This post is the sixth 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, and it is those that are addressed in this series:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling Leadership as connecting Leadership as inviting Leadership as representing (this post)Untangling the strands

If you were expecting “Leadership and identity” at this point, don’t worry. As I did with the previous instalment, I decided to rename it rather than break from the “Leadership as…” theme. As it happens, I find the new title more interesting! As for the concluding post, “Untangling the strands”, an alternative title might be “How not to scale”, so watch out for that!

Leadership as representing

The topics of the preceding five posts can easily be viewed from the perspective of representation. Starting with the first four, and whether you regard the responsibilities below as conferred on leaders by the organisation or taken on by those who choose to act as leaders, I hope that you find it helpful to consider and perhaps reflect on this list:

With leadership as structuring, leaders represent their respective organisational scope’s place in the wider organisation, its particular responsibilities with respect to which part of the outside business environment, and its objectives within the context of the organisation’s broader goals. That much is straightforward enough, but those three structures – organisation, environment, and strategy – are rarely in perfect alignment. That creates the challenge of at least acknowledging the inherent challenges, conflicts, and contradictions therein. When they are up for discussion, the leader represents their scope to the wider organisation and vice versa.With leadership as translating, leaders represent their scopes in terms of progress, issues, and performance, doing that in the language of their audience (most often that of those they report to, those that report to them, or that of peer scopes), or explaining how it translates. Again, in support of the reverse flow of information, they must also do this internally on behalf of other scopes, i.e. representing them.With leadership as reconciling, to that translation challenge is added a significant complication: the strategies of any or all of the scopes involved may need adjustment in the light of new information or new goals, perhaps to the extent that existing structures come under challenge. After all, an organisation that isn’t open to that can hardly be said to be adaptive! In these conversations, leaders must at a minimum be able to express their scope’s strategies adequately to others, and when representing internally the strategies of related scopes, to do that justice too.With leadership as connecting, leaders represent the availability (or lack thereof) of context. That means two things: First, their presence at opportune times both to offer and to acquire the business context on which good decision-making depends, and second, representing the systemic challenge of minimising the likelihood and impact of bad decisions. To do that without at the same time stifling initiative is a difficult task indeed.

Notice that none of the above requires leaders to have all the answers. Quite the contrary! The need to structure and connect arises in part because no leader can hope to be all-knowing. When translating and reconciling, no reasonable person expects leaders to understand the progress and plans of related scopes to the extent that they understand their own. And so to leadership as inviting, the fifth of the preceding topics in this series. In any kind of consequential conversation, who better to represent any scope of activity – whether formally recognised as an organisational structure or otherwise – than actual, first-hand representatives of that scope? That works both ways, of course; it is in the intersection of interests that the need for effective and appropriately diverse representation is most acute.

That is not the full extent of leadership as representing. The clue is in this article’s previously advertised working title, “Leadership and identity”. That would have been about how in various different aspects, different organisational scopes see themselves and are seen by others. Among these aspects are how the scope’s members conduct their work, how they coordinate internally and with other scopes, how they organise around each new challenge and steer the resulting work, and how they strategise, internally or with others. In all of those, there are boundaries of acceptability, a function not only of the prevailing senses of safety, trust, and trustworthiness, but also of what the scope and its surrounding organisation really stand for.

The hardest part here isn’t that of maintaining appropriate boundaries, it’s knowing when to acknowledge that old identities or values may be holding us back. Most of the time, those true, group-held boundaries are essential; they minimise noise and they cost little mental or conversational effort. Sometimes though, it must be acknowledged that how we present ourselves in our different relationships may not be in our or others’ best interests. If such issues are to be dealt with authentically, they become issues of identity.

Hold the line, or allow lines to be tested? Stay the course, or pivot? Stick or twist? Let me answer those questions with a book recommendation. It is Edwin H. Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (10th anniversary edition 2017). The clues are there in the title. Don’t lose your nerve! Accept no unsustainable quick fixes. Lead!

Postscript

That book recommendation reminds me of another book! I haven’t finished it yet, but my wife Sharon and I are enjoying Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference (2025). Bregman’s moral ambition and Friedman’s non-anxious presence aren’t the same thing, but they do have something in common. For a taste, see this recent CNN article (cnn.com).

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 Leadership as representing Untangling the strands