Leadership by Design; the Praxis of Intention
There seems to be a critical stalemate in place. Many if not most organizations, public and private, large and small, are facing dramatically changed social and economic conditions. Forces for even greater change continue building. This may be a good thing, exciting and full of opportunity, or it can be a bad thing, leading to organizational failure and extinction. Which it will be depends on the presence and intervention of good leadership, an organizational capacity that remains elusive for most organizations.
In addition to the rapid pace of change experienced by organizations, it is also becoming clear that this is an age of customization. This means in addition to delivering customized services or products, every organization must be uniquely formed in response to the particular situation it is in; serving a particular purpose, for and with particular people, utilizing particular resources. It is no longer the case that theorists can provide generalized templates of organizational design that can be applied universally to organizations. It is also no longer true that a successful design for one organization can be replicated successfully in other organizations.
Organizations are challenged to change what they produce, how they produce, why they produce and for whom they produce, goods or services. At the same time they are trying to transform themselves into organizations that can survive and thrive in ever changing and uniquely defined environments. This double challenge requires the organization to have the capacity to be creative and innovative in multiple dimensions. This is not exactly accurate however since an organization is not a separate entity, but infact, people joined in relationships with each other and their technologies. Therefore it is more accurate to state that it is important for people to be organized in such a way as to be able to think and act in alignment with their individual capacities to be both creative and innovative.
Attempts to respond to the need for effective creativity and innovation results most often in frustration and failure. People within organizations and people who consult or theorize about organizations are saying the same thing i.e. studies of and theories about leadership and change are not relevant in application. This is because creativity and innovation are not possible given the present capacities of the people making upan organization: the command and control relationships, habits and norms of behavior, lack of resources including time and ever present fears concomitant with a lack of courage. But, despite all the reasons that it can't happen or isn't happening, there is a consensus that something different needs to happen and happen fast. The change may need to take place with individuals rather than organizations. Attempts to evoke creativity and innovation in organizational settings have been tried in several ways. One of the more common approaches is some variant of the thousands monkeys. The image of a thousand monkeys typing randomly on a thousand typewriters until, by chance, a Stephen King novel emerges (sorry Shakespeare doesn't have the bottom line effect organizations are looking for); is the guiding vision of programs that practice fire-ready-aim approaches to creating the new and novel. There are enough successes by chance that this remains an attractive option for organizations. Put young, fresh eyes together with enough resources and no constraints and something novel is bound to emerge, maybe even something useful.
Some organizations go to other extremes to create a safe place for creative thinking and innovative activity; creating sub-organizations like skunkworks
which are apart from, while still being a part of, an organization. The organizational forces that kill creativity and stop innovation are held at arms length by this slight of hand long enough for new ideas to take shape and change to insinuate itself into the host organization. In the new
economy, creativity is bought and sold as a commodity, rather than as a competence. Small dot-coms create a new product or service and wait to be bought by a larger company as a one-shot deal. Larger dot-coms look around for new products or services that will help them stay competitive. Thus gaining by ownership the advantage of being leading edge without the capacity to be leading edge. I would like to suggest another alternative. That is to create a culture of design within organizations and to create a new leadership competency based on design capacities. Good leaders are designers.
Leadership as a designed outcome is a composition of interactions among human beings who are intentional in their approaches to change. This composition is a rich mix of systemic relationships in alignment with guiding purposes, which makes it distinct in every way from the types of leadership that are vision driven. There are two approaches to vision leadership and related roles that appear to be diametrically opposed to each other, yet both are based on the same category of relationship i.e. hierarchy. The traditional top-down form of leadership, from charismatic to command-and-control, is still popular (at least among such leaders), despite a growing dissatisfaction with power-over relationships. The emerging bottom-up form of leadership is another kind of power-over but in the more democratic form of majority rule. Leadership has been studied extensively concerning whether leadership skills are genetic or acquired and what checklist of skills is required to be a leader. Similar lists of qualities of character and leaderly attributes can be created for both top-down and bottom-up types of leadership.
Leadership as a relationship-based attribute is founded on both systems thinking and design action. The term system, used both as a description of an embodied way of thinking and as a description of the thing which is being thought about, is like the term design; both a verb and a noun. As a noun the Greek origin of the term system is sustema, meaning a composite whole
, while the verb is a derivative of the compound term sunistanai which means to bring together
(sun™ together
+ histanai™ to cause to stand
). Thus a systems thinking approach reflects a desire to know how things are caused to stand together as a composition or whole and how to be an agent in that process. Design is a process of creative thinking and innovative action. Leadership based on systems thinking and design action is thus about how people are caused to stand together through an intentional process of creativity and innovation.
It is interesting that people in organizations often report that their leaders stand in their way or leaders stand over them with threats and cajoling, standing behind them pushing and prodding them in predetermined directions toward the leader's vision. Attempts to humanize leaders ask that they stand in the others shoes as a way to empathize with them so that the measures of control used to direct and motivate them are more acceptable and effective. Leadership is about working together systemically but the protocols defining the relationships from a design perspective based on service is very different from relationships based on hierarchy. Where leaders stand in a design situation is distinctly nonhierarchical neither top down or bottom up.
Where one stands in relationship to other people in a leadership relationship is important both abstractly and concretely. In relationships where people stand or sit across from one another conceptually, as in positional seating arrangements of typical organizational meetings for instance, there is an impulse to confront rather than cooperate. People are encouraged to look in one another's eyes as part of a face-down or part of a face-off in place of facing forward. This may be appropriate when the intended outcome of the meeting is a solution to a problematic situation, but it is not a successful strategy abstractly or concretely, when the desired outcome is dependant on creativity and innovation. Standing or sitting in front of someone blocks their view and yours as well. Design teams are formed by individuals standing next to one another confronting thesame opportunity, looking in the same direction at a horizon of possibilities. Design communication takes on a different quality when the dialogue is with someone - looking into the same unknown as you are - rather than in a face-to-face exchange of data or information.
People want leadership to emerge when leaders stand by them, stand with them, stand up for them, stand beside them, stand for something of worth and consequence. They want leaders that can take a stand against habits of manipulation and self serving interests that compromise the potency of outcomes. Outcomes that are not only novel, but are improvements in the quality of life of everyone involved. People on design teams in organizations stand together when leaders take a stand to serve the best intentions of the team members and those being served, as part of the design contract with clients, customers and end users. This is true whether the client is the organization itself, or is external to the organization.
Leaders are designers working in a mutual relationship of service with clients, stake holders, decision makers, customers, end users, and producers. Leaders as designers do need to have design competencies but these are different in quality from the typical check list of attributes needed for hierarchical authority - charismatic or egalitarian. The designerly stand, as a leadership role, is based on foundations and fundamentals particular to the design tradition. Leadership from this design perspective can be defined as the quality of creativity and innovation aligned through the intentionality of a design contract. The contract is a service contract- to stand on one's own on behalf of another.