Leaders Leadering: Problem & Solution
The perils and ethical implications of bringing an institution to an ecosystem fight
For many people…
The most impactful thing a leader will ever do won’t be enabling them to be their most productive selves in the achievement of institutional (or even personal) goals. It will be protecting them from the institution which that leader represents.
Put another way, the most important act of leadership might be better framed an act of intervention rather than enablement. And that intervention could in many instances be enabling, but it also might be clearly contrary to the goals of the institution rather than in pursuit of them.
A few years ago, I gave a talk at TEDx Hickam AFB about the necessity for values-driven interdiction to manage the inevitable incursion of the unpredicted and unpredictable when we put mechanistic (e.g. institutional) systems in interaction with complex systems (e.g. people, communities, environment). My thinking on this topic has progressed significantly in the meantime, but I put a lot of work into writing and giving this talk, so if you wanna watch it, here you go:
Here are two strong opinions that I hold:
The failure to interdict when an institutional system harms people, disrupts belonging, or impedes thriving is a failure of leadership.
The failure to engage in practices that would reveal when interdiction is necessary is a failure of leadership.
Leadership is often framed as something one succeeds or fails at insofar as they enable the institution to achieve its stated ends. This is a key aspect of the role-definition through which a leader is legible and accountable to the institution. Consequentially, the mechanisms of selection and performance-management the institution employs consistently drive those designated leaders to fail in the two ways I’ve described above (fail to sense and fail to interdict).
We should know that to the system and to anyone sufficiently socialized and compelled to internalize its way of seeing the world, the sensing/sensemaking and interdiction I’m talking about are likely to present as a threat. In circumstances that warrant intervention/interdiction, through a purely institutional lens, the best leader may look like they are failing at their only job.
In previous writings, I have explored the differing dynamical aspects of roles versus relationships in social systems. Institutions have a tendency to pretend that there’s just one thing going on1—reality as depicted by the simplistic models underlying the institutional operating system. Per the institutional view, there is only one social system, a model whose primary logic is role-based, and from agentic roles “relationships” are to be derived. The institution affects those relationships through performance-management and other ordered-system mechanisms. Those who see purely through the institutional lens are prone to employing only institutional means (those legible to and coherent with its models) to create effects.
But one of the most important things we can learn from complexity theory is that such approaches—those that attempt to reduce reality to legible, ordered systems—do not equip us to operate within complexity (the reality that extends in defiance of those models). I think I did an ok job of describing why in this introduction to the Cynefin framework:
Contrary to what institutional-thinking might depict, there is decidedly not just one, big, complicated thing going on. Within any institutional context are many systems, nested, proximal, eddying, ambiguous, combining, disappearing, dynamic and changing, and many of the things that are going on are not reducible and will therefore never be legible through an institutional lens.
I often repeat the classic complexity-theory adage:
In ordered systems, what matters most is the roles of elements, while in complex systems what matters most is the relationship between elements.
To illustrate, consider that the designation of “leader” is far more relationship-driven than role-driven. In every organization I have belonged to, leaders have frequently emerged where roles would dictate otherwise. Those granted no institutional power gain influence and demonstrate qualities and effective leadership impact, acting as catalysts and caretakers for those they are connected to, through relationships alone. By contrast, those granted institutional power frequently fail to demonstrate effective leadership, despite their best efforts. They pull the institutional levers set before them (e.g. positive/negative incentive or policy) with sometimes no effect, sometimes paradoxical, often unexpected and even harmful effect. They have a hammer, and therefore everything looks like a nail. Leaders’ institutionally-constrained responses to a problem often prove more damaging than the original problem did. In many cases, it would be better to have done nothing at all, as dynamical effects in complexity can have a naturally limited lifecycle without intervention; but of course institutional socialization, social enforcement, and control compel leaders to assertively employ their limited toolkit with gusto. They are judged first and foremost on responsiveness—whether they engaged in prescribed procedures indicated by the myopic institution. Bad actions get more points than no actions. An action taken with institutionally legible justification is accepted, no matter the impact (complexity becomes an excuse rather than the operant paradigm). Whereas failure to take action is simply seen as failure.
The relational aspect of leadership is in some contexts widely recognized. A clear example is in how change-management often advocates employing influencers within the ranks—those who already wield social power—to achieve institutional ends. In an organization that recognizes the relational drivers of leadership, the demonstration of influence or capacity to earn the trust of those around you might become a systematized aspect of performance management and promotion, a well-meaning measure to ensure that those granted institutional power also wield the power of influence. Complexity thinking is subordinated to institutional paradigms. This might seem a logical way of aligning the institutional with the complex, but there are mighty forces at work to ensure that those with institutional power are constrained to the institutional lens, rendering their efforts futile.
