In this blogpost, Joan Lurie, Founder and CEO of Orgonomics™, challenges higher education leaders to shift from expert problem-solvers to collaborative learners.
Across the globe, higher education institutions are navigating converging pressures from climate disruption and geopolitical instability, to technological acceleration and financial constraint. This context is trying, worrying, exhausting and it is testing leaders in all sectors.
So how are you stepping in? For many leaders their tendency may be to try and take control, to analyse what’s going on, to look for root causes and fix things; to focus on their patch, to protect, to identify what they can preserve; and to build their people’s individual resilience to hold strong in this challenging time. To do what they know best using their expertise.
What if this context was calling for a very different kind of leadership? What if, paradoxically, this time is a calling for you to step into a distinctly different, and for some, new role, which you may have never played before? One which you may not yet be ‘trained’ or fully equipped for, because prior contexts never required this of you. What if this context may be calling you to be a ‘learner’, ‘inquirer’, discoverer’, ‘designer’, rather than an ‘expert’, ‘fixer’, ‘nurturer’, ‘protector’, ‘competitor’. And as a leader in a complex system, not of an institution; part of a complex system in the messy middle of adaption.
The challenge the sector faces is not a simple technical problem for each organisation to fix for themselves, but an adaptive challenge to navigate together.
When faced with adaptive challenges in complex systems Orgonomics 4D Calibration assumes one of the first steps you can take is to pause and take time to step into Discovery.
- To inquire with curiosity how your system of roles, relations and patterning is functioning, including your own ‘seeing’ of it.
- To understand and make sense of what is going together.
- To bring in multiple perspectives to form a coherent view of this.
- And then to ask –how could we design our system differently such that we got a different emergent outcome?
Here we are not looking for technical solutions to fix what’s wrong or broken, we are developing hypotheses for adjacent possibilities for:
- how our systems could function differently
- how roles could be played and how members could interact and relate differently
- how we can introduce new patterns of thinking and interacting.
The role of leader in these contexts is to create containing spaces for this shared sense making; for both discovering how it is and designing a way forward for how it could be.
This practice taps into and builds the inherent resilience of the system – not just of individuals in it – to continuously evolve, recalibrate and design a way forward into new patterns of coherence. Designing forwards not bouncing back.
So, a challenge or invitation to those reading this…
- What are you observing?
- Is this a role you are already playing?
- Are your Executive and Leadership Teams doing this together, yet?
- Are you or your Executive Teams connecting beyond the borders (boundaries) of your own organisations to collaborate with others in doing this?
If not, are you curious or tempted to consider, explore and experiment with how you might begin?
Executives at the Leading Edge is an exclusive member-only series of monthly two-hour online events designed for senior higher education leaders navigating today’s most complex challenges.
Participants gain practical strategies, international perspectives and peer learning opportunities, connecting with Vice-Chancellors, Executive Directors and other senior leaders across the sector.Find out more.
Joan Lurie is the Founder and CEO of Orgonomics™, an organisation strategy and leadership development consultancy she established in 2008 to help leaders and organisations develop, perform and transform. She is a Fulbright Scholar with a Master’s Degree in Adult Education and a Master’s Degree in Developmental Psychology.
Joan works with boards, executives and leadership teams to help them to develop systemic intelligence and to design and lead complex adaptive change in their organisations with turnaround results. Working together they emerge new cultures, operating models and organisational forms.
Joan applies the Orgonomics™ methodology she created which is most often referred to as groundbreaking. It’s a novel theory and practice for organisations, which integrates strategy, systems thinking, complexity and adult development theory. It provides an ecological ‘map’ for leaders to navigate the unique challenges they face and be fit for the current complex landscape we are in. It enables leaders to fundamentally shift how they take up their roles; reframe their assumptions, mental maps and ways of knowing and repattern their organisational systems for new ways of relating and operating to function as coherent wholes.
In a nutshell, Joan’s work enables leaders, teams and organisations to liberate themselves from the constraints and patterns which no longer serve them, but in which they are stuck
“When I first created Orgonomics™ my core purpose was to assist leaders and organisations to develop their systemic and adaptive muscle – to enable them to continuously develop and grow with complexity. Back then, this was a “nice to have” but now it is an individual and organisational imperative, one which we have to accelerate for the good of our whole ecology.”
