Reflecting on Our Times: Valuing Transformative Leadership in Real-World “Living Systems”

Abstract

We present this brief reflection on key aspects of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the implications of the worldwide focus on achieving the sustainable development goals as external observers of the evaluation endeavor around the world. We have conducted and participated in evaluations, but it is not our primary field of work and we are not engaged in the global community of evaluation specialists. However, we believe that the urgency of the challenges confronting the world today should inspire those influencing and shaping evaluation internationally to focus much more fiercely on the value of evaluation and its implications for leadership at all levels and in all fields of work. We propose that evaluation as practice should support and help inspire, value, and evaluate the type of leadership that the world needs now—dynamic and purposeful “living systems” leaders working toward large-scale, drastic change.

Keywords

action research systems sustainability system evaluation leadership

Coeditors’ Note

This is our first invited contribution from outside the global evaluation community. It presents an urgent plea by experts in the field of leadership in the era of the Anthropocene and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (ASD), urging evaluation specialists to help shape the global thought leadership arena surrounding the nascent area of living systems leadership, its valuing, and its evaluation. We agree that a robust focus on this type of leadership is crucial if humanity is to resolve the challenges before us. How can evaluators use the key issues and framing the authors articulate in this reflection? How can we support this type of leadership to help advance the 2030 ASD and build resilience in a post-COVID-19 pandemic world? In what way can evaluators add practical value to this nexus of living systems and leadership? How are these ideas reflected in different contexts and cultures? We challenge you to examine the implications for your evaluation work and to consider how we can help ensure that it is a priority area of focus. Please feel free to write to the authors or coeditors with your thoughts.

by Zenda Ofir & Deborah Rugg

Preamble

In September 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (ASD) with its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) was endorsed by world leaders as a global vision for the equitable and sustainable development of our world and its people. Its landmark principles call for unprecedented concerted actions to be pursued by all nations on earth, recognizing the profound interconnectedness and systemic nature of the challenges being addressed. It advocates for integrated responses that involve collective action through partners working in synergy with one another.

We present this brief reflection on key aspects of the 2030 ASD and the implications of the worldwide focus on achieving the SDGs as external observers of the evaluation endeavor around the world. We have conducted and participated in evaluations, but it is not our primary field of work and we are not engaged in the global community of evaluation specialists. However, we believe that the urgency of the challenges confronting the world today should inspire those influencing and shaping evaluation internationally to focus much more fiercely on the value of evaluation and its implications for leadership at all levels and in all fields of work. We propose that evaluation as practice should support and help inspire, value, and evaluate the type of leadership that the world needs now—dynamic and purposeful living systems leaders working toward large-scale, drastic change.

Leaders working tirelessly for the outcomes set out in the 2030 Agenda try to foster shifts, large and small, in the behavior of the people from a living systems perspective—that is, recognizing that the systems of which humanity is part, and on which it depends, are made up of interactions, relationships, and flows of information and energy between many different types of people as well as other forms of life. In this reflection, we use our decades-long experience of working with leaders from many different levels, sectors, fields of work, and societies around the world, as well as concepts from systems and complexity sciences as they play out in living systems. We combine these to suggest characteristics and patterns of living systems leadership that can inform frameworks for the valuing and evaluation of this type of leadership. We pose questions as to how evaluation might continue to evolve in ways that address the issues of complexity that leaders face in the 2030 agenda, issues that by their very nature cannot be reduced to cause and effect reasoning. We ask how evaluation can thus be perceived as supporting, rather than distracting, practitioners who are exploring the nature of living systems leadership as a response to this urgent and complex environment.

The 2030 ASD

The 2030 ASD (United Nations [UN], 2015) is an agreed comprehensive plan for global action. It charts an equitable and sustainable future for the people of our world. Developed through an intense period of consultation and negotiation between 2012 and 2015 among the world’s nations—including a survey involving more than 8 million persons around the world—it was endorsed by leaders of all countries at the UN in September 2015.

