Leadership Begins Where Expertise Stops Being Enough

Josie Gibson’s essay on collaboration around complex problems makes a useful argument: many system-change efforts spend enormous energy on governance, methods, metrics and delivery while underinvesting in the relational infrastructure required to keep people with different expertise, incentives and worldviews working together. The usual leadership model assumes that the leader understands the problem, chooses a direction and aligns others behind it, but wicked problems are different because the problem itself is contested and no participant holds the full picture. Research on systems leadership reaches a similar conclusion: where authority is distributed, effective leaders are less able to direct action and more concerned with helping diverse actors build enough shared understanding to act together. Climate resilience makes this visible because heat, flooding or disaster finance can simultaneously be public-health, labour, infrastructure, fiscal, community and investment problems, and each institution can frame the same risk correctly from its own perspective while still disagreeing about what should happen next. Leadership in that setting is therefore not the ability to supply the best answer, but the ability to surface competing frames, identify what each actor can see that the others cannot, build trust across those differences and gradually create a shared direction without pretending disagreement has disappeared. That also changes the meaning of expertise: deep technical knowledge still matters, but the scarce capability may be the person or institution able to translate between disciplines, connect mandates and hold the relationships through which collective action becomes possible. The question I am left with is whether we are still training leaders to perform well inside organisations when the problems that matter most increasingly require them to lead in the spaces between them.

Source: Josie Gibson, Sustainable collaboration on complex problems: a “who” not a “what” challenge, Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 2023. Read the article

Also useful: World Economic Forum, What is systems leadership, and how can it change the world? Read the WEF piece