1. Building Change Leadership That
Others Will Follow
A Systems Perspective on Change Leadership

2. Becoming a Leader Others
Will Follow
I have identified fourteen
systems principles (at this
time) – these are principles
that all living systems share. In
times of significant change it
is crucial that we revisit these
fundamental principles and the
truths they can teach us.

3. The Universal Truths of
Systems
 All HEALTHY living systems share the same 14 qualities:
1. Purposefulness – the dominance of goals
2. Differentiation – specialization of parts
3. Wholeness – subjugation of parts to the whole
4. Interrelatedness – interdependence of parts
5. Openness – environmental influence and adaptation
6. Transformation – input-output process
7. Control – maintaining focus and order
8. Rhythms – cycles and patterns
9. Competition – seeking competitive niche distinction
10. Decay and death – natural entropy
11. Intelligent design – irreducible complexity and beauty
12. Learning – adaptation and specialization
13. Sustainability – through substantive advantage and harmony
14. Equilibrium – punctuated and dynamic
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4. The Universality of
Systems
• Some observations:
– These systems properties or
principles provide insight into leader-
follower
• Cause and effect relationships
• Primary and secondary sequence
– In the end, human behavior is infinitely
complex and ultimately irreducible.
However, the systems properties do
provide perspective that allows us to
see more deeply and precisely. 4

5. The Universality of
Purposefulness
• Purposefulness – the dominance of
goals
Health promoting leaders marshal all their
energy and effort to attain important
change goals
Health promoting leaders seek
simple, clear, compatible purposes.
Health promoting leaders adapt to
environmental changes by making
adaptations to their leadership approach
in order to continue to meet their
fundamental change purposes (fanatical
devotion to ends, flexible adaptation to
means) 5

6. The Universality of
Differentiation
• Differentiation – people exhibit a great
deal of differences in
preparation, personalities, and
perspectives
 Health promoting leaders develop insights and
initiatives that respond positively to the different
characteristics and skills of their followers
 Health promoting leaders do not try to force
everyone into a particular “mold” of thinking or
acting. They celebrate differences, and are not
threatened by the inevitable “friction” that arises
when different people work together on a
common purpose. 6

7. The Universality of
Wholeness
• Wholeness – the subjugation of parts to the
whole
 Health promoting leaders lead their individual
team members to recognize the need to sub-
optimize by each part to the good of the whole
 Sub-optimization in healthy systems is a good
thing because it focuses on the cooperation of
parts in service to the greater collective gain of
the system
 The leaders seek to act in ways that reflect a
preference for harmony and rationality even
during chaotic times. 7

8. The Universality of
Interrelatedness 8
• Interrelatedness – the
interdependence of parts
Health promoting leaders create an
internal communication process that
minimizes conflict and maximizes
cooperation
Health promoting leaders are ware of
the impact of process and workplace
design – developing processes and
procedures that facilitate rational and
orderly flows of consultations and
decisions

9. The Universality of
Openness
• Openness – environmental
influence
Health promoting leaders are
sensitive and responsive to their
environment
Health promoting leaders continually
adapt to changes in their environment
Health promoting leaders resist the
tendency in times of conflict and
chaos to allow communication and
cooperation to cease.
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10. The Universality of
Transformation
• Transformation – input-output process
Health promoting leaders are creative and
focused on the relationship between
resource inputs and outputs used by the
system and valued by its environment
Health promoting leaders seek efficiency –
the optimum proportion of inputs to outputs
that achieves internal conservation and
external value-added
Health promoting leaders creatively adapt to
changes in input-output competitive
challenges and innovative technologies
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11. The Universality of
Control
• Control – maintaining focus and order and
innovation
 Health promoting leaders develop optimal controls to
insure effectiveness (goal attainment) and efficiency
(resource utilization)
 Health promoting leaders place controls at the key
points where recognition and response are best
located
 Health promoting leaders achieve economy of control
– control always serves clear value-added purposes
 Health promoting leaders promote innovation though
control – control does not always mean maintaining
direction – it can and should mean learning, growing
and changing
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12. The Universality of
Rhythms
• Rhythms – cycles and patterns
health promoting leaders are sensitive
to cycles
• rest – work – recuperating
• birth – growth – maturity – decline
• daily – monthly – seasonal – annual
Health promoting leaders seek pacing
and sequencing that preserves and
restores the system
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13. The Universality of
Competition
• Competition – seeking competitive
niche distinction
Health promoting leaders know that they are
in competition with others for resources –
that competition helps make the system
stronger and more adaptively resilient
Health promoting leaders compete by
focusing on a an environmental niche and
marshalling resources to attain a competitive
edge in that niche
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14. The Universality of Decay
and Death
• Decay and death – natural entropy
Health promoting leaders know that
everything and every person have a finite life
– no system last forever
All systems lose, gradually and eventually
completely, loss of energy and function
Healthy systems experience decay and
death (and rebirth and repair) in various
parts throughout their lifetime
All systems experience
momentum, inertia, gravity and entropy –
either succumbing to these forces or growing
by resisting these forces
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15. The Universality of
Intelligent Design
• Intelligent design – irreducible complexity
and beauty
 Health promoting leaders see structural design
and process integration that is impossible to
achieve accidentally
 Health promoting leaders recognize that systems
are irreducibly complex – their minimum
requirements could not appear merely
sequentially by a natural evolutionary process
 Irreducible complexity highlights such truths as
non-determinism, unexpected outcomes, and
non-linear/multi-level cause and effect.
 So, healthy systems are both intentionally
designed and spontaneously emergent
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16. The Universality of
Learning
• Learning - through environmental adaptation
and specialization
 Health promoting leaders learn from their environment
through sensitivity to environmental cues and responsive
adaptation to those cues.
 Health promoting leaders create specific structural and
performance capacities to thrive in a particular
environment.
 Health promoting leaders avoid “over learning,” that
is, so greatly specializing that they are incapable of
adjusting to new environmental cues.
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17. The Universality of
Sustainability
• Sustainability – the development of external
and internal mechanisms that build system
longevity
 Health promoting leaders seek long term growth
through mechanisms which balance the competing
demands they face from external and internal
stakeholders.
 Health promoting leaders develop ways of utilizing
resources in ways that optimize the total system’s
welfare, rather than maximizing one particular
component at the expense of all other components.
 Health promoting leaders seek competitive
advantages that are significant, supportable and
enduring.
 Health promoting leaders place primary focus on
acquiring and utilizing scarce and valuable resources 17

18. The Universality of
Equilibrium
• Equilibrium - dynamic and punctuated
 Health promoting leaders understand that systems are
cooperative networks of complimentary and supportive
subsystems and seek to continuously share through the
management of dynamic flows of information and
resources .
 Health promoting leaders know that systems go through
periods of both continuity and change – long periods of
relative normalcy punctuated by periods of rapid
change, often keyed by the accumulation of small internal
adjustments or small external pressures that have
reached some tipping point
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