The 2030 ASD has five overarching principles, 17 SDGs, and 169 targets. It is a significant advance on its predecessor, the millennium development goals (MDGs), that had to be achieved by 2015. The MDGs were developed without extensive consultation and encouraged a focus on specific issues, primarily in developing countries, in order to gain concentration of effort. In contrast, the 2030 ASD is the result of lengthy negotiations that included a broad range of societies and communities from multiple nations. Its implementation requires us all to think and act differently. It calls for transformative changes that reflect a deep understanding of the interconnections between all countries in the world as well as between business, society, and the environment, seeing all societal sectors as integral parts of essential paradigm shifts.

A key aspect of the 2030 ASD is therefore the recognition that people’s lives and the planet’s ecosystems are inextricably linked. Its first principle reflects this interconnectedness: It was never intended that individual SDGs would be pursued through independent, siloed initiatives. For example, “no poverty” (SDG1), “good health and well-being” (SDG3), “decent work and economic growth” (SDG8), and “sustainable cities and communities” (SDG11) are all interlinked—part of the way in which societies around the world are connected, as the COVID-19 pandemic has so clearly highlighted. Universality is another principle: The 2030 ASD applies to all nations, institutions, and organizations in the world. A third principle puts people at the center in the interests of the whole of society, with nobody omitted or left behind, while a fourth principle calls for actions that are integrated across sectors of government and professional disciplines. The fifth principle maintains that the 2030 ASD can only be achieved by partnering in ways that foster synergy and enable all actors to align their efforts to work together, drawing on the understanding that the impact of the whole is often greater than the sum of individual parts.

Living Systems Leadership

The 2030 ASD encourages people and nations to work together when tackling deep systemic issues. This requires a holistic approach across issues and geographies that is best advanced through systems thinking. Designs and plans that are based on linear models of change, and achieving results through matching specific solutions to individual problems, can add value in specific situations but are poorly suited when groups of diverse actors have to come together to tackle the complex issues the world faces today. When actors with very different interests join hands to encourage meaningful systems change, they need innovative leadership styles that are based on systems thinking and complexity science concepts. Of particular importance is living systems leadership.

The living systems approach to change focuses on systems that display the key characteristics of life, in particular people and their connectedness within the natural and societal ecosystems on which all life depends (Capra & Luisi, 2019). Living systems continuously evolve as a result of changes in the behaviors of those within them. The success of initiatives to adapt living systems in line with the 2030 ASD therefore depends greatly on how the process of adaptation is being led, hence the need to focus on the qualities of living systems leaders who can inspire, nurture, and guide humanity in directions strategically aligned toward achieving the 2030 ASD—and now, also dealing with the long-term aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Core Characteristics of Living Systems That Matter to Leaders

The body of knowledge about living systems is comprehensive and deep (Maturana & Varela, 1992) and provides insights about core characteristics that are relevant for good practice in living systems leadership. They are essential to grasp if we are to value, evaluate, and guide the contributions of living systems leaders.

Complexity

Most people have little difficulty in seeing the world of the SDG era as complex, yet few use the term tightly; instead, they use it interchangeably with the term complicated. A complicated problem may have multiple challenges and facets but can ultimately be resolved by a skilled team or operator (Grint, 2010).¹ When we enter the realm of complexity, the concept of nonlinearity means that while some outcomes may be likely, they are not certain, and cause and effect cannot be directly linked; too many interacting variables are constantly in play. Cause and effect can be distant in time and space, and minute variations in starting conditions can lead to fundamentally different outcomes.

Leaders are thus faced with irreducible uncertainty (Meadows, 2009). In a world where they are held accountable for their actions and outcomes, and constantly evaluated against these, the realization that control is illusory and that contexts matter a great deal is deeply disturbing. It raises profound questions about what leaders should be doing and how to determine what can be or has been effective.

