Systems Thinking for Leadership Development

When we talk about leadership, we need to start with the context. And when we start with the context, we need to fully understand the problem (or opportunity) for which leadership is required

Let’s anchor ourselves on Rittel, Webber, and Grint’s descriptions and applications of wicked, tame, and critical problems. Remember, a wicked problem is the overwhelming situation that is so complex we have no idea what to do about it. Wicked problems demand leadership. Critical problems are emergencies. They are catastrophes if someone doesn’t stand up, take charge, and immediately resolve them. Tame problems are simple or complicated but remain tame because we know what to do. We have the procedures, rules, and crucial resources on hand with the knowledge of what to do with them. Tame problems require a prescription of good management.

Why?

Why is this model helpful? Because it explains the essential differences among the contexts in which one leads, manages, or commands. It also explains how the context dictates the required response. And it begins to indicate to learning designers what to design.

Since this isn’t an article about management, or even commanding, let’s home in on the wicked.

Wicked Problems

According to Keith Grint, wicked problems have interweaving root causes that keep changing and evolving. They often have moving targets. Wicked problems are so complex that we often cannot see a solution. Or if we do, that solution is going to set off ten more problems. Wicked problems often are going to involve leader and team failures. There are so many interweaving, textural aspects to the problems, that one perspective isn’t going to be enough to identify potential approaches. Wicked problems, therefore, require a systems thinking approach.

Systems thinking is simply a way of making sense out of complexity. It is exploring the various interconnections of people, events, processes, and resources and how they all affect each other.

Two Important Aspects

As alluded to in previous articles, most leadership tropes ignore two very important aspects that are core to leadership in a context:

  1. Leadership will lead to failure more often than not.

  2. Any hope for a long-term, sustained solution(s) to a wicked problem requires a systems perspective.

Success and Failure

Leaders are judged on success. They are not permitted to fail. In fact, a CEO who cannot solve the wicked problems will be fired quickly. A coach who fails to win games will be exchanged for a winner at the end of the season. A politician whose tax policy leads to a recession will be voted out in the next election. These are simply truisms for how we judge leaders and, therefore, leadership. Failure is not acceptable and is viewed as a failure of leadership, rather than an integral part of the process for solving wicked problems. This paradoxical paradigm renders leadership as a problem solving, facilitative process. We cannot live with leaders who fail while at the same time, we expect them to come in and immediately solve the impossible problem without any form of organizational learning. We expect the great to be great in one shot. This expectation is why so many leaders fail to remain in leadership roles.

This perspective is fundamentally at odds with what we need from our leaders to guide us out of those overwhelming troubles. Or, to edge us forward to those immense opportunities we cannot even see.

Advantages of the Framework

One reason I love the Wicked-Tame-Critical Problem framework as a foundation for leadership development is that it really resolves the definitional and alignment problems inherent in more traditional frameworks. It puts parameters around the function of a leader as someone who deals with wicked problems. We want leaders to come in from the dark and shed light. We want them to save the day. We want them to rescue us. We want them to make gold from nothing. In other words, we want them to resolve the wicked, the overly complex, and the overwhelming problems. There is nothing wrong with this expectation from followers and stakeholders. But we better approach how we find these folks in such a way they can succeed.

We don’t need leadership for those problems we know how to resolve: We will just manage them. I really want an expert in that specific situation to boss me around and just fix it. So, leadership is about the wicked problems.

And when we are dealing with wicked problems, when we need someone to save us in the traditional mindset, we are dealing with broken, unknown, and complex systems.

Complex Systems

Complex systems require systems thinking. So, the effective leader, the effective leadership function, and thus, the effective leadership development process involves teaching systems thinking.

To borrow from Paul Kirschner, the great educational psychologist, complex, higher order thinking skills require both context and the domain-specific expertise in that context. In other words, when we teach systems thinking, it is impossible to do so without a topical area and a base level of competence in that area. Why? Because without domain expertise in a specific area it is impossible for the learner to see the connections and the applications. The learner cannot see the root causes, and their effects. The learner is ignorant of possible solutions. And the learner has no way of finding and then evaluating the subject matter experts who likely can help solve the wicked problem. Without the context, the learner can only learn the superficial. Which is why we need to teach systems thinking in the context of what the prospective leaders do daily. Check out this video by John Sweller, the father of Cognitive Load Theory, and his description of what can and cannot be taught outside the context.

Other Skill Sets

Systems thinking isn’t the only skill set required for handling wicked problems. There are facilitation skills, influencing skills, politics, and other such skills. They are all contextual, as well. They are all complex skills and need to be taught within a specific topical area and context.

Ultimately, when we teach in the context of what people do and are functional experts, we also resolve the context problem identified in the previous articles. The bottom line is leadership is to resolve the overwhelmingly complex issues on the table. We should expect our leaders and the leadership function to fail regularly and not punish the leaders for that. We should expect leaders to learn to lead within the context that they will lead in eventually. We should begin by teaching prospective leaders how to think and analyze more systemically. They should become systems thinkers within their respective domains. So, it is acceptable to want our leaders to solve the impossible. At the same time, we should have the mindset of accepting failure as a part of the journey.

Summary and Conclusions

Let us sum up to repeat the key ideas and to focus your attention:

  1. Leadership is the process we use to solve wicked problems.

  2. Leadership involves failure. We should expect leaders to fail repeatedly.

  3. Leaders fail because they do not (and cannot) fully fathom the complex system from which they operate as they work to solve their wicked problem.

  4. We need to teach systems thinking within a context to our prospective leaders.

References

Grint, K. (2005). Problems, problems, problems: The social construction of ‘leadership.’ Human Relations. 58 (11), 1467-1494.

Grint, K. (2010). Leadership: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press, Inc. New York.

Pfeffer, J. (2015). Leadership BS : fixing workplaces and careers one truth at a time (First edition. ed.). New York, NY: Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

PWC. (2019). CEO turnover at record high. https://pwc.to/3AVWcro.

Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M.. (1973) Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences. 4, pp. 155-169.