Even the most competent individual, as they are promoted to roles of greater institutional power, faces increasing constraints on their capacity to apply complexity-coherent approaches to individuals and the social systems that they occupy. A direct supervisor can make sense of their subordinates’ situation and needs through continuous direct interaction, but a squadron superintendent is left to spend most of their time viewing the organization through dashboards and spreadsheets—each individual isolated and reduced to 2-dimensional indicators of “performance” or “readiness” rather than complex beings deeply entangled in socio-relational context and environment. But even the role of direct supervisor within a unit is highly constrained. Front-line supervisors face enormous pressure from those above them to operate as though the system were ordered even when it makes absolutely no sense to do so.
Here’s an example that feels illustrative…
In the Air Force (and other military branches), we have the “sick call” system for people who think they can’t or shouldn’t go to work due to illness. For most of my career, when I woke up sick enough to think I should maybe stay home in bed (or even just work from home), I was expected to shave, get in uniform, travel to the base clinic for designated sick-call hours, and get a whole-ass doctor to tell me if I had a cold or flu. If I was deemed actually sick (as opposed to lying I guess) and placed on quarters, people and systems would lurch into sluggish action to make my very real lived experience legible to the institution. The inefficiency, dehumanization, and discomfort of this experience is… impressive, especially when you realize just how much knowledge a person needs to make the medical determination at play here. I have always considered the whole approach to be a stupid institutionalization of what ought to be a humane and efficient triage process. In I think most cases, a person should be able to say for themselves whether they are well enough to go to work, and whether they are sick enough to require professional medical intervention.
For relational reasons, I can’t help but believe that I am a far better judge of whether my subordinate is lying about the symptoms of mild, contagious seasonal illnesses than a doctor is. Most seasonal afflictions are diagnosed primarily through declared symptoms and the sharing of subjective experience, and a person can feel pretty rotten (and be contagious to those around them) without presenting much in the way of empirically determinable or “provable” symptoms. The doctor kinda just has to decide if they believe you about your sore throat and achy muscle. Every time I traveled miserably to sick call without conveniently visible bleeding face ulcers, I just had to pray the doc would believe me when I described how I felt. In most of my encounters they have, but most of the time I’ve also had the nagging feeling that this could have been no more than a quick phone call with my supervisor.
You know who is going to be the most reliable authority on whether my subordinate is lying about having a miserable, if minor, cold? It’s me. I know them, because I interact with them. You know who is the best judge of whether their presence at work on a given day is a must-have or a nice-to-have for mission outcomes, and what aspects of their work they could easily accomplish from home? Also me.
For the record, I also consider children requiring doctor’s notes to be excused from school idiotic. The most logical point of triage for minor illnesses in this case is a child’s parent, not a doctor. And parents already have the responsibility of determining when it’s time to involve the medical establishment.
The approach I tend to take when it comes to minor illnesses (below a threshold of severity) is to believe the people under my care (extending trust is trust-building), offer them affordances that maximize their wellness and well-being, protect others in the workplace as much as I can from unnecessary exposure to contagious viruses, and measure these values against the demands of the mission and how the rest of us can flex to accommodate absences. I modulate response on the basis of information made available to me through the relationships between me, those in my care, and the institutional systems we are accountable to. I’m pretty familiar with cold and flu symptoms at this point. Of all of these sensemaking factors, a whole-ass doctor performs better than me at maybe one of them (the recognizing colds and flus thing), and even that is up for debate.
A reasonable person could likely make the case that we ought to include doctors in all of this. Luckily, these days, we’re moving away from the rigid, systematic in-person approach due to improved interfaces between patients and doctors. My point is to illustrate how what ought to be a complex, individualized sensemaking process utilizing and taking into account relational factors and effects is stilted and rendered even harmful at times by forces of institutional systematization.
As I attempted to flesh out this example, I had to recognize that the institutional systematization of the sick-leave process might in some cases exist to serve the well-being of the sick individual, granting medical professionals the authority to veto overly stoicized and institutionalized leaders, and constrain them from the failure to set aside institutional goals to give their sick subordinates a humane break. This also makes sense, given some of the values I’ve known leaders to hold (forcibly imposed stoicism is abuse), and it helps to illustrate the complexity at work here. Causes and effects, even within the institutional sickness-verifying system, are not clearly legible.
As examples:
Rather than enabling illness-based excusal from work, the system acts as a deterrent for self-care and is therefore a driver of the phenomenon of everyone within a workplace continuing to show up and the whole team getting every seasonal illness at least once per season. I have personally gone to work sick countless times because of the unknowable threshold for excusal and my anxiety over perception-management.
The hesitation to believe someone when they say they are sick enough is a constraint on the relationship between a leader and a subordinate. Even deferring to such a system, when modes of care like telehealth, nurse-advice lines for servicemembers, and supervisor-granted day passes exist, has a strong effect on the relationship between leaders and those in their care. When someone asks someone with institutional power “can you please allow me to not be productive today?” and that leader offloads the determination of whether sympathy or the weighing of quality-of-life over institutional goals is actually warranted to some medical rando (who might also be an asshole), their action/inaction constrains the relationship, which is part of the complex relational system of the organization which institutional lenses are incapable of capturing.
Being redirected from a personal sensemaking process to an impersonal system is a strong driver of alienation.
When I say that failure to sense and interdict when institutions harm individuals is a failure of leadership, it is rooted in the idea that, even though the institution intends only to grant a leader power within the confines of that limited, ordered, institutional system, with roles defined legibly and logically (e.g. supervisors don’t deal with anything approaching the domain of medicine) institutional power places a person in a position of outsized influence over more than merely their institutional niche. All of those overlapping complex systems that exist within and around the institution become systems over which a leader exerts power. Their choices directly impact those systems, and to ignore such influence is a failure.
Leaders, granted institutional power, become unwitting stewards of the many complex systems in interaction with and affected by that institution.
The institution is like a factory, plopped down in the middle of a thronging, churning wetland. Its concrete corridors become pathways for water and myriad teeming organisms. Its office carpets serve as substrate for seedlings. Climbing its non-porous walls are flora that struggle for purchase and starve for sunlight. Through a purely institutional lens, these hallways and ceilings might appear clean and sanitized. It is only when we take a complex, multi-systemic, multi-domain lens that these messy, dynamic, substantive and deeply impactful realities come into view.
Consider individual thriving. How the constraints of an institution might affect any one person or their family, how it might interact with their personal needs, desires, goals, etc… these are things that can only be known through complex and thorough interaction with the individual. Thriving is a concept too complex to be legible to institutions. Aspects and drivers of thriving, like belonging, can only really be discerned and stewarded by sense-making, ways-finding, listening, feeling, and trying. This should be apparent, and yet it is apparent to me that many leaders feel unequipped to appreciate their agency and importance in this domain, despite them being the only ones with sufficient power to stand in the way of the rigid confines and constraints of the institution when thriving, belonging, or even psychological survival are at threat (see that TEDx linked above for more on this point).
Another example of institutionally illegible systems would be the complex, relational social systems within teams and institutions, driven by relational dynamics that extend well beyond those accounted for by institutional role-definition. These relationships are a crucial part of both productivity and individual thriving, being drivers or constraints of trust, collaboration, and safety on a team.
I hate to break it to you, but friendship and enmity are dominant drivers of what goes on within any team or institution. Affinity and even friendship is a powerful force with positive and negative institutional impact. I have seen interpersonal alienation and even enmity completely halt forward progress (while harming the social system and those within it) countless times in my career.
And then of course the belligerent lumbering behemoth of the institution is basically perpetually crashing through the undergrowth and disrupting what ought to be carefully stewarded and nurtured systems of relationality and interconnection. To the same degree that a leader can be the institution’s most important enabling asset, they can be the enabler of a system that imposes violent disruption of that which would enable thriving.
When we make it our business to serve as the habitat in which individuals will spend 40-80 hours a week for much of their lives, we sure as hell better accept the multi-faceted responsibility we’re taking on for their well-being.
All Flourishing is Mutual
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
I have faced these tensions a great deal in my career, both as the individual requiring leaders’ intervention and as the leader caught between the institution’s view of the world and the world as I actually know it to be. I have made it my project to advocate for better approaches to how we as individuals operate within the institutional and military context, for the sake of goals but also for the sake of life as it is lived and experienced moment to moment, because mere accomplishment does not make a life well-lived.
In this essay, I tried to make the case that those privileged with institutional power have an ethical obligation to sense and intervene with an eye for complex systems dynamics, regardless what the institution might lead them to believe. I am of the view that one of the most important things that we should be teaching leaders is to be competent in these tasks of sensing and intervention on behalf of individuals caught in the gears of the great machines which they operate, because as I said at the beginning, it is likely to be the most important and impactful thing one ever does as a leader.
This is a remix of a quote from “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow: “Social Theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there's just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. as a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous...”
Final thought: I wonder what a mayor of a small town could/should make of your essay...
Also, side note: your use of 'legible' reminds me of Scott's Seeing Like a State. If you haven't read it, I think you'd appreciate it!