Emergence

Although many organizations use the term transformation quite liberally in their literature and other corporate communications, more often than not the changes they seek or describe are enhanced versions of current realities rather than an altogether new state. Yet history is filled with well-researched paradigm shifts. The concept of emergence describes a process whereby component parts of a system interacting randomly start to work in synergy, eventually giving rise to the emergence of a new macro-level of organization that is a product of the synergies between the parts rather than simply the properties of the parts themselves (Systems Innovation, 2016). The notion of emergence points to a fundamental shift in the underlying rules of association, and once elements—actors, organizations, initiatives, or ecosystems—are connected differently, something different emerges. This is why transformational change is so often associated with rule-breaking, dissonance, or disruption. Notably, changing the underlying rules of association while initiating change may increase but does not guarantee the likelihood of a desired outcome.

Leadership has to create the conditions under which emergence of a new state is more likely. This requires channeling the energy of multiple actors into a common endeavor with a common purpose, creating a transformation system (Waddell, 2016) by “weaving the relational web” (Nabarro & Atkinson, 2019b; Pedwell, 2008) that can hold and nurture the dissonance that tends to arise and encourage the formation of new positive feedback loops that amplify the outputs of the energy and dissonance in the system. It requires continually framing and reframing the context and debate in ways that hold multiple viewpoints concurrently and involves the development of connections and understandings that allow disagreement to resolve into new insights. It is an unstable and volatile situation that needs constant attention, and leadership must embody approaches that recognize that these dynamics are social rather than analytical. Critical to this being a successful process of change are several leadership practices such as not dampening the energy that actors bring, being able to regulate the level of dissonance, and the capacity to form novel networks that are the means of amplification.

Sensemaking

The process of cognition within a system is a deep and rapidly growing field of knowledge. One of the determining factors in the shape of a system is how human actors make sense of any given circumstance. Current research suggests that about 20% of a person’s understanding of a situation is derived from sensory input, while the remaining 80% arises from internal processing resulting from the sensory stimulation (Varela et al., 2017). This means that even when all actors receive the same information, individually and collectively, they will make different sense of it, influenced for example by their education, development, and life experiences.

As the internal and informal discourse in a system is a process of sensemaking that determines what actions will follow, this has profound implications for leadership, particularly in terms of communication. It positions leadership in the role of storytelling and constantly bringing in or adjusting narratives that can help persons coming from multiple viewpoints make sense of the situation as it unfolds (Bohm, 2004). This understanding of the nature of group cognition raises deep questions about the validity of many of the current forms of evaluation among others challenging the concept of an objective view.

Network Building

The process of cognition in a living system is inextricably linked to the interconnected, networked nature of such systems. Networks are the repositories of knowledge and know-how (Hidalgo, 2015). Individuals’ close networks reinforce and perpetuate their ways of thinking and doing. This is critical in maintaining capacities to remember even simple daily operations. The levels of knowledge and know-how necessary to perform simple tasks are also surprisingly high; for example, brushing teeth will be impossible without a network of mining engineers, polymer chemists, logistics specialists, and many others who deliver a simple end product such as toothpaste.

These deeply interlinked networks in any living system highlight the levels of complexity involved in making progress on the 2030 ASD. Leaders have to form and maintain networks, and unless they succeed in weaving a relational cradle, existing networks may be unable to comprehend or accept such information or respond and adapt accordingly.

Context and Environment

Considering humanity as being part of living systems requires recognizing societies’ symbiosis with their immediate environment. Just as we shape our context, our context shapes us—including the natural environment where humans interact with other living species. Changes in one of the many interlinked networks may require changes in many others who are not yet conditioned to accept change. Systems are able to mitigate changes in their environment, while the networked nature of actors in a system also helps to preserve the status quo. Thus, variation is invariably smoothed, and in time, each change effort amounts to much less than expected.

The global context in which we live in the era of the Anthropocene, and which the SDGs have to address, has evolved over millennia. It will not simply be undone by a designed development approach. Fortunately, the notion of emergence shows that, when necessary, systems can adapt remarkably quickly to new conditions. This means that to help effect, or respond to, drastic changes or paradigms shifts in the living ecosystem of the people and planet, leaders have to develop narratives that make sense of major unexpected events and opportunities and lead others in making new sense of available information from within their different perspectives and contexts. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an example. Leaders in many countries have taken time both to anticipate and recognize the pandemic’s multiple, systemic drivers and impacts and the growing complexity of the required response. They have found it hard to cultivate appropriate, collective narratives and actions that could have enabled the fostering of effective systemic action as the crises have evolved.

