Re-Constructing Leadership:
Moving from Individual-Centric to an Integral, Complex Adaptive Systems View

How can we re-define and re-construct leadership in a way that provides the necessary guidance and support to the post-modern workforce – one that must organically sense, interpret, respond, and adapt to the rapidly changing environment? In addition to the traditional goals of individual and organizational economic gain, leaders in today’s organizations-as-global-communities must also incorporate positive meaning-making and sustainability into their desired outcomes. Given our uncertain and highly complex era, leaders cannot continue to follow the rigid, command-and-control, bureaucratic structures and self-promoting behaviors that were established during the stable post-war era. Neither can we, as practitioners, effectively evaluate, coach, and develop leaders using the classic quantitative and behaviorist models that define leadership at the individual level. We must move from the construction of leadership as an individual-centric, administrative model to one which is more system-oriented and integral: distributed, dynamic, complex, and generative leadership, which is socially situated.

How do we accelerate the acceptance and development of a newer construction of “leadership” within the complex adaptive systems that comprise the postmodern work world – distributed, integral leadership that measures success not through the rise of the individual leader’s career, but through a positive and sustainable impact on individuals, teams, organizations, and communities?

My proposal is to provide historical review, then weave together three streams of thought:
The evolution of popular metaphors of organizations, as representations of the key social factors of their age. Emphasis will be placed on the more recent emergence of general systems theory, living systems theory, and finally the use of the metaphor complex adaptive systems for representing the modern global organization (as a subset of the society within which it is embedded).

The evolution of leadership models, in their attempt to describe what leadership is and what success factors are required. Emphasis will be placed on the more recent and emergent models, which situate leadership within the context of interactive social systems and complexity.
The evolution of intentional development theory, as it applies to leaders and leadership. The paper will examine the various epistemologies of adult learning and psychological development, and focus on applications for leadership and organizational development.

The problem statement articulates that the social and organizational challenges posed by the post-modern turn are not well addressed through today’s embedded leadership models and their associated development programs. Although systems and complexity theory have modeled the importance of inter-relationships and connectedness toward generative goals, we still tend to think of the contributions of leaders in a more reductionist, individualist, and economically-oriented model. Learning and development methods primarily focus on the individual, with few methods employing complex social interaction as their primary mode of delivery. There is a need to promote a view of leadership which better meets the realities and challenges of today’s complex adaptive systems, and, in parallel, a development approach that moves beyond individual-isolated skills training and employs high-context social and situated learning approaches to nurture the integrated, more complex psychological development, social intelligence, and network skills required for generative and sustainable outcomes.