Keith Grint being wicked

Here is a video of Keith Grint discussing ‘wicked problems’at the Management and Leadership Network conference earlier this year.

For those of you not familiar with this way of thinking about leadership, here is a quick summary. Most leadership theories are geared towards the characteristics of leaders (personality, behaviour etc). Adopting a problems lens on leadership moves our focus away from the characteristics of those doing the leading and instead focuses on the problem in hand. The argument is that we collectively hold most problems as overly simplistic, or in highly mechanistic ways. Such an approach is unhelpful when it comes to tackling more complex, intractable problems – i.e. ‘wicked’ problems.

Keith has progressed this thinking on ‘wicked’ to a point where he emphasises the mobilisation processes of importance to leadership. First, leadership cannot be held by a single individual because if a problem is ‘wicked’then it is likely to stretch across the boundaries of a number of organisations, communities and groups. Second, leadership becomes about how people in collectives hold each other to account and push each other onwards – through tough stretch questioning, reframing problems and challenging dominant power relations. We can contrast such an approach to leadership with management, which is largely about making problems predictable and controllable. Leadership is about the opposite – coming to terms with a problem in its complexity.

The sting in the tail of this kind of leadership is that the dominant way of viewing problems in our organisations and societies is either through a managerial or individualistic lens. An important part of leadership is therefore to convince others that problems should be taken seriously as leadership problems, which require an alternative, more collaborative approach. This is where the idea becomes linked closely with power – people need to confront and challenge the status quo in order to engender more of a leadership approach.

We would be interested to hear your views. ‘Wicked’ is a tricky concept to work with in a development context precisely because it seems counter-cultural to most people. Maybe you have a story of working with ‘wicked’in development that you would like to share. Or, if you are a practitioner who thinks they have a problem which calls out for a wicked approach, we would like to hear about it. Maybe you have even adopted such a leadership strategy and have lived to tell the tale – tell us the tale!