National Stakeholder Forum on SDGs mean business
Leadership in Complex Systems
This approach is for:
- Leaders in public sector or cross-agency roles facing contradictory mandates and distributed authority
- Experiencing the personal costs of resisting generic approaches while experiencing the difficulty of articulating alternatives
- Sensing patterns in institutional responses but struggling to see them from within
- Leading in climate, biodiversity, and ESG contexts where problems are coupled, and agency is fluid
- Navigating criticism for not providing the clarity and certainty others expect
What this involves:
Developing meta-cognitive capacity to see yourself as part of the field you’re in, not separate from it. This means noticing the patterns and affordances within your specific context, recognising how institutional architecture shapes what’s possible, and understanding where agency actually sits rather than where it’s supposed to sit.
This often takes the form of group work. Not group coaching toward predetermined leadership competencies, but cultivating the ability to navigate contexts that resist conventional leadership frames.
What you develop:
The capacity to inhabit your leadership position differently, to work with distributed agency, notice when you’re being pulled toward ritualised responses, recognise response mismatches across your organisation, and develop language for what you’re sensing. The ability to lead when simple solutions aren’t available and performing certainty would be dishonest.