes to help leaders become future and complexity fit. As I am reading Jennifer Garvey-Berger’s new book Changing on the Job, she and Zafar Achi, provide wonderful new insights on how to develop these forms of mind and capacities.

I want to specifically call out the capacities they highlight for future and complexity fit leaders. You need to reflect if you and others show the following:

• Connection between cause and effect – are they considering the subtleties of problems, what caused them and how to address them? Do they see nuance?
• Context awareness – are the mentioning context as important in the challenges they face?
  Capacity to innovate and rather than repeat - are they considering novel options? Are they using underlying principles when solving challenges?
• Ability to take other perspectives – can they successfully hold perspectives of others that are quite different from their own beliefs and motivations?
• Resisting of a hero/villain narrative – can they resist blame and see things more broadly and with more nuance?
• Curiosity about what is underneath the desires of stakeholders – do they look deeper into the reasons people want what they want and are they flexible with stakeholders that have shifting views.
• Capacity to understand their own internal drivers – do they understand their own motivations?
• Willingness (and a sense of ability) to change – they acknowledge their growth and change and are open to more of it.

I will let you make up your own mind about the state of leadership in our world and, in the meantime, encourage each and everyone of us to continue to develop our complexity fitness. The world needs us to so urgently.