Qualities of Living Systems Leadership in Practice

New approaches suitable for nonlinear leadership are slowly starting to enter the mainstream. We have coupled the characteristics of living systems described in the previous section with our experience of working on multiple large-scale systems change efforts over many years in public and private settings and from local to global level. This has led us to identify key qualities of leaders who have learned how to navigate and effect significant change from within living systems.

Most fundamentally, effective living systems leaders embrace complexity and accept that they work in a web of living ecosystems; they differ from leaders who work with a more mechanical systems perspective on the world. They explore the properties of living systems and take account of them when designing and leading strategies and interventions—developing new competencies and shifts in worldview and mindset away from a linear approach, embracing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (Barber, 1992). Effective living systems leaders have an ambitious worldview yet are sanguine about making change happen on their own. They view change in living systems as an emergent property, an outcome of multiple processes. They are constantly exploring the nature of emergence and the implications for their choices and actions.

Leading for change in line with the principles of the 2030 ASD and the SDGs is also challenging because power and accountability lines tend to be diffuse and unclear, and the process of leading a range of actors who seek to contribute to the same cause is often messy. Even if there is a clear vision to which all actors aspire, leading in such a context means inspiring and accompanying a diffuse community of actors with diverse interests and perspectives and strong views on how all concerned should come together for the greatest and most urgent impact. Living systems leaders therefore need skills in diplomacy, active empathic listening, dialogue, and negotiation. They are ready to support those within their systems as they shift what they do to effect change. They are curious about how different people view their challenges and want to hear from them rather than shut them out. They connect meaningfully with many different audiences. They see their role as one of adapting to ways that recognize and respond to the changing environment. They are also skilled at adapting their strategies because what happens in practice is rarely in line with theory or what was planned.

Effective living systems leaders have mindsets that combine a relentless commitment to advancing the 2030 ASD and other global commitments with a profound belief in the potential for new paradigms to emerge through collective action. The leaders who fare best welcome very different understandings of situations in order to be able to appreciate the value of new or novel coalitions. They learn to be confident working in arenas of uncertainty, political interest, and power plays while focusing hard on navigating the best path forward for themselves and the people and planet for whom they are responsible. The contested political spaces in which they work bring challenge and adversity. When only a few leaders adopt patterns of thought and action that are outside the accepted norm, they are bound to have a sense of isolation and vulnerability, a sense of going it alone.

Working outside the norm carries personal and organizational risk, and political buffeting is inevitable. Not all transitions can be just. Not every decision—however carefully it is made—can be a win for all parties. Leaders inevitably face criticism and attack and may well feel that they are unfairly treated. All of this means that leaders for change have to be tenacious and tactful while being audacious and courageous at the same time.

Given that living systems leaders have to display all the qualities noted here, we believe it to be essential that valuing and evaluating the effectiveness of leadership in this era of the Anthropocene and the SDGs should focus on leaders’ capacity to work in appropriate ways rather than on simply evaluating the attainment of objectives or expected outcomes that arise from their leadership.

Valuing and Evaluating Living Systems Leadership

The interconnectedness and interdependencies in the world raise huge issues for the evaluation of any SDG-related intervention. The desire of financiers, recipients of funding, and other stakeholders to have and report on success stories can lead to interventions from local to global level that are not of high priority, yet attractive for reasons of influence, profile, or financial benefit. It might lead to gaming of measurement and evaluation approaches in order to ensure favorable results or seeking simplistic interventions and solutions that are easy to conceptualize, measure, and evaluate. Or both interventions and evaluations might be biased and based on values that do not recognize the importance of diversity and the inextricable interconnections between the well-being of humanity and nature.

It is therefore crucial to nurture leadership that is both effective and reflects the urgency with which opportunities have to be grasped and solutions found to help achieve the SDGs and address the ills of the Anthropocene. In our view, it is fundamental to consider whether systems leadership helps to improve the health of a system which, in turn, means understanding what constitutes a healthy system. Leadership has to enhance the system’s capacity for appropriate adaptation and for change to a desirable, resilient new state. Among others, this requires a codesigned approach to evaluation between those working on the intervention, those financing it, and those commissioning and evaluating it in order to get a common sense of how, why, for whom, and under what circumstances the system is performing, and what might be suitable explorations to enhance understanding of its performance.

The University of the West of England Evaluation of the Systems Leadership/Local Vision program in England, UK (Bolden et al., 2020), explored the critical importance of the interrelationships between processes, contexts, changes, and outcomes as the basis of an evaluation approach. This meant accompanying key actors through the process. Developmental evaluation similarly engages in creating near real-time feedback loops between evaluators and program staff thus facilitating a continuous development experience (Patton, 2006). These ideas are well suited to exploring the nature of systems leadership approaches in complex settings such as the SDGs (Feinstein, 2020.)

So, instead of evaluation being a post hoc intervention, it requires a constant process of exploratory learning alongside the intervention in line with developmental evaluation (Patton, 2011)—shaping the intervention and relationship between all actors engaged in the process in real time rather than seeking to determine the merit, worth, or significance of its historical impact. It has to remove the false distinction between learning and formal evaluation. Separating the learning and evaluation process works against increasing the capacity of the system to adapt. Where, for example, techniques such as learning histories (Roth & Kleiner, 1995) are created as an ongoing part of leadership foci, we see not only a contemporaneous record of events from multiple perspectives but an instructive pathway to understanding how leaders are thinking and therefore acting. This becomes evident in real time and enables them to adapt their approaches and communications as situations unfold.

Toward a Framework for Evaluation

Our reflections in this brief have led us to propose that, in summary, the following are five key qualities of living systems leadership that need to be considered when developing evaluation frameworks to value, assess, and support this type of leadership (Nabarro & Atkinson, 2019a):

Holding competing perspectives simultaneously. There is a tendency to resolve issues into simple binary choices. Instead, living systems leaders have to weave a relational cradle that can hold multiple perspectives shaped by contexts and cultures, values and norms, wisdom and experiences, and tap into their energy and dissonance to generate the positive feedback loops that may lead to emergence.

Focusing on the system, not (only) the parts. In a complex and interconnected, highly networked environment, focusing on specific discrete elements will have some value but is unlikely to alter system capacities. Instead, by focusing on strengthening and deepening the relationships and connections between the parts—including between people and nature—leaders can powerfully enhance the health of the system and develop its capacity to make rapid adaptations in light of evolving circumstances.

Feeling the pace, rhythm, and readiness. The capacity to sense a system’s capacity for change is critical. Leaders have to be able to determine the readiness of a system to shift or act forcefully or detect the cycles of activity that already exist to give momentum where a situation is stuck.

Seeing the system in relation to its environment. Leaders have to focus beyond the boundaries of the system in which they are engaged. Often, the most effective way to encourage emergent phenomena is by attending to the relationship between the system and its environment.

Meeting people right where they really are. Every person offers an insight into the health of a system through their actions and the way they describe and think about events. If leaders are unable to listen deeply and openly because they are more concerned with presenting their specific point of view, they lose this critical insight and ultimately their influence on the people and system they represent.

We would like to challenge evaluation specialists to advance thinking and practice in this area with a sense of urgency.

We would like to see how evaluation specialists can continue to develop approaches that focus not simply on the number or quality of relationships in a systems leadership intervention but instead on how these are woven together by leaders to create the relational cradle we refer to. How are leaders working with people, politics, and power to create the environment where profound change can emerge? How are they moving between paying intimate attention to the anxieties and needs of specific actors and circumstances while still maintaining the importance of the health of the system as a whole through focusing on how these discrete elements connect? How does evaluation make visible what happens when they do this?

We would also like to see evaluators draw more attention to the importance of seeing the system that leaders are working in over time. How are the system’s patterns and cycles made explicit by systems leadership and what is the impact of this knowledge in shaping the timing, pace, and nature of approaches and interventions? How does the fundamental symbiosis between a system and its environment emerge; what are the feedback loops that inform and maintain this and in exploring the nature of this symbiosis, how does systems leadership lead to novel and different approaches that catalyze new and dynamic adaptations?

And finally, meeting people where they really are supposes a level of personal mastery in terms of the ability to suspend judgment, pause the drive for results, and in the moment attend fully to what is happening in each and every conversation. We would like to see evaluators shine more light on what happens when people are able to do this, how they are able to do this, and how this critical systems leadership capacity can be developed.

We believe therefore that the five qualities we identify can serve as guidance for developing the leadership capacity and traits necessary to lead the living systems of the future. Through the important evaluations, they commission and conduct, and as leaders themselves, evaluation specialists have an important and urgent role to play in applying in practice, cultivating within themselves, and advocating for stronger living systems leadership.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material, sj-docx-1-aje-10.1177_1098214020982071 - Reflecting on Our Times: Valuing Transformative Leadership in Real-World “Living Systems”

Supplemental Material, sj-docx-1-aje-10.1177_1098214020982071 for Reflecting on Our Times: Valuing Transformative Leadership in Real-World “Living Systems” by John Atkinson, Florence Lasbennes and David Nabarro in American Journal of Evaluation

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

John Atkinson

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material is available in the online version of this article at

Note

References

Barber

H. F.

(1992). Developing strategic leadership: The US Army War College experience. Journal of Management Development, 11(6), 4–12. https://doi.org/10.1108/02621719210018208

Bohm

(2004). On dialogue. Routledge Press.

Bolden

Gulati

Edwards

(2020). Mobilizing change in public services: Insights from a systems leadership development intervention. International Journal of Public Administration, 43(1), 26–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/01900692.2019.1604748

Capra

Luisi

P. L.

(2019). The systems view of life: A unifying vision. Cambridge University Press.

Feinstein

(2020). Dynamic evaluation for societal transformation. https://zendaofir.com/dynamic-evaluation-for-societal-transformation/

Grint

(2010). Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: The role of leadership. In Brookes

Grint

(Eds.), New public leadership challenge. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277953_11

Hidalgo

(2015). Why information grows: The evolution of order, from atoms to economies. Basic Books.

Maturana

Varela

(1992). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Shambhala Press London.

Meadows

(2009). Thinking in systems: A primer. Earthscan.

10.

Nabarro

Atkinson

(2019a). Comfort in complexity. 4SD. https://www.4sd.info/living-systems-leadership/comfort-in-complexity/

11.

Nabarro

Atkinson

(2019b). Encouraging systems change. 4SD. https://www.4sd.info/living-systems-leadership/encouraging-systems-change/

12.

Patton

M. Q.

(2006). Evaluation for the way we work. The Nonprofit Quarterly, 13(1), 28–33. http://www.scribd.com/doc/8233067/Michael-Quinn-Patton-Developmental-Evaluation-2006

13.

Patton

M. Q.

(2011). Developmental evaluation: Applying complexity concepts to enhance innovation and use. Guilford Press.

14.

Pedwell

(2008). Weaving relational webs: Theorizing cultural difference and embodied practice. Feminist Theory, 9, 57–107.

15.

Roth

Kleiner

(1995). Learning history overview. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. http://ccs.mit.edu/lh/overview.html

16.

Systems Innovation. (2016). Emergence. https://fr.systemsinnovation.io/post/emergence

17.

United Nations. (2015). 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for%20Sustainable%20Development%20web.pdf

18.

Varela

F. J.

Thompson

Rosch

(2017). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press Scholarship Online.

19.

Waddell

(2016). Societal change systems: A framework to address wicked problems. Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, 52, 422–449. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0021886316666374

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.01 MB