Notes and Takeaways from The Dawn of System Leadership
When I read it: June 2021
Why I read it: My sister Campbell is a current Robertson Scholar and she recently reviewed this essay as part of her leadership program. It's a dense article that builds on Peter Senge's work on systems thinking and leadership.
Follow this link to read the essay or scroll down for my notes.
Want to get my future notes when I publish them? Subscribe to my weekly newsletter below.
My notes
About The Dawn of System Leadership
This article walks through:
What it means to be a system leader
How to develop the core capabilities of a system leader
Collective leadership
The "heroic individual leader" is a myth. According to Peter Senge, the Indo-European root of "to lead" is leith, which means "to step across a threshold—and to let go of whatever might limit stepping forward".
(For more on collective leadership, see this video in which Peter Senge explains his definition of leadership as "the capacity of a human community to shape its future." This definition emphasizes the collective: the human community. We often fall into a trap of making leadership about individuals, but when you look at what actually gets accomplished, it's collectives that get the big stuff done. Leadership is a bit paradoxical: it's both about your individual capabilities and the collective's ability to accomplish things that matter.)
Long-term change requires collective leadership.
System leader
A system leader is someone who can foster collective leadership.
Systemic challenges like climate change, racism, water scarcity, and poverty are too big for traditional organizations and their hierarchical authority structures. Solving these problems requires collaboration across organizational charts, groups, and countries. These macro-collaborations fail without collective leadership.
For example, Nelson Mandela was a system leader. He brought a divided South Africa together to face their common challenges. For example, he created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that brought black and white South Africans together to face one another, share their perspectives, forgive, and move on.
The three core capabilities of a system leader
System leaders share the following core capabilities:
The ability to see the larger system and help others see it too. This enables people working in different parts of the system to see the big picture and collaborate on improving the whole system versus limiting their focus to their individual parts.
The ability to foster reflection and more generative conversations. This enables people to explore opposing views that challenge their personal beliefs so they can participate in productive conversations that increase trust.
The ability to shift the collective focus from reactive problem-solving to co-creating the future. This enables people to explore their creativity and articulate their deepest aspirations.
The gateways for system leadership
Entry points to system leadership include:
Redirecting attention: seeing that problems “out there” are “in here” also—and how the two are connected.
Re-orienting strategy: creating the space for change and enabling collective intelligence and wisdom to emerge.
Practice, practice, practice: all learning is doing, but the doing needed is inherently developmental.
Redirecting attention: seeing that problems “out there” are “in here” also—and how the two are connected.
This is about realizing that we are part of the systems we seek to change.
It's not just them. It's us. No one has the moral high ground.
Re-orienting strategy: creating the space for change and enabling collective intelligence and wisdom to emerge.
This is about creating the conditions for change rather than pushing change.
Many change efforts fail because leaders try to force change with top-down assumptions and agendas. System leaders recognize that collective wisdom cannot be built into a plan in advance.
System change is about changing the relationships between the people who make up those systems. This requires leaders to engage stakeholders and to create the conditions (e.g. time, space, trust, openness) for them to come together, tell the truth, think deeply, explore options, reflect, learn, and generate ideas from the bottom up. This is not about seeking commitment from people to your plan, but rather engaging people with genuine questions about your intention.
Practice, practice, practice: all learning is doing, but the doing needed is inherently developmental.
This is about using tools and deliberate practice to build the three system leadership capabilities.
Tools that help people see larger systems they are part of include:
Asking simple questions that expose the full system and its interdependencies.
Using system mapping to help stakeholders visualize the system and its interdependencies.
Tools that help foster reflections and conversations that engage stakeholders and build genuine trust include:
Peacekeeping circles. This is a Native American practice. It begins by having stakeholders sit in a circle and take turns saying a few words about their deepest intentions. (For more, see this article.)
Dialogue interviews. These are structured interviews with stakeholders that can be used to help you identify co-leaders and system insights. (For more, see these guidelines by the Presencing Institute.)
Peer shadowing and learning journeys.
Ladder of Inference. This is a thinking tool created by Chris Argyris that can help you become more aware of your reasoning. (For more, see Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline.)
Tools that shift the collective focus from short-term problem-solving to long-term creation include:
The gap between vision and reality. You can use this gap to build and sustain creative tension by asking yourself and stakeholders two core questions. "What do we really want to create" and "what exists today?"
The impact of a system leader
System leaders impact groups of people in the following ways:
They create conditions that allow people to learn, build networks of trust and collaboration, and make progress together.
They inspire a commitment to the health of the collective whole.
They build relationships with and engage stakeholders across boundaries.
They get the right people in the room (i.e. people open to their own development, people excited by the intention.)
They prioritize long-term creation over short-term problem-solving.
They balance advocacy and inquiry (i.e. they cultivate an ability to inquire into and listen to opposing views, they recognize that passionate advocacy can put others on the defensive).
They let go of their original strategy to follow better paths and opportunities as they emerge.
They partner with other system leaders for help and support.
Random anecdotes:
In their book Leading from the Emerging Future, Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer describe three “openings” needed to transform systems:
Opening the mind (to challenge our assumptions),
Opening the heart (to be vulnerable and to truly hear one another), and
Opening the will (to let go of pre-set goals and agendas and see what is really needed and possible).
Jay Forrester is the founder of the system dynamics method. He has pointed out that complex non-linear systems exhibit "counterintuitive behavior". For example, government interventions focused on short-term solutions often cause bigger long-term problems. (For more, see The Beginning of System Dynamics.)
In From Data to Wisdom, Russell Ackoff characterized wisdom as the ability to distinguish an intervention's short-term effects from its long-term effects.
As shown by Ronald Heifetz in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, system leaders create conditions that allow others to learn and make progress together.
Random quotes:
"Many business leaders espouse ideals like vision, purposefulness, and growing people to grow results. If these aims are so widely shared, then why are such organizations so rare? I think it is because very few people appreciate the nature of the commitment needed to build such an enterprise." —William O’Brien
“If you want to change how a person thinks, give up. You cannot change how another thinks. Give them a tool the use of which will gradually cause them over time to think differently.” —Buckminster Fuller
"The wicked leader is he who the people despise.
The good leader is he who the people revere.
The great leader is he who the people say, 'We did it ourselves.'"
—Lao Tzu