Complexity Is Not the End of Leadership: It Is Its New Touchstone

The key is no longer to optimize behavior, but to help shape the systems and values that give rise to behavior in the first place.

Leadership is (shared) structural and value work
BANI is the new conference buzzword: the world is brittle, non-linear, and to many incomprehensible because old certainties are eroding. This insight contrasts with leadership images that seem out of step with the times. From a scientific perspective, leadership is still thought of as a regression model: a mostly heroic leader, trained in a leadership style that is slightly adapted depending on the crisis situation and is supposed to inspire employees, usually to greater productivity, rarely to greater creativity (as shown by Gallup surveys, which indicate an increase in micromanagement). In other words, a model based on strength rather than fragility, linearity rather than emergence, and predictability rather than uncertainty. And one that continues to treat the organization, where life and complexity actually rage, as a black box. Today, we measure more than ever, and yet we often see less.

But what should leadership look like if we really want to break away from this mechanistic and purely “what counts is counting” thinking? At least two fundamental shifts are necessary.

Firstly: Leadership is structural work
We must seriously address the question of how we know what we know. If we only look at the surface, our interventions will be as shallow. Because reality only becomes apparent when we take underlying patterns, rules, and conditions seriously. Leadership cannot be separated from reality; it takes place in social systems, in companies, which in turn are embedded in society. This limits our options for action, because structures, values, narratives, and other actors always play a role, and results can never be predicted with complete accuracy. Anyone who wants to make a difference here must therefore work on the system. Those who change incentive systems or share decision-making power achieve more than those who believe they can move mountains through personal charisma. Ultimately, leadership is not about optimizing individual variables but about shaping the conditions that make the future possible in the first place.

Secondly, leadership is about values
Organizations are bustling with life, and whilst economic efficiency is important, it is only one value among many. Different lifestyles and interests collide: employees, customers, owners, communities, suppliers, real stakeholders with real demands. We can ignore this diversity of values, but only at our own risk. Especially in a BANI world, we should open our eyes wide and perceive which values attract us and how they frame our imagination. Attention is never neutral here, we become what we focus our attention on. This diversity of values inevitably gives rise to normative tensions, and this is precisely where leadership comes into play: through reasoning evaluation. Leadership is value work, in that we assess what is possible, desirable, and the responsible thing to do here and now in a specific context, not by simply calculating. In the end, it takes judgment, not Excel.

Take-away:
Leadership does not work through appeals, but through working on the system and making judgments. We shape the future by setting possibilities and priorities.

Conclusion
This is precisely where our executive education program CAS HSG Strategic Human Resource Management comes in: not with additional tools, but with the ability to design systems and make decisions that make the future possible. Learn more about our exclusive program and register for the online information session on November 27 at 12:15..