Article (6.04) A Kaleidoscope, Not a Recipe: Systemic Leadership in Polycrisis
Edinburgh, early 1990s. A young woman working in drug education walks out of another meeting that has produced nothing. She falls into step beside the head of the local drug squad. Without planning it, they start talking about what they’re actually seeing. Within months, they’ve built a collaboration that nobody in either organisation would have approved in advance.
Liz Skelton, a leadership practitioner, co-author of Lost Conversations and PhD candidate at the ANU School of Cybernetics, tells that story not as evidence of boldness but as the first moment she noticed something that has shaped her work ever since: that the perceived boundaries between groups are usually more permeable than either side believes, and that pragmatism sometimes does what ideology cannot.
Twenty-five years on, she is working on a harder version of the same problem. The question is no longer how individuals cross sectoral divides but what conditions allow entire systems to operate differently when the challenges they face are overlapping, accelerating, and resistant to anything that looks like a recipe.
The word she returns to is ‘polycrisis’, and she uses it with precision. These situations are not just complicated; they’re interconnected in ways that mean solving one thread without attending to the others tends to tighten the knot. Homelessness looks different when floods arrive. Unemployment connects to housing, which connects to health, which connects to everything else. Tools developed in calmer, more separable conditions don’t transfer.
Her working hypothesis, shaped by both decades of practice and current doctoral research, is that what’s needed isn’t a new framework applied to these conditions but what she calls a ‘systemic way of being’: capacities that allow practitioners to stay in genuine relationship with the system they’re working in rather than standing outside it applying technique. The distinction matters because, as she argues, we are never neutral. Presence itself shapes a system. A leader who imagines they’re observing objectively is already influencing, just without awareness of it. She describes this through a kaleidoscope: turn the dial slightly and the same scene reconfigures entirely. What matters isn’t arriving at the correct view but developing the habit of turning the dial, regularly, rather than mistaking one angle for the whole picture.
This is also her diagnosis of why leadership development so often doesn’t stick. People go through a programme, they see differently, they return to their organisation, and the system doesn’t move. The problem, as Liz has come to see it, isn’t the quality of the learning: it’s that the conditions for applying it were never created. Her response is action learning, working with the real challenges people are already navigating and building capacity in context rather than in abstraction.
Listen to Episode 6.04 at leadershipdecanted.com.