This post is the fifth in a series inspired by the fourth chapter of my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025). You can find both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. Building on the organisational model developed in the first three chapters, Chapter 4, The Space Between, deals with scale-related challenges.

In this series:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling Leadership as connecting Leadership as inviting (this post)Leadership and identityUntangling the strands

This instalment was previously advertised under the working title of “Leadership and participation”, a title that would have broken away from the “Leadership as…” theme. It remains to be seen whether I find a new title for the next one, “Leadership and identity”!

Leadership as inviting

One way or another, articles in this series have been concerned with issues of scale, and I will bring them all together with a concluding post, “Untangling the strands”. In this one, the issue is that of participation in the strategy process, which begs three questions: Who’s invited? How? Why?

I’ll leave the How to Daniel Mezick and Mark Sheffield’s book Inviting Leadership [1]. That leaves the Who and the Why.

Why invite people into the strategy process?

I have two answers to this one. The first is about the role of leadership and how that relates to others around you. As I wrote in the introduction to Wholehearted (2025) and before that, in the 2024 blog post [2] that introduced the Engage, Invite, Celebrate model, if you are not engaging with the right challenges, inviting people into the process, and celebrating their successes, are you actually leading? And how do you scale and sustain that? By inviting others to do the same of course! And to turn it around, wouldn’t you want to be invited? Wouldn’t you want to participate? When they have something to contribute, wouldn’t most people?

My second answer relates to organisational scale, and it builds on previous articles in this series. We organise in part to moderate the impact of complexity. Not every detail of what happens at one level of scale or one organisational scope needs to be or indeed can be visible outside, and to think otherwise is to be either unaware of one’s blind spots or at risk of being overwhelmed. It would be delusional therefore to think that leaders are all-knowing, and it follows that strategies dependent on good operational or customer intelligence and insight need those concerns to be represented adequately. Show me a strategy that needs neither of those, and I’ll show you one that doesn’t matter.

When you combine those people-related and systemic aspects, you get a sense of participation in the process, the right people in the room, shared ownership of what the process produces, and not just a plan on paper but actual, celebration-worthy results!

Who’s invited?

The term strategy deployment isn’t meant to imply “rollout,” but it feels like it to me, and I’m not its greatest fan therefore. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which the organisation ensures some appropriate level of alignment or coherence are important, they affect who gets invited, and they can vary widely between organisations. For example, those mainly Japanese firms that practice hoshin kanri achieve it mainly through rounds of one-to-one conversations up and down the organisation. Not a top-down cascade, but a painstaking process of briefing and back-briefing – painstaking because it can take some considerable time for the organisation as a whole to converge on something coherent. At the other extreme in terms of both participation and speed is Open Space (or more properly, Open Space Technology, OST) [3], to which many people may be invited – perhaps everyone. These have a self-organised agenda and typically a dedicated host/facilitator. I would note that it is rare to see a productive Open Space event that doesn’t begin with an invitingly worded challenge that was either pre-prepared or the product of preliminary conversations; events that lack one can be desultory affairs indeed! Further to the topic of the motivating challenge, see also generative change [4]; much of my work of the past ten years comes under that banner.

In several of my books and in Leading with Outcomes [5], I recommend something between those one-to-one and all-hands extremes. For an impactful strategy conversation, try to get representation from least three levels of organisation, such that you get real-world intelligence, business context, and between those, those people whose job is to hold it all together. For example, if you’re starting with a leadership team (typically two levels of organisation – a senior manager and their direct reports), add some team representation, some customer representation, and/or what we used to call sponsorship. Try it! I’ve had senior managers sit next to new joiners and customers in the room also, and it worked really well.

Not every conversation needs everyone, and not every conversation needs to be had in one go, but an effective strategy process does depend on adequate representation. With my “three levels” suggestion in mind, try working backwards, right to left [6]: Whose needs will we be meeting? When they are making meaningful progress in their “struggling moments” [7], from whom will the best solution ideas have come from? Who has a sufficiently close and empathetic relationship with them to understand their needs in their proper context? Who will have been asked to work differently or to different objectives? And whose expertise will have been needed? Whose support? Whose sponsorship? Resisting the urge to decide or design things on your own, thinking instead about the possibilities you can enable, Who’s invited?

[1] Daniel Mezick and Mark Sheffield, Inviting Leadership: Invitation-Based Change in the New World of Work (Freestanding Press, 2018)

[2] Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July 2024)

[3] Harrison Owen, Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008)

[4] Gervase R. Bushe, The Dynamics of Generative Change (BMI Series in Dialogic Organization Development, 2020)

[5] Leading with Outcomes (academy.agendashift.com)

[6] The Right to Left principle/pattern – working backwards from key moments of impact and learning – is described in several of my books, Wholehearted included, but the definitive one is Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)

[7] A book I recommend at every opportunity: Bob Moesta with Greg Engle, Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress (Lioncrest Publishing, 2020)

Posts in this series appear first as LinkedIn articles. You can read and comment there:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling Leadership as connecting Leadership as inviting (this post)Leadership and identity

But while we’re here, some upcoming events:

16-19 June, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 30 September to 11 November, online, cohort-based – 7 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort