From hero mechanic to collaborative gardener

This blog mini-series explores the design process behind the Cohort 2040 leadership initiative. In this second blog Daniel Jonusas, our design assistant, shares some of the research findings from the last few months. You can read the first blog here.

The old styles of leadership aren’t working.  

Look around: leaders cast in the traditional mould are clearly unable to realise the transition to an environmentally sustainable world. You don’t have to look very far to find senior figures who are obstructing the transformational change we need. 

But their success is only a symptom of a global problem: the old idea of leadership is not designed to handle complex, overlapping crises.

That’s because this is the expectation of leadership as manifested in one job: a leader at the top of a hierarchy. In many settings, this might be appropriate. Factories, for example, might require a whole set of routine (though still complex) tasks that must be done in a certain order and on time. Someone has to help coordinate and drive this process.

Let's call them the "hero mechanic".

The problem is that this style of leadership is used in settings that aren't appropriate, like politicians who are expected to lead entire societies, which are vast, complex systems. This is partly a result of how mainstream economics has influenced policymaking, making politicians think that societies can be managed as simple machines or factories, with a small fix here and there.

The hero mechanic is then expected to be knowledgeable and decisive to a degree that no one individual can. The vision of change by one person, however able, can't span entire systems. This model of leadership takes only a limited view of how groups of people operate and fails to draw on the collective wisdom of everyone involved.

So the hero mechanic ends up as a bottleneck for change, endlessly applying hammers and wrenches to complex societies and ecosystems.

As a result, emissions are rising at an accelerating pace, systemic inequalities remain largely unaddressed, and the Earth’s systems are becoming increasingly unstable.

Out with the old, in with the new

There is another way.

To successfully tackle the climate and nature crisis, our leaders will need to understand and work with complexity.

In my last blog, we explored complex systems. How they’re webbed with connections which interact in non-linear ways, leading to self-organising patterns which emerge and reinforce over time. Growing complexity is both a cause and a consequence of climate and ecological change, constantly creating new challenges for leaders, present and future. 

So, the world isn’t like a factory or a machine. It’s like a garden, a constantly evolving complex system. We can intervene to direct that evolution toward better ends. In fact, that’s already happened, as climate and ecological change has set that evolution on a dangerous path. If we don’t more directly intervene in the garden’s evolution, we’re headed for disaster. 

So, a leadership style that can better realise a just transition must handle complexity. A leadership that is less heroic mechanic, more “collaborative gardener”. 

We can think of this leadership as a practice, not a position. It is expressed by anybody seeking to contribute ideas and act together on shared challenges. In this way, leaders are distributed within and throughout the many connections that make up complex systems.

This style of leadership isn’t just about playing the cards you're dealt. Being sensitive to the system you’re operating in opens up opportunities for positive transformation as a direct result of chaos and uncertainty. So, the success of these leaders comes down to their capacity for observing situations as they emerge.

They create the enabling conditions for people to organise around shared problems. 

Their ability to facilitate contrasting areas of expertise can generate new perspectives and solutions. Uncertainty is a defining aspect of their working context, be it political, economic or ecological. Though there are rhythms to their work, the landscape is always changing. 

This is far from a constraint. In fact, their iterative approach to monitoring and taking action means they are able to respond to risks and make the most of opportunities. So they have excellent timing to inspire action at the point when change is most possible.  

Our design process

At Cohort 2040, we are developing a set of tools to help people become collaborative gardeners.

Over the last few months, we’ve been searching the academic literature*, interviewing leadership practitioners and hosting interactive workshops with people seeking to realise rapid emissions reductions. 

From listening to their experience of changing systems, we’ve distilled a few insights into the key skills for emerging leaders (including some of their words). 

1. An understanding of other people

 “...if I was doing it now, I probably would be slightly more trying to get my head into where different people were in the system…”

In the old model, leaders already have their hands on the levers for change: they are the most important people in the room.

However, systems are never static and are difficult to grasp. Amid this uncertainty, one thing is constant: every corner is populated by people.  

Understanding where others are coming from – their values, concerns and motivations – gives you the best possible chance for transforming your corner together. 

It’s easy to think that bombarding people with information on the risks posed by the climate and nature crisis will be enough; “if only they knew what I know, then they’d take action”. But everyone has their own unique ‘risk currency’: their personal understanding of the risks, the importance for their work, and how best to act in response. If you don’t tap into their risk currency, your message won’t land in the way you want and you might feel tempted to give up on them.

By motivating people through their risk currency, they can be better activated in changing the system. As we explored in our last blog, it only takes one part of a system to shift for huge, cascading changes to occur. 

2. Leadership as facilitation

“...the critical skill to be a leader and to be a leader of systems change is actually the facilitative quality [...] because that's how you navigate power and influence…”

At best, traditional leaders can manage a team: that means parcelling out tasks that have already been designed and decided upon.

But the truth is, no individual can enable the transition on their own. 

For all our efforts to be worth more than the sum of their parts, leadership is about facilitating connections and possibilities between people. This can happen across hierarchies. 

Some of the people at our workshops were not senior, but had nonetheless driven hugely valuable change, making connections within and out of their organisation.  

An interactive workshop facilitated by Dr Kris de Meyer, Director of the UCL Climate Action Unit.

3. The ability to question assumptions

“...the constant need to remain agile, particularly given the pace of all of the shifts that we're seeing, this idea of polycrisis and things all coming at us at the same time…”

In the past, it was felt that leaders knew what was best for everybody: the answers were already in play, they just needed to be acted out under proper direction. But transitioning to an equitable, net-zero society requires transformations at every scale. 

If we want the world to be different, we’re going to need to shed lots of our assumptions in the process. 

Our brains are sponges, absorbing the beliefs and behaviours from our surroundings to construct ideas about what’s normal. If we want a different normal, leaders need to be nimble in their perspectives: ready to put aside what’s unhelpful and accept what’s necessary – all at the pace of change.

And the changes we are seeing are horrifying, too vast and complex for any one leader to contextualise, let alone to reassure and motivate us. We don’t need a group of heroic war leaders, but whole communities of caring, empathic people who inspire understanding and action in others.  

4. Resilience is emergent

“...the major determinants of resilience, I think, are whether there's a system around you that supports and puts processes in place that makes it possible for you to go on despite difficult circumstances.”

The traditional leader was a person of unparalleled strength and endurance. It seemed like they stood alone in the face of the storm, propelled forward at any cost by an unwavering belief in their ability to succeed.

A more recent movement around the importance of empathy and mental wellbeing has generated an array of techniques to help individuals nurture personal resilience.

But we’re forgetting that leaders are ordinary people, and everyone has their limits. 

Resilience is determined just as much by a person’s environment as it is their capacity to withstand pressure. Supportive structures and relationships will always do more to boost a person’s resilience than any mindset or meditation.

“The lack of resilience causes people to withdraw also in terms of their views [...] you get into a bit of a doom loop.”

Most importantly, resilience comes from a sense of agency: an understanding of not just what needs doing, but how to do it.

Knowing what actions to take to achieve change rises out of all the skills listed above. It comes from understanding what motivates others; being able to collaborate across silos; facilitating the expertise of those around you; questioning your own assumptions and changing your practice in response. 

Only by practising these skills can a leader understand where to take action in their system. These are the skills that help people to handle complexity, to find their own agency and to adapt to dynamic challenges. 

Next steps in our design process

These (and many, many more) insights are informing our design process. We’re building and testing a set of tools to help people contribute meaningfully to systems change. The failure of traditional leadership to achieve these changes means that present and future leaders need to carry out these transformations even as our systems become more unstable.

In our next blog post, we’ll explore an example of a tool we’re building to help do this, which we’re currently calling our ‘tipping points simulator’. 

We’re working with the Global Systems Institute at Exeter University to model the impacts of a specific climate tipping point (the ‘North Atlantic subpolar gyre’). If triggered, this event could have cascading impacts on our environmental and social systems as soon as the coming decade.

We’ll use the findings to develop a scenario simulator experience to help people explore how to better work with and change systems even in the chaos brought by the tipping event. To make sure that if these events do happen, we have a generation of collaborative gardeners ready to help navigate us to a better future. 

We’ll post more updates soon. But feel free to get in touch if you’d like to learn more.

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* Academia has spent years matching complexity science to various leadership models. Out of this field have sprung a series of toolboxes, containing everything from frameworks for complexity decision-making to methods for leaders to re-evaluate their role within complex adaptive systems.

This blog post is partly inspired by the models of leadership explored by Simon Sharpe in his new book, Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics and Diplomacy of Climate Change. Which you should read.