Responding to crisis - the birth of Catalytic Leadership

In March 2009, more than ten international agencies met to establish a coalition to promote a green economy. Many co-signed a letter to the London meeting of the G20 which sets out the basis for a 'global green new deal', and represents a commitment to co-operate from groups as diverse as the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the International Trades Union Congress (ITUC and Royal Phillips Electronics, to invest in an inclusive and green economy that provides jobs, cares for the environment, and addresses poverty.

Each of the 10 organisations has its own mandate and constituencies whose interest it is obliged to serve. Some are businesses with shareholders; some co-ordinate policy amongst national governments, others campaign for specific conservation interests or for the rights of workers. By agreeing to work together they implicitly assume a leadership role in relation to the one world in which we live; what is going on here? How has this come about, and does it affect the way we think about leadership in more local settings?

I will answer these in reverse order, starting with implications for the way we think about leadership. These are examples all around us of the need to lead complex partnerships, and very often these span government, business and communities. As Roger Niven, a colleague at the Centre for Leadership Studies, puts it:

"Such partnerships currently face several critical issues. Apart from the complexity of leadership in a multi-sector partnership where funding is often governmental - but sourced from many and often competing departments or agencies - there is the immediate context of dwindling local government resources and increasing community needs. We are specifically interested in the development of leadership skills in such partnerships outside of formal meetings: ie: from partnerships into constituencies rather than in the narrow leadership group itself" (full article on page 13 of Leadership Matters 17).

Here we are talking about something more than representing one's organisation in bi-lateral or multi-lateral relationships. Boundary spanning has always been a feature of leadership - arguably one of the main responsibilities of a leader is to manage relations across the boundaries of the organisation, and people in junior positions are often called on to lead when representing their own group to others. But the degree of interdependence signalled in Niven's comments is of quite another order. It is a matter of ambition beyond 'what can we do for ourselves' or 'what can we do for others', to 'how far can we stretch our impact by co-operating?' It implies tremendous diplomatic skills and the intellectual alacrity to appreciate and articulate common interests without belittling differences. It cannot proceed without trust, most likely built up over a long period, and very unlikely to be vested in just one person, so the ability to build a coalition to co-lead is probably crucial. These are some of the qualities required of those taking initiative and exerting influence in this interdependent world of ours.

But what of the underlying conditions? The current sense of ecological and financial crisis underpins calls for a new economic model for the world (or at least for constraints on market capitalism and more space for a diversity of models). It remains to be seen whether this common sense will be translated into a common vision and common action. In the past, when a society has come close to collapse and needed a fresh start, we have seen inspirational, charismatic leaders come to the fore, bolstered by popular relief at their message and by slick - usually ruthless - organisational capability. Witness the rise of the National Socialists in Weimar Germany in the 1930s; and for a more benign example, the ability of Nelson Mandela to articulate a vision of a non-racial South Africa and to back it up through the discipline of the ANC and the (mainly white) civil service. And through courageous acts of leadership by many other citizens - people who could see the possibility of disaster, and also the imperative and the dream of a new, non-racial way of going about things. In spite of present difficulties, South Africa is an example of what might be possible for the world; it is also a warning that it will not be easy, and that there are compromises to be made all round.

Now, back to my first question - what is going on here? We may or may not be looking into the abyss of ecological disaster. We are certainly seeing that some people do not recognise this as a system-changing event, and are responding by pushing responsibility down the line to regulators, environmental officers, cost controllers, debt collectors. Their aim is to get us back on the same tracks as soon as possible, and to limit systemic change to minor adaptations to the changing environment. Others (to paint these as extremes), see in the current crisis an opportunity, even the necessity for very fundamental system-wide changes. Realistically, many of us hold both these perspectives in mind; and this is the ideological landscape in which leadership now operates: a dawning willingness to imagine very different ways of going about things, which valuing predictability and security. We need to be able to manage change, but within a context of strategic leadership; but strategy is no longer the preserve of those in the so-called 'top' positions.

It is now easy for millions of people to participate in developing a coherent set of definitions and policies, via processes such as the wiki, as pioneered by the on-line user-generated encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and now adopted by many organisations as a means of knowledge sharing. Expertise can be gathered together without the old structures of representative forums, and emerging policies can be articulated across vast populations in real time by communications tools such as twitter and associated blogs. A major challenge here is one of identity: how do we know who is 'speaking', the quality of their judgement or their motives? For this reason, leaders of social initiatives, however they participate in these new media, will still depend on sustained personal interactions and networks of trusted collaborators. But rather than visionaries or strategists, they will be catalysts.

A catalyst is a change agent that enables new realities to emerge. The catalytic leaders of the coming age will create social architectures using both 'hard' and 'soft' communications technologies, enabling us to imagine and to enact new realities. The alliance that is forming and promoting a 'green economy' mentioned in the opening of this article, is an example of the new social architecture; it depends on complex networks (the subject of a recent paper by another colleague in the Centre for Leadership Studies, Professor Annie Pye), on the catalytic leadership of a few key people, and the ideological commitment of many, many more.

So, with the 17th issue in this series of Leadership Matters journals, we are at the beginning of an exciting new stage in leadership studies – one that will focus on what I am calling 'catalytic leadership'. I hope readers of this journal will stay with us on the journey.

Professor Jonathan Gosling
Director - Centre for Leadership Studies
University of Exeter Business School