The complexities of Responsible Leadership

Earlier in the week, I had the privilege of spending the morning exploring ideas around complexity and leadership with two friends who understand both fields.  Our conversation mostly centered on Responsible Leadership as one of the participants runs the Albert Luthuli Centre for Responsible Leadership and it's a very relevant topic at the moment.  At Davos 2017, the focus was on Responsive and Responsible leadership,  which hopefully signifies a growing awareness that complex and entangled contexts require different leadership models.

While applying the Cynefin framework to the topic of Responsible Leadership, an interesting conversation emerged about the meaning of the word 'Responsible" and how it means different things in different contexts. We all assume that we know what "responsible" means, it is, after all, a pretty common term. You're financially responsible if you follow financial disciplines like budgeting, having an emergency fund, and saving for retirement.  You're a responsible parent when you make sure your child goes to school, gets regular medical checkups, etc.  So responsible leadership seems pretty obvious - or is it?

When we reflect on the term Responsible through the lens of Cynefin, it's suddenly not so cut and dried.  In ordered contexts, whether or not someone is responsible seems pretty concrete and measurable.  If you follow the rules (e.g. sticking to the speed limit while driving) or follow best practices you are responsible.  Here responsibility is about compliance, governance, and following established or conventional wisdom.  In the complicated domain, responsibility seems to be about making informed decisions ... consulting the right experts (no-one's ever been fired for hiring McKinsey ...), or making sure decisions are made based on solid evidence. It's about considering various perspectives and/or solutions, and weighing up pros and cons in order to make the right decision.   It's about preparing for various eventualities, considering scenarios, and charting the "safest" course.  Being responsible here rests on the assumption that one can predict and prepare for future outcomes; that there are correct solutions to problems and your task is to choose the best and most sustainable option and then plan properly to ensure that budgets aren't overrun and deadlines aren't missed.

But what does responsible mean in complex contexts where we don't fully understand the problem, where there are no solutions or right answers and the rich, non-linear interactions and inter-weavings between agents make it impossible to predict the future?  According to Dave Snowden, one of the only things we can be certain of when intervening in a complex system is that there WILL be unintended consequences.  Even the most well-intentioned and well-thought-out solution could have the complete opposite effect of what we intended.  Therefore, some of the things that would be deemed responsible in ordered contexts (e.g. implementing expert solutions or rule compliance), might actually be irresponsible in complexity.  In complexity, response-ability is a better term than responsibility i.e. the ability to respond appropriately to changing contexts.   Among other things, it involves ensuring that interventions are "safe-to-fail" (e.g. small & local), with amplification and dampening strategies and prioritising adequate feedback mechanisms to monitor the impact of your actions.  It involves spreading your risk across multiple, diverse (even contradictory), and sometimes oblique experimental interventions and being ready to learn from failure.  In complexity, there are no rules or best practices to follow, and listening to experts often leads you down the wrong path.  It's "crossing a river by feeling the stones", there is no nice "responsible" bridge.

It also involves breaking the rules or disobeying an order when it is appropriate, never blindly following a rule or an order without assessing potential consequences in the current context.   When one considers the idea of "responsible" from this perspective, it seems the people at Davos were prudent to make their focus "responsive AND responsible leadership".  In today's world, you can't have one without the other.  Being responsible is being response-able i.e. being aware of, and responsive to your context all the time.

It means that the leaders of tomorrow will require different skill sets - they will need to know how to make sense of volatile and ambiguous contexts; they will need humility to acknowledge when they don't know and courage to experiment and disobey orders or rules when they need to.   They will need to surround themselves with enough diverse perspectives to minimise the risk of being blindsided as they cannot afford to be complacent.  I think one of the most responsible things a leader can do is to let go of the idea of being "the leader" and enabling collective responsive leadership teams or crews, because in this new world of work, no single leader has the answers, and no hierarchy can respond fast enough.