There are a growing number of nonprofits unafraid to tackle wicked social problems—the seemingly intractable, large one. These organizations are seeing interconnections between social problems, such as the relationship between health, insecure housing, and education, or the relationship between the environment and poverty.
Wicked problems are complex problems, and resolving complex problems will happen with complex adaptive networks that embrace ambiguity, the value of all participants, and finding many possible solutions at the margins. Working with many hands, hearts, and heads requires flexibility, and the willingness to learn from each other, especially those in the weeds of the problems. Continuous learning can occur when the mission and vision are kept in mind to lead strategic thinking, not when we get lost in the more simplistic, reductionist use of strategy.
A traditional hierarchical model of leadership can be unproductive, even detrimental, in the highly dynamic and multi-networked environments in which many 21st-century nonprofits operate or are learning to operate. Changing social conditions can't happen by using the same techniques them in the first place. As more and more organizations recognize the complexity of the environments in which they operate, they understand that few individuals possess the leadership dimensions needed in highly-dynamic, highly-networked systems. To effectively function in such systems, participants must be willing to, and often must learn how to, share leadership. The concept expressed by Lichtenstein, Uhl-Bien, Marion, Seers, Orton and Schreiber (2006) as leadership resting in the interactions between parties--not leadership resting within individuals—is intriguing. It changes how we think of leadership in complexity.
Complex adaptive systems survive through creative change. Leadership in complexity includes disruption as a necessary component. Becoming comfortable with ambiguity will make us better leaders, and make leadership more participative. Often, disruptive efforts can embolden the disenfranchised to take to forms of advocacy. Life--and politics--is not binary. Uncertainty opens up many new possibilities.
Perhaps a first step is to stop listening to consultants who swoop in with traditional recommendations intended for the business sector and which often do not fit the real needs of nonprofit organizations or its community, and then go away. As parts of highly-dynamic networks, it is more effective to work with long-term advisors, mentors, and coaches. Developmental evaluation has proven to be effective in many communities. Wherever we start, we must take the time to reflect about what is and what is not working, to help us improve our representation and our leadership development.
A learning organization loops back into evaluation, tweaking, adjusting programs or creating new programs. It takes a unique kind of leadership for this type of systems thinking, a kind of leadership for which very few are being trained. The leadership shortfall the nonprofit sector faces is not in numbers of potential leaders, but in potential leaders prepared to deal with the increased complexity of social concerns.
The underlying theme in our recommendations is systems thinking. Effective leadership in complex adaptive systems include adaptiveness, coevolution (affecting the environment while adapting to it), and positive disruption. Effective leadership means change, but taking the initiative on change, not merely responding to it as it happens.
What we care about—a more just world, air and water we can safely breathe and drink, communities designed for everyone, civility and decency, caring across differences, human and civil rights, respect for science and art, and perhaps most of all, the sense of collective responsibility that is the core of every healthy, functioning human society—is not all that unrealistic. We are simply being called to live our values.
As values keepers, as stewards of slices of the commons, we are called to be liberators, sages sowing a different kind of populism, one that, at its heart, remembers that we are all, truly and forever, in this together.
For more information:
Collinson, D. (2011). Critical leadership studies. The SAGE handbook of leadership, 181-194.
Grace, G. E. R. A. L. D. (1997). Critical leadership studies. Buckingham: Open University Press.