Leadership ecology? This much I know.

(3 min read)

I keep circling on an idea: leadership ecology.

The system of relationships, roles & contextual forces through which leadership emerges. By definition, leadership isn’t a role so much as a relationship with terrain & everything in it, known & unknown.

Here’s the rub: we never have access to the whole system, where it starts or if it ends.

It’s not terrain as territory to own, conquer or optimise, but as a living, adaptive, interdependent, surprisingly fragile assemblage without horizon.

Dirk Gently nudged me, the interconnectedness of ALL things. John Muir hooked me ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe’.

The best leaders don’t operate in the landscape, they curate it, tend it, are of it. What they unfold, enfolds back into it.

Under pressure leaders can become extractive. They take more than they replenish. They mistake speed for vitality, activity for health, certainty for longevity. There is privilege in crafting conditions, a responsibility. More importantly, accountability.

Leadership lives on inter-relational frontiers, on the blurring edges of a sprawling, ecologically complex world. At its zenith, it’s where boundaries soften & dissolve into uncertainty & there’s nowhere to hide. Where past & future overlap & once impossible ideas quietly rehearse themselves into inevitability.

Inevitability is a strong word. It claims us all.

Organisations as ecosystems can feel unfashionable, earnest. Too slow for a world addicted to velocity & false certainty. Business at the speed of thought. But arrogance has a cost & we all live downstream. If we fail to reorient, treating systems as machines rather than living things, we risk our own Silent Spring.

Yet here we are: On the edge of radical interconnectedness: bio, psycho, social, tech: all life gathered on a precipice. New forms of intelligence arrive faster than our capacity to integrate them. Layered onto ways of thinking already exhausted. Stone Age minds navigating a tech-age panopticon.

Many leaders feel it, but don’t quite know how to step into it, let alone map it. Where are Burke & Wills or Mason & Dixon when you need them?

This much I know: the problem isn’t that the map is outdated, it never existed. We try to draw borders around relationships that are messy: rule-making, rule breaking. But intelligence is a slippery thing & the future will be squandered if leadership is continually extractive from an already fragile ecology.

From an ecology of leadership:

* What conditions, am I actively creating or quietly tolerating, that shape how people & ideas interact?

* What might be possible if I shift from optimisation to attunement?

* What responsibility do I hold for the long-term health of this system, not as a leader, but as someone who embodies it?

Pay it forward. Don’t settle. Stay curious. Hazard your soul. Flow well.

Cliffthecoach