informal coalitions

The tyranny of the explicit

Great observation and commentary from Johnnie Moore on our obsession with formal enquiries and the presumption that we are able to model the complex dynamics of real-world interaction:

"It seems a default setting in this country to demand enquiries, led by authority figures and typically lawyers. These take a long time and produce dense, thick detailed written reports. It all sounds sensible, but I think the whole grammar and style of these things is seriously disconnected from the way people actually function in the real world ... We get seduced by the idea that if we work hard enough, we can produce a sufficiently detailed model of the system and figure out what’s wrong."

He calls this "the tyranny of the explicit" - a great phrase, which I've 'half-inched' for this post's title.

Read Johnnie's full post and onward links here.

Making progress by paying attention to the everyday realities of leadership practice ahead of idealized prescriptions

In a new LinkedIn Group associated with the Centre for Progressive Leadership, members were recently invited to answer the following question:

"What are your top five 'must haves' if we are to see progress in the field of leadership?"

In response to this, and echoing my recent paper for the Centre entitled Taking Organisational Complexity Seriously, it seems to me that meaningful progress depends on the willingness and ability of managers to:

• understand and engage more insightfully with the complex social reality of organizational life;
• avoid the lure of simplistic, “if you do this, you’ll get that” prescriptions; and, in the words of Ralph Stacey,
• accept that "Managing and leading are exercises in the courage to go on participating creatively despite not knowing." 

At present, there is a wide gap between the established ways in which people understand and talk about organizational leadership, and the current reality of what leaders actually do in practice. Rather than prescribing some idealized future state based on prescriptive 'must haves', therefore, I thought I would respond to the question by offering five ‘already haves’. That is, five ways (amongst others) in which people's experienced reality of organizational life and leaders' actual behaviours already run counter to the ways in which these are supposed to operate according to conventional management 'wisdom' and common discourse.

These five 'already haves' are reproduced below.