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Complexity leadership: leadership for a changed world

Published on May 5, 2014 Reviewed on April 30, 2018   40 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
Hi, my name is Mary Uhl-Bien and I'm going to be talking today about work that we've been doing on complexity leadership. The title of the talk is Complexity Leadership, leadership for a changed world. This is work that I've been doing with my colleague Michael Arena who is Chief Talent Officer at General Motors. The purpose of the talk is to describe the complexity leadership model and then provide some updates on the research that we've been doing and the recent findings and thought about what the implications are of this model for the workplace.
0:31
It's an interesting time to be in leadership. There's a sea change going on in the field of leadership. What's happening is that the world has changed, it's moved to an environment in which hierarchical command and control systems are being replaced by organizations that need to be adaptive. This is happening not only in the workplace, we also see effects of it in the research that we're doing on leadership, with a growing interest in things like shared leadership, distributed leadership, collaboration and in the old behavior field things like voice.
1:07
Why is it occurring? It's occurring because the foundations of modern management are over 100 years old. They were developed for a different time, a different era, the Industrial Age, and the focus was on physical assets, efficiency, and control.
1:24
But today we're in the connectionist era. It's a new age, a Global Knowledge era, and the need today is to enable intellectual or social assets. The focus is on knowledge, adaptability, and learning.
1:38
In this era, old models are not sufficing. Our current leadership models are grounded in bureaucratic principles and that was appropriate for a time when we could focus on standardization, efficiency and control. But they aren't working anymore.The environment has changed.
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Complexity leadership: leadership for a changed world

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