Frameworks for Strategic Leadership

I suggest two frameworks that may improve understanding of strategic thinking, strategic decision making, and strategic leadership. The first I call the Epistemology Framework. The second which was described and continues to be promoted by David Snowdon and colleagues is the Cynefin Framework

Managing in Uncertainty : Complexity and the paradoxes of everyday organizational life

© 2015 Chris Mowles. All rights reserved.The reality of everyday organizational life is that it is filled with uncertainty, contradictions and paradoxes. Yet leaders and managers are expected to act as though they can predict the future and bring about the impossible: that they can transform themselves and their colleagues, design different cultures, choose the values for their organization, be innovative, control conflict and have inspiring visions. Whilst managers will have had lots of experiences of being in charge, they probably realise that they are not always in control. So how might we frame a much more realistic account of what’s possible for managers to achieve? Many managers are implicitly aware of their messy reality, but they rarely spend much time reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing. Drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, process sociology and pragmatic philosophy, Chris Mowles engages directly with some principal contradictions of organizational life concerning innovation, culture change, conflict and leadership. Mowles argues that if managers proceed from the expectation that organizational life as inherently uncertain, and interactions between people are complex and often paradoxical, they start noticing different things and create possibilities for acting in different ways. Managing in Uncertainty will be of interest to practitioners, advanced students and researchers looking at management and organizational studies from a critical perspective

Meaning Management: A Framework for Leadership Ontology

Leadership is a multifaceted and complex subject of research and demands a sound ontological stance that guides studies for the development of more integrative leadership theories. In this paper, I propose the leadership ontology PVA (perception formation – value creation – achievement realization) and associate it with the two existing leadership ontologies: TRIPOD (leader – member – shared goals) and DAC (direction – alignment – commitment). The leadership ontology PVA, based on a new theory called “meaning management,” consists of three circularly supporting functions: cognitive function to form perception, creative function to generate value, and communicative function to realize higher levels of achievement. The PVA is an epistemology-laden ontology since the meaning management theory allows one to make propositions that explicitly link its three functions with the leadership outcomes: perception, value, and achievement. Moreover, the PVA leadership ontology transcends and includes both the conventional TRIPOD ontology and the DAC ontology

Understanding Leadership in Public Collaborative Context

The paper aims to contribute to theory on collaboration through problematizing and exploring the complexity that characterizes leadership in collaborative contexts and to provide some generative conceptualizations to inform future empirical and conceptual development. It draws on a substantial review of leadership theory relevant to the context of public sector collaboration and provides examples from empirical research on collaboration over the last two decades in the UK and US respectively. It does so by identifying and developing key characteristics of the context, the nature of leadership in relation to context, and leadership agency pertaining to actors who actually make a difference in the process and outcomes of collaboration

Inclusive leadership : realizing positive outcomes through belongingness and being valued for uniqueness

We introduce a theoretically-grounded conceptualization of inclusive leadership and present a framework for understanding factors that contribute to and follow from inclusive leadership within work groups. We conceptualize inclusive leadership as a set of positive leader behaviors that facilitate group members perceiving belongingness in the work group while maintaining their uniqueness within the group as they fully contribute to group processes and outcomes. We propose that leader pro-diversity beliefs, humility, and cognitive complexity increase the propensity of inclusive leader behaviors. We identify five categories of inclusive leadership behaviors that facilitate group members' perceptions of inclusion, which in turn lead to member work group identification, psychological empowerment, and behavioral outcomes (creativity, job performance, and reduced turnover) in the pursuit of group goals. This framework provides theoretical grounding for the construct of inclusive leadership while advancing our understanding of how leaders can increase diverse work group effectiveness

Take a walk on the wild side: Exploring, identifying, and developing consultancy expertise with elite performance team leaders

Objectives: Stemming from sport psychology’s recent shift to examine the effective management of elite sports team organizations, the extensive, significant, and complex challenges faced by those with responsibility for team performance have been emphasized. Recognizing that most work in this budding area has been theoretical in nature, our contribution to this special issue consequently identifies and critically evaluates some implications for excellence in practitioners who support leaders of elite sport performance teams. Method: Narrative review and commentary. Results and Conclusions: To survive and succeed, leaders of elite teams must: (a) negotiate complex and contested socio-political dynamics both within and outside their performance department; (b) make impactful and consistent real-time decisions; and (c) continually reinforce and protect their programme. To provide an optimally impactful and valued service, sport psychologists must therefore be able to advise on a broad and politically-astute leadership style and, most critically for consultancy excellence: (a) work within a professional judgment and decision making model; (b) facilitate the leader’s adaptive expertise and nested decision making; and (c) operate a proactive, forthright, and straight approach to ethical considerations. Based on these implications, we conclude by providing suggestions for the training and development of applied consultants

Use of Research Evidence: Social Services Portfolio

The William T. Grant Foundation intends that the emerging research evidence from its Use of Research Evidence (URE) portfolio be useful to those engaged in these (and other) diverse efforts. But broad and meaningful use of research evidence will require conversations that extend beyond researchers and expert forums. Indeed, URE findings suggest that policymakers and practitioners should not be viewed simply as "end users" of research evidence. To provide insight into how URE studies and the resulting evidence could be most relevant and useful to them, policymakers and practitioners at all levels in the social services system must have a voice in these conversations. This paper is intended to foster and inform dialogue among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners by reflecting on the Foundation's social services URE portfolio from the perspective of policy and practice and by identifying potential opportunities for the next generation of studies and considerations for those undertaking that work

Overcoming Roadblocks to Learning

{Excerpt} The gulf between the ideal type of a learning organization and the state of affairs in typical bilateral and multilateral development agencies remains huge. Defining roadblocks, however numerous they may be, is half the battle to removing them—it might make them part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Organizational learning is collective learning by individuals, and the fundamental phenomena of individual learning apply to organizations. However, organizational learning has distinctive characteristics concerning what is learned, how it is learned, and the adjustments needed to enhance learning. These owe to the fact that an organization is, by general definition, a collective whose individual constituents work to achieve a common goal from discrete operating and supporting units. Practices bring different perspectives and cultures to bear and shape data, information, and knowledge flows. Political considerations are the most serious impediment to becoming a learning organization. However, by understanding more fully what obstacles to learning can exist in a complex organization in a complex environment, one can circumscribe the problem space and create enabling environments for a more positive future. Such environments would facilitate self-organization, exploration of the space of possibilities, generative feedback, emergence, and coevolution.They would create an explanatory framework and facilitate action

The ecology of wisdom

This is the first of two papers concerning wisdom as an ecosystem appearing in sequential editions of Management & Marketing journal. The notion of wisdom as an ecosystem, or “the wisdom ecology,” builds on work by Hays (2007) who first identified wisdom as an organisational construct and proposed a dynamic model of it. The centrepiece of this paper and the companion part to follow is a relationship map of the wisdom ecosystem (the Causal Loop Diagram at Figure 1). This first instalment provides background on wisdom and complex adaptive systems, and introduces the wisdom ecosystem model. The second instalment, “Mapping Wisdom as a Complex Adaptive System,” appearing in the next edition of Management & Marketing, explains systems dynamics modelling and discusses the wisdom ecosystem model in detail. It covers the four domains, or subsystems, of the wisdom ecosystem, Dialogue, Communal Mind, Collective Intelligence, and Wisdom, and walks readers through the model, exploring each of its 24 elements in turn. That second paper examines the relationships amongst system elements and illuminates important aspects of systems function.causal loop diagramming, complexity, dialogue, organisational learning, systems dynamics, wisdom.

COMPLEXITY * SIMPLICITY * SIMPLEXITY

“In the midst of order, there is chaos; but in the midst of chaos, there is order”, John Gribbin wrote in his book Deep Simplicity (p.76). In this dialectical spirit, we discuss the generative tension between complexity and simplicity in the theory and practice of management and organization. Complexity theory suggests that the relationship between complex environments and complex organizations advanced by the well-known Ashby’s law, may be reconsidered: only simple organization provides enough space for individual agency to match environmental turbulence in the form of complex organizational responses. We suggest that complex organizing may be paradoxically facilitated by a simple infrastructure, and that the theory of organizations may be viewed as resulting from the interplay between simplicity and complexity. JEL codes: