Leadership at the Edge of Systems

This article is a reprint from its original source

Here’s a brutal truth: every system is perfectly designed to get the results it produces. That school district that talks about equity while its policies widen achievement gaps? Working as designed. The company that preaches work-life balance while rewarding 70-hour weeks? Also working as designed.

These aren’t accidents or failures of execution. They’re features, not bugs.

We can preach all we want about showing up as a visionary leader with a promise of a better tomorrow. But without truly understanding a) Your part in the mess, and b) the system’s design of the mess, you have no firm ground to stand on. Worse off, you do not even have a roadmap of where the root cause(s) are located!

What does this have to do with leadership? Simple: it actually defines what leadership really is! It is mobilizing people to confront a reality they would rather avoid, not selling and executing on a vision.

Therefore, real leadership means calling out the gap between the system’s espoused intention and the current design’s actions.

Mind you, this is not an exercise of assigning blame. It is usually not one manager’s fault, or a single department’s fault, et. al. Rather, the act of leadership in calling out the uncomfortable reality is to help people see the invisible forces shaping their daily reality.

When you can show a team how their own well-intentioned policies create the exact problems they’re trying to solve, something shifts. Thus, the conversation moves from “Who screwed up?” to “What’s actually happening here?” It’s quite powerful (though that process of shifting the understanding in the room is far less simple than this article may be making it seem).

This is where systems thinking becomes a terrific backdrop of the activity of leadership. Instead of getting trapped in the endless cycle of blame and quick fixes, you start seeing patterns. The feedback loops that keep problems alive. The structures that make smart people do counterproductive things. The unwritten rules that seem to always override the written ones.

When you help people see these dynamics, three things happen:

Shared reality emerges. Everyone stops pretending the emperor has clothes and starts dealing with what’s actually in front of them.

Perspective expands. People realize that the person they’ve been blaming is probably just responding rationally to a broken system.

Ownership spreads. When people understand their role in maintaining the status quo, they can also see their power to change it.

System’s thinking almost feels like learning a new language. It certainly has a learning curve, especially for us Westerners in the globe who have a language that is engrained in linear thinking.

But once you start seeing systems more clearly, you can’t unsee them. You become responsible for what you know. At that point, it becomes somewhat (maybe more so) of an obligation to exhibit leadership to change the current reality of the system.

Final Thoughts

Leadership isn’t about moving people toward a vision. It’s about helping them confront reality as it is, not as they wish it were. Systems thinking is a tool/language/new sense & meaning making filter in which to help exhibit more effective leadership. Together, they provide the necessary ingredients for catalyzing meaningful change.

Everything else out there on leadership seems like inspiration-fueled dopamine rushes, with no true sense of what the problems or challenges really are.