Thanks once again to a most distinguished network of people we follow on Twitter, I came across an interesting paper yesterday: Leading Complexity: The Art of Making Sense (by Charles J. Palus and David M. Horth)
Introduction
This article is about developing and using creative leadership in the face of complex challenges. What has emerged from seven years of our research with over 500 leaders is a new and surprisingly useful definition: Creative leadership is making shared sense out of complexity and chaos and the crafting of meaningful action.
The following definition of complex challenges has been useful as a starting place in our work with leaders:
Complex challenges are situations or contexts that defy existing approaches or solutions. They are central in importance and demand decisive action. Yet because the organization, team, or individual does not know how to act, there is also a need to slow down and reflect.
Here’s how you know it’s complex:
- You feel “stuck,” and the challenge is a source of real pain. Prior attempts at resolution have misfired.
- The challenge seems outside current or proposed approaches. Existing formulas don’t fit. You may not even be sure exactly how to talk about the challenge.
- The challenge involves a clash of basic assumptions, worldviews, or communities. People disagree about the nature of the challenge and what should be done.
In facing and resolving complex challenges, we have found that two sets of competencies are necessary. One is well known — rational skills such as planning, analyzing, and decision making. Most leaders are aware that they have to develop these in themselves and in their organizations. Indeed, excellence in these skills is typically what people are hired and rewarded for. The second set is less well known in the organizational setting. These creative leadership competencies are typically considered inappropriate and are therefore often neglected.
The paper goes on to explain the following six creative leadership competencies:
- Paying attention – the disciplined art of slowing looking down in order to discern the unfamiliar in the familiar, as well as the familiar in the unfamiliar
- Personalizing – adeptly tapping into one’s unique life experiences and passions to provide insight and perspective on shared challenges
- Imaging – making and using of all kinds of images — pictures, stories, metaphors, visions — to make sense of data and communicate effectively
- Serious play – generating knowledge through exploration, experimentation, rule bending, limit testing, levity, and sport
- Collaborative inquiry – the ability to sustain productive dialogue in addressing complex issues within and across community boundaries
- Crafting – the skillful synthesis of issues, objects, events, and actions into beautifully integrated, meaningful wholes
Sound familiar? I thought so. What struck me is that a very similar skill set is required in the context of dialogue, deliberation or public participation — and not just on the part of the leaders (the conveners or facilitators), but rather the participants themselves.
This is where education and training come in as important building blocks of successful public participation — a great opportunity for online offerings to support this kind of capacity building over time in a cost-effective manner.
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