Distributed leadership involves sharing leadership responsibilities across an organization. It focuses on developing leadership capabilities in all people rather than designating a single leader. The key capabilities include sensemaking, relating, visioning, and inventing. Sensemaking involves interpreting information to develop understanding of challenges. It is an iterative social process focused on cues and plausibility over accuracy. Distributed leadership relies on many people in an organization engaging in sensemaking to recognize issues and opportunities in a dynamic environment.

1. Distributed Leadership

2. Distributed Leadership
• Leadership is the activity of mobilising people to
respond to adaptive challenges by clarifying
their guiding values, developing new strategies
that incorporate these guiding values and
learning new ways of operating. This ongoing
activity is achieved by individuals/organisation
developing the capacity for leadership by
developing the 4 key capabilities of
sensemaking, relating, visioning and inventing
• The capabilities are outlined in the Distributed
Leadership Model

3. Distributed Leadership
• Numerous models/perspectives: emergent,
dispersed, informal, organic, decentralisation,
democratic
• Basic idea:
– leadership at all levels, not necessarily position-
related
– Decision-making is but one aspect of leadership;
organisation invents the way decision-making is
undertaken (Gore)
• Distributed Leadership is the undertaking of
leadership at various levels within the
organisation by people with and without formal
authority

4. Single Leaders Model

5. Distributed Leadership Model

6. Our model: based on Sloan
Leadership Model
– Distributed Leadership Model recommends
“developing productive relationships and networks,
visualizing the desired outcome, and inventing ways
of working together to realize that vision.”
– Moves away from a "command and control" model to
a more "cultivate and coordinate" model
– How is this leadership: think of the capabilities as:
• Stretching: extending your comfort zone
• Building blocks: enabling capabilities, creative and
implementation

7. Existing literature on ‘the
organisation’
• Fit with DLM
– Environmental uncertainty
– Need for flexibility
– Flatter structures
– Malone’s Future of work:
• Form of the organisation: does structure precede
strategy or does strategy precede structure?
• Expectations of staff

8. Sloan Distributed Leadership
• Views leadership as a capacity i.e. a potential that is yet
to be realised
• This capacity resides in the individual or the organisation
• This capacity is built on 4 capabilities: sensemaking,
relating, inventing, visioning: ability
• If residing in individual, must cycle thru these 4
capabilities or do so in partnership with others
• If residing in the organisation, formal leader must
facilitate the development of these capabilities within the
organisation AND facilitate boundary spanning activities
at all levels
• Additional component to the model: Change signature

10. A consideration
• DLM cannot work if you have the ‘wrong’ people
in the organisation
• Collins: Get the right people in the right seats on
your bus
• One of those people is the formal authority
• After that it is recruitment
• With the right people, your structure, systems,
processes (i.e. components of the DLM) can be
aligned

11. DLM continued
• 4 assumptions: Leadership is
– Distributed: an ongoing process involving a set of
individuals taking on a variety of tasks and working
interdependently. It is not a position or a single
person; Senge and systems perspective
– Personal and developmental (consistent with HB:
change LS style; Fiedler: change member relations;
personality: manifestations can be changed)
– About change (manager-leader distinction)
• How you create change depends on situation:
– Nature of followers, organisational culture, strong/weak
situation
– Evolutionary: develops over time
• Learn to change your style e.g. HB, personality
• Affected by traits not determined by traits

12. The 4 capabilities: a brief look
• Sensemaking:
– is not only research
– A dynamic, on-going, iterative process that
requires ‘objectivity’ aimed at getting to the
truth of the matter: what is the reality?
– Gain understanding
• Relating:
– 3 components: inquiry, advocacy and
connectivity

13. • The objective of Relating is to achieve unity and
understanding by improving one’s ability to build
relationships.
– Inquiry: to understand where someone is coming
from
– This is not a license to practice subjectivism or
relativism: values impact on this
– It is intended to build understanding of others. It is
balanced by your self-understanding and advocacy of
your own viewpoint
– With these components in place, we can then try to
build networks/coalitions/alliances of people to create
change

14. • Visioning:
– Much has been said, but practiced little
– Aligns people
– Establishes a quid pro quo
• something for something: If I give up something, what can I
hope for in return
– Dreams
• Inventing:
– New ways of …
– Processes and structures
– How can we get people to work together: pertains to
mobilising people
– Boundary spanning, decision-making, team
work/dynamics

15. Change Signature
• Your characteristic way of doing things,
how you see the world (a world view?)
• Change thumbprint
• This evolves as well
• Pertains to ACTION
• Your actions may reflect your values
• What do these quotes say to you about
the speakers change signature?

17. In different contexts….

18. Technical
Challenge
Adaptive
Challenge

19. Sensemaking
• Simply put it is making sense
• Making sense of uncertainties in environments
through interaction
• Deals with the establishment and interpretation
of meaning
– Links information, knowledge and meaning
– People act on the basis of the meaning they create
• An ongoing iterative process directed at eliciting
meaning and hence understanding
• Objective is gain an understanding of the
situation the organisation is facing at this
moment in time
– Nokia: paper mills (1860s) to telecommunications
(1960s)
– The hard reality: The Stockdale Paradox
– Personal traits that assist?

20. Properties of sensemaking:
• Grounded in Identity
Construction
• Retrospective
• Enactive of Sensible
Environments
• Social
• Ongoing
• Focused on and by Extracted
Cues
• Driven by Plausibility Rather
than Accuracy

21. Grounded in Identity Construction
• Begins with a Sensemaker
• Situation Meaning: which ‘hat’ are you wearing
– Identity Dependence
• The meaning you derive is contingent on the perceptual
map you apply; this depends on your identity at the time
of sensemaking
– What was your identity when you stepped thru the door after the
break? How did it affect what you said or did (or did not do?)
– People act in the direction of maintaining identity
• Derives from Need for a Sense of Identity
• Self-Referential
• Microsoft and the internet: "Sometimes we do get taken
by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along,
we had it has a fifth or sixth priority.“ (Gates, 1998)

22. Contrast
• Identity:
• Compare
– "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages.
Bitter cold. Long months of winter. Constant danger.
Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case
of success.“ (Advertisement allegedly placed by
Ernest Shackleton in The Times in December 1901)
– “Better a live donkey than a dead lion” Shackleton,
Arctic explorer

23. Retrospective
• After the horse has bolted … so that it won’t happen
again ... But:
– The past has been reconstructed knowing the outcome, which
means things never happened exactly the way they are
remembered … and
• Memory vs recall:
– What is placed into memory: selective perception: your filter
– Attention is directed backward from a specific point in time.
Whatever is occurring at that moment will influence what is
discovered when people glance backward – recall
• How did you go about placing the farmers?
– Would I get exactly the same account from everybody?

24. Enactive of Sensible Environments
• People Produce Part of the Environment they
Face
– Observer effect: The act of observing an object
changes it
– A marketing campaign: you consider possible competitor
actions and incorporate them in your plan
• People Create Environments (action), Environments
Constrain Actions
– If farmer A is here, that means pears are grown by Farmer
B, implying that the truck cannot be driven by Farmer C
• No Detached, External Environment:
– Not discrete but continuous.

25. Social
• Linked to preceding
• Sensemaking affected by others
– Physically present or otherwise
– “Besides if my mum found out she’d kill me …”
• People obey the rules only to the extent that they
believe that they will be caught e.g. speeding, drink-
driving, stealing, cheating on tax
• So sensemaking is never solitary
• How did other people affect what you contributed to the
exercise?
• Talk, Discourse, and Conversation

26. Ongoing
• Sensemaking Never Stops
• Continuous Flows:
– We separate experiences into blocs: at work, at
home, in traffic, lunch
– Seamless but containing cues we extract … yet
• Interruptions and Emotional Responses
– Interruption to a flow typically induces an emotional
response, which then paves the way for emotion to
influence sensemaking.
• How aware are you at any one moment?
Situation awareness (human factors)

27. Focused on and by Extracted Cues
• Only that which stands out is perceived: failure
to match expectations: Extracted Cue
• Fundamental to learning
• Extracted Cues Depend on Context
• Extracted cue: if A is here, it means he/she
should be driving M, but that can’t be the case
(error)

28. Driven by Plausibility Rather Than
Accuracy
• Accuracy is Nice but not Necessary
• Strength of Sensemaking
• Why Accuracy is Secondary
– Need to Filter
– Embellishment: I got the impression …” “I
assumed …”
– Impossibility: you’ll never know for sure at the
moment whether your sensemaking (meaning) is
right or wrong hence
• Does your story make sense: naturalistic
decision-making
• Iterative

29. Try This
• Draw the
picture
described
in this
paragraph

30. Lessons
– Be conscious of identity:your own and others at time
of sensemaking
• Identity and extracted cue
– Cast your eyes over past events to see if those events
are relevant (can they become part of the story)
• The past can tell us what is wrong with the present
– Be aware that you are creating the environment in
which you are acting:
• Affect what others say, do or don’t do
• Constrain and open up actions for yourself and for others
– You learn from others:
• Water cooler chats, morning teas and boundary spanning
– Sensemaking is not just research
• Which is better : a probability sample or a non probability
sample?

31. Outcome of sensemaking
• Inventing meaning that provides
understanding and insight to the external
environment you/the organisation is facing
• Perfect sensemaking is to invent perfect
meaning and obtain perfect understanding
– a Platonic Ideal
• The more people involved in sensemaking,
the better off we’ll be making sense

32. Sensemaking and Distributed Leadership
• Dynamic external environment
• Formal Leader does not have all the answers
• Others in the organisation aid sensemaking: e.g.
they detect the deviation between the expected
and the unexpected: extracted cues
– IBM in 1994: great technical ability. Like
Microsoft did not recognise potential of internet
(TV feed of Winter Olympics diverted to internet
with IBM logo replaced with Sun Microsystems’
Logo) – extracted cue recognised by lower level
manager who agitated for change
– By 1999 25% of revenue was net related