Complexity Leadership and Followership: Changed Leadership in a Changed World

Abstract

ABSTRACT All who have experienced the global pandemic of 2020 can tell you that we live in a changed world. People no longer question whether we are in complexity, that reality has been made explicitly clear. What they want to know now is, what do we do about it, and what does it mean for how we need to lead differently? In this article I explore these questions by integrating generative emergence (Lichtenstein, B. [2014]. Generative emergence: A new discipline of organizational, entrepreneurial, and social innovation. Oxford University Press) and complexity leadership theory (CLT) (Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. [2007]. Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298–318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.04.002). Using COVID-19 as an example, I show how understanding complexity leadership theory as generative emergence can help us better understand how to lead differently in crisis and complexity. Doing so requires that research and practice focus on developing leaders and followers who can respond by adapting, rather than denying or retreating, in the face of complexity pressures. MAD statement The global pandemic of 2020 has made it clear that we need to place more emphasis on developing leaders and followers who can lead in complexity. This paper does this by using examples from COVID-19 to show the difference between successful and unsuccessful pandemic leadership. Successful leadership has leaders and followers who co-create adaptive responses that use complexity leadership to enable generative emergence. Unsuccessful pandemic leadership turned to order responses that denied the reality of the situation and tried to wish it away, leading to disastrous outcomes and hundreds of thousands of needless deaths.