In a previous post “Beyond Agile Theater: Nurturing Organizational Ecosystems,” I explored a fundamental shift in perspective: viewing organizations not as machines to be optimized but as living ecosystems to be nurtured. I examined how natural patterns of succession, resource flows, and biodiversity offer powerful models for organizational development – to help create conditions where healthy practices naturally emerge and thrive, rather than attempting to control organizational change, transformation, and business as usual (BAU) processes through rigid frameworks and top-down mandates.
This perspective creates a fascinating paradox: How to “lead” in a system designed to self-organize? What is the “leader’s” role when the goal is emergence rather than control? If organizations are living ecosystems rather than machines, leadership requires a fundamentally different approach. But what?! Might we find clues from nature?
Exploring Nature’s Patterns
In a conversation about leadership evolution with Bob Anderson (creator of the Leadership Circle Profile), we explored three stages of leadership development:
- Reactive – “Control it”
- Creative – “Work with it”
- Integral – “Recognize that I am part of it”
The reactive operating system – a legacy of colonialism and the industrial age, based on authority, prediction, and intervention – doesn’t work in non-linear, complex adaptive systems. (The Leadership Circle has data that indicates ~75% of leaders operate from a reactive mindset, and coincidentally or perhaps not, 75% of agile transformations fail. )
Nature has been dealing with uncertainty and complexity for, oh, a few billion years. Different ecosystems – e.g., coral reefs, savannas, forests, and tide pools – have evolved unique approaches to balance seemingly contradictory needs:
- Structure without rigidity
- Coherence without uniformity
- Direction without control
- Resilience through diversity
Might nature’s models help us navigate the fundamental paradoxes of “leading” self-organizing teams and organizations? Are there useful insights into holding the creative tension between providing direction and enabling emergence, between stepping forward and stepping back?
Infinitely Diverse Approaches
In this series, I explore several specific metaphors. These patterns will represent a subset of nature’s infinitely diverse approaches, selected to illustrate particular dynamics. Just as in nature, where no ecosystem exists in isolation – all are interconnected parts of our planet’s larger biosphere – these explorations won’t be standalone solutions, nor will they provide formulas to follow.
- Coral Reef Leadership: Structure, symbiosis, and the power of specialized roles
- Savanna Leadership: Vigilance, migration patterns, and collective intelligence
- Forest Succession: Patience, complexity, and nurturing long-term vision
- Tide Pool Leadership: Resilience, adaptation, and the importance of boundaries
- Leadership as a Distributed Function: How ecosystems distribute leadership across the system
- From Metaphor to Practice: Organizations Embracing Ecosystem Leadership
These patterns represent a subset of nature’s infinitely diverse approaches, selected to illustrate particular dynamics. Just as in nature, where no ecosystem exists in isolation – all are interconnected parts of our planet’s larger biosphere – these explorations won’t be standalone solutions, nor will they provide formulas to follow.
I hope they offer differing yet complementary perspectives that provide a modicum of inspiration, which you’ll integrate and adapt to your unique context. (And then share your learnings/experiments, e.g., facilitation over control, enabling trust, etc.)
The goal is not to crack the code, but rather to catch the rhythm – Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles
The future of leadership isn’t about having all the answers. Instead, it’s about acknowledging our mutual interdependence and nurturing the conditions so our collective creative intelligence can and will flourish.