Showing up differently: A collective approach to complex issues

What compelling issue would aggravate and ignite you into coming together with others to solve it?

Imagine someone placing a cup on a table to represent an issue that is aggravating them…. they have courage to name it and then seek to see if others around them join the conversation, because they too are aggravated and ignited because they care.  As more people join this table around the cup – the compelling issue, a shared purpose begins to emerge followed by a flow of ‘what if?” ideas and possibilities.  This in turn leads into some of these ideas being scoped and defined into actions and prototypes, then resourced and implemented. Some work well, others don’t and this learning is quickly fed back into the co-design process to fine-tune the next steps in the initiative.  The cycle of design, do and review continues and over time, elaborate, bespoke, targeted and exponentially impactful solutions emerge…

Leadership Lab has always focussed on growing leaders to work together to tackle pervasive social issues – some call these complex or adaptive challenges. These issues have been stubbornly immune to being shifted by all efforts to this point, and they are also are highly emotive, both frustrating but also with the beginnings of hope and optimism that things could be different. They are quite different to the transactional approaches that we are familiar with where solutions are packaged neatly in advance and procured as deliverables.

Over the last 6 years we have developed the “Showing up differently” approach and its principles over a large number of projects and it is fundamental to our impact. Check out our Leadership Lab projects and you will see that each one is built in response to a complex issue; ie: “How do we prevent grassroots community leaders across Canterbury burning out after the earthquakes?”, “How do we overcome the culture of competition between schools in order to create pathways for our students?”, “How do we develop a collective leadership practice that supports the provision of an integrated service for people with acute mental health disorders.”

Explore this process below as we walk you through how the design process plays out….

Chris Jansen, Co-Director Leadership Lab