Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World

in complex systems, it is rarely appropriate to go it alone. Forming partnerships within the faction one is working in, creating allies across the boundaries between factions, and finding confidants who are outside the field of action altogether is critical to the art of adaptive leadership.

this more effective deployment of self is cultivated by a potent set of concepts, metaphors, and practices. These foster the formation of five central competencies:

Many of the most significant shapers of history were themselves shaped gradually, not ready to make an impact on the world until time and the crucible of experience had first performed their duties. Leadership can (and often must) be learned by those who would hope to practice it.

One’s sense of power begins to be reordered: on the one hand, you are less in charge. Yet, within a radically interdependent world every action has some effect, so one’s actions (even when modest) may have more effect than was previously supposed.14 Thus, one’s sphere of responsibility is enlarged.

As is implied throughout this exploration of the experience of the artist as a primary metaphor for the reimagination of leadership, to be an artist is to be invested in the work.

The politics of the market and workplace conspire with one’s own defensive powers to build resistance to the opportunity to learn from failure.

classroom, in the art studio no one expects a lecture. Teachers do not necessarily stand and students do not necessarily sit. Students observe each other’s work, exchange insights, and return to their canvases to try again. Mistakes are not seen as failures; they are encouraged and rewarded as inevitable steps in an ongoing learning process that re

This phase of the imagination process requires wading into the swamp of conflicting passions, forces, values, perspectives, personalities, and factions. It requires also creating a container (time, place, norms of working) in which the conflicts can be orchestrated to become productive.

At least five key hungers conspire to create what is increasingly recognized as a growing crisis in leadership.