#ELC15Bangkok What skills do leaders need to cultivate networks instead of manage hierarchies? @IdeacreationNZ

1. 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

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Chris Jansen

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“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)

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Greater Christchurch Education Renewal

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9. Culture eats strategy
for lunch…
…and structure creates culture

10. Culture
Strategy

11. 11www.ideacreation.org

12. 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
12www.ideacreation.org

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14. .
.
.
Hierarchies and Beauracracies
“the organisation”

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16. Networks, movements and living systems

17. .
.
.
Power vs influence
Leaders vs leadership?
Position of a leader vs action of leadership
Hierarchies and Networks

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Shifting role of leader

19. 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
19www.ideacreation.org

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Leadership actions that facilitate self-organisation

21. 1) Articulate compelling collective
vision and values
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• 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

22. “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!
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• 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?

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28. Are our individual
and collective values
aligned?
What compelling
purpose could we all
rally around?
28www.ideacreation.org

29. 2) Foster interaction and shared
learning
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• 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

30. Foster interaction, shared learning, and leverage
collective intelligence
30www.ideacreation.org
What
solution?
How to
engage?
+ Ownership,
motivation and
commitment
++ Better solutions
and innovation
Two key questions in adaptive change

31. • 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.
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32. 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.
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33. 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).
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34. Who has a voice in our
organisation?
What mechanisms can we
create to foster interaction
and shared learning?
34www.ideacreation.org

35. 3) Proactive mentoring
•Recognise and value
people
•Intentionally develop
people
“employee first –
customer second”
Anand Pillai
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www.ideacreation.org

36. 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

37. Who are you actively
developing and looking
out for? Who is looking
out for you?
How could we increase
this informal
mentoring?
37www.ideacreation.org

38. 4) Distribute power and decentralise
control
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• Build collaborative
relationships
• Share leadership
• Foster interdependance
and trust

39. 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

40. 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
40www.ideacreation.org

41. Who makes the
decisions?
How do these
processes impact
organisational
culture?
41www.ideacreation.org

42. Keeping in contact….
chris@leadershiplab.co.nz
www.ideacreation.org
www.leadershiplab.co.nz
@IdeacreationNZ
42www.ideacreation.org