Chapter 7: Essential Reins for Guiding Complex Organizations¹

Informed by the complexity perspective, this chapter argues that effective leadership in today’s complex organizations recognizes that structures which appear to be stable and predictable are in reality malleable and ever-changing. It takes a broad view of the design school model and considers leadership to be a design-in-action process that is enacted through others in response to uncertainty and changing circumstances. Complexity leadership continually enables the emergence of new structure by evolving and reinforcing recognizable and useful practices that can temporarily stabilize routine interactions. At the same time, it challenges and sometimes erases stale processes that resist or hinder change. To further specify this process, the chapter identifies three categorical dualities that frame how events are represented or described within the workgroup. Effective leadership, it argues, influences the choices and actions of others by shaping the perception of events in the context of the six poles of these dualities. By doing so, it limits or expands what is perceived to be possible and at the same time defines and clarifies what is expected. The chapter describes how leaders tend the reins that guide collective performance along six essential complex organizing functions by alternatively tugging and loosening the constraints on thinking and action that are implied by the poles of each duality.