Leadership as structuring

Previously: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

[This post first appeared on LinkedIn. You can comment on it here]

A core idea of my new book, Wholehearted, is that we – leaders, practitioners, anyone who would engage in any serious way with the organisation or would help others to do so – must pay attention to the mutual relationships that exist between different aspects of the organisation. Are those relationships healthy and productive? Where they aren’t, what stops that? What gets in the way?

That general approach begs an obvious question: which relationships, and which aspects in particular? That question may be open-ended and contextual, but the model at the book’s core, namely the VSM-inspired Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, helpfully identifies some that necessarily exist in every organisation and at every scale thereof. Rather than listing them here (see [1] for some clues), for this post I’d like to focus on four aspects that are of particular interest when considering issues of scale.

The first two:

The organisation’s formal structure – i.e. how it is generally understood, which lines of accountability are most important, and so onHow the organisation understands its business environment – in terms of who and where its users, customers, suppliers, and competitors are, their needs, how they change over time, and so on

The relationship between those structures is very interesting! Not only can we ask if it is healthy and productive overall, we can ask it for every substructure. For every organisational scope, formal or otherwise (in the book, we place far more emphasis on what different participants actually experience than we do on what is formally settled upon), is its respective environmental relationship healthy and productive? Whose needs does it serve? What needs? How well? How do we know? What intelligence and insights is it uniquely well-placed to gather? And looking at it from the opposite direction, are there aspects of the environment that are not well served, or as the book has it, are there “holes in the whole product”?

Both of those first two aspects can and do change over time, but they are relatively stable compared to the last two:

The organisation’s commitments and their structure – plans, strategies, objectives, and so onThe organisation’s challenges, most interestingly (but not limited to) those that emerge from the environment

These new aspects introduce some tension. Is the organisation structured to fit its environment or to execute its plans? Do we understand the environment in terms of what persists or what’s new?

Except perhaps the most benign of conditions, those tensions never go away. At the extreme, the issues are existential. If, in the name of responsiveness, we blow in the winds of challenge, what do we actually stand for? Why then do we exist? Conversely, what if what we stand for risks becoming irrelevant?

To lead is both to represent those structures in spite of those tensions and to engage with the paradoxes therein, knowing that there is no quick fix – no supposedly objective formula, no algorithm, no methodology – that can resolve them for you. To fail to do those things when it matters most would represent a failure of nerve [2] and therefore of leadership. But both to depersonalise the issue and to create opportunities for leadership, a deliberately adaptive organisation frequently challenges its structures, its understanding, and its commitments, and does that at every level of organisation. Embedding that discourse, learning, and meaning-making in the face of structural change is as much an act of organisation design as the structural changes themselves, more so as the latter are experienced not as imposed but as self-organised. Formal structures may remain, but do we let them get in the way of doing the right thing? Only if we let them!

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation hit Amazon last month. You can find both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books.

[1] Verbing the nouns of business agility (January 2025)

[2] Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (1999, 2007, 2017)

Previously: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

[This post first appeared on LinkedIn. You can comment on it here]