Bridging the Complexity Gap: Rethinking Leadership for a Regenerative Economy

Written By Terry Sexton

By Dr. Valentina Canessa-Pollard and Terence Sexton

As the world pivots toward regenerative, inclusive, and stakeholder-driven models of value creation, a deeper challenge is emerging; one that’s often overlooked in the rush to innovate. It’s not just about new strategies or economic paradigms. It’s about the people leading them. Specifically, it’s about a growing mismatch between the complexity of today’s systems and the developmental capacities of those expected to navigate them. This is what researchers are calling the complexity gap.

From Machines to Ecosystems: A Leadership Paradigm Shift

For decades, leadership has been shaped by industrial-era thinking. Organisations were viewed as machines, being predictable, controllable, and optimisable through hierarchy and linear logic. Leaders were trained to solve known problems with known tools, guided by models rooted in neoclassical economics and technical rationality.

But the world has changed. Today’s organisations are more like ecosystems, needing to be dynamic, interconnected, and embedded within broader social and ecological networks. Influenced by regenerative economic models like stakeholder capitalism and Doughnut Economics, this new paradigm demands leaders who can think systemically, act relationally, and adapt fluidly to emergence and ambiguity.

It’s a shift from command-and-control to co-creation and coordination. From solving problems to sensing patterns. From managing people to stewarding systems.

The Developmental Challenge: Leadership Agility in a VUCA World

This transformation isn’t just about acquiring new tools; it’s about evolving how leaders make meaning. Adult developmental psychology offers a powerful lens here, describing the shift from conventional to post-conventional stages of psychological development. At these advanced stages, leaders are more capable of holding multiple perspectives, embracing paradox, and engaging uncertainty as a space for learning rather than a threat.

These capacities, what Bill Joiner calls leadership agility, are essential in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments. Yet they remain rare. A 2015 PwC study found that only 8% of senior leaders consistently operate at these developmental levels. And without these capacities, even the most well-intentioned sustainability strategies risk falling flat.

 

The Complexity Gap: Why Traditional Leadership Development Falls Short

Here’s the crux: this isn’t just a leadership gap; it’s a complexity gap. Most leadership development programmes still rely on cognitive, skills-based models. They treat learning as content delivery: a curriculum of competencies to be internalised by individuals. But this approach abstracts leadership from the messy, relational, and ecological realities in which it actually unfolds. Leadership is complex.

The Integrated Systems Coaching Framework (Canessa-Pollard & Sexton, 2025) offers a compelling alternative. It views learning as a process of becoming within systems of practice. Identity, agency, and capacity aren’t acquired in isolation; they emerge through participation in communities, dilemmas, and material environments. The framework invites exploration across multiple domains:

  • Somatic Systems: Attuning to the body, the environment, and the felt sense of connection with nature.

  • Psychological Systems: Quieting the ego’s dominance to awaken a fuller spectrum of human intelligence.

  • Transpersonal Systems: Engaging with purpose, values, and spiritual dimensions of leadership.

  • Ecological Systems: Engaging with nature as a gateway to transformation, inviting a shift from mechanistic thinking toward more integrated, systemic ways of perceiving and relating to the world.

  • Social Systems: Navigating relationships, power dynamics, and collective intelligence.

Guided by this framework, leaders don’t just learn about complexity; they learn within it.

 

Coaching for Complexity

This is where coaching comes in, not as a performance tool, but as a transformative learning space. When guided by the Integrated Systems Coaching Framework, coaching becomes a method for participatory reflection, embodied insight, and relational experimentation. Especially when conducted in real-world settings such as organisational systems, outdoor environments, or community contexts. Coaching in these real-world settings enables leaders to engage complexity directly.

This isn’t about abstract instruction. It’s about cultivating new ways of sensing, thinking, and acting. It’s about supporting leaders not just to understand regenerative systems, but to inhabit them.

 

Toward Regenerative Leadership

To meet the demands of regenerative economies and stakeholder-oriented organisations, we need leaders who are not just competent, but conscious. Not just strategic, but systemic. And not just informed, but transformed. The path forward isn’t paved with more metrics. It’s built through learning that is relational, situated, and embodied.

Reference

Canessa-Pollard, V., & Sexton, T. (2025). Coaching with the Earth in Mind: A Fourth-Generation Integrative Framework for Regenerative Leadership. Journal of Management Learning. (In Review).

Authors

Dr. Valentina Canessa-Pollard. Coaching Psychologist, Senior Lecturer at the University of Chichester and Director at Natural Systems Coaching and Development Ltd.

Terence Sexton. Leadership Psychologist, PhD Student at Liverpool John Moores University and Director at Natural Systems Coaching and Development Ltd.

Get in Touch

Get in touch if you would like to discuss any of the issues explored in this article.

Terry Sexton