Building sustainable collaborations by Josie Gibson.

Despite decades of collective efforts and millions of dollars of investment, collaborations created to address wicked problems have had mixed success.

The wicked problem-solving arena is busy and lucrative and obscures nagging questions about the efficacy of common approaches used on big challenges ranging from climate action to the design and delivery of multi-billion dollar public infrastructure.

As eminent megaprojects researcher Bent Flyvbjerg notes, “projects don’t so much go wrong as they start wrong”.

Typically, such approaches prioritise governance models, metrics and methodologies over the type of leadership and culture required to build and sustain collective efforts, often over many years.
What does effective leadership on such complex initiatives look like? How does it balance formal compliance and delivery expectations with the need to sustain and evolve relationships with diverse sets of stakeholders?

Management thinker Peter Senge uses the term ‘system leadership’ to describe a transcendent form of leadership that has strong alignment with collective principles in many First Nations cultures.

In this session we’ll explore different approaches to the wicked problem arena and what they might offer in this era of geopolitical turmoil and climate crisis.

References:

• https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_dawn_of_system_leadership
• Goodchild, Melanie. “Relational Systems Thinking: That’s How Change is Going to Come, from Our Earth Mother”, Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, vol. 1, no. 1, 2021. https://jabsc.org/index.php/jabsc/article/view/577

Josie Gibson is Founder and Director of strategic advisory firm CatalystFX and The Catalyst Network, a changemaker community. She is an experienced coach, creative mentor and strategic adviser on complex projects. A former journalist specialising in geopolitics, Josie has held senior roles in organisations ranging from family-owned companies to global multinationals, her experience spanning all sectors. She has worked in executive development and higher education and delivered Australia’s first leadership index at a highly ranked business school. On the business side, Josie has co-founded several startups and helped to build thriving business networks for multinational executives. She is active in new work, community and economic initiatives and is a Senior Industry Fellow at RMIT University’s FORWARD Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.