Salt and Light Leaders’ Conference
Session 1
What is the cultural background to the
prevalent model of leadership and what are
some new metaphors for leadership today?
Traditional Worldview:
the Enlightenment
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Rational
Logical
Scientific
Linear
Newtonian/ Mechanistic
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Cause and effect
Control and Prediction
Competition
Reduction
Objectivity
One right Answer
Certainty
Applications
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Medicine
Psychotherapy
Organisations
Marketplace
Church?
New Metaphors for Organisations
Solvay Conference 1927
New Metaphors: Einstein
• Wave/particle duality
• What if both are right?
• Einstein held up the paradox – the Principle of
Complementarity
• Choosing one means losing the potential of
the other
• Diversity and unity, not uniformity
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
• Electrons: particles or waves?
• When measuring location, it’s a particle
• When measuring speed,
it’s a wave
• Both are right
• Our observation matters
• You find what you’re
looking for
Fractals: Benoit Mandelbrot
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Deeply patterned objects
The shape of the whole is in the parts
Self-similarity on different levels of scale
Patterns not measurement
Influence not force
Want culture change?
You change…
Meg Wheatley
• Not survival of the fittest, or natural selection,
but adaptation by a species
• Life collaborates with life – no competition.
We can all play our part in the ecology of
church
• Change that appears negative may not be so –
a new beach after the hurricane
• Organisations – churches - are living systems
Organic/ Quantum
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Non-locality: influence not force
Experimentation, not control and prediction
Co-operation and co-dependence
Holism, not reductionism
Participation, not objective observation
Millions of right answers, not just one
Uncertainty
Leadership Mindsets
• Change is a nuisance
• Change is life
• Grand plan
• Local initiatives
• Homogenous policy – one size fits all
• Heterogeneous policy
Leadership Mindsets
• Equilibrium desired
• Equilibrium is short-lived
• Managing outcomes
• Managing mindsets
• Directed strategy
• Emergent strategy
Leadership Mindsets
• Top down managed
• Propagation
• Pre-specified success
• Post-specified success
• Single decision
• Iterative process
Leadership Mindsets
• Prediction
• Surprise
• Engineered change
• Cultivated change
• Designed identity
• Autopoeisis
Summary
• Old metaphors for organisation – mechanistic
• New metaphors from quantum physics –
organic
• Wave/particle duality – both are right
• Heisenberg – we find what we’re looking for
• Fractals – influence not force
• Living Systems – collaboration not competition
• Leadership mindsets – old and new