1

Emergent Leadership: People, culture and collective intelligence

EARCOS Leadership Conference Bangkok 2015 Workshop 1: Thursday 29th November Dr Chris Jansen – University of Canterbury, New Zealand

chris@leadershiplab.co.nz www.leadershiplab.co.nz

3

Chris Jansen

4

“The greatest challenge for future leaders is the pace of change and the complexity of the challenges faced….”

….”perpetual white-water”…

“Our organisations are not equipped to cope with this

complexity…” (IBM study – 1500 CEO’s)

5

6

7

Greater Christchurch Education Renewal

8

Culture eats strategy for lunch…

…and structure creates culture

Culture

Strategy

11 www.ideacreation.org

Complexity / Change / Uncertainty / Ambiguity

Paradox / Lack of Control / Unintended consequences

Adaptive challenges

Leadership capacity

Organisational capacity

Self organising, adaptive, innovative, flexible, nimble,

responsive, creative and resilient

12 www.ideacreation.org

13 www.ideacreation.org

.

.

.

Hierarchies and Beauracracies “the organisation”

15 www.ideacreation.org

Networks, movements and living systems

.

.

.

Power vs influence Leaders vs leadership?

Position of a leader vs action of leadership

Hierarchies and Networks

18

Shifting role of leader

Complexity / Change / Uncertainty / Ambiguity

Paradox / Lack of Control / Unintended consequences

Adaptive challenges

Leadership capacity

Organisational capacity

Self organising, adaptive, innovative, flexible, nimble,

responsive, creative and resilient

Distribute power and decentralise control

Explore and articulate shared values

Foster interaction and shared learning

Proactive mentoring of individuals

19 www.ideacreation.org

20

Leadership actions that facilitate self-organisation

1) Articulate compelling collective vision and values

21

• Seek out shared values

• Gain clarity of focus – know why…

We need to be culturally tight and managerially loose. Order and design are not externally imposed but emerge as a result of the combination of individual freedom and shared core values

An attractor – motivated by threat or opportunity

“Think back over your experiences as a leader - locate a moment or period that was a high point in your experience as a leader, when you felt a sense of satisfaction and went home saying YES!

22

• Describe the situation. What happened? What was the result?

• What was your role in creating this experience? What other people and factors contributed to this exceptional moment?

Partner - what values seem to be important to this person?

23

Are our individual and collective values

aligned?

What compelling

purpose could we all rally around?

28 www.ideacreation.org

2) Foster interaction and shared learning

29 www.ideacreation.org

• Open up communication

• Role model a learning focus

• Develop organisational culture

• Build mechanisms for dialogue

“It is no longer sufficient to have one person learning for the

organisation... Its just not possible any longer to figure it out from the top, and have everyone

else following the order of the ‘grand strategist’. (Senge , 2002)

interactions with neighbours

Foster interaction, shared learning, and leverage collective intelligence

30 www.ideacreation.org

What solution?

How to engage?

+ Ownership, motivation and commitment

++ Better solutions and innovation

Two key questions in adaptive change

• When I first came into this leadership role – I got together a team of senior staff and re-wrote all the staff procedure manuals. I started with an idea that we’d perhaps do it in a month. Then I tried to take this to the meeting and present it to (the staff) and it just ended up in this shitfight basically . . . What about this?, You’ve forgotten about that?, blah, blah, blah. It was a total disaster, and one of the absolute low points of my time here. But it made me realise that unless I got these people to come with me I was wasting my bloody time.

31

We ended up having to go back to the drawing board and eventually we figured out this process which is still here this year, well it’s completely fundamental now. It’s called OPG (Operational Policy Groups) where you take a subset of people to work on developing a process and then anyone who’s not present, you give them the right to submit.

Even though it took 12 months longer than I thought, we got a result that actually stuck. We didn’t come up with a nice new book that no one used, which is very very common. We got two things out of it, we got the best answers, these great rules that were user friendly, generally easy to follow, concise, nothing that wasn’t a rule, didn’t make it in here. So we got a great answer, a great result, and we got really good buy-in too.

32

Yeah, that was really an epiphany around the issue for me, and I guess it’s characterised my leadership style ever since. I learnt that if things are really important, especially in an organisation like this, where we have staff who actually have knowledge, skill, experience and passion – we have to include them in the process (L 21).

33

Who has a voice in our organisation?

What mechanisms can we create to foster interaction and shared learning?

34 www.ideacreation.org

3) Proactive mentoring

•Recognise and value people •Intentionally develop people

“employee first – customer second”

Anand Pillai 35

www.ideacreation.org

Juggling our roles…..

Leadership (Vision & people driven)

Management (Office bound/paper driven)

Professional Technical Work/Service

Plan Organise Control Administer systems Critique Create Order

Vision Meaningful Contribution Values Engage and develop People Create context

Compliance & Status-Quo Efficiency

Commitment, Change & Hi-

Performance

Cammock (2001) The Dance of Leadership

Who are you actively developing and looking out for? Who is looking out for you?

How could we increase this informal mentoring?

37 www.ideacreation.org

4) Distribute power and decentralise control

38 www.ideacreation.org

• Build collaborative relationships

• Share leadership • Foster interdependance

and trust

A framework for empowerment Extrinsic motivation intrinsic motivation external locus of control internal locus of control control empowerment Strict and complete external control no external control Responsibility on leader responsibility shared responsibility on participant I decide we decide you decide less choice more choice Dependence interdependence independence

Jansen 2005

Go to the people, Live with them,

Learn from them, Love them,

Start with what they know, Build with what they have, But with the best leaders, When the work is done, The task accomplished,

The people will say, “We have done it ourselves”

Chinese Philosopher Lao Tsu

40 www.ideacreation.org

Who makes the decisions?

How do these processes impact organisational culture?

41 www.ideacreation.org

Keeping in contact….

chris@leadershiplab.co.nz

www.ideacreation.org

www.leadershiplab.co.nz

@IdeacreationNZ

42 www.ideacreation.org