Navigational Leadership

Is your leadership team stuck fighting fires?

If you lead in a complex, multi-stakeholder organization, you’ll likely recognize the firefighting cycle.

It isn't a failure of talent or will. The challenge lives in a larger ecosystem of people, incentives, and pressures that no single mandate can control, and the old industrial playbook of linear plans, top-down authority, and siloed fixes was never built for that.

Navigational leadership is the capacity to see that ecosystem and work with it, rather than react to each piece of it as it arrives.

The firefighting cycle: launch a new initiative or pilot, invest effort, resources, and political capital, then things drift back to where they started, and a new initiative begins. pulled back The firefighting cycle 1 Launch a new initiative or pilot 2 Invest effort, resources, and political capital 3 Things drift back to where they started

A two-hour virtual workshop built around your challenge

This isn’t a generic curriculum. Before the session, we have a short conversation with you about the challenge your team is wrestling with, so the examples and exercises speak to your situation.

In the session, you and your team will:

  • Explore why effort hasn’t stuck. Look at where the old playbook breaks down in complex human systems, and what shifts when leaders move from architect toward ecosystem steward.
  • Get to know the Four Orders of Complexity. Transactional, functional, strategic, and ecosystemic, and why working in only one or two tends to produce either efficient processes disconnected from strategy, or inspiring visions that never change daily reality.
  • Begin to name your ecosystem. Start defining the ecosystem, or ecosystems, behind your challenge and what each is meant to accomplish.
  • Take a first look at interventions. Sketch, at an introductory level, what might need to shift at each order and when.
  • Leave with a shared language for the patterns your team has been living inside.

After the Session

Afterwards, we meet with the sponsoring leader to reflect on what surfaced and on whether a deeper look at the ecosystem makes sense.

From the open session

We first ran Navigational Leadership as an open virtual session for AMI, an innovation learning community, with leaders from across sectors each bringing their own challenge. The recording below gives a sense of the ideas and how we work. Participants told us they found real value in it, and that it shifted how they saw their own challenges.

This workshop is...

  • An introduction to ecosystemic thinking, built around your challenge
  • A first look at your ecosystem, its purpose, and possible interventions across the Four Orders
  • A shared language your team can keep using

This workshop isn’t...

Let’s talk about bringing Navigational Leadership to your organization

If your organization is investing in change that isn’t holding, we’d welcome a conversation about what you’re facing and whether this introductory session is the right next step.

 

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