In this blogpost, Joan Lurie, Founder and CEO of Orgonomics™, challenges higher education leaders to shift from expert problem-solvers to collaborative learners.

Across the globe, higher education institutions are navigating converging pressures from climate disruption and geopolitical instability, to technological acceleration and financial constraint. This context is trying, worrying, exhausting and it is testing leaders in all sectors.   

So how are you stepping in? For many leaders their tendency may be to try and take control, to analyse what’s going on, to look for root causes and fix things; to focus on their patch, to protect, to identify what they can preserve; and to build their people’s individual resilience to hold strong in this challenging time. To do what they know best using their expertise.  

What if this context was calling for a very different kind of leadership? What if, paradoxically, this time is a calling for you to step into a distinctly different, and for some, new role, which you may have never played before? One which you may not yet be ‘trained’ or fully equipped for, because prior contexts never required this of you. What if this context may be calling you to be a ‘learner’, ‘inquirer’, discoverer’, ‘designer’, rather than an ‘expert’, ‘fixer’, ‘nurturer’, ‘protector’, ‘competitor’. And as a leader in a complex system, not of an institution; part of a complex system in the messy middle of adaption.  

The challenge the sector faces is not a simple technical problem for each organisation to fix for themselves, but an adaptive challenge to navigate together.  

When faced with adaptive challenges in complex systems Orgonomics 4D Calibration assumes one of the first steps you can take is to pause and take time to step into Discovery.   

• To inquire with curiosity how your system of roles, relations and patterning is functioning, including your own ‘seeing’ of it. 
• To understand and make sense of what is going together. 
• To bring in multiple perspectives to form a coherent view of this. 
• And then to ask – how could we design our system differently such that we got a different emergent outcome?  

Here we are not looking for technical solutions to fix what’s wrong or broken, we are developing hypotheses for adjacent possibilities for: 

• how our systems could function differently 
• how roles could be played and how members could interact and relate differently 
• how we can introduce new patterns of thinking and interacting. 

The role of leader in these contexts is to create containing spaces for this shared sense making; for both discovering how it is and designing a way forward for how it could be. 

This practice taps into and builds the inherent resilience of the system – not just of individuals in it – to continuously evolve, recalibrate and design a way forward into new patterns of coherence. Designing forwards not bouncing back. 

So, a challenge or invitation to those reading this… 

• What are you observing?  
• Is this a role you are already playing?  
• Are your Executive and Leadership Teams doing this together, yet?  
• Are you or your Executive Teams connecting beyond the borders (boundaries) of your own organisations to collaborate with others in doing this?  

If not, are you curious or tempted to consider, explore and experiment with how you might begin?