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Leadership in complexity

Creating direction, collaboration and purposeful action while holding many perspectives and dependencies at once.

The question we start from

How do we lead when the answer is not yet known?

Reading depth

Four ways to read the same topic. Start wherever you like.

Leadership in complexity is the capacity to create direction, collaboration and momentum when reality is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

When cause and effect only become visible over time, leadership holds both analysis and exploration. Several perspectives can exist at once, and the next step is sometimes discovered through action.

The capacity develops by understanding, exploring, testing, learning and applying what works.

One situation, four perspectives

The perspectives are equal. Together they make the situation clearer.

A strategic initiative has lost momentum. Different parts of the organisation describe entirely different causes.

Me: What in my own reading of the situation have I already taken for granted?
We: Which different pictures of the situation exist between us, and what does someone else see that I miss?
The organisation: Which structures, goals, responsibilities and ways of working create the pattern we see?
The system: Which dependencies, actors and changes beyond our own unit are shaping the situation?

Practising the perspective

Here we show how the perspective can be trained and applied in everyday work.

Individual practice

Instar

Leadership in complexity is trained in real situations: understanding where things stand, shifting perspective, separating fact from assumption, forming questions, testing action, seeing the consequences and adjusting the next step. Instar is Katalystra's environment for the individual part of that practice.

Here self-leadership, attention, reflection and direction find room in everyday work between shared sessions. The practice is our way of applying the perspective.

Explore Instar →

Shared practice

Dragonfly

Complex questions are carried by several people together. Dragonfly is Katalystra's shared workspace, where a team can make different perspectives visible and work on the same question over time.

There the group can explore the question together, build shared understanding, test a next step, follow up on what happened and learn from it. This too is practice — our way of working with the perspective.

The environment is described here and becomes available later on.

This connects with

Keep exploring in whichever direction matters most to you.

Leadership in complexityVertical developmentSelf-leadershipCollective intelligenceStrategyOperational ExcellenceTransformation capacity

Vertical development
Developing how we make meaning, take perspective and exercise judgement in complex situations.
Self-leadership
Directing attention, regulating your state, choosing deliberately and learning in everyday work.
Collective intelligence
When people's knowledge, experience and perspectives become shared understanding, decisions, action and learning.
Strategy
Choosing direction and developing the organisational conditions that turn it into everyday practice.
Operational Excellence
The capability to create value through direction, improvement, action, follow-up and learning in everyday work.
Transformation capacity
The capacity to understand which kind of change a situation calls for and to improve, develop or transform accordingly.