If you’ve sat through any of my classes or workshops, you’ll hear me say repeatedly that we’re still using forms of leadership and organization that are thousands of years old. You wouldn’t expect this of your dentist, who you’d hope is using modern and updated methods to take care of that pesky tooth in need of a filling. But when it comes to how authorities wield influence and resources, we keep reverting to the same ol’, same ol’.

It’s as if there was a meeting where many people desperate to get to the coffee and cakes after quickly decided that when it comes to rigid hierarchies and cascading organizational charts, “All learning about how to do this well should stop here.” Another saying might as well be, “If it was good enough for Genghis Khan, it’s good enough for our [insert nonprofit/government agency/corporation/other]. Many works go much further into these issues.

Now, don’t get me wrong, traditional forms of leadership where there’s a boss at the top, subordinates below that, and so on can accomplish a great deal. Compared to the structurelessness of anarchy, it’s better to have some organizing where good enough could be a reasonable standard for making sure most work is at least getting done. As a known challenge with a protocol, for example, getting help with filling out a complicated form from someone up the chain could be useful. And contrary to the bad press it gets, “bureaucracy” can be well suited to relatively stable and straightforward industries such as manufacturing.

The issue is that under conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, traditional forms of leadership cannot meet the challenges at hand without resorting to broader collaborative and stakeholder-driven engagement.

Nowhere has this insight struck me with greater force than in a recent read through Nick Obelensky’s Complex Adaptive Leadership. Obelensky grounds the type of leadership most needed for the present in scientific developments from complexity science, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, and more. Just as the history of scientific revolutions required breakthrough thinking rather than a slow accumulation of data and analysis, we’re overdue for a parallel, big paradigm shift in the forms of leadership and organizing we keep turning to in our social and political worlds.

One way of demonstrating the practical aspects of what we’re after is through an adaptation of the following Cynefin model:

Source: Drawing Change

Like the difference between technical and adaptive challenges, more simple problems can resort to known knowledge and known solutions. But adaptive challenges are often defined by a lack of agreement and certainty, meaning that the nature of both the problem and/or solution is unknown. Here’s a great chart with examples for each of the domains:

Source: Liberating Structures

While I’d personally put “raising a child” in the chaotic zone most of the time (seriously, help!), the placement of these examples is less important than the key implications here for leadership, communication, and collaboration. Simple challenges need a routine that anyone can follow. Someone or some group who can put the recipes in motion is all that’s needed. Complicated problems necessitate experts. Yet notice that even in this move the plural and across “a variety of fields” is emphasized for decision-making. So, the nature of these challenges necessitates councils of experts to talk to one another.

Going up a level, complex challenges rely on experimentation and a whole lot of figuring it out along the way. To quote Del Close, they require you to “Fall, then figure out what to do on the way down.” What becomes central to leadership, per the previous chart, is “dialogue and debate,” as well as “emergence” and “innovation.” That requires an external focus, continuous feedback, and learning from others.

Chaotic challenges hyper-focus increasing requirements for experimentation, holding conclusions and interpretations tentatively, a back-and-forth with multiple people across many spaces, and improvising well. You’re in the dark, so a “networked” leadership approach is demanded for making headway on the issue that you’re confronting.

Pausing for a moment, perhaps the problem of so much contemporary politics is the treating of complicated, complex, and chaotic challenges as simple ones? Entire media systems seem premised on an idea that for any issue (really, wicked problems), “here’s the fix a higher up has committed to,” without any sense for a leadership process involved to get there.

So, the more complicated, complex, and chaotic the challenge, the less traditional forms of leadership will work. Each of these challenges demands a more communication-driven form of leading (e.g. overcommunicating), attention to the structures by which a person or group organizes themselves (e.g. strategizing and selecting effective formal and informal informational flows), and above all, a facilitative style that puts the work back where it belongs—“getting people deeply involved” and “creating the space to allow others to exercise leadership.”