Systemic Leadership. What does Systemic stand for and why does that matter?

What is Systemic Leadership?

Systemic leadership implies looking at the organization and seeing it as a whole.

It means acting with systemic awareness, an awareness that is rooted in the understanding that the organization is an organic structure.

When we start acknowledging that organizations are “live-life systems”, we are more able to lead systems towards positive synergy and that’s because the implicit assumptions we rely on in decision making are better aligned with how organic systems actually work.

When we do that, we minimize waste — time and resources spent on “forcing and pushing” things to happen and we are more able to facilitate the flow of trust and spark positive synergies that put in motion the natural magnetism of systems — the“attracting and pulling” dynamics.

The Systemic in “Systemic Leadership”

Systemic means looking at organizations as organic systems.

Think of the organization as if it were a tree. The current structure and modus operandi of the organization represent the bark that covers all the layers of history that are contained within. As trees implicitly store information about their history, be it dry seasons or forest fires, so do companies.

As any organic system, the organization also registers everything in its invisible field of information so that it can serve its implicit purpose of Preservation. By their very nature, organizations maintain wholeness and equilibrium at any cost.

In the quest of adapting to change and serving the hard-coded Preservation law (also known as natural selection), the organization has the innate ability to self-regulate. The movements towards self-regulation are what we call “system dynamics”.

In order to maintain cohesion, systems are governed by higher ordering principles that are immune to human will and are by their very nature amoral — they transcend morality or norms of belonging — lower ordering principles that apply strictly to the human species.

The unintended consequences of systems ignorance

“Systems ignorance” — the illusion that the power of will is immune to system dynamics is costing people and organizations across the world a lot of energy and resources. In an ever growing web of global inter dependencies, having this awareness in our blind spot is, even as you are reading this, producing consequences that we will ultimately come to pay sooner or later.

What’s at stake? Organizational health is the cost for “systems ignorance” — the organizations become more fragile as we are less able to develop useful ways of acting as a response to change. The less we are able to foster environments that spark synergies that serve the purpose, the more we are at risk of becoming obsolete.

What does systemic leadership serve?

Systemic leadership is a function of the system collectively held by people in the organization that implies looking at the whole system — past, present, future with discernment and compassion, so that we might address the repetitive dynamics that consume energy and make it more difficult for people to really focus on serving the reason for existence. Serving the purpose is what allows organizational systems to adapt to change and evolve toward their highest potential.

As systemic leaders our task is to observe repeating patterns, to gather useful information that paint a picture of what the current level of organizational health is.

What is organizational health?

Organizational health is the system’s ability to respond to change by developing new constructive patterns of thought and action that both preserves existence and allows the further development of the organization.

Systemic Leadership — Inspired by nature. In service of organizational health

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