System Leadership and Community Development

Stanford Social Innovation Review (Winter 2015) <p>An article titled “The Dawn of System Leadership” was recently published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton, and John Kania and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in community development. While the notion of system leadership is not new—it is getting at similar ideas that others have called collaborative, integrative, boundary-spanning, adaptive or catalytic leadership—I believe the emphasis on “systems” thinking, change, and leadership is very helpful, and their short article does a great job of distilling down a lot of learning into a few key points that I’d like to summarize here.</p> <p></p> <p>The authors speak in terms of a “search for a new type of leadership” that seeks to “catalyze and guide systemic change at a scale commensurate with the scale of the problems we face.” System leaders work at the system-level, which is why this term might be better than “collaborative” leadership, because collaboration can and does occur on more micro-scales, below the system-level. Senge and his colleagues find that true system leaders develop three “core capabilities…in order to foster collective leadership.” These leaders can “see the larger system” and help others set it. They foster “reflection and more generative conversations” among system stakeholders. And they shift “collective focus from reactive problem solving to co-creating the future.” In other words, they help stakeholders think strategically and work toward system governance as opposed to staying in problem-solving mode.</p> <p>The article also talks about how people “grow as system leaders” and discusses helpful tools [...]</p>