Leadership in complexity comes down to three words that, if lived by, can transform organziations and navigate uncertainty with grace. These are: humilty, inquiry and agility.
Strategy involves leadership. Knowing what to do when there is uncertainty is among the great challenges that complexity poses. There aren’t ‘best practices’ that enable tried and true results, but nor is it chaos. Rather than prescribe specific leadership actions, we’re better off looking at qualities that can be integrated into most leadership styles and are fit for purpose for uncertainty and complexity. These are: humility, inquiry, and agility.
The Leadership Challenge in Complex Systems
The evidence is overwhelming: we live in an era where leadership preparedness for uncertainty has reached concerning lows. Only 40% of leaders feel equipped to handle economic uncertainty, and just 28% feel confident navigating geopolitical complexity. The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented leadership stress test, demanding rapid shifts in style, communication, and decision-making. It was the most outsized example of what it means to lead in a complex, dynamic system that affects health, yet only one of many that we could point to.
Yet traditional leadership models, built for stable hierarchical organizations, are inadequate for today’s complex adaptive systems. Leadership models of the last century have been products of top-down, bureaucratic paradigms effective for physical production but not well-suited for a knowledge-oriented economy. The challenge isn’t just about being faster or more efficient—it’s about fundamentally rethinking how leadership operates in environments where cause and effect are non-linear, where small changes can cascade into major transformations, and where the future emerges from countless interactions rather than centralized planning.
Modern organizations are complex adaptive systems driven by people and their interactions with each other, prescribed work processes, and the contextual environment. In such systems, leadership becomes less about commanding and controlling, and more about sensing, adapting, and enabling emergence.
Humility: The Foundation of Adaptive Leadership
Humility in leadership is perhaps the most counterintuitive quality in our culture of confident executives and visionary CEOs. Yet research consistently shows that humility gets results, creating stronger relationships, more engaged employees, reduced turnover, and higher profits. Leaders — from clinicians, to administrators, to C-suite occupants and beyond require a humility to lead, not just confidence, knowledge, or experience.
Confident humility—being secure enough in your expertise and strengths to admit your ignorance and weaknesses—allows you to believe in yourself while questioning your strategies. This isn’t about self-deprecation or weakness; it’s about intellectual honesty and strategic vulnerability.
In complex systems, no single leader can possess all the necessary information or perspective to make optimal decisions. In complexity, synthesizing diverse insights, not individual brilliance, drives success. The appearance of knowing is less important than tapping collective knowledge. Humility enables leaders to access this distributed intelligence.
Consider the cognitive load: Leading in complex adaptive systems places significant mental demands on leaders, requiring new epistemologies and mindsets as systems shift from machine-like predictability to ecosystem-like emergence. A humble leader recognizes these limitations and builds systems to compensate rather than pretending to transcend them.
Humility also creates psychological safety. When leaders move from telling to asking, employees feel more engaged, empowered, and willing to contribute valuable insights. In environments where innovation and adaptation are crucial, this psychological safety becomes a competitive advantage.
Inquiry: The Practice of Curious Leadership
Inquiry transforms humility from an internal mindset into an active leadership practice. Humble inquiry invites people into conversation as individuals who can offer valuable contributions, rather than making demands or telling them what they must do or think.
Edgar Schein’s concept of Humble Inquiry involves asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, building relationships based on curiosity and interest in others. This isn’t casual questioning—it’s a disciplined practice of drawing out insights, testing assumptions, and uncovering hidden knowledge within the organization.
The power of inquiry becomes evident when we consider that traditional leadership favors telling (advocacy) over inquiry, yet in complex environments, the higher you rise in an organization, the more critical it becomes to ask questions, and the less likely you are to do so.
Effective inquiry in complex systems involves several dimensions:
Generative Questions: Rather than seeking confirmation of existing beliefs, leaders ask questions that open new possibilities and challenge current assumptions. These questions help teams think beyond current constraints and imagine different futures.
Systems Questions: Complex systems require understanding relationships, feedback loops, and emergent properties. Leaders need to ask questions that reveal how different parts of the system interact and influence each other.
Learning Questions: In uncertain environments, the goal isn’t to have all the answers but to learn quickly and adapt. Questions become tools for rapid experimentation and knowledge creation. A developmental, learning-centred approach is a way to bring this into practice.
Stakeholder Questions: Stakeholder agility—how effectively a leader understands key stakeholders and creates alignment with those whose views, priorities and objectives differ—becomes crucial in turbulent or dynamic environments. Knowing where you are in relation to those you’re working with makes a big difference.
Agility: The Capability to Adapt and Learn
Agility in leadership isn’t about speed—it’s about the ability to learn from experience and apply that learning to new situations. Learning Agility, or the willingness and ability to learn from one’s experience and then apply that learning to new situations, is a key component of potential and can be accurately defined and measured.
Leadership agility is the master skill-set needed for sustained success in today’s increasingly complex, fast-paced changing human systems environment. It involves multiple interconnected capabilities:
Mental Agility: Mentally agile individuals are curious, always looking for parallels and fresh connections. They are sponges, always trying to learn new information from books, TED talks, newspapers, and the like. This isn’t about intelligence but about cognitive flexibility and pattern recognition across domains.
People Agility: Individuals with high people agility are looked to by others in a crisis, enjoy helping others solve problems, and are open to a wide array of individual perspectives. They value diversity of thought, rather than find it threatening.
Change Agility: Those high in Change Agility seek out new and first-time situations. They introduce new slants and can take the heat of change in organizations. They don’t just tolerate uncertainty—they thrive in it.
Results Agility: The ability to deliver results in first-time situations by assembling teams, clarifying roles, and finding ways forward when the path isn’t clear.
Self-Awareness: High self-awareness tends to lead to humility, rather than overconfidence. In a Cornell University study, it was found that self-awareness was the best predictor of overall success in leaders.
The Interconnected Nature of These Qualities
These three qualities—humility, inquiry, and agility—are not separate capabilities but interconnected aspects of a coherent leadership approach suited for complexity. Humility enables inquiry by creating the psychological safety and intellectual honesty necessary for genuine learning. Inquiry develops agility by constantly testing assumptions and gathering new information. Agility reinforces humility by demonstrating the limits of current knowledge and the need for continuous learning.
Uhl-Bien’s Complexity Leadership Theory recognizes that context is a key determinant in how the dynamic process of leadership is expressed and understood, meaning that leaders must adapt their approach depending on the context in which they lead.
This interconnectedness reflects the nature of complex adaptive systems themselves, where organizational identity and social movements serve as mediating variables through which leadership affects organizational adaptability and evolutability.
The Path Forward
Leaders will need to inspire and guide their teams through the complexities of remote and hybrid work environments. Embracing change with agility and maintaining a clear vision of the future will be critical. Yet this vision cannot be rigid—it must be adaptive.
The challenge for leaders is developing these qualities within themselves and their organizations. Such a model of complexity leadership enables the required learning, creativity, and adaptive capacity necessary to navigate a complex adaptive system.
This requires moving beyond traditional leadership development focused on acquiring specific skills or techniques. Instead, it demands what might be called “vertical development”—the expansion of mental models, perspective-taking capacity, and tolerance for paradox and ambiguity.
The leaders who will thrive in our complex world are those who embrace humility as strength, inquiry as a tactic, and agility as capability. They understand that in a world of increasing uncertainty, the most important leadership quality is the ability to learn and adapt faster than the rate of change itself.
In complexity, leadership becomes less about having answers and more about enabling better questions. Less about control and more about influence. Less about certainty and more about sense-making. The path forward requires leaders who can hold these tensions creatively and help their organizations do the same.
Strategy still involves leadership, but it’s a different kind of leadership—one suited for the adaptive challenges of our time. It’s leadership that recognizes complexity not as a problem to be solved but as a reality to be navigated with wisdom, courage, and grace.
This is part of our strategic design for innovation series. If you liked it and are interested in how you can design better, let’s book a time to chat.
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