15: Leadership Challenges from the Edge of Experience in the Global Crisis Context

Diverse global crisis contexts create emergent disruptions and changes that challenge leadership in novel and unexpected ways. The pressures and forces unleased by the interconnectivity and ambiguity of these crises can overwhelm traditional institutional problem-solving and set in chain further crisis events that can result in fragmentation across societies. The emergent problems associated with crises can challenge the capacity of leadership to leverage the required surge capacity across state, institutional and organizational boundaries. In crisis contexts, leadership operates at the edge of known experience where problems are novel, intricate, and interconnected.

Leadership at the edge of experience is about responding to these emergent contexts by working with coalitions to adapt and pursue viable action that achieves a coherent response. The failure of traditional approaches in making sense of complex inter-connected problems can be found in the say-do gap (i.e., the discrepancy between words, or policy, and action, or outcomes).