What does leadership mean to me? It’s not about having followers, although many leaders do. It’s not about telling people what to do, or being a servant leader. Leadership is a way of being in relationship to an emerging future that invites others to come into conversation with their own contribution. Leadership is ultimately about growth and development, about transformation and the journey that takes us from where we are to where we want to be.

This is why good leadership is about creating clarity and alignment. You can have the best people in the world, but if their efforts are not aligned in the same direction, then you’ll never get the forward motion you’re trying to achieve.

Building clarity also serves another purpose: creating distributed cognition. We live in a world of such incredible complexity that the old paradigm of command and control does not have the sophistication that is required to navigate.

Creating clarity and alignment in a team allows everyone to be creatively engaged in sensing and responding to the world. This ability for the whole team to be creatively engaged with the world also allows their diversity of different skills, and perspectives to be brought into service of the mission.

Leadership is about evolution and adaptation. Any significant enterprise will require evolution. Creativity and innovation will never arise from the application of formal rules, and will only arise from the complex interaction of forces that produce emergence. And we can’t be engaged in this process without being changed by it.

A good leader will embody this process and will stand with commitment in this vulnerable place of becoming. This can be an uncomfortable place that requires us to be in relationship to the unknown, to be willing to stand at the boundary of chaos and order – that fertile fractal boundary out of which the emerging future can be discovered.