Leadership is contextual

Why do we so often miss the mark when it comes to leadership? Leadership is highly context-related. Whether something works or not very much depends on context. What may work here, may be totally ineffective there. Churchill was a great leader at times of war, but he himself admitted: “Those who win a war well can seldom make a good peace.” He won the war in May 1945 and lost the election in July of the same year.

So let’s take a closer look at the context in which many leaders have to operate in today’s world. These include our mayor of New Portland.

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So we are talking about leadership in a world with three characteristics.

• There is a network of interdependencies – which means there is no one who can ultimately say ‘I am in charge’. Command and control is ineffective.
• Problems are wicked or unstructured – which means expertise, including technical expertise, never has sufficient authority to base decisions on it.
• And the world is dynamic – the more everything is interrelated, the greater the likelihood of unexpected events that radically disrupt the decision-making process. Dynamism means that project management tools – a favorite among many engineers – do not work.

So you are deprived of your tried-and-tested tools. Command and control is ineffective. Expertise is insufficient. Project management becomes an obstacle. What is your way out?

WHAT IS THE ESSENCE OF THE MAYOR’S PROBLEM?

In essence, what problem is the mayor facing? Let’s summarize the three characteristics from before:

• She is in a network – which means she needs to ensure she has sufficient support from the stakeholders.
• The problem is unstructured, there are multiple uncertainties – which means she must ensure that a level of consensus emerges on what constitutes the right information and what does not.
• The world is dynamic – which means the mayor must ensure that this becomes a problem for all players. She needs to ensure that these players do not use any unexpected problems that may occur to block the plan, but see these unexpected problems as shared problems instead.

SHE NEEDS A RADICAL GAME CHANGER

The mayor can only achieve this by means of a radical game-changer. The game needs to be transformed from a single-issue game to a multi-issue game.