For all my talk about values and purpose and complex adaptive systems, none of it matters, and you will remain irretrievably stuck, if you’re unable to do this one simple thing: Let. Go. Letting go seems counter intuitive. Common wisdom dictates that leaders must not let go because letting go is lazy and irresponsible. The leader must maintain control. She must aim for stability. Stability is what makes companies successful over time. Right? It turns out, not so much. Stabili

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We have a habit of looking at organizations as machines that simply take input and transform it into output. But of course, that’s not what’s really going on. What’s really going on is much more complex. Modern organizations of the knowledge era are living systems of interconnected ingredients, processes and interactions. In Other Words, They’re Complex Systems. When academics talk about complex systems, they like to show you things like this (and then they wonder why system

Last week, we talked about complex adaptive systems and the amazing creativity and solutions that emerge from them - if that is, we let them emerge. Allowing emergence to happen requires leaders to be generative in nature. Generative leadership is simply the act of nurturing healthy complex adaptive systems so emergence can arise. How do Unstuck Leaders nurture these systems? Well, they structure the organization in a way that optimizes the conditions for them. That means lot

Hi there! Please note that this week's post is a follow-up to last week's post on co-creation. You can read it here. Before we can understand the nature of emergence, we have to understand the nature and behavior of complex adaptive systems. You already know what complex adaptive systems are, even if you don’t know you know. You’ve seen them in practice. You’ve watched teams self-organize to address a problem. You’ve watched cross-functional interactions resulting in product