Rethinking Leadership for a Complex World

For more than a century, leadership has been assumed to be something that resides within a single person. In times of relative stability, this assumption appeared workable. Today, however, organisations operate in conditions shaped by climate disruption, social fragmentation, geopolitical volatility, and rapid technological change. These pressures expose the limits of individual leadership and call for a more collective and systemic approach.

The Legacy of Great Man Theories

In business, politics, research and everyday conversation, we tend to picture the leader as a heroic individual with special qualities who guides others toward success. This view is rooted in the traditional Great Man theories of leadership, which focus on the traits and behaviours that supposedly set leaders apart (e.g. Stogdill, 1948). Decades of research have since demonstrated that no universal set of traits reliably predicts leadership effectiveness. The belief that leaders are born rather than developed has steadily lost credibility.

From Traits to Situations: The Shift Toward Adaptability

As the limitations of trait-based thinking became clear, attention shifted to the idea that effective leaders adapt their style to the situation. This shift gave rise to leadership styles theory (Tannenbaum and Schmidt, 1958), contingency models (Fiedler, 1967), and situational leadership (Hersey and Blanchard, 1982). While adaptability certainly matters, it is unrealistic to expect any one individual to possess all the capabilities required to lead effectively in every context. As organisational life is now shaped by uncertainty, complexity, interdependence, and competing demands, it is far too much for leadership to rest on the shoulders of a single individual.

Leadership as a Collective Process

Over time, research began to show that leadership is rarely an individual act. Instead, it is often shared among multiple people and shaped through ongoing interactions between those in formal leadership roles and the wider team. Leadership is increasingly understood as a dynamic process that unfolds through relationships and mutual influence.

This shift is particularly evident in the field of sustainability leadership. Here, leaders are described as those who “lead with rather than over others, attending to the long-term viability of complex, interconnected living systems” (Ferdig, 2007). As a result, sustainability leadership is often characterised as shared, relational, collaborative, strategic, and global in orientation (Sajjad et al., 2023). These qualities reflect the scale and complexity of sustainability challenges, which cut across organisational boundaries, time horizons, and social ecological systems.

Such approaches are often grouped under collective forms of leadership that emphasise decentralised decision-making and shared responsibility (Park et al., 2025). In this approach, leadership becomes a fluid process of influence rather than a fixed role. Individuals step forward based on their expertise and the needs of the moment, enabling organisations to respond more effectively to rapid change.

Even many contemporary approaches to collective leadership continue to rest on an individualist foundation. Leadership is often described as distributed, with different people stepping into leadership roles at different times, or as shared decision-making among a group (Part et al., 2025). While these approaches represent an important shift away from heroic models of leadership, they still tend to frame leadership as the coordination or aggregation of individual contributions.

What if the whole is more than the sum of the individual parts? How might leadership harness the power of shared insight, relational depth, and the wisdom that emerges when people think, feel, and act together?

Leadership Beyond the Individual

A systems perspective invites a more radical rethinking. Instead of viewing leadership as something that resides within individuals or is distributed among them, leadership can be understood as emerging from the system itself. Insight, direction, and agency arise from patterns of relationship, shared meaning-making, and collective sensing that no individual could access alone.

This is the foundation of a Natural Systems approach to leadership. Leaders are seen as embedded within multiple interacting systems, including somatic, ecological, social, and spiritual. Rather than leading from personal authority alone, the leader’s role becomes one of sensing what is emerging across these systems and giving voice to what is taking shape. Leadership arises from the collective, and the individual becomes its instrument. Anyone can step forward to serve in this way when the moment calls for it.

Ancient Traditions of Collective Wisdom

The idea that leadership emerges from attunement, relationship, and collective intelligence is not new. Many non-Western traditions have long embraced this perspective.

Classical Daoist philosophy offers the concept of wu wei (無為), often translated as non-action or effortless action. Rather than suggesting passivity, wu wei describes a mode of action that is responsive, adaptive, and aligned with the natural flow of events. Leadership arises not from asserting personal will, but from acting in harmony with wider social, ecological, and even cosmic patterns. As Duyvendak (1947) notes, wu wei emphasises yielding rather than forcing, simplicity rather than control, and responsiveness rather than domination. The leader acts much like water: flexible, receptive, and powerful precisely because it does not resist the contours of its environment.

A similar collective ethos is found in African philosophical traditions, particularly the concept of Ubuntu, which is often expressed as “I am because we are,” highlighting a relational understanding of personhood and agency. Leadership within an Ubuntu framework is grounded in connection, mutual responsibility, and shared decision-making. Authority is exercised horizontally, and legitimacy arises from service, moral standing, and relational trust rather than formal hierarchy.

Together, these traditions point toward a form of leadership grounded in relational awareness, ethical responsibility, and collective flourishing. They remind us that many of the qualities now being rediscovered in contemporary leadership research, such as attunement, humility, contextual intelligence, and the ability to sense and respond to emerging patterns, have been cultivated for centuries outside Western individualist paradigms.

Toward Leadership as Collective Flourishing

For business leaders and HR professionals, the implications are significant. In a world defined by complexity, leadership can no longer be understood as the responsibility of a single individual. It emerges from the collective and is shaped by the interplay of individual and shared consciousness. A Natural Systems perspective invites organisations to develop leadership not by focusing solely on individual capability, but by strengthening relational capacity, collective intelligence, and the ability to sense and respond to what is emerging across systems.

This shift calls for new approaches to leadership development, talent strategy, and organisational culture. It encourages leaders to listen more deeply, act more relationally, and cultivate the conditions in which collective insight can flourish.

If you are ready to translate a systems perspective on leadership into real organisational practice, we invite you to explore our Changemaker Circles and Leadership Encounters. These programmes create the conditions for deeper insight, shared learning, and meaningful change.

Get in touch to discuss how we can support the development of your leadership or help your organisation build the collective capacity it needs for a complex world.

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.

References

Duyvendak, J. J. L. (1947). The Philosophy of Wu Wei. Asiatische Studien: Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Asiengesellschaft (Études asiatiques: revue de la Société Suisse-Asie), Vol. 1 (3-4), pp. 81–102. Available via the e-periodica archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20211215104129id_/https://www.e-periodica.ch/cntmng?pid=ast-002%3A1947%3A1%3A%3A206

Ferdig, M. A. (2007). Sustainability leadership: Co-creating a sustainable future. Journal of Change Management, 7(1), 25-35.

Fiedler, F. E. (1967). A theory of leadership effectiveness. McGraw-Hill.

Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K. H. (1982). Grid® principles and situationalism: Both! A response to Blake and Mouton. Group & Organization Studies, 7(2), 207-210.

Park, J. G., Kwon, B., & Park, K. (2025). Understanding collective forms of leadership through text mining-based review of literature. Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance.

Sajjad, A., Eweje, G., & Raziq, M. M. (2024). Sustainability leadership: An integrative review and conceptual synthesis. Business Strategy and the Environment, 33(4), 2849-2867.

Stogdill, R.M. (1948). Personal factors associated with leadership. Journal of Psychology. Vol. 25, 35-71.

Tannenbaum, R. & Schmidt, W. H. (1958). How to choose a leadership pattern. Harvard Business Review, vol. 37, March-April, 